The Love Of Long Ago
The old-fashioned chateau was built on a wooded knoll in the midst of
tall trees with dark-green foliage; the park extended to a great
distance, in one direction to the edge of the forest, in another to the
distant country. A few yards from the front of the house was a huge
stone basin with marble ladies taking a bath; other, basins were seen at
intervals down to the foot of the slope, and a stream of water fell in
cascades from one basin to another.
From the manor house, which preserved the grace of a superannuated
coquette, down to the grottos incrusted with shell-work, where slumbered
the loves of a bygone age, everything in this antique demesne had
retained the physiognomy of former days. Everything seemed to speak
still of ancient customs, of the manners of long ago, of former
gallantries, and of the elegant trivialities so dear to our grandmothers.
In a parlor in the style of Louis XV, whose walls were covered with
shepherds paying court to shepherdesses, beautiful ladies in hoop-skirts,
and gallant gentlemen in wigs, a very old woman, who seemed dead as soon
as she ceased to move, was almost lying down in a large easy-chair, at
each side of which hung a thin, mummy-like hand.
Her dim eyes were gazing dreamily toward the distant horizon as if they
sought to follow through the park the visions of her youth. Through the
open window every now and then came a breath of air laden with the odor
of grass and the perfume of flowers. It made her white locks flutter
around her wrinkled forehead and old memories float through her brain.
Beside her, on a tapestried stool, a young girl, with long fair hair
hanging in braids down her back, was embroidering an altar-cloth. There
was a pensive expression in her eyes, and it was easy to see that she was
dreaming, while her agile fingers flew over her work.
But the old lady turned round her head, and said:
"Berthe, read me something out of the newspapers, that I may still know
sometimes what is going on in the world."
The young girl took up a newspaper, and cast a rapid glance over it.
"There is a great deal about politics, grandmamma; shall I pass that
over?"
"Yes, yes, darling. Are there no love stories? Is gallantry, then, dead
in France, that they no longer talk about abductions or adventures as
they did formerly?"
The girl made a long search through the columns of the newspaper.
"Here is one," she said. "It is entitled 'A Love Drama!'"
The old woman smiled through her wrinkles. "Read that for me," she said.
And Berthe commenced. It was a case of vitriol throwing. A wife, in
order to avenge herself on her husband's mistress, had burned her face
and eyes. She had left the Court of Assizes acquitted, declared to be
innocent, amid the applause of the crowd.
The grandmother moved about excitedly in her chair, and exclaimed:
"This is horrible--why, it is perfectly horrible!
"See whether you can find anything else to read to me, darling."
Berthe again made a search; and farther down among the reports of
criminal cases, she read:
"'Gloomy Drama. A shop girl, no longer young, allowed herself to be led
astray by a young man. Then, to avenge herself on her lover, whose heart
proved fickle, she shot him with a revolver. The unhappy man is maimed
for life. The jury, all men of moral character, condoning the illicit
love of the murderess, honorably acquitted her.'"
This time the old grandmother appeared quite shocked, and, in a trembling
voice, she said:
"Why, you people are mad nowadays. You are mad! The good God has given
you love, the only enchantment in life. Man has added to this gallantry
the only distraction of our dull hours, and here you are mixing up with
it vitriol and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of
Spanish wine."
Berthe did not seem to understand her grandmother's indignation.
"But, grandmamma, this woman avenged herself. Remember she was married,
and her husband deceived her."
The grandmother gave a start.
"What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of
today?"
Berthe replied:
"But marriage is sacred, grandmamma."
The grandmother's heart, which had its birth in the great age of
gallantry, gave a sudden leap.
"It is love that is sacred," she said. "Listen, child, to an old woman
who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience
of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to
found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society.
Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each
family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always
seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together
suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races and
aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only
once my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love
twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this.
Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct which impels us,
sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The
world has made laws to combat our instincts--it was necessary to make
them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist
them too much, because they come from God; while the laws only come from
men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,
darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to
take it just as it is."
Berthe opened her eyes wide in astonishment. She murmured:
"Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once."
The grandmother raised her trembling hands toward Heaven, as if again to
invoke the defunct god of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly:
"You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the
Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognize society. You have
attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner
of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have
written poetry telling you that people have died of love. In my time
poetry was written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we
liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh
caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last
Lover--unless we kept both of them."
The old woman smiled a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled in her
gray eye, the intellectual, skeptical roguery of those people who did not
believe that they were made of the same clay as the rest, and who lived
as masters for whom common beliefs were not intended.
The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:
"So, then, women have no honor?"
The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept in her soul some of
Voltaire's irony, she had also a little of Jean Jacques's glowing
philosophy: "No honor! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even
boasted of it? But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in
France, had lived without a lover, she would have had the entire court
laughing at her. Those who wished to live differently had only to enter
a convent. And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love but
you alone, all their lives. As if, indeed, this could be the case.
I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that society
should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand?
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you
misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn
like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress."
The young girl caught the old woman's trembling hands in her own.
"Hold your tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!"
And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to bestow
on her a great passion, one sole, eternal passion in accordance with the
dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on the
forehead, quite imbued still with that charming, healthy reason with
which gallant philosophers tinctured the thought of the eighteenth
century, murmured:
"Take care, my poor darling! If you believe in such folly as that, you
will be very unhappy."
-THE END-
Guy De Maupassant's short story: The Love Of Long Ago
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