Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 2
SOPHIE.
Shut in by high walls, the hushed green convent garden lay, amid the stir and noise of ever restless Paris, like a little oasis of peace and prayer and ecstatic absorption in God. Here, noiselessly moving along ancient avenues, now touched with the living green of spring, walked the sober nuns, landing out in mournful relief against the flowering glory of May. The impression of this secluded spot, of the regulated contemplative life, of the religious services, where the full organ tones mingled with the soaring voices of the nuns as they chanted their anthems, filled the young devotee with rapture. In spite of her intense affection for her mother, Manon dreamed of taking the veil, though well aware that as an only child she would meet with the strongest opposition from her parents. In the meanwhile she assiduously applied herself to devotional exercises, and became a favourite with the nuns. They soon felt how such a pupil would redound to their credit and lavished praises and caresses on her. Within a few months of her entrance, by the unanimous consent of the superiors and the director, she was allowed to receive her first communion.
This year, spent by Manon at the convent, was marked by the beginning of an intimacy which never knew break or interruption for thirteen years; and to the correspondence which it elicited we owe the knowledge of Madame Roland's daily thoughts, habits and surroundings while she still lived in the peaceful obscurity of private life.
In the summer months of 1765 some new boarders, young ladies from Amiens, were expected at the convent. Great excitement in consequence among the pupils pending their arrival! At last the strangers made their appearance, and happened at supper to be seated at the same table with Manon Phlipon. They were Henriette and Sophie Cannet. The eldest was a well-grown girl of eighteen, whose countenance indicated a mixture of sensitiveness, pride, and discontent. The fact being, that, as she was of a very joyous and lively disposition, she did not relish being sent back to convent life in order to mitigate her sister's grief at leaving home. Sophie seemed of a much more equable temper, though her charming countenance was just then stained with tears. She was a gentle, demure, affectionate young damsel of fourteen, with a prematurely reflective turn of mind. Manon was taken at first sight by her young neighbour, though she could see her but indistinctly, her face being covered by a veil of white gauze. They soon became inseparable. They worked, read, walked together, and, being both in a deeply religious frame of mind, enjoyed the closest community of sentiment. In the fresh delight of uttering their thoughts for the first time, they often sauntered arm-in-arm down the fragrant avenues of old lime-trees, and the year which they thus passed together remained one of the most pleasant memories of their lives.
There was another inmate of the convent who contracted a genuine and lifelong attachment for Manon. This was Angélique Boufflers, who, being dowerless, had perforce taken vows at seventeen. She was one of the lay sisters, under the name of Sister Agathe. Although the most menial tasks devolved on her, she performed them all with zeal and cheerfulness, while in mind and heart she was far superior to most of the ladies of the choir. With quick penetration she singled out the little Phlipon as her pet boarder, and never lost an opportunity of anticipating her wishes, even secretly giving her a key to her cell, that in her absence she might pore over the poems and writings of the Mystics—to the shrill singing of her canary bird. This good soul, whose repressed affection seems to have been concentrated on the extraordinary child that for a while gladdened her monotonous existence, never quite lost sight of Madame Roland. And years later, when convents were abolished, poor Sister Agathe, living penuriously in a garret near her ancient haunts, forgot the vicissitudes of her own lot in lamenting those of her "daughter," as she was wont to call her darling Manon.
But these days lay unsuspected in the future. We are as yet only in the summer of 1766, when Manon, having passed her appointed time at the convent, was taken to spend a year with her paternal grandmother. Her father, having been appointed to some parochial office, was taken much from home, and the supervision of the apprentices devolved to a great extent on her mother, who might thus not have been able to devote herself so much to her daughter as she would have wished. So it was judged better to place her under her grandmother's care. Old Madame Phlipon, who lived with a maiden sister in a decent apartment in the quiet Île Saint Louis, was a portly, good-humoured little woman, whose winning laugh, agreeable manners and roguish twinkle, showed her at sixty-six not indifferent to her appearance. Left a widow after one year's marriage, she seems to have lived in the character of help and governess in the family of some rich and distant relatives, but was now taking her ease on a little legacy, reverentially waited on by her maiden sister, Angélique, with pale face, poked-out chin, and spectacles on nose. The jovial Madame Phlipon was very fond of young people, and initiated her grandchild in the mysteries of fine needle-work and sentimental conversation, not unenlivened by wit.
