Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol III, No 13, 1851

"The plot was deeply laid. The snare was covered with flowers. I was nominally free. I was the wife, and not the wife, of him who, when a little time had passed away, and my father was in the grave, and I was at his mercy, assumed the right of asserting over me the authority of a husband. I did not then know the full extent of my dependence. Upon the failure of my consent, the whole property was to devolve upon him. Of that I thought little; it was a cheap escape from a bondage I abhorred, if, by surrendering all I possessed, I could escape. There was nothing left in my own hands, but the power of withholding my consent, and I did withhold it; and my aversion increased with the base, unmanly, and vindictive means he used to wring it from me.

"Years passed away; he was ever in my path, blighting me with threats and scoffs. My life was one continued mental slavery. He had the right, or he usurped it, of holding me in perpetual bondage – hovering about me, watching my actions, and subjecting me to a persecution which, invisible to every body else, was felt by me in the minutest trifles. And all this time my heart, shut up and stifled, felt a longing, such as prisoners feel, to breathe the free air, to find its wings and escape. I was conscious of a capacity for happiness; I felt that my existence was wasting under a hideous influence – that my situation was cruel and anomalous – that it was equally guilty to stay and feed the rebellion of my blood, that might at last drive me mad, or to fly from the evil thoughts that fascinated and beset me; – and long contemplation of this corroding misery convinced me that the greater guilt was the hourly falsehood – the constant mutiny of my soul – the sin I was committing against nature by continuing to tolerate the semblance of an obligation that made me almost doubt the justice of heaven!

"Again and again he renewed the subject, only to be again and again repulsed with increased bitterness and scorn. The sternness of my resolution gradually obtained a victory over his perseverance. No man, be his devotion as intense as it may, can persist in this way, when he is thoroughly assured that a woman hates or despises him; and he had ample reason to know that I did both. Threats failed – hints of scandal and defamation failed – prayers and entreaties failed – he tried them all; and he saw at last that my determination was irrevocable. I would not redeem my pledge. I took all the consequence of the perfidy. I submitted to the ignominy of his taunts and reproaches, and even admitted their justice, rather than stain my soul with a blacker crime. What was left to him? His arts were baffled – his pride turned to dust – his love rejected? What was left to him out of this ruin of his long cherished scheme? Revenge!

"Although he could not force me to fulfill the contract, he could blast my life in its bloom – wither the tree to the core – make a desert round it – poison the very atmosphere that gave it nourishment and strength – and wait patient – to see it die, leaf by leaf, and branch by branch, This was his devilish project. Love – if ever so sacred a passion had found its way into his soul – was transformed into hate, deadly and unrelenting; the red current had become gall; and the same slow, insatiable energy, with which he had before urged and forced his suit, was now applied to torture and distract me. I wonder it did not drive me to some act of desperation!

"And all this time I moved through society like others. Nobody suspected the vulture that was at my heart; and I had to endure the wretched necessity of acting a daily lie to the world. It gave a false severity to my manner – it made me seem austere and lofty, where I only meant to avert approaches which it would have been criminal to have admitted and deceived. And I had need of all that repellant armor; and it served me, and saved me – till I met you!

"Shall I proceed any farther? Shall I tell you how a new state of existence seemed insensibly opening before me? – how the want in my heart became unconsciously filled? – and that which had been a dream to me all my life long, vague, flitting, and undefined, was now a reality, clear, fixed, and distinct? What that sympathy was it is needless to ask, which made me feel that your history was something like my own – that you, too, had some discontent with the world, that made you yearn for peace and solitude, and the refuge of love, like me. I fought bravely at first. You know not how earnestly I questioned myself – how I probed my wounded spirit, and battled with the temptation. All that was hidden from you; but it was not the less fierce and agonizing. The blessed thought and hope of freedom, of a happiness which I had never trusted myself to contemplate, was a strong and blinding fascination. I saw my wretchedness, and close at hand its perilous remedy. Doomed either way, which was I to choose? The world? – my soul? All was darkness and terror to me. Calamity had made me desperate; yet I was outwardly calm and self-sustained. But I was goaded too far at last; he goaded me; and my resolution was taken; it was one plunge – and all was over. I fled from the misery I could no longer endure, and live; and I know the cost – I know the penalty – I see before me the retribution. Let it come – my fate is sealed!"

