Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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There was a fineness of sensation in these unpremeditated thoughts,
which to Gaston seemed to connect itself with the exquisite words he
had found to paint his two great affections, for his [112] father and
for Etienne de la Boetie,--a fineness of sensation perhaps quite
novel in that age, but still of physical sensation: and in pursuit of
fine physical sensation he came, on his broad, easy, indifferent
passage through the world, across the coarsest growths which also
thrive "under the sun," and was not revolted. They were akin to that
ruder earth within himself, of which a kind of undissembled greed was
symptomatic; the love of "meats little roasted, very high, and even,
as to several, quite gone"; while, in drinking, he loved "clear
glass, that the eye might taste too, according to its capacity"; akin
also to a certain slothfulness:--"Sleeping," he says, "has taken up a
great part of my life." And there was almost nothing he would not
say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he
would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the
animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:--he would never blush
at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French
literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know
very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who
have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts."

Yet when Gaston, twenty years afterwards, heard of the seemingly
pious end of Monsieur de Montaigne, he recalled a hundred, always
quiet but not always insignificant, acts of devotion, noticeable in
those old days, on passing a village [113] church, or at home, in the
little chapel--superstitions, concessions to others, strictly
appropriate recognitions rather, as it might seem, of a certain great
possibility, which might lie among the conditions of so complex a
world. That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a
mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest
of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him
of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them
would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, seemed to have been
the consistent motive, however secret and subtle in its working, of
Montaigne's sustained intellectual activity. A lowly philosophy of
ignorance would not be likely to disallow or discredit whatever
intimations there might be, in the experience of the wise or of the
simple, in favour of a venerable religion, which from its long
history had come to seem like a growth of nature. Somewhere, among
men's seemingly random and so inexplicable apprehensions, might lie
the grains of a wisdom more precious than gold, or even its priceless
pearl. That "free and roving thing," the human soul--what might it
not have found out for itself, in a world so wide? To deny, at all
events, would be only "to limit the mind, by negation."

It was not however this side of that double philosophy which
recommended itself just now to Gaston. The master's wistful
tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age,
attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with
those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one
from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and
experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him.
Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that
general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then
demanded of the moral theorist. For so pronounced a lover of
sincerity as Monsieur de Montaigne, there was certainly a strange
ambiguousness in the result of his lengthy inquiries, on the greatest
as well as on the lightest matters, and it was inevitable that a
listener should accept the dubious lesson in his own sense. Was this
shrewd casuist only bringing him by a roundabout way to principles he
would not have cared to avow? To the great religious thinker of the
next century, to Pascal, Montaigne was to figure as emphatically on
the wrong side, not merely because "he that is not with us, is
against us." It was something to have been, in the matter of
religious tolerance, as on many other matters of justice and
gentleness, the solitary conscience of the age. But could one really
care for truth, who never even seemed to find it? Did he fear,
perhaps, the practical responsibility of getting to the very bottom
of certain questions? That the actual discourse of so keen a thinker
appeared often inconsistent or inconsecutive, might be a [115] hint
perhaps that there was some deeper ground of thought in reserve; as
if he were really moving, securely, over ground you did not see.
What might that ground be? As to Gaston himself,--had this kindly
entertainer only been drawing the screws of a very complex piece of
machinery which had worked well enough hitherto for all practical
purposes?--Was this all that had been going on, while he lingered
there, week after week, in a kind of devout attendance on theories,
and, for his part, feeling no reverberation of actual events around
him, still less of great events in preparation? These were the
questions Gaston had in mind, as, at length, he thanked his host one
morning with real regret, and took his last look around that
meditative place, the manuscripts, the books, the emblems,--the house
of Circe on the wall.

VI. SHADOWS OF EVENTS

[116] We all feel, I suppose, the pathos of that mythic situation in
Homer, where the Greeks at the last throb of battle around the body
of Patroclus find the horror of supernatural darkness added to their
other foes; feel it through some touch of truth to our own experience
how the malignancy of the forces against us may be doubled by their
uncertainty and the resultant confusion of one's own mind--blindfold
night there too, at the moment when daylight and self-possession are
indispensable.

In that old dream-land of the Iliad such darkness is the work of a
propitiable deity, and withdrawn at its pleasure; in life, it often
persists obstinately. It was so with the agents on the terrible Eve
of St. Bartholomew, 1572, when a man's foes were those of his own
household. An ambiguity of motive and influence, a confusion of
spirit amounting, as we approach the centre of action, to physical
madness, encompasses [117] those who are formally responsible for
things; and the mist around that great crime, or great "accident," in
which the gala weather of Gaston's coming to Paris broke up, leaving
a sullenness behind it to remain for a generation, has never been
penetrated. The doubt with which Charles the Ninth would seem to
have left the world, doubt as to his own complicity therein, as well
as to the precise nature, the course and scope, of the event itself,
is still unresolved. So it was with Gaston also. The incident in
his life which opened for him the profoundest sources of regret and
pity, shaped as it was in a measure by those greater historic
movements, owed its tragic significance there to an unfriendly shadow
precluding knowledge how certain facts had really gone, a shadow
which veiled from others a particular act of his and the true
character of its motives.

