In the month of May, 1821, this family, ever grappling with adversity, received a first reward for its efforts at a little fete which Pillerault, the arbiter of its destinies, prepared for it. The last Sunday of that month was the anniversary of the day on which Constance had consented to marry Cesar. Pillerault, in concert with the Ragons, hired a little country-house at Sceaux, and the worthy old ironmonger silently prepared a joyous house-warming.
"Cesar," said Pillerault, on the Saturday evening, "to-morrow we are all going into the country, and you must come."
Cesar, who wrote a superb hand, spent his evenings in copying for Derville and other lawyers. On Sundays, justified by ecclesiastical permission, he worked like a Negro.
"No," he said, "Monsieur Derville is waiting for a guardianship account."
"Your wife and daughter ought to have some reward. You will meet none but our particular friends,--the Abbe Loraux, the Ragons, Popinot, and his uncle. Besides, I wish it."
Cesar and his wife, carried along by the whirlwind of business, had never revisited Sceaux, though from time to time each longed to see once more the tree under which the head-clerk of "The Queen of Roses"
had fainted with joy. During the trip, which Cesar made in a hackney-
coach with his wife and daughter, and Popinot who escorted them, Constance cast many meaning glances at her husband without bringing to his lips a single smile. She whispered a few words in his ear; for all answer he shook his head. The soft signs of her tenderness, ever-
present yet at the moment forced, instead of brightening Cesar's face made it more sombre, and brought the long-repressed tears into his eyes. Poor man! he had gone over this road twenty years before, young, prosperous, full of hope, the lover of a girl as beautiful as their own Cesarine; he was dreaming then of happiness. To-day, in the coach before him, sat his noble child pale and worn by vigils, and his brave wife, whose only beauty now was that of cities through whose streets have flowed the lava waves of a volcano. Love alone remained to him!
Cesar's sadness smothered the joy that welled up in the hearts of Cesarine and Anselme, who embodied to his eyes the charming scene of other days.
"Be happy, my children! you have earned the right," said the poor father in heart-rending tones. "You may love without one bitter thought."
As he said these words he took his wife's hands and kissed them with a sacred and admiring effect which touched Constance more than the brightest gaiety. When they reached the house where Pillerault, the Ragons, the Abbe Loraux, and Popinot the judge were waiting for them, these five choice people assumed an air and manner and speech which put Cesar at his ease; for all were deeply moved to see him still on the morrow of his great disaster.
"Go and take a walk in the Aulnay woods," said Pillerault, putting Cesar's hand into that of Constance; "go with Anselme and Cesarine!
but come back by four o'clock."
"Poor souls, we should be a restraint upon them," said Madame Ragon, touched by the deep grief of her debtor. "He will be very happy presently."
"It is repentance without sin," said the Abbe Loraux.
"He could rise to greatness only through adversity," said the judge.
To forget is the great secret of strong, creative natures,--to forget, in the way of Nature herself, who knows no past, who begins afresh, at every hour, the mysteries of her untiring travail.
Feeble existences, like that of Birotteau, live sunk in sorrows, instead of transmuting them into doctrines of experience: they let them saturate their being, and are worn-out, finally, by falling more and more under the weight of past misfortunes.
When the two couples reached the path which leads to the woods of Aulnay, placed like a crown upon the prettiest hillside in the neighborhood of Paris, and from which the Vallee-aux-Loups is seen in all its coquetry, the beauty of the day, the charm of the landscape, the first spring verdure, the delicious memory of the happiest day of all his youth, loosened the tight chords in Cesar's soul; he pressed the arm of his wife against his beating heart; his eye was no longer glassy, for the light of pleasure once more brightened in it.
"At last," said Constance to her husband, "I see you again, my poor Cesar. I think we have all behaved well enough to allow ourselves a little pleasure now and then."
"Ought I?" said the poor man. "Ah! Constance, thy affection is all that remains to me. Yes, I have lost even my old self-confidence; I
have no strength left; my only desire is that I may live to die discharged of debt on earth. Thou, dear wife, thou who art my wisdom and my prudence, thou whose eyes saw clear, thou who art irreproachable, thou canst have pleasure. I alone--of us three--am guilty. Eighteen months ago, in the midst of that fatal ball, I saw my Constance, the only woman I have ever loved, more beautiful than the young girl I followed along this path twenty years ago--like our children yonder! In eighteen months I have blasted that beauty,--my pride, my legitimate and sanctioned pride. I love thee better since I
know thee well. Oh, /dear/!" he said, giving to the word a tone which reached to the inmost heart of his wife, "I would rather have thee scold me, than see thee so tender to my pain."
"I did not think," she said, "that after twenty years of married life the love of a wife for her husband could deepen."
These words drove from Cesar's mind, for one brief moment, all his sorrows; his heart was so true that they were to him a fortune. He walked forward almost joyously to /their/ tree, which by chance had not been felled. Husband and wife sat down beneath it, watching Anselme and Cesarine, who were sauntering across the grassy slope without perceiving them, thinking probably that they were still following.