XI

This narrative occupied a longer time in the relation than in the shape to which I have reduced it, for it was frequently interrupted by questions and exclamations, which I have not thought it necessary to insert here. When she concluded, the day was already waning, and the long shadows from the woods were stretching down the stream, and the setting sun was, here and there, blazing through the trees, like focal rays caught on the surface of a burning-glass. The haze of evening was gathering round us, and settling over the little bridge which was now slowly fading into the distance.

Astræa had confided her whole life to me with the utmost candor. The strong emotions she exhibited throughout afforded the best proof, if any were wanted, of her perfect sincerity. There was nothing kept back – no arrière-pensée– no false coloring; her real character came out forcibly in this painful confession. Few women would have had the requisite fortitude to submit to such an ordeal, and take their final stand upon a position which marked them out as Pariahs in the eyes of the world. I felt how great the misery must have been from which she sought this terrible escape; and how much greater was the strength of will that sustained her in the resolution to embrace it. Her wild sense of natural justice had risen in resistance against laws which it appeared to her more criminal to obey than to violate. It was not a paroxysm of the passions – it was not the sophistry that seeks for its own convenience to arraign the dispensations of society; it was a strong mind, contending in its own right against obligations founded on force, and violence, and wrong – asserting its claim to liberate itself from trammels to which it had never given a voluntary assent – recoiling from a life of skepticism and hypocrisy, and the frightful conflicts it entails between duty and the instincts of reason and the heart – and prepared, since no other alternative was left, to suffer in itself alone, and in the consequences of its own act, all obloquy, all vengeance the world could inflict. That there lay beneath this a grave error, undermining the foundations upon which the whole social superstructure rested, was, in a certain large and general sense, sufficiently obvious to me. But who could argue such questions against convictions based upon individual and exceptional injuries? Who could require, in the very moment and agony of sacrifice, that she who had been thus wronged and tortured, and who had never, of her own free action, incurred the responsibility from which she revolted, should offer herself up a victim to laws that afforded her no protection, and condemned her to eternal strife, and the sins of a rebellious conscience? I would have saved her if I could. It was my first impulse – my most earnest desire. But of what avail was the attempt? Where was she to find refuge? Only one of two courses lay before her – to return and fulfil her contract, or to renounce the world: the first was doubtful, perhaps impossible; the second, she had resolved upon. Even if I were to hold back on the brink of the precipice, it would not shake her determination.

In this extremity and in the last resort, I felt myself bound to her by every consideration of love and honor. Honor! When that element enters into our casuistry, the peril is at its height!

"Have you never endeavored to release yourself from this contract?" I inquired.

"He would not release me."

"Have you explicitly demanded it of him, so that you should have the satisfaction of feeling that you had tried all other means before you broke the bond yourself?"

"I have demanded and besought it of him – prayed to him – appealed to him, by his soul's hopes here and hereafter, to release me. I have laid my own perdition on his refusal – and he still refused. I gave up all; offered to leave England forever; to give him security that, be my fate what it might, neither he nor his should be troubled with me. To no purpose – he was iron. He could have procured a separation, which I could not. I gave him the means, and would have borne any humiliation to obtain my freedom. He would not release me; he held me bound, that he might gloat his vengeance upon my sufferings."

"And this man – this fiend – you have not told me, Astræa, who he is."

While I was speaking, I observed her looking keenly through the mist that was collecting about us. Some object had attracted her attention. My eyes followed the direction hers had taken, and I discerned a figure, apparently wrapped up in a cloak, about the centre of the bridge, on the near side. We watched it in silence for a space of two or three minutes, when it moved slowly from its position, and winding down among the trees, took the path that led directly to the spot where we were seated. She grasped my arm, and cried in a whisper —

"Stand firm. Speak not. It is my deed, not yours. The hour I have looked for through long years of anguish is come at last. Fear nothing for me!"