For, the scene of events being now contracted very closely to Paris,
the predestined actors therein were gradually drawn thither as into
some narrow battlefield or slaughter-house or fell trap of destiny,
and Gaston, all unconsciously, along with them--he and his private
fortunes involved in those larger ones. Result of chance, or fate,
or cunning prevision, there are in the acts great and little--the
acts and the words alike--of the king and his associates, at this
moment, coincidences which give them at least superficially the
colour of an elaborate conspiracy. [118] Certainly, as men looked
back afterwards, all the seemingly random doings of those restless
months ending in the Noces Vermeilles marriage of Henry of Navarre
with Margaret of France, lent themselves agreeably to the theory of a
great plot to crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning
Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and
Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented
itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested
in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a
mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day
and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the
Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems
to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by
Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to
mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the
chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful
towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni-
-Mon pere! Mon pere!--all his calineries in that age of courtesy and
assassinations--would wonder always in time to come, as the more
equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty
foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this
ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding
itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a
sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It
might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power,
thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our
actual misfortunes. However carefully the critical intelligence in
him might trim the balance, his imagination at all events would never
be clear of the more plausible construction of events. In spite of
efforts not to misjudge, in proportion to the clearness with which he
recalled the visible footsteps of the "accursed" Valois, he saw them,
irresistibly, in connexion with the end actually reached, moving to
the sounds of wedding music, through a world of dainty gestures, amid
sonnets and flowers, and perhaps the most refined art the world has
seen, to their surfeit of blood.

And if those "accursed" Valois might plead to be judged refinedly, so
would Gaston, had the opportunity come, have pleaded not to be
misunderstood. Of the actual event he was not a spectator, and his
sudden absence from Paris at that moment seemed to some of those he
left there only a cruelly characteristic incident in the great
treachery. Just before that delirious night set in, the news that
his old grandfather lay mortally sick at Deux-manoirs had snatched
him away to watch by the dying bed, amid the peaceful ministries of
the religion which was even then filling the houses of Paris with
blood. But the yellow-haired woman, light of soul, whose husband he
had become by dubious and [120] irregular Huguenot rites, the
religious sanction of which he hardly recognised--flying after his
last tender kiss, with the babe in her womb, from the ruins of her
home, and the slaughter of her kinsmen, supposed herself
treacherously deserted. For him, on the other hand, "the pity of
it," the pity of the thing supplied all that had been wanting in its
first consecration, and made the lost mistress really a wife. His
recoil from that damaging theory of his conduct brought home to a
sensitive conscience the fact that there had indeed been a measure of
self-indulgent weakness in his acts, and made him the creature for
the rest of his days of something like remorse.

The gaiety, the strange devils' gaiety of France, at least in all
places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage--a
marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to
Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the
"Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference
to, the Pope. With the great Huguenot leaders, with the princes of
the house of Guise, and the Court, like one united family, all in
gaudy evidence in its streets, Paris, ever with an eye for the chance
of amusement, always preoccupied with the visible side of things,
always Catholic--was bidden to be tolerant for a moment, to carry no
fire-arms under penalties, "to renew no past [121] quarrels," and
draw no sword in any new one. It was the perfect stroke of
Catherine's policy, the secret of her predominance over her sons,
thus, with a flight of purchaseable fair women ever at command, to
maintain perpetual holiday, perpetual idleness, with consequent
perpetual, most often idle, thoughts about marriage, amid which the
actual conduct of affairs would be left to herself. Yet for Paris
thus Catholic, there was certainly, even if the Pope were induced to
consent, and the Huguenot bride-groom to "conform," something illicit
and inauspicious about this marriage within the prohibited degrees of
kinship. In fact, the cunningly sought papal dispensation never
came; Charles, with apparent unconcern, fulfilled his threat, and did
without it; must needs however trick the old Cardinal de Bourbon into
performing his office, not indeed "in the face of the Church," but in
the open air outside the doors of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the
Catholics quietly retiring into the interior, when that starveling
ceremony was over, to hear the nuptial mass. Still, the open air,
the August sunshine, had lent the occasion an irresistible physical
gaiety in this hymeneal Assumption weather. Paris, suppressing its
scruples, its conscientious and unconscientious hatreds, at least for
a season, had adorned herself as that fascinating city always has
been able to adorn herself, if with something of artifice, certainly
[121] with great completeness, almost to illusion. Whatever gloom
the Middle Age with its sins and sorrows might have left there, was
under gallant disguise to-day. In the train of the young married
people, jeunes premiers in an engagement which was to turn out almost
as transitory as a stage-play, a long month of masquerade meandered
night and day through the public places. His carnality and hers, so
startling in their later developments, showed now in fact but as the
engaging force of youth, since youth, however unpromising its
antecedents, can never have sinned irretrievably. Yet to curious
retrospective minds not long afterwards, these graceful follies would
seem tragic or allegoric, with an undercurrent of infernal irony
throughout. Charles and his two brothers, keeping the gates of a
mimic paradise in the court of the Louvre, while the fountains ran
wine--were they already thinking of a time when they would keep those
gates, with iron purpose, while the gutters ran blood?

