THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS
To Monsieur de Canalis:
My Friend,--Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,--happy to old age. Ah!
friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle fragrance can never fail,--it is eternal.
Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude, I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of Lord Byron's many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak, and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty, intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the vulgarities of life! it is yours--yours, before any eye has blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my thoughts,--all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden--so devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you--is Friendship, pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be any the worse if Mademoiselle d'Este does not give it two or three sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my thoughts and all my earthly efforts.
I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never belong to any ninny just because he is the son of a peer of France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day, nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My father adores my wishes; he will never oppose them. If I please my poet, and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune.
I am an eaglet; and you will see it in my eyes.
I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I will put its substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. Ah!
my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to us through the first exercise of my will: listen to its argument:--
A young girl with a lively imagination, locked up in a tower, is weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only are allowed to rove. She invents a way to loosen her bars; she jumps from the casement; she scales the park wall; she frolics along the neighbor's sward--it is the Everlasting comedy. Well, that young girl is my soul, the neighbor's park is your genius. Is it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to my poet to answer.