Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/18

10 born in St. Cloud, and brought up the playfellow of princes; getting dejected when the hail dashes down, sweeping the year's revenue of young grapes off the vines, yet blaming herself for her want of trust in Providence; driving back all alone and sad, crying under her veil, when she has taken her boy to school, but glad he had not seen her go to revive his childish trouble; then at a later period lamenting with a real distress which looks whimsica ' enough to our eyes, and asking herself how, if they retire altogether to Milly as her husband thinks expedient, abandoning the lodging in Macon, she is to marry her girls? yet weeping with heart-breaking sympathy over the poor young fellow who loves Suzanne, and whom the uncles and aunts reject as not rich enough. The mother cries over him, though Suzanne does not mind very much. She grows old quietly before us, and plunges into the more serious cares which rise round a mother, after the sweet anxieties of her children's early days are over— and lies awake at nights, wondering with aching heart how her boy is to be extricated from his difficulties, his debts paid, his marriage brought about, and the young Englishwoman secured for him on whom he has set his heart; nay, even with a tender superfluity of love when she has read his verses, this dear lady hurries off to a bit of naked wall somewhere, to plant ivy with her own hands—"pour que mon fils ne mentjt pas meme dans ses vers, qtiand il decrivit Milly dans ses harmonies." The last glimpse we have of her is perhaps the most touching of all—when she goes back at sixty to the allee, in the homely garden, where it was her daily habit to retire for thought every twilight in the happy days when she was so poor and her children young; and where all alone she can scarcely keep herself from gazing " la-bas sous les tilleuls pour voir si je tfy aperceyrai pas les robes blanches de mes petites." This delightful picture, so womanly, so mother-like, so exquisite in all its soft details, is finer than all the many "Harmonies" which Lamartine gave to the world,—it is the best poem he has left behind him.

It was thus, among so many homely surroundings, that the little barefooted goatherd of Milly, proud young Burgundian gentilhomme, heir of many substantial terres, and much family pride and prestige, grew and matured on his native soil. The contrast and the mixture of lowliness and loftiness is such as we can scarcely conceive of in England, and it is very captivating to the imagination. During the brief preliminary reign of Louis XVIII., which ended in ignominious flight, when Napoleon escaped from Elba, the young Lamartine was taken by his father to court, like a true young hero of romance, and there presented to the old friends from whom the chevalier would ask nothing for himself, but to whom he commended his son, enrolling him in the king's body-guard. The brilliant and beautiful young garde du corps made, according to his own account, a sensation at court, where he shows himself to us, led by his handsome old patrician father, in all the bloom of his youth, and in all the enthusiasm of long-dormant loyalty, exactly as one of our favourite heroes appears in a novel. This did not, however, last long; but, short as was the period of his service, it was too long for the young poet, who mourns piteously over his hard fate in his jouthf ul letters. " Che crea aveva fatto io al cielo per devenir una?nacchina militare f " he cries, with comical despair, to one of his correspondents. But he did not continue a military machine. The return of the Bourbons did not tempt him to resume his musket, and he soon began to fix his hopes upon diplomacy. For a few years afterwards his course was erratic enough. He wandered hither and thither, from Milly fo Macon, or to one of the houses of his uncles in the neighbourhood, to his friends at Nice, the De Maistre family, or, above all, to Chamb<Sry, where he found his English bride. There were many difficulties in the way of obtaining employment for him, and in arranging his marriage, to which his family, on the one hand, and the lady's mother on the other, had decided objections. Though he speaks throughout his "Confidences" of this marriage in very lover-like terms, it is amusing to find the matter-of-fact prudence wifh which he discusses the subject at the moment when it was for htm the most important of businesses. In one of the letters of this period, published since his death, we find him asking the good offices of his correspondent to discover for him, through means of friends she had in London, the particulars of the young Englishwoman's fortune, and veri- fication of her pretensions. It was a good v match, and " en fait de bons partis la cSleriti est d^une haute importance" he says, with comical good faith and seriousness. During the time of his uncertainty, when he waited in expectation of a letter from Paris, announcing an appointment worthy his acceptance on one hand, and for