The figure approached, still enveloped in a cloak, and stood exactly opposite to us. For a moment – the most intense I ever remember – not a word was uttered. At last, the stranger spoke.

"It is, then, as I expected. I have tracked you to your hiding-place, and I find you with your paramour."

It was the voice of the dwarf! The blood leaped in my veins, and, hardly conscious of what I was doing, or meant to do, I sprang from my seat. Astræa rose at the same moment, and interposed.

"If you have the least regard or respect for me," she said, "do not interfere. For my sake, control yourself."

"For your sake!" echoed the dwarf. "Do you glory in his shame, as well as your own?"

"Shame!" cried Astræa. "Take back the foul word, and begone. You have no authority, no rights here. The shame is yours, not mine – yours, unmanly, pitiful, and mean, who have taken advantage of a contract wrung from a girl to doom the life of a woman to misery."

"Have I no authority?" quoth the dwarf. "Listen to me – you must – you shall – if it kill you in your heroics. I am your husband – my authority is law. I can command you to my foot, and you must obey me. You think you are secure; but I will show you that you have committed an egregious mistake. Believe me," he added, in a tone of supercilious mockery, for which I could have inflicted summary chastisement – "believe me, you only deceive yourself, as you have tried to deceive me."

"In what have I tried to deceive you?" she demanded. "I have been so explicit with you, that none but the most contemptible of your sex would have persisted at such a sacrifice of pride and feeling. Pride? You have none. Where you proffered love – oh! such love! – you found aversion; – where you sought, sued, and threatened, you received nothing in return but loathing and scorn. And now, henceforth and forever, I break all bonds between us. Since you will not do it, I will – I have done it! Obey you? I owe you no obedience. Be wise; take my answer, and leave me."

"Not at your bidding, madam. I did not come here to visit you in your retirement, and be turned away so unceremoniously. It is not my intention to leave you. Where you are, there must I be too."

The insolent coolness with which this was spoken, rendered it very difficult for me to submit to the injunction Astræa had imposed upon me. I began to feel that I, too, had rights, and that the course this husband-in-law was pursuing, was not the best calculated to induce me to surrender them.

"Where I am you shall never come again!" returned Astræa. "That is over. A gulf yawns between us. Do not tempt it any further."

"I will not be critical about words with you," said the dwarf. "If I am not to come where you are, you shall come to me. It is the same thing. You are only wasting your fine speeches. I have come here to take you back to London."

"To take me back?" she echoed. "Are you mad? Do you believe such a thing credible? I have chosen my own course; and no power, authority, or force can turn me from it. Take me back! Even were I willing to go – suppose I were weak enough to repent the step I have taken – can you not see – have you not eyes and understanding to see and comprehend, that it would be to your own eternal dishonor – that it would only bring upon you the contempt and derision of the world?"

"It is for me to judge of that. Come – we are losing time, and it is growing dark already."

"Then why do you stay? Why do you not go as you came. I have given you my answer; and if you were to stand here forever, you will get none other. Have you no particle of self-respect left?"