If Huguenots were disgusted with the frivolities of the hour, passing
on the other side of the street in sad attire, plotting, as some have
thought, as their enemies will persuade the Pope, a yet more terrible
massacre of their own, only anticipated by the superior force and
shrewdness of the Catholics, on the very eve of its accomplishment--
they did but serve just now to relieve the predominant white and red,
[123] and thereby double the brilliancy, of a gay picture. Yet a
less than Machiavellian cunning might perhaps have detected, amid all
this sudden fraternity--as in some unseasonably fine weather signs of
coming distress--a risky element of exaggeration in those
precipitately patched-up amities, a certain hollow ring in those
improbable religious conversions, those unlikely reconciliations in
what was after all an age of treachery as a fine art. With Gaston,
however, the merely receptive and poetic sense of life was abundantly
occupied with the spectacular value of the puissant figures in motion
around him. If he went beyond the brilliancy of the present moment
in his wonted pitiful equitable after-thoughts, he was still
concerned only with the more general aspects of the human lot, and
did not reflect that every public movement, however generous in its
tendency, is really flushed to active force by identification with
some narrower personal or purely selfish one. Coligni, "the
Admiral," centre of Huguenot opposition, just, kind, grim, to the
height of inspired genius, the grandest character his faith had yet
produced--undeterred by those ominous voices (of aged women and the
like) which are apt to beset all great actions, yielded readily to
the womanish endearments of Charles, his filial words and fond
touching of the hands, the face, aged at fifty-five--just this
portion of his conduct let us hope being exclusive of his precise
share [124] in the "conspiracy." And the opportune death in Paris of
the Huguenot Queen of Navarre only stirred question for a moment:
autopsy revealed no traces of unfair play, though at a time credulous
as to impossible poisoned perfumes and such things, romantic in its
very suspicions.

Delirium was in the air already charged with thunder, and laid hold
on Gaston too. It was as if through some unsettlement in the
atmospheric medium the objects around no longer acted upon the senses
with the normal result. Looking back afterwards, this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under its influence he had
lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real
differences and oppositions of things in that hotly coloured world of
Paris (like a shaken tapestry about him) awaiting the Eve of Saint
Bartholomew. Was the "undulant" philosophy of Monsieur de Montaigne,
in collusion with this dislocating time, at work upon him, that,
following with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour,
he found himself more than he could have thought possible the toy of
external accident? Lodged in Abelard's quarter, he all but repeats
Abelard's typical experience. His new Heloise, with capacities
doubtless, as he reflected afterwards regretfully, for a refined and
serious happiness, although actually so far only a man's plaything,
sat daintily amid her posies and painted potteries in the [125]
window of a house itself as forbidding and stern as her kinsmen, busy
Huguenot printers, well-to-do at a time not only fertile in new books
and new editions, but profuse of tracts, sheets, satiric handbills
for posting all over France. Gaston's curiosity, a kind of
fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on
occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture-
like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim
abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these
people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their
religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive
pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her
like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a
natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro,
wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the
very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all
longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him--a
right to consideration--to an effort on his part: he finds a sister
to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy,
honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to
save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might
have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the
marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no
binding sacrament. [126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself,
and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to
understand--for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction
seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant
love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed
the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow
which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere
mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.

Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the
ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or
feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true
friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a
poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to
go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Conde and Henry of
Bearn, would fain have done--the gallant world about them being come
just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a
trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been
distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence. To
the officers in immediate charge it was intimated that "those of the
new religion" designed "to rise against the king's authority, to the
trouble of his subjects and the city of Paris. For the prevention of
which conspiracy the king enjoined the Provost to possess himself
[127] of the keys of the various city gates, and seize all boats
plying on the river, to the end that none might enter or depart."
And just before the lists close around the doomed, Gaston has bounded
away on his road homeward to the bed of the dying grandfather, after
embracing his wife, anxious, if she might, to share his journey, with
some forecast of coming evil among those dark people.

