"Très-bien," said the reflective parents. "Now fall in love as fast as ever you please."
Monsieur and mademoiselle not only "fell," but plunged.
Two weeks afterward, however, the papas fell out. Cafétier exacted more than Commis could promise, and Commis declared Mademoiselle Clothilde pas grand' chose: her eyebrows were too white, and her toes turned in.
The marriage was declared "off," and the young people were ordered to fall out of love the quickest possible.
"Too late!" they cried.
"You have seen each other but four times."
"Quite enough," declared the lovers.
"You shall not marry," shouted the parents.
"We will!" screamed their offspring.
Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no dot unless her father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of sommations respectueuses. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafétier assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to dotless girls.
Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a "trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr. Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him four times?
There was one way out of her troubles,—that to which Alphonse Daudet's and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was laid in her grave.
The whole French social system revolves around the dot.
"How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no dot!"
"It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family," I heard remarked in a social company. "It is a pity, for she is a good woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad."
"Yes, it is a pity," answered another; "but, then, what else can she expect? She brought no dot into the family."
Once upon a time a young man made a friendly call upon a family in our ville, he a distant relative of the family. He sat in the salon with mother and daughter, when suddenly the mother was called away a moment. When she returned, not more than two minutes later,—horror! she could not enter the room! In closing the door she had somehow disarranged the handles; screws had dropped out and could not be found; the knob would not turn. What a situation! A young girl shut up in a locked room with a young man! What a scandal if the story got out in the town! and what could the poor, distracted mamma do to release her daughter from that damning situation without the knowledge of the servants? She dared not even summon a locksmith, for locksmith tongues are free; and who would not shoot out the lip at poor Jeanne, hearing the miserable story at breakfast-tables to-morrow?
"You must marry Jeanne, mon cousin," cried mamma through the keyhole.
"Impossible, ma cousine. You know I am fiancé," laughed he.
Nevertheless he did!
For when papa heard that Jeanne had remained two whole hours shut up with Cousin Pierre in a brilliantly-lighted salon, with a frantic mother at the keyhole and all the servants grinning upon their knees searching for the missing screws, he added twenty thousand francs to her dot on the spot, and Pierre wrote to his other fiancée that he had "changed his intentions."
"Mamma's tapage was too funny," laughed Madame Pierre, telling me this story herself. "Pierre and I laughed well on our side of the door, although we were careful not to let maman hear us. For we had often been alone together before when nobody knew it."
Which makes all the difference in the world in our ville, as well as elsewhere.
Pierre's funny experience did not end with his betrothal. In relating the adventure which follows, I wish it distinctly to be understood that I do it in all respect, admiration, and reverence for the Church which is the mother of all Churches calling themselves Christian. The Holy Roman Catholic Church is no less holy that her servants are so often base and vile and that her livery is so often stolen to serve evil in. What wickedness and hypocrisy have we not in our own Protestant clergy, and without even the tremendous excuse for it which the conditions of European society give for the occasional levity of its priesthood! In France the Church is a recognized profession, to which parents destine and for which they educate their sons without waiting for them to exhibit any special bias toward a religious life. In spite of themselves, many young men are even forced into the priesthood, not only by strong family influence, but through having been educated so as to be absolutely unfitted for any other walk of life. With us the priesthood is a matter of deliberate and perfectly voluntary choice, and he who wears it as a cloak is ten thousand times the hypocrite his Catholic brother is.
It happened that our curé of Saint-Étienne was a jolly good fellow, somewhat given to wine-bibbing, and much given to Rabelaisian stories. He was also hail-fellow-well-met with Pierre, and Pierre, like most of the young men of France, prided himself upon his entire freedom from the "superstitious." Père Duhaut lived by teaching and preaching.
In France the church sacrament of marriage cannot be performed unless both the contracting parties furnish certificates of having made confession within three weeks. To secure his certificate it would be necessary for Pierre to confess to the curé of Saint-Étienne, Père Duhaut.
"I confess to Duhaut!" he laughed in our house. "I'll be—what's-his-named first. Old Duhaut might as well confess to me. I shall simply give him six francs and get my certificate without any more ado, just as the other fellows get theirs."
That very afternoon Père Duhaut took tea with us, and Émile was mean enough to betray Pierre's intentions.
"We'll see," said our curé.
