The Lily of the Valley quotes

Was it the result of their imitative instinct? Was it a desire to try their power, or a lack of fellow-feeling? All these causes combined perhaps to deprive me of the comfort of brotherly kindness.

Cut off already from all affection, I could love nothing, and Nature had made me loving!

Is there an angel who collects the sighs of such ever-repressed feeling? If misprized sentiments turn to hatred in some souls, in mine they became concentrated, and wore a channel from whence at a later date they gushed into my life.

The Palais-Royal was an Eldorado of love where ingots ready coined were current every evening. Virgin doubts were there enlightened, and there our curiosity might find gratification.

The Palais-Royal and I were asymptotes, ever tending to meet, but never meeting.

This is how fate thwarted my hopes.

My spirit, full of cravings, struggled with a body which was frail indeed in appearance, but which—as an old doctor of Tours was wont to say—was going through the last annealing process of an iron temperament.

Young in body and old in mind, I had read and thought so much, that I was metaphysically familiar with life in its highest summits, just when I was about to explore the tortuous difficulties of its narrow passes and the sandy ways of its plains.

Exceptional chances had kept me late in that delightful phase when the soul is conscious of its first agitation, when it is opening to its first raptures, when everything is fresh and full of savor.

My mother told me I was acting a farce. I complained of her neglect; she called me an unnatural son. There was such a cold grip about my heart that at Blois I went out on the bridge to throw myself into the Loire.

I was put off from suicide simply by the height of the parapet.

On my arrival, my two sisters, who scarcely knew me, showed more surprise than warmth; later, however, by comparison they seemed to me full of kindliness. I was given a bedroom on the third floor.

The lady gave a piercing cry, inaudible above the music; she turned sharply around, saw me, and said, “Monsieur!”

If she had said, “My good boy, what possesses you?” I should perhaps have killed her; but this word Monsieur brought hot tears to my eyes.

I was petrified by a look fired with righteous anger, and an exquisite face crowned with a plait of fair brown hair, in harmony with those adorable shoulders.

Then, overpowered by this first physical indulgence of my heart’s wild fever, I wandered through the ballroom, now a desert, without finding the unknown vision. I went home and to bed, an altered creature.

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me.

My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy. Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love.

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me. My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy.

Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love.

Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room; they had not made the slightest impression on me.

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me.

My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy.

Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love. Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room;

the poplars laughed as they swayed; there was not a cloud in the sky; the birds sang, the grasshoppers chirped, everything was melody.

Never ask me again why I love Touraine! I do not love it as we love our childhood’s home, nor as we love an oasis in the desert; I love it as an artist loves art.

I love it less than I love you; still, but for Touraine, perhaps I should not now be alive.

I would have bought them hoops or marbles, have been their horse to drive; I was only vexed that they had not already taken possession of me as a thing of their own.

Love has its intuition as genius has, and I dimly perceived that his violence and surliness and hostility would be the ruin of my hopes.

This dinner was to me a time of exquisite raptures. Finding myself under her roof, I forgot her real coldness, and the indifference that lay beneath the Count’s politeness. In love, as in life, there is a period of full growth where it is self-sufficient.

This dinner was to me a time of exquisite raptures. Finding myself under her roof, I forgot her real coldness, and the indifference that lay beneath the Count’s politeness.

In love, as in life, there is a period of full growth where it is self-sufficient.

I made some blundering answers, in keeping with the secret tumult of my passions; but no one could guess this, much less she who knew nothing of love. The rest of the evening was as a dream.

A speech made by a certain satirical prince long clung to his heels: “Monsieur de Chessel generally has something of the Durand about him,” said His Highness. And this witticism was long a joy in Touraine.

Parvenus are like monkeys, and not less dexterous.

Seen from above we admire their agility in climbing; but when they have reached the top, nothing is to be seen but their more shameful side. The wrong side of my entertainer was made of meanness puffed up with envy.

then I learned to know his sudden changes of temper, his fits of utter, causeless dejection, his gusts of rebelliousness, his bitter and harsh complaining, his impulses of controlled madness, his childish whining, his groans as of a man in despair, his unexpected rages.

Moral nature differs from physical nature, inasmuch as nothing in it is final.