"Whatever self-respect or pride I had," returned the dwarf, in a low and bitter tone, "you have trampled upon, and raised up a demoniac spirit in this place. It might have been otherwise once. I loved you – ay! writhe under the word – I loved you; but I was ill-favored, misshapen, stunted, and loathsome to look upon. You thought that love and ambition and high thoughts could not take up with such a frame as this – that they all went with straight limbs and milky faces. Nature could not condescend to endow the dwarf with the attributes of humanity. But I was a man as well as they – had the passions and hopes of a man, the capabilities of good and evil. You never sought the good; you never felt it to be your duty to seek and cultivate the better qualities which my own consciousness of my outward defects made irresolute and wayward in development. You only looked upon the surface: and in the selfishness of your heart you spurned me from you. You never thought of asking yourself whether it was in your power to redeem and elevate, for noble ends, the human soul that was pent up in this weak and distorted body. You never stopped to reflect whether, by your contumely and pride of beauty, you were not destroying the germs of all self-respect, perverting the virtuous instincts into poisonous fangs, and shattering to the core the best resolves of a human being who might be better than yourself. A word of kindness in season – a generous construction of my character – an effort to call my moral strength into action, might have raised me to the dignity of the manhood it was your pleasure to disdain and degrade – might have given me the fortitude and the compensating motive to resign you – might have saved us both! But that word was never on your lips – that effort you were not generous enough to try. What I am, then, you have made me – bitter to the dregs, engrossed by one thought, living but for one object. Life is a curse to me. Every new day that rises upon me, humiliation and despair are before me. Do you believe I will suffer this tamely? What have I to lose? You hate me – I return you hate for hate, loaded with the recollections of years of scorn and defiance. Defiance? Ha! ha! It is my turn now, and no remorse shall step in between us to mitigate my vengeance!"

His voice rose almost into a shriek at the close, he had worked himself up to such a height of fanatic excitement; yet, notwithstanding the denunciation with which he ended, it was impossible not to be touched with pity for the real suffering that had reduced him to this condition. A great sorrow had converted this wretched man into a human fiend; and I never before believed that there were the elements of tenderness in him which these references to the past seemed dimly to light up. Astræa heard it all very calmly.

"We are not answerable for our likings or antipathies," she replied; "and I am no more accountable for my feeling than you are for your shape. Had you possessed the instincts you speak of – the manhood you claim for yourself, you might have long since secured, at least, my gratitude, and spared us both the ignominy of this night. But it is useless to look back. I have nothing more to say. Let us part – in hate, if you will. I am indifferent alike to your opinions and your vengeance. Avail yourself of whatever power the law gives you; but here we now part, never to meet again!"

As she said this, she moved away, and I still lingered behind to protect her retreat, if it should be necessary.

"No, madam; not so easily. We do not part. I command you to leave this place, and go with me. It is my pleasure. Do not compel me to enforce it."

Seeing him rush forward to follow her, I placed myself between them.

"I charge you," cried the dwarf, "to stand out of my path. It will be dangerous."

"You have threatened me before," I exclaimed; "and it is full time that you and I should understand each other. I have an advantage over you which I do not desire to use, except in extremity; be careful, therefore, how you provoke it. Advance no further, or I will not answer for the consequences!"

"So, then, you champion her in her guilt," he cried.

"I know of no guilt," I replied. "I have not interfered hitherto; I had no right to do so. But I will not suffer any violence to be committed toward her; she must be free to act as she pleases!"

"And what right have you to interfere now?"

"The right which every man has to protect a woman against outrage."

"I warn you for the last time!" exclaimed the dwarf, his eyeballs flashing fire. "It is you who have done this; you who have tempted and destroyed her – destroyed us both. Do not urge me to the retribution I thirst for. Put your hand upon me; there is my outstretched arm – only touch it with your fingers, and put me on my defense!"

Astræa was standing at my side.

"I charge you," she said, "to leave him, and go into the house. He will not dare to follow me!"

"I will dare the depths of perdition, and follow you wherever you go. See how he shrinks from me! – this champion and bully, for whom you stand condemned and branded before the world!"

"Bully!" I cried, "if you were not the feeble, wretched thing you are, I would strike you to the earth. It is you, not I, that have worked out this shame for your own fiendish ends. Did you not tell me that you helped and encouraged our intercourse – that you saw feelings growing up, and used all your arts to heighten them into an attachment which you knew would bring misery upon us all? For what purpose, devil as you are, did you do this?"

"To break her heart – for she had broken mine!"

"Be content, then, with what you have done, and leave us. You have placed me in a position which no fear of consequences can induce me to abandon. I will protect her to the last. Look upon us henceforth as inseparable, and rid us of your presence, lest I lose all self-command."

