Toward midnight a coffin was clandestinely borne to the parish church by four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best.A few friends of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat intimate with this lost genius.Four torches flickered on the coffin, which was covered with crape.The rector, assisted by one discreet choirboy, said the mortuary mass.Then the body of the suicide was noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter to the mother.Athanase lived and died in shadow.No voice was raised to blame the rector; the bishop kept silence.The piety of the mother redeemed the impiety of the son's last act.
Some months later, the poor woman, half beside herself with grief, and moved by one of those inexplicable thirsts which misery feels to steep its lips in the bitter chalice, determined to see the spot where her son was drowned.Her instinct may have told her that thoughts of his could be recovered beneath that poplar; perhaps, too, she desired to see what his eyes had seen for the last time.Some mothers would die of the sight; others give themselves up to it in saintly adoration.
Patient anatomists of human nature cannot too often enunciate the truths before which all educations, laws, and philosophical systems must give way.Let us repeat continually: it is absurd to force sentiments into one formula: appearing as they do, in each individual man, they combine with the elements that form his nature and take his own physiognomy.
Madame Granson, as she stood on that fatal spot, saw a woman approach it, who exclaimed,--"Was it here?"
That woman wept as the mother wept.It was Suzanne.Arriving that morning at the hotel du More, she had been told of the catastrophe.If poor Athanase had been living, she meant to do as many noble souls, who are moneyless, dream of doing, and as the rich never think of doing,--she meant to have sent him several thousand francs, writing up the envelope the words: "Money due to your father from a comrade who makes restitution to you." This tender scheme had been arranged by Suzanne during her journey.
The courtesan caught sight of Madame Granson and moved rapidly away, whispering as she passed her, "I loved him!"Suzanne, faithful to her nature, did not leave Alencon on this occasion without changing the orange-blossoms of the bride to rue.She was the first to declare that Madame du Bousquier would never be anything but Mademoiselle Cormon.With one stab of her tongue she revenged poor Athanase and her dear chevalier.
Alencon now witnessed a suicide that was slower and quite differently pitiful from that of poor Athanase, who was quickly forgotten by society, which always makes haste to forget its dead.The poor Chevalier de Valois died in life; his suicide was a daily occurrence for fourteen years.Three months after the du Bousquier marriage society remarked, not without astonishment, that the linen of the chevalier was frayed and rusty, that his hair was irregularly combed and brushed.With a frowsy head the Chevalier de Valois could no longer be said to exist! A few of his ivory teeth deserted, though the keenest observers of human life were unable to discover to what body they had hitherto belonged, whether to a foreign legion or whether they were indigenous, vegetable or animal; whether age had pulled them from the chevalier's mouth, or whether they were left forgotten in the drawer of his dressing-table.The cravat was crooked, indifferent to elegance.The negroes' heads grew pale with dust and grease.The wrinkles of the face were blackened and puckered; the skin became parchment.The nails, neglected, were often seen, alas! with a black velvet edging.The waistcoat was tracked and stained with droppings which spread upon its surface like autumn leaves.The cotton in the ears was seldom changed.Sadness reigned upon that brow, and slipped its yellowing tints into the depths of each furrow.In short, the ruins, hitherto so cleverly hidden, now showed through the cracks and crevices of that fine edifice, and proved the power of the soul over the body; for the fair and dainty man, the cavalier, the young blood, died when hope deserted him.Until then the nose of the chevalier was ever delicate and nice; never had a damp black blotch, nor an amber drop fall from it; but now that nose, smeared with tobacco around the nostrils, degraded by the driblets which took advantage of the natural gutter placed between itself and the upper lip,--that nose, which no longer cared to seem agreeable, revealed the infinite pains which the chevalier had formerly taken with his person, and made observers comprehend, by the extent of its degradation, the greatness and persistence of the man's designs upon Mademoiselle Cormon.
Alas, too, the anecdotes went the way of the teeth; the clever sayings grew rare.The appetite, however, remained; the old nobleman saved nothing but his stomach from the wreck of his hopes; though he languidly prepared his pinches of snuff, he ate alarming dinners.
Perhaps you will more fully understand the disaster that this marriage was to the mind and heart of the chevalier when you learn that his intercourse with the Princess Goritza became less frequent.