The intensity of effect is in proportion to the character acted on, or to the ideas that may be associated with an action. My continuing at Clochegourde, my whole future life depended on this fantastic will.

Though my honesty, watered with cold sweats, stood firm at those moments when the waters of life part and show the stony depths of its bed, whenever human justice draws her terrible sword on a man’s neck, I say to myself,

“Penal laws were made by those who never knew want.”

In this dire extremity I found in Monsieur de Chessel’s library a treatise on backgammon, and this I studied; then my host was good enough to give me a few lessons.

… burden of my griefs uttered with the fire of an Isaiah, I waited for a word from the woman who had heard me with a downcast head, she lightened the darkness with a look, and vivified the worlds, earthly and divine, by one single sentence.

“Our childhood was the same,” said she, showing me a face bright with the halo of martyrdom.

After a pause, during which our souls were wedded by the same consoling thought, “Then I was not the only one to suffer!”

Believe me when I tell you that a life of love is an exception to every earthly law; every flower fades, every great joy has a bitter morrow—when it has a morrow.

Real life is a life of sorrow; this nettle is its fit image; it has sprouted in the shade of the terrace, and grows green on its stem without any sunshine.

Here, as in northern latitudes, there are smiles in the sky, rare, to be sure, but making amends for many griefs. After all, if a woman is exclusively a mother, is she not tied by sacrifices rather than by joys?

“Believe me, the human being who can appear in the presence of the Great Judge, leading any comforted soul that had been ready to curse life, will have transformed his sorrows into delight.

If my suffering has secured the happiness of my family, is it really suffering?

”

You alone can know the immensity of joy in the moment when a heart opens to you, an ear listens, a look answers you.

One day wipes out all the evil days.

Past sorrows, broodings, despair, and melancholy—past, but not forgotten—are so many bonds by which the soul clings to its sister soul. The woman, beautified by our suppressed desires, inherits our wasted sighs and loves; she refunds our deluded affections with interest;

“Well,” replied I, “tell me plainly how you would wish me to love you.”

“Love me as my aunt loved me; I have given you her rights by permitting you to call me by the name she had chosen from my names.”

“Love you without hope, with entire devotion?—Yes, I will do for you what men do for God. Have you not asked it of me?—I will go into a seminary; I will come out a priest, and I will educate Jacques.

This impulse of feeling revealed to me all the torment of a woman whose generous soul is joined to that of a man whose meanness she has to cover decently every day.

Respect is a barrier which protects great and small alike; each on his part can look the other steadily in the face.

I was deferent to the Duchess by reason of my youth; but where others saw only the Duchess, I saw my Henriette’s mother, and there was a solemnity in my respect.

The great Thursday came; it was a festival of tiresome formality, one of those days which lovers hate, when they are used to the facilities of everyday life, accustomed to find their place ready for them, and the mistress of the house wholly theirs.

Love has a horror of everything but itself.

The Duchess returned to enjoy the pomps of the Court, and all fell into order at Clochegourde.

they are shrewdly knowing, and your guileless accomplices; they steal up on tiptoe, smile in your face, and silently leave you. Everything welcomes you, loves you, and smiles upon you.

A true passion is like a beautiful flower which it is all the more delightful to find when the soil that produces it is barren and wild.

But if I had the delights of being thus naturalized in a family where I made relationships after my own heart, I also paid the penalties. Hitherto Monsieur de Mortsauf had controlled himself in my presence;

She could but die, offering up to God this added anguish, though she could not endure it without tears and torment.

“I have given you more than I ought,” she said in conclusion, “since there is nothing more that you can take, and I am already punished.”

I could but soothe her, promise never, never to cause her a moment’s pain, and vow to love her at twenty as old men love their youngest born.

And I have found Henriette before one of those nosegays, her hands hanging loosely, a prey to those stormy contemplations when the feelings swell the bosom, give light to the brow, surge up in waves that toss and foam and leave us enervated by exhaustion.

I have never since gathered nosegays for anyone!

When we had invented this language for our own use, we felt the sort of satisfaction that a slave finds in deceiving his master.

And she laughed the hearty laugh of youth when, following the little girl with my basket full, I said, like Madeleine, “And look at mine, mamma.”