Grasping Astræa's hand, and controlling myself by a violent effort, I turned from him to lead her toward the house.

Perhaps it was this action which suddenly infuriated the demon, who now looked more horrible in the contortions of his unbridled rage than ever; and as I turned I felt, rather than saw, that he had coiled himself up to spring upon me. Relieving myself from her, I instantly faced him. His motions were as quick as light. One hand was upon my chest, and the other was fumbling under his cloak. Suspecting his intention, I seized his right arm and dragged it out. There was a pistol in his hand. It was not a time to exercise much forbearance in consideration of his physical inferiority, and by desperate force I wrenched the pistol from his grasp, and, tossing it over his head, flung it into the river. In the struggle, however, it had gone off, and, by the cry of pain he uttered, I concluded that he was wounded. But I was too much heated to think of that; and, in the fierceness of the conflict between us, I lifted him up by main strength, and flung him upon the ground.

Leaving him there, I hastened to Astræa, and we both went into the house, taking care to lock and bar the door, so that he could not follow us. The windows of the sitting-room went down close to the gravel-walk outside, upon which they opened. These were already secured, and we were safe.

As we sat there, half an hour afterward, a low, piteous voice came wailing through the shutters, uttering one word, which it repeated at intervals, in a tone that pierced me to the soul. "Astræa! Astræa! Astræa!" It was a voice so freighted with sorrow, that, had not evil passions intervened to shut our hearts to its petition, we must have relented and shown mercy to him out of whose despair it issued. But we held our breaths, hardly daring to look in each other's faces, and moved not!

God! all the long night that wailing voice seemed repeating, in fainter tones, "Astræa! Astræa! Astræa!" and she to whom it was addressed, and to whom it appealed in vain – let me not recall the memory! Many years have since trampled out other recollections, but that voice still seems to vibrate on my heart, and the name still surges up as I heard it then, sobbing through tears of mortal agony!

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

MADAME DE GENLIS AND MADAME DE STAËL. 7

Before the Revolution, I was but very slightly acquainted with Madame de Genlis, her conduct during that disastrous period having not a little contributed to sink her in my estimation; and the publication of her novel, "The Knights of the Swan" (the first edition), completed my dislike to a person who had so cruelly aspersed the character of the queen, my sister in-law.

On my return to France, I received a letter full of the most passionate expressions of loyalty from beginning to end; the missive being signed Comtesse de Genlis: but imagining this could be but a plaisanterie of some intimate friend of my own, I paid no attention whatever to it. However, in two or three days it was followed by a second epistle, complaining of my silence, and appealing to the great sacrifices the writer had made in the interest of my cause, as giving her a right to my favorable attention. Talleyrand being present, I asked him if he could explain this enigma.

"Nothing is easier," replied he; "Madame de Genlis is unique. She has lost her own memory, and fancies others have experienced a similar bereavement."

"She speaks," pursued I, "of her virtues, her misfortunes, and Napoleon's persecutions."

"Hem! In 1789 her husband was quite ruined, so the events of that period took nothing from him; and as to the tyranny of Bonaparte, it consisted, in the first place, of giving her a magnificent suite of apartments in the Arsenal; and in the second place, granting her a pension of six thousand francs a year, upon the sole condition of her keeping him every month au courant of the literature of the day."

"What shocking ferocity!" replied I, laughing; "a case of infamous despotism indeed. And this martyr to our cause asks to see me!"

"Yes; and pray let your royal highness grant her an audience, were it only for once: I assure you she is most amusing."

I followed the advice of M. de Talleyrand, and accorded to the lady the permission she so pathetically demanded. The evening before she was to present herself, however, came a third missive, recommending a certain Casimir, the phénix of the époque, and several other persons besides; all, according to Madame de Genlis, particularly celebrated people; and the postscript to this effusion prepared me also beforehand for the request she intended to make, of being appointed governess to the children of my son the Duc de Berry, who was at that time not even married.