Manon Phlipon, now in her teens, returned once more to her parents and to her small closet, narrower than any nun's cell. "My father's house had not," she writes, "the solitary tranquillity of that of my grandmother; still, plenty of air and a wide space on the roof overlooking the Pont Neuf, were before my dreamy and romantic imagination. How many times from my window, which looked northward, have I contemplated with emotion the vast desert of heaven, from the blue dawn of morning behind the Pont du Change, until the golden sunset, when the glorious purple faded away behind the trees of the Champs Élysées and the houses of Chaillot. I rarely failed to employ thus some moments of a fine day; and quiet tears frequently stole deliciously from my eyes, whilst my heart, throbbing with an inexpressible sentiment, happy thus to beat, and grateful to exist, offered to the Being of beings a homage pure and worthy of Him."
Her father, seeing her remarkable aptitude for almost every pursuit, had not given up the idea of making her, to some extent, his assistant, and again induced her to handle the graving tool. He would set her to engrave the edge of a watch-case or to ornament a box, and, in order to give her an interest in this work, he induced her to keep an account book, and divided the profits of these little jobs between them. But the pleasure of purchasing a ribbon or girlish trinket did not compensate her for the time lost to serious study, and she presently put away the graver and never touched it again.
Her life in those days was of unvarying regularity. Every morning she and her mother went to mass, and then to do a little shopping. Lessons from some of the masters already mentioned filled up the rest of the forenoon. In the retirement of her closet she would afterwards study until evening, when her mother read some instructive book to her, she being engaged the while in needlework.
Outwardly, no existence could be more monotonous than was Manon Phlipon's at this time; but what a glow of feeling, what a moving panorama of ever fresh images, what an eager reaching out after self-improvement filled the inward life with a stir of passionate activity. To this power of mental concentration she joined a plenitude of sensations that even in youth it is given to but few to feel; for she had a magnificent physique, and her highly-strung sensitive nerves did not impair a vigour that would not have disgraced an Amazon. This accounts for her being able to study till far into the night, and yet re-awaken with something of the joyous feeling of a bird. Every morning, indeed, was like the spring of the day to her.
This varied intellectual life was poured forth in long letters to Sophie, now returned to Amiens. In those letters, often carried on from day to day, and sent once or twice a week, one almost seems to hear her thinking aloud. In them she hits off every occurrence of the day, giving an analysis of every book she had read, and discussing the religious meditations and philosophical ponderings that succeeded them. The published correspondence opens in the year 1771. The precocious habits of thought and fluency of style of this girl of seventeen are most surprising, especially when one bears her surroundings in mind. Of course we meet with the sententiousness of the eighteenth century, with its high-sounding phrases and idyllic sentimentality; but when we remember that the people who wrote so complacently about the abstract virtues were, in the fulness of time, ready to sacrifice everything to their convictions, we must acknowledge that what now sounds affected to us, once had the fulness of reality.
In one of the earliest letters, we meet with this striking passage: "The knowledge of ourselves is no doubt the most useful of the sciences. Everything tends to turn towards that object the desire to know which is born with us, a desire we try to satisfy by acquainting ourselves with the histories of all past nations. This is by no means a useless habit, if we know how to avail ourselves of it. My views on reading are already very different from those I entertained a few years ago; for I am less anxious to know facts than men; in the history of nations and empires, I look for the human heart, and I think that I discover it too. Man is the epitome of the universe; the revolutions in the world without are an image of those which take place in his own soul."