“Dear child,” she said to me, “do not get too hot.” Then, stroking my hair and my neck, she gave me a little slap on the cheek, adding, “Thou art in a bath!”

This is the only time I ever received from her that verbal caress, the lover’s tu. I stood looking at the pretty hedgerows full of red berries, of sloes, and blackberries; I listened to the children shouting;

On our way home, the Countess took my arm; she leaned on me so as to let my heart feel all the weight of her hand, like a mother who longs to impart her gladness, and said in my ear:

“You bring us good fortune.”

And to me, knowing of her sleepless nights, her constant alarms, and her past life, through which she had indeed been supported by the hand of God, but in which all had been barren and weariful, these words, spoken in her deep, soft voice, brought …

Such was the retreat where tears were so constantly shed by this daughter of an illustrious race, at this moment swamped in bitterness, and rejecting the love that might have brought her consolation. A hidden and irremediable misfortune!

The victim in tears for the torturer, the torturer in tears for his victim.

When the children and the maid came in, I left her. The Count was waiting for me; he already regarded me as a mediator between his wife and himself; and he grasped my hands, exclaiming, “Stay with us; stay with us, Félix!”

In the evening, as we took a walk, the autumn leaves rustling under our feet, she said:

“Pain is infinite, joy has its limits,”

a speech which revealed the extent of her sufferings by comparison with her transient happiness.

Henriette’s words had enlightened me, but as the lightning-flash which destroys the garnered harvest. During that hour on the river I had fancied that she cared most for me; I now felt bitterly that her words were perfectly sincere.

The lover who is not all in all is nothing.

So I was alone in my love with the longing of a passion that knows all its wants, that feeds on anticipation, on hoped-for kindness, and is satisfied with the joys of imagination, because it confounds with them those it looks for in the future.

It is fed alike by storms and by the slow tribute of rippling springs.

Yes, when we love, everything feeds love.

The first great danger past, the Countess and I became accustomed to sickness. In spite of the confusion caused by the constant care needed by the Count, his room, which we had found in such disorder, was made neat and pretty.

Ah! I should have been saved if only some friend had repeated the odious speech she had uttered concerning Madame de Mortsauf and me:

“I am sick,” said she, “of this turtledove sighing!”

Though I have no wish to justify my crime, I must point out to you, Natalie, that a man has less chances of resisting a woman than you women have of evading our pursuit.

Well, Lady Arabella satisfies the instincts, the organs, the appetites, the vices, and the virtues of the subtle matter of which we are compounded; she was the mistress of my body.

Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of my soul.

The love the mistress could satisfy has its limits; the matter is finite, its properties have recognized forces, it is liable to inevitable saturation; I often felt an indescribable void in Paris with Lady Dudley. Infinity is the realm of the heart;

Guilty as I was, I had a heart, and all these speeches were poniard thrusts coldly directed to the tenderest spots, which they seemed chosen to hit.

Mental suffering is not a fixed quantity; it is in proportion to the sensitiveness of the soul

, and the Countess had bitterly gone through the whole scale of anguish; but for this very reason the best woman will always be cruel in proportion to what her kindness has been. I looked at her, but she kept her head down.

“Can you ask him such a question,” cried the Countess. “

Is not the woman a man loves always the most beautiful of her sex?

”

“Can you ask him such a question,” cried the Countess. “Is not the woman a man loves always the most beautiful of her sex?”

“Yes, always,” I replied with emphasis, and a flashing look that she could not meet.

“You are in luck,” the Count went on. “Yes, you are a lucky rascal! Ah! when I was young my head would have been turned by such a conquest—”

“What is the matter?” said I.

“I no longer know what virtue means,” said she. “I have ceased to be conscious of my own.”

We both remained petrified, listening to the echo of these words as to a stone flung into a chasm.

“Amédée,” said I. “Félix is another creature, who can never be known to anyone but you.”

“Henriette dies hard,” said she, with a faint, pious smile.

“But she will die,” she went on, “in the first effort of the humble Christian, the proud mother, the woman whose virtues, tottering yesterday, are confirmed today.

whereas, in the early days, the woman he loves imparts her virtues, her refinement, invites him to what is beautiful by her smile, and shows him what devotion means by her example.

Alas for the man who has not had his Henriette! Alas for him who has not met a Lady Dudley!

