Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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The fact that armed persons were still abroad, thieves or assassins,
lurking under many disguises, [75] might explain what happened on the
last evening of their time together, when they sat late at the open
windows as the night increased, serene but covered summer night,
aromatic, velvet-footed. What coolness it had was pleasant after the
wine; and they strolled out, fantastically muffled in certain old
heraldic dresses of parade, caught up in the hall as they passed
through, Gaston alone remaining to attend on his grandfather. In
about an hour's time they returned, not a little disconcerted, to
tell a story of which Gaston was reminded (seeing them again in
thought as if only half real, amid the bloomy night, with blood upon
their boyish flowers) as they crossed his path afterwards at three
intervals. Listening for the night-hawk, pushing aside the hedge-row
to catch the evening breath of the honeysuckle, they had sauntered
on, scarcely looking in advance, along the causeway. Soft sounds
came out of the distance, but footsteps on the hard road they had not
heard, when three others fronted them face to face--Jasmin, Amadee,
and Camille--their very selves, visible in the light of the lantern
carried by Camille: they might have felt the breath upon their
cheeks: real, close, definite, cap for cap, plume for plume, flower
for flower, a light like their own flashed up counter-wise, but with
blood, all three of them, fresh upon the bosom, or in the mouth. It
was well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even
devils, [76] as wise men know, taking flight at its white glitter
through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with
mimic counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before
them.

Curdled at heart for an hour by that strange encounter, they went on
their way next morning no different. There was something in the mere
belief that peace was come at last. For a moment Huguenots were, or
pretended to be, satisfied with a large concession of liberty; to be
almost light of soul. The French, who can always pause in the very
midst of civil bloodshed to eulogise the reign of universal kindness,
were determined to treat a mere armistice as nothing less than
realised Utopia. To bear offensive weapons became a crime; and the
sense of security at home was attested by vague schemes of glory to
be won abroad, under the leadership of "The Admiral," the great
Huguenot Coligni, anxious to atone for his share in the unhappiness
of France by helping her to foreign conquests. Philip of Spain had
been watching for the moment when Charles and Catherine should call
the Duke of Alva into France to continue his devout work there.
Instead, the poetic mind of Charles was dazzled for a moment by the
dream of wrestling the misused Netherlands from Spanish rule
altogether.

Under such genial conditions, then, Gaston set out towards those
south-west regions he had [77] always yearned to, as popular
imagination just now set thither also, in a vision of French ships
going forth from the mouths of the Loire and the Gironde, from
Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of
Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that
of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and
allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its
advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La
Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of
his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and
wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of
the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a
region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the
mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white
Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy
seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so
many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human
habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along
some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little
prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive
architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely
native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one
was not but might become--the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined,
to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With
their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal
chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision
for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were
the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque
age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed
souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy
apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their
very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light
here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did
not merely accept the sun, but flashed it back gratefully from the
white, gracious, carven houses, that were like a natural part of it.
As he passed below, fancy would sometimes credit the outlook from
their lofty gables with felicities of combination beyond possibility.
What prospects of mountain and sea-shore from those aerial window-
seats!

And still, as in some sumptuous tapestry, the architecture, the
landscape, were but a setting for the human figures: these palatial
abodes, never out of sight, high on the river bank, challenged
continual speculation as to their inhabitants--how they moved, read
poetry and romance, or wrote the memoirs which were like romance,
passed through all the hourly changes of their all- [79]
accomplished, intimate life. The Loire was the river pre-eminently
of the monarchy, of the court; and the fleeting human interests, fact
or fancy, which gave its utmost value to the liveliness of the
natural scene, found a centre in the movements of Catherine and her
sons, still roving, after the eccentric habit inherited from Francis
the First, from one "house of pleasure" to another, in the pursuit at
once of amusement and of that political intrigue which was the
serious business of their lives. Like some fantastic company of
strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, the
royal family, with all its own small rivalries, would be housed for
the night under the same roof with some of its greater enemies--Henri
de Guise, Conde, "The Admiral," all alike taken by surprise--but
courteously, and therefore ineffectively. And Gaston, come thus by
chance so close to them, had the sense not so much of nearness to the
springs of great events, as of the likeness of the whole matter to a
stage-play with its ingeniously contrived encounters, or the
assortments of a game of chance.

And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation
of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and
whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in
a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined,
varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination
by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly
along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel
freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it
was visible--sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon
line. The features of the landscape changed again, and the gardens,
the rich orchards, gave way to bare, grassy undulations: only, the
open sandy spaces presented their own native flora, for the fine
silex seemed to have crept into the tall, wiry stalks of the ixias,
like grasses the seeds of which had expanded, by solar magic, into
veritable flowers, crimson, green, or yellow patched with black.