The next day Pierre passed our windows. He bowed gayly, and called up that he was going for his six francs' worth of ante-nuptial absolution. An hour later he passed again, but he did not look up. In the evening Père Duhaut came, bursting with laughter.
"Ask Pierre how he got his certificate," he guffawed. Then he told us the story. Pierre, it seems, had offered the six francs, which offer the confessor had rejected with scorn.
"In to the confessional," he cried, "and make your confession like a penitent!"
"I'll make it fifteen," grinned Pierre.
"Not for a thousand. In! in!"
"Come, now, Duhaut, this is all humbug. You know I'm not penitent, and I'll be– if I'll confess to you."
Without more words, the burly priest seized the recalcitrant and grabbed him by the neck, trying to force him into the confession-box. Pierre resisted, and, as the curé told us bursting with laughter, the two wrestled and waltzed half around the church. Finally Pierre was brought to his knees.
"Eh bien, allez! What am I to confess?" he grumbled.
"Every sin you have committed since your last confession."
How malicious was Père Duhaut in this! for he knew Pierre had not kept the observances of the Church since he left home at seventeen, and had not been an anchorite either.
"I'll make it an even hundred," begged the now exasperated yet humbled Pierre. "Come, now, do be reasonable; that's a jolly old boy."
"Confess! confess!" roared the confessor, dealing the kneeling impenitent a sounding cuff on the ear.
"Ask Pierre how he got his certificate," roared Père Duhaut. "Demandez-lui! Demandez-lui!"
But we never did.
Until his grave received him, only a few weeks ago, a marked character of our ville was a stooping old man, of a ghastly paleness, noted through all the region for avarice and for speaking every one of his many languages each with worse accent than the other. His Spanish sounded like German, his German had the strongest possible American accent, his English was vividly Teutonic, and after forty years of marriage his Norman wife never ceased to mock at his atrociously-mouthed French. He was wine-merchant and banker combined, and, though his social position was among the best in our bourgeoise ville, all the world smiled with the knowledge that the rich old banquier, whose nose had a strong Hebraic curve, delivered his own merchandise at night from under his long coat, in order to escape the tax on every bottle of wine transported from one domicile to another.
The stately gate-post of "Père S–'s" pretentious and philistine mansion is decorated with the coats-of-arms of several nations. England's is there, Germany's, Spain's, Portugal's, as well as our own Eagle; while upon days when our own exiled hearts beat most proudly—4th of July and 22d of February—our star-spangled banner floats from his roof-top as well as from our own, the only two, of course, in our ville. Our ville, so important to us, has scarcely an existence for our home government, and administrative changes there float over us like clouds of heaven, without touching us in their changefulness. Thus Père S–, though so courteous and cordial to Americans, has been long years forgotten at Washington, whence every living servitor of the administration that appointed him our consul here has long since passed away forever. He was born in Pennsylvania, of German parents, nearly eighty years ago. He received his appointment in 1837, and held it through fourteen administrations since Van Buren, without ever returning to America, till he faded away one little month ago and was buried in the parish cemetery of Saint-Léonard by a Lutheran pastor brought over for the occasion from Havre. No church-bells tolled for his death, and the street-children did not go on their way singing, as they always do, to the sound of funeral bells.
"Viens, corps, ta fosse t'attend!" for Pere S– was a heretic, and could not have slept in consecrated ground had he died before the République Française removed religious restrictions from all burial-places. All the consular corps in all the region round about followed the old man to his long home, all our public buildings hung their flags half-mast high, all our little world told queer stories of the dead old man. But our own hearts grew tender with thoughts of this life finished at fourscore years with its longing of almost half a century unfulfilled. "Philip Nolan" we often called the old man, who sometimes said to us, with yearning, pathetic voice,—
"I am an American; I am here only till I make my fortune. When I am rich enough I shall go Home. I shall die and be buried at Home,—when I am rich enough."
Temperament is Fate. Père S–'s temperament of Harpagon fated him to die as he had lived,—a man without a country.
MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.THE PRIMITIVE COUPLE
I. PARADISE
The island in Magog Lake was like a world by itself. Though there were but fifteen or twenty acres of land in it, that land was so diversified by dense woods, rocks, verdant open spots, and smooth shore-rims that it seemed many places in one.
Adam's tent was set in the arena of an amphitheatre of hills, upon close, smooth sward sloping down to the lake-margin of milk-white sand. Beyond the lake stood up a picture as heavenly to man's vision as the New Jerusalem appearing in the clouds.