If he marries, the second will fail to retain his wife, the first may perhaps be deserted by his mistress; happy is he who finds both in one woman; happy, Natalie, is the man you love!

if speech and looks are alike prohibited she can use the sand under her feet to trace a thought in; alone she expresses her passion even in her sleep, in short, she bends the world to her love.

The Englishwoman, on the contrary, bends her love to the world.

Accustomed by education to preserve the icy manners, the egotistic British mien of which I have told you, she opens and shuts her heart with the readiness of English-made machinery. She has an impenetrable mask which she takes on and off with phlegmatic coolness;

they may say what they will. Protestantism and Catholicism account for the differences which give to a Frenchwoman’s spirit so great a superiority over the reasoned, calculating love of Englishwomen.

Protestantism is sceptical, it examines and kills belief; it is the death of art and of love.

Where the world rules the people of the world must obey; but those who know what passion means, flee away; to them it is intolerable.

Madame de Mortsauf had read this nature at a glance in their brief meeting; I remembered her prophetic words. Henriette was right throughout: Arabella’s love was becoming intolerable.

I have since noticed that women who ride well are never tender; like the Amazons they have lost a breast, and their hearts are petrified in one spot, I know not which.

Just when I was beginning to feel the weight of this yoke, when weariness was stealing over me, body and soul, when I understood how great a sanctity true feeling can give to love, and when the memories of Clochegourde were too much for me …

It punishes none but visible crimes. Why death and disgrace to the assassin who kills with a single blow, who generally comes upon you in your sleep and leaves you to sleep forever, or who strikes you unexpectedly and spares you the agony of death?

Why a happy life and the world’s respect for the murderer who pours venom drop by drop into the soul and undermines the body to destroy it?

How many assassins go unpunished! What deference for superior lives! What an acquittal for the homicide caused by moral persecution!

Science is the world’s accomplice in these crimes, for which there is no tribunal.

No one, it would seem, ever dies of grief, or despair, or love, or hidden poverty, or hopes fruitlessly cherished, perpetually uprooted and replanted!

The new nomenclature has ingenious words that account for everything: gastritis, pericarditis, the thousand feminine ailments of which the names are spoken in a whisper, are mere passports to the coffin on which hypocritical tears are shed, to be soon wiped away by the lawyer.

And at last you are here—and I reward your devotion by the horrible spectacle which made the Comte de Rancé turn Trappist; I, who hoped to dwell in your remembrance beautiful, noble, like an immortal Lily, I destroy all your illusions.

True love makes no calculations.

“But do not fly: stay. Monsieur Origet thought me much better this morning; I shall live again—be renewed under your eyes. And then, when I shall have recovered my strength a little, when I can take some food, I shall grow handsome again.

“Yes, I will live!” she cried, making me stand too, and leaning on me; “live on realities and not on lies. My whole life has been one of lies; I have been counting them over these last days.

Is it possible that I should die, I who have not lived?

I who have never been to meet anyone on a heath?” She paused, seemed to listen, and smelt something through the very walls.

What majesty there is in that silence and coldness! How many reflections do they utter! What beauty in that perfect repose, what command in that motionless sleep! All the past is there, and the future has begun.

Ah! I loved her as well in death as I had in life.

In the morning the Count went to bed, the three weary priests fell asleep at that hour of exhaustion, so well known to all who have watched through a night.

in short, all the good works of a Christian, a mother, a lady bountiful; and sums of money given to help loving couples to marry, or to provide substitutes for young men drawn by the conscription, touching gifts from the loving soul that had said:

“The happiness of others becomes the joy of those who can no longer be happy.”

These facts, talked over every evening for the last three days, had brought together a vast throng. I followed the bier with Jacques and the two Abbés. According to custom neither Madeleine nor the Count was present; they remained alone at Clochegourde.

then, when our treasure has been through the crucible, when we have mixed with men, and known events, it all seems unaccountably small, we find so little gold among the ashes.

Such is life⁠—life in its reality!⁠—a great deal of aspiration, a small result.

I meditated on myself at great length, wondering what I could do after a blow that had cut down all my flowers.—I determined to rush into politics and science, by the tortuous paths of ambition, to cut women out of my life entirely, and be …