Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/15

Rh acquiescence in their sequestration from all independent life, unless that which could be found in the priesthood or the cloister. The daughters had all adopted a religious life, one of them, however, occupying the more brilliant position of a chanoinesse; but they were all driven back to the paternal roof by the Revolution. The second son became a priest, and eventually bishop, obeying the universal law of self-renunciation so, curiously and without outward murmur accepted by these young aristocrats. The third son, M. le Chevalier, was equally destined to annihilate himself for his race; but here a curious contretemps intervened to check the family plans. The eldest son, for whose sake and to keep whose fortune intact all these brothers and sisters had to sacrifice themselves, was himself required to complete the sacrifice by giving up the bride he desired, her dot not being considered sufficient for the heir of the Lamartines. But some spark of originality existed in this half-revolutionized fine gentleman. To the consternation of everybody concerned, he declined marrying any one except the woman he loved; and lo! in the rigid house of the Lamartines, where every one up to this moment had obeyed his destiny without a murmur, the object of all these renunciations became the first rebel. "Il dit à son père, 'Il faut marier le chevalier. But the passage in which this extraordinary revolution within a revolution, this family coup d'état, is suggested, affords so perfect a sketch of the singular state of society then existing, that we need not apologize to the reader for quoting it entire:—

My father was the youngest of this numerous family. At the age of sixteen he had entered the regiment in which his father had served before him. He was not intended to marry; it was the rule of the time. His lot was to grow old in the modest position of captain, which he attained at an early age; to pass his few months of leave now and then in his father's house; to gain, in the process of time, the Cross of Saint-Louis, which was the end of all ambitions to the provincial gentleman; then, when he grew old, endowed with a small pension from the State, or a still smaller revenue of his own, to vegetate in one of his brother's old châteaux, with rooms in the upper storey; to superintend the garden, to shoot with the curé, to look after the horses, to play with the children, to make up a party at whist or trictrac, the born servant of everybody—a domestic slave, happy in being so, beloved and neglected by all; and thus to complete his life, unknown, without lands, without wife, without descendants, until the time when age and infirmities confined him to the bare room, on the walls of which his helmet and his old sword were hung, and that day on which everybody in the château should be told—M. le Chevalier is dead.

My father was the Chevalier de Lamartine; and this was the life to which he was destined. No doubt his modest and respectful nature would have accepted it with sorrow, but without complaint. An unexpected circumstance, however, changed all at once these arrangements of fate. The eldest brother became hypochondriac. He said to his father, "You must marry the chevalier." All the feelings of family, and the prejudices of habit, rose up in the heart of the old noble against this suggestion. Chevaliers are not intended for marriage. My father was consigned to his regiment. A step so strange, and which was especially repugnant to my grandmother, was put off from year to year. Marry the chevalier! it was monstrous. On the other hand, to allow the family to die out, and the name to become extinct, was a crime against the race.

The chevalier, however, over whose passive head so many discussions were going on, was not long of feeling the exciting influence of the new idea, and allowed thoughts to enter into his mind which, in other circumstances, he would have thrust away from him. One of his sisters was a member of a chapter of noble chanoinesse—a kind of béguinage, without labour or austerity, in which a select number of notable ladies, each in her "pretty house, surrounded by a little garden," were collected round the chapel in which they said their daily prayers. In winter these elegant nuns—if nuns they could be called—were allowed to pay visits as they pleased among their relatives and friends, and even when assembled in their chapter had evidently a very pretty society among themselves, many being young, and all tant soit peu mondaine, elegant, and fond of society. True, they were debarred all male visitors, but with one remarkable exception. The young chanoinesse were allowed to receive visits from their brothers, who were permitted to stay with them for a fixed number of days at each visit, and to be presented to their friends in the chapter. This "conciliated everything," as M. de Lamartine says; and thus in the most natural way a few genuine love-matches, rare enough now, still more rare then, were made up from time to time in the pretty half-monastic retirement where girls of fifteen still unprofessed lived under the genial charge of young women of twenty-five, dignified into "madame," by the vows of the order. M. le Chevalier de Lamartine went very often to visit his