It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea's arms, amid the low
murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a
little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient
manor, deserted as the sea encroached--long ago, for the fig-trees in
the riven walls were tough and old. Next morning he must turn his
back betimes, with the freshness of the outlook still undimmed, all
colours turning to white on the shell-beach, the wrecks, the children
at play on it, the boat with its gay streamers dancing in the foam.
Bright as the scene of his journey had been, it had had from time to
time its grisly touches; a forbidden fortress with its steel-clad
inmates thrust itself upon the way; the village church had been
ruined too recently to count as picturesque; and at last, at the
meeting-point of [81] five long causeways across a wide expanse of
marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant, La Rochelle
itself scowled through the heavy air, the dark ramparts still rising
higher around its dark townsfolk:--La Rochelle, the "Bastion of the
Gospel" according to John Calvin, the conceded capital of the
Huguenots. They were there, and would not leave it, even to share
the festivities of the marriage of King Charles to his little
Austrian Elizabeth about this time--the armed chiefs of
Protestantism, dreaming of a "dictator" after the Roman manner, who
should set up a religious republic. Serried closely together on
land, they had a strange mixed following on the sea. Lair of
heretics, or shelter of martyrs, La Rochelle was ready to protect the
outlaw. The corsair, of course, would be a Protestant, actually
armed perhaps by sour old Jeanne of Navarre--the ship he fell across,
of course, Spanish. A real Spanish ship of war, gay, magnificent,
was gliding even then, stealthily, through the distant haze; and
nearer lay what there was of a French navy. Did the enigmatic
"Admiral," the coming dictator, Coligni, really wish to turn it to
foreign adventure, in rivalry of Spain, as the proper patriotic
outcome of this period, or breathing-space, of peace and national
unity?

Undoubtedly they were still there, even in this halcyon weather,
those causes of disquiet, like the volcanic forces beneath the
massive [82] chestnut-woods, spread so calmly through the breathless
air, on the ledges and levels of the red heights of the Limousin,
under which Gaston now passed on his way southwards. On his right
hand a broad, lightly diversified expanse of vineyard, of towns and
towers innumerable, rolled its burden of fat things down the slope of
the Gironde towards the more perfect level beyond. In the heady
afternoon an indescribable softness laid hold on him, from the
objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And
was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron,
the chalybeate influence, was to come?--those coquettish, well-kept,
vine-wreathed towers, smiling over a little irregular old village,
itself half-hidden in gadding vine, pointed out by the gardeners (all
labourers here were gardeners) as the end of his long, pleasant
journey, as the abode of Monsieur Michel de Montaigne, the singular
but not unpopular gentleman living there among his books, of whom
Gaston hears so much over-night at the inn where he rests, before
delivering the great poet's letter, entering his room at last in a
flutter of curiosity.

In those earlier days of the Renaissance, a whole generation had been
exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself. An older
ideal moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature
actually in possession, still haunted humanity, at the very moment
when it was [83] called, through a full knowledge of the past, to
enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own
capacities.--Might one enjoy? Might one eat of all the trees?--Some
had already eaten, and needed, retrospectively, a theoretic
justification, a sanction of their actual liberties, in some new
reading of human nature itself and its relation to the world around
it.--Explain to us the propriety, on the full view of things, of this
bold course we have taken, or know we shall take!

Ex post facto, at all events, that justification was furnished by the
Essays of Montaigne. The spirit of the essays doubtless had been
felt already in many a mind, as, by a universal law of reaction, the
intellect does supply the due theoretic equivalent to an inevitable
course of conduct. But it was Montaigne certainly who turned that
emancipating ethic into current coin. To Pascal, looking back upon
the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the
impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who
represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama,
hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings,
that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and
impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.

Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a
life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been
accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated
modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston
presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season,
that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he
took, Montaigne--the acclivity--of Saint Michael, just thirty-six
years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the
neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return
thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his
days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of
the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life,
a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and
unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with
seeming indolence at home.

It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his
house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been
rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war
shelters: and openness--that all was wide open, searched through by
light and warmth and air from the soil--was the impression it made on
Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court,
to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the
great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still
lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a
certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a
preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and
savoured of his native earth.

Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively,
as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life,
towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely
interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest,
truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service
as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays
were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he
cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with
itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed,
outward stimulus--physical motion, some text shot from a book, the
queries and objections of a living voice.--"My thoughts sleep, if I
sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but
thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked
them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions,
many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting
their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual
publication at last to none of the usual literary motives--desire for
fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell--but to the sociable desire for
a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for
companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance";
speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."--"If there
be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who
can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but
whistle, and I will run!"

Notes of expressive facts, of words also worthy of note (for he was a
lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an
irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers,
with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or
"protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its
scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also
to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the
hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like
this morning's with a visitor for the first time,--amid the
felicitous chances of that, at some random turn by the way, he would
become aware of shaping purpose: the beam of light or heat would
strike down, to illuminate, to fuse and organise the coldly
accumulated matter, of reason, of experience. Surely, some
providence over thought and speech led one finely through those
haphazard journeys! But thus dependent to so great a degree on
external converse for the best fruit of his own thought, he was also
an efficient evocator of the thought of another--himself an original
spirit more than tolerating [87] the originality of others,--which
brought it into play. Here was one who (through natural
predilection, reinforced by theory) would welcome one's very self,
undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his
own--one's errors, vanities, perhaps fatuities. Naturally eloquent,
expressive, with a mind like a rich collection of the choice things
of all times and countries, he was at his best, his happiest, amid
the magnetic contacts of an easy conversation. When Gaston years
afterwards came to read the famous Essays, he found many a delightful
actual conversation re-set, and had the key we lack to their
surprises, their capricious turns and lapses.--Well! Montaigne had
opened the letter, had forthwith passed his genial criticism on the
writer, and then, characteristically, forgetting all about it, turned
to the bearer as if he had been intimate with him from childhood.
And the feeling was mutual. Gaston in half an hour seemed to have
known his entertainer all his life.

In unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever--there,
rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books--the flower,
the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its root.
With books, as indeed with persons, his intercourse was apt to be
desultory. Books!--He was by way of asserting his independence of
them, was their very candid friend:--they were far from being [88]
an unmixed good. He would observe (the fact was its own scornful
comment) that there were more books upon books than upon any other
subject. Yet books, more than a thousand volumes, a handsome library
for that day, nicely representative not only of literature but of the
owner's taste therein, lay all around; and turning now to this, now
to that, he handled their pages with nothing less than tenderness: it
was the first of many inconsistencies which yet had about them a
singularly taking air, of reason, of equity. Plutarch and Seneca
were soon in the foreground: they would "still be at his elbow to
test and be tested": masters of the autumnal wisdom that was coming
to be his own, ripe and placid--from the autumn of old Rome, of life,
of the world, the very genius of second thoughts, of exquisite tact
and discretion, of judgment upon knowledge.

But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of
enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret
staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat,
noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he
was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its
people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically
lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have
touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he
looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had,
in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country,"
through a series of chapters, every one of which had told
emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and
new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old
perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been
certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice,
incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The
variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man,
concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature,
making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional;
a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray
of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all
the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and
nature and of the individual mind;--such was the sense of this open
book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly
enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies;
disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious
sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of
character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements,
the soul and potency of the man.

How imperceptibly had darkness crept over them, effacing everything
but the interior of [90] the great circular chamber, its book-shelves
and enigmatic mottoes and the tapestry on the wall,--Circe and her
sorceries, in many parts--to draw over the windows in winter. Supper
over, the young wife entered at last. Always on the lookout for the
sincerities of human nature (sincerity counting for life-giving form,
whatever the matter might be) as he delighted in watching children,
Montaigne loved also to watch grown people when they were most like
children; at their games, therefore, and in the mechanical and
customary parts of their existence, as discovering the real soul in
them. Abstaining from the dice himself, since for him such "play was
not play enough, but too grave and serious a diversion," and
remarking that "the play of children is not performed in play, but to
be judged as their most serious action," he set Gaston and the
amiable, unpedantic, lady to play together, where he might observe
them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation,
the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's
recreations.--Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into
swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly,
that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the
conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books,
meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking
intervals of a long day-sleep.

V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

[91] The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!--so deep a sense
of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever
changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable
differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware,
on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. That
the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest
of facts. Pursue that variety below the surface!--the lines did but
part further and further asunder, with an ever-increasing divergency,
which made any common measure of truth impossible. Diversity of
custom!--What was it but diversity in the moral and mental view,
diversity of opinion? and diversity of opinion, what but radical
diversity of mental constitution? How various in kind and degree had
he found men's thoughts concerning death, for instance, "some (ah
me!) even running headlong upon it, with [92] a real affection"?
Death, life; wealth, poverty; the whole sum of contrasts; nay! duty
itself,--the relish of right and wrong"; all depend upon the opinion
each one has of them, and "receive no colour of good or evil but
according to the application of the individual soul." Did Hamlet
learn of him that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so"?--What we call evil is not so of itself: it depends only
upon us, to give it another taste and complexion.--Things, in respect
of themselves, have peradventure their weight, measure, and
conditions; but when once we have taken them into us, the soul forms
them as she pleases.--Death is terrible to Cicero, courted by Cato,
indifferent to Socrates.--Fortune, circumstance, offers but the
matter: 'tis the soul adds the form.--Every opinion, how fantastic
soever to some, is to another of force enough to be espoused at the
risk of life."

For opinion was the projection of individual will, of a native
original predilection. Opinions!--they are like the clothes we wear,
which warm us, not with their heat, but with ours. Track your way
(as he had learned to do) to the remote origin of what looks like
folly; at home, on its native soil, it was found to be justifiable,
as a proper growth of wisdom. In the vast conflict of taste,
preference, conviction, there was no real inconsistency. It was but
that the soul looked "upon things with [93] another eye, and
represented them to itself with another kind of face; reason being a
tincture almost equally infused into all our manners and opinions;
though there never were in the world two opinions exactly alike."
And the practical comment was, not as one might have expected,
towards the determination of some common standard of truth amid that
infinite variety, but to this effect rather, that we are not bound to
receive every opinion we are not able to refute, nor to accept
another's refutation of our own; these diversities being themselves
ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in
large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of
the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this
particular moment, and from this unique point of view--that for you,
this for me--now, but perhaps not then.

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