The girl thinker, lost in meditation in her little cell, while outside the din and roar of the mighty city were lulled for awhile, actually hit upon one of those truths which we are wont to consider as the mature fruit and last result of Goethe's philosophy of life. It is not knowledge or power or literary fame that this child of the Seine asks for (though they were all within reach of her); no, what she would learn is the art to live—that most difficult of all the arts, according to the author of Faust. For in 1772, we hear the humble enameller's daughter writing: "Let us endeavour to know ourselves; let us not be that factitious thing which can only exist by the help of others. Let us be ourselves. Soyons nous." Here we have the note of the highest originality—of genius. Instead of a slavish following of custom, instead of trying to digest the old dough of superannuated ideas, which has spoilt the digestion of so many generations, let us dare to solve the problems of life in our own way and day; let us try and see for ourselves, not take it for granted that all our thinking has been done for us by our ancestors. If in these thoughts of the young student there is something of the lofty calm of the sage, there is likewise a tone of practical sagacity and daring, indicative of a nature eminently fitted for mixing in and controlling affairs.
How far Sophie Cannet herself may have been able to enter into her friend's abstract reasonings we have but little means of ascertaining; but from many allusions in these letters we infer that she was of a serious turn of mind, and fond of keeping pace with the studies of Manon, who in the course of a year or two outsped her, however, so completely, that she gave up the attempt. Sophie, moreover, was not free to follow her studious bent. Placed in a provincial capital, and a higher social sphere, she was expected to go into society with its trivial round of visitings, balls, and whist parties. It is amusing to note how often Marie Phlipon compassionates her for this drudgery of pleasure, and how vehemently she inveighs against dancing, when a man's mind, she says, is in his legs, and a woman's head turned by insipid compliments. "Ah!" she exclaims, "you give me a very amusing description of those young ladies drawn up under arms in the prescribed uniform, that their judges may review them. A comic picture which may entertain, but I am shocked at that servitude forged by the chains of opinion, of which they make themselves the willing slaves. How foolish women are! They would exercise a genuine empire over men if their reason reinforced that of their charms, and if they would persist in retaining the right of disposing of their hearts in favour of merit sanctioned by duty."
But Manon could not entirely steel herself to the pleasing sensations of vanity. She was now in the early bloom of youth, a rich exuberant bloom in no wise dimmed by her midnight studies. She was tall and well proportioned, with a womanly fulness of contour. The ample development of her figure partook more of the robustness of the people than of the delicately-reared ladies, who pay for their delicacy with vapeurs in one age and neuralgia in another. Languor and weariness never came near her. In her erect carriage and light easy walk, the elasticity of her nature showed itself. She had soft, dark, abundant hair, eyes of almost transparent darkness, where the white is so pure as to appear almost blue, and a brilliant complexion, midway between fair and brunette, the quick blood coming in flushes with every passing emotion. In spite of her philosophy, Manon sometimes critically surveyed her nose in the glass, and heaved an involuntary sigh at its tip being too clumsy. Her mouth also, like that of all born speakers, was large for the strict rules of beauty, but showed fair white teeth when she talked or smiled. The strength and energy of her character revealed itself in the bold turn of her prominent chin, while her richly modulated voice, changing with every variation of feeling, resembled one of those subtly-stringed instruments whose vibrations are capable of expressing all moods, from the faintest suggestions of tenderness to the most fervid accents of indignation or daring.
Such being her appearance, she could not walk abroad with impunity; certainly not in the streets of Paris, where, from the ouvrier in his blouse to the flâneur on the Boulevards, every man looks upon a handsome woman as fair game for his flattering comments. Of course, in French fashion, Manon never went out unaccompanied. But when on a Sunday her father took her to the Tuileries gardens, or to the picture galleries, which he delighted to frequent with her, there would often come about her the buzz of admiring remarks not altogether unpleasant in her ears.