The white badges of Catholicism had been distributed, not to every
Catholic (a large number of Catholics perished), to some Huguenots
such as La Rochefoucauld, brave guerrier et joyeux compagnon, dear to
Charles, hesitating still with some last word of conscience in his
ear at the very gate of the Louvre, when a random pistol-shot, in the
still undisturbed August night, rousing sudden fear for himself,
precipitates the event, and as if in delirium he is driven forth on
the scent of human blood. He had always hunted like a madman. It
was thus "the matins of Paris" began, in which not religious zealots
only assisted, but the thieves, the wanton, the unemployed, the
reckless children, les enfants massacreurs like those seen dragging
an insulted dead body to the Seine, greed or malice or the desire for
swift settlement of some long-pending law-suit finding here an
opportunity. A religious pretext had brought into sudden evidence
all the latent ferocities of a corrupt though dainty civilisation,
and while the stairways of the Louvre, the streets, [128] the vile
trap-doors of Paris, run blood, far away at Deux-manoirs Gaston
watches as the light creeps over the silent cornfields, the last
sense of it in those aged eyes now ebbing softly away. The village
priest, almost as aged, assists patiently with his immemorial
consolations at this long, leisurely, scarce perceptible ending to a
long, leisurely life, on the quiet double-holiday morning.*

The wild news of public disaster, penetrating along the country roads
now bristling afresh with signs of universal war, seemed of little
consequence in comparison with that closer grief at home, which made
just then the more effective demand on his sympathy, till the thought
came of the position of Colombe--his wife left behind there in Paris.
Immediate rumour, like subsequent history, gave variously the number-
-the number of thousands--who perished. The great Huguenot leader
was dead, one party at least, the royal party, safe for the moment
and in high spirits. As Charles himself put it, the ancient private
quarrel between the houses of Guise and Chatillon was ended by the
decease of the chief of the latter, Coligni de Chatillon--a death so
saintly after its new fashion that the long-delayed vengeance of
Henri de Guise on the presumed instigator of the murder of his father
seemed a martyrdom. And around that central barbarity the slaughter
had spread over Paris in widening [129] circles. With conflicting
thoughts, in wild terror and grief, Gaston seeks the footsteps of
Colombe, of her people, from their rifled and deserted house to the
abodes of their various acquaintance, like the traces of wrecked men
under deep water. Yet even amid his private distress, queries on
points of more general interest in the event would not be excluded.
With whom precisely, in whose interest had the first guilty motion
been?--Gaston on the morrow asked in vain as the historian asks
still. And more and more as he picked his way among the direful
records of the late massacre, not the cruelty only but the obscurity,
the accidental character, yet, alas! also the treachery, of the
public event seemed to identify themselves tragically with his own
personal action. Those queries, those surmises were blent with the
enigmatic sense of his own helplessness amid the obscure forces
around him, which would fain compromise the indifferent, and had made
him so far an accomplice in their unfriendly action that he felt
certainly not quite guiltless, thinking of his own irresponsible,
self-centered, passage along the ways, through the weeks that had
ended in the public crime and his own private sorrow. Pity for those
unknown or half-known neighbours whose faces he must often have
looked on--ces pauvres morts!--took an almost remorseful character
from his grief for the delicate creature whose vain longings had been
perhaps but a rudimentary aptitude for the [130] really high things
himself had represented to her fancy, the refined happiness to which
he might have helped her. The being whose one claim had lain in her
incorrigible lightness, came to seem representative of the suffering
of the whole world in its plenitude of piteous detail, in those
unvalued caresses, that desire towards himself, that patient half-
expressed claim not to be wholly despised, poignant now for ever.
For he failed to find her: and her brothers being presumably dead,
all he could discover of a certainty from the last survivor of her
more distant kinsmen was the fact of her flight into the country,
already in labour it was thought, and in the belief that she had been
treacherously deserted, like many another at that great crisis. In
the one place in the neighbourhood of Paris with which his knowledge
connected her he seeks further tidings, but hears only of her passing
through it, as of a passage into vague infinite space; a little
onward, dimly of her death, with the most damaging view of his own
conduct presented with all the condemnatory resources of Huguenot
tongues, but neither of the place nor the circumstances of that
event, nor whether, as seemed hardly probable, the child survived.
It was not till many years afterwards that he stood by her grave,
still with no softening of the cruel picture driven then as with fire
into his soul; her affection, her confidence in him still contending
with the suspicions, the ill-concealed [131] antipathy to him of her
hostile brothers, the distress of her flight, half in dread to find
the husband she was pursuing with the wildness of some lost child,
who seeking its parents begins to suspect treacherous abandonment.
That most mortifying view of his actions had doubtless been further
enforced on her by others, the worst possible reading, to her own
final discomfiture, of a not unfaithful heart.

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