But these very harmless diversions were not without their after-effects. They left behind them a certain elation of vanity and an increased desire to please. On the other hand, these mundane thoughts but ill accorded with her philosophical tenets and religious principles. These and other promptings of, an "unregenerate" heart began to trouble her considerably; shocked at certain unaccountable stirrings in her nature, she used to leap out of bed in the middle of winter, stand with naked feet on the tiled floor of her bed-room, and, by way of penance, sprinkle her head with ashes—a frame of mind probably induced by her reading "The Lives of the Saints." In going to confession at this time, she once accused herself of "having had emotions contrary to the chastity of a Christian"; but the Abbé Morel not finding very much to say, she concluded that she was not so criminal as she had supposed. This phase of mind belonged to her fifteenth year, for in the course of a few years she began to inquire more deeply into her religious principles; and the first shock her belief sustained had its origin in her revolting from the idea of a "Creator, who devotes to eternal torments those innumerable beings, the frail works of his hands, cast on the earth in the midst of so many perils, and lost in a night of ignorance, from which they have already had so much to suffer." In the warmth of her heart she would have re-echoed Diderot's resounding cry—"Enlarge your God." With fearless truthfulness, Manon's first impulse on becoming conscious of her nascent doubts was to confide them to her confessor, a little man not wanting in sense and of unimpeachable conduct. Anxious to re-establish her shaken faith, he lent her a number of works by the champions of Christianity. The curious part of this transaction was that, on learning the names of the authors attacked in these controversial writings, she took care to procure them also, and thus came to read Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal's Système de la Nature, passing in course of time through many intellectual stages, in which she was in turn Jansenist, Stoic, Sceptic, Atheist, and Deist. She finally landed in a frame of mind much resembling that of the modern Agnostic; content to admit that there is an Unknowable, and that "there are many things in heaven and earth" insoluble by the best patented philosophies, whether material or otherwise. For the rest, she says that at one time, while intent on the study of Descartes and Malebranche, she used curiously to watch her kitten, considering it as a piece of mechanism going through its evolutions. But it seemed to her that in separating feeling from its manifestations she was dissecting the world and robbing it of all its charms; and she would sooner have adopted Spinoza's view, and ascribed a soul to everything rather than go without the belief in one. But on the whole, whenever her feelings were deeply moved she willingly recurred to the belief in a beneficent Creator and the immortality of the soul. While these thoughts were agitating her inwardly, she was fearful of communicating them to Sophie, for fear of exposing her to like mental disturbances. But what was her surprise on learning from her friend's letter that, without any prompting from without, she had been passing through a similar crisis! In her delight at this news, she writes in May 1772:—"By what strange coincidence of mutual similarity do you always trace my story in writing your own? Or rather, why does the openness with which you show me your heart reproach me for having hidden from you what was passing in mine? Without wishing to excuse my silence, you shall know its reason."
Superfluous to enter into her explanation. She confesses that a high self-esteem is her besetting sin, ingenuously exclaiming, "I am evidently so conceited that this same self-esteem hinders me from seeing the many faults which must of course be mine." But in reality she was not so far wrong, and had hit her one cardinal failing: for her physical, morale and intellectual attributes were so finely balanced as to make her an exceptionally complete human being; nor was she so much mistaken in her estimate of Sophie. Her instinctive hesitation in disturbing her friend's convictions shows a fine insight into character; for this young lady, cut adrift from her old moorings, tossed violently from opinion to opinion, and after much mental perturbation, lapsed again into Catholicism. Manon's epistolary tone during these mental distresses is gentle, as towards a sick child. With much philosophy, she is equally ready to utter her thoughts as frankly as heretofore, or to hold her tongue, whichever may best suit her friend's mood. But outspoken sincerity or tolerant silence were alike intolerable to Sophie. Nothing would content her but that her friend should retrace her steps and re-enter the fold. This being impossible, the old effusiveness at times suffered some constraint, which, however, disappeared when the Cannets paid an occasional visit to Paris.
Manon's natural bias became gradually more manifest, and preoccupations with man's social well-being engaged her in preference to theological and metaphysical subjects. During her mother's lifetime she must also have observed a certain reserve as regards some topics, for she dreaded nothing more than hurting her feelings. Deeply as she loved her mother, a subtle reticence had sprung up between them, especially since Manon had emerged from childhood. Madame Phlipon's deep but undemonstrative feelings did not call forth that full flow of confidence which the daughter, with some encouragement, would have been prepared to indulge in. In order to know what was passing in Manon's mind, the copious epistles to Sophie were usually left unsealed on the table for a while; and, without any explicit understanding, Madame Phlipon could make herself acquainted with their contents. Outwardly Manon not only conformed to her mother's religious practices during the latter's life-time; but she held that a woman was bound to do so, whatever her opinions, for the sake of those "weaker brethren" whose conduct would be modelled on her own. So that after her mother's death she still continued attending divine service for the sake of their trusty old domestic, Mignonne, whose highest wish was to die in the service of her young mistress.