Part 69

But, if notwithstanding what I have alledged, you will not give into this project, my advice is, at all events, to banish this dangerous man; always to be dreaded by one or the other: for, be it as it may, the education of our children is still less important to us than the virtue of their mothers. I leave you to reflect, during your journey, on what I have written. We will talk further about it on your return.

I send this letter directly to Geneva; lest, as you were to lie but one night at Lausanne, it should not find you there. Pray bring me a good account of that little republic. From the agreeable description, I should think you happy in the opportunity of seeing it; if I could set any store by pleasures, purchased with the absence of my friends. I never loved grandeur, and at present I hate it, for having deprived me so many years of your company. Neither you nor I, my dear, went to buy our wedding cloaths at Geneva; and yet, however deserving your brother may be, I much doubt whether your sister-in-law will be more happy, with her Flanders lace and India silks, than we in our native simplicity. I charge you, however, notwithstanding my ill-natured reflections, to engage them to celebrate their nuptials at Clarens. My father hath written to yours, and my husband to the bride’s mother, to invite them hither. Their letters you will find inclosed: please to deliver them, and enforce their invitations with your interest. This is all I could do, in order to be present at the ceremony; for I declare to you, I would not upon any account leave my family. Adieu. Let me have a line from you, at least to let me know when I am to expect you here. It is now the second day since you left me, and I know not how I shall support two days more without you.

P. S. While I was writing this letter, Miss Harriot truly must give herself the air of writing to her mamma too. As I always like children should write their own thoughts, and not those which are dictated to them, I indulged her curiosity; and let her write just what she pleased, without altering a word. This makes the third letter inclosed. I doubt, however, whether this is what you will look for in casting your eye over the contents of the packet. But, for the other letter, you need not look long, as you will not find it. It is directed to you, at Clarens; and at Clarens only it ought to be read: so, take your measures accordingly.

Letter CL. Harriot to her Mother.

Where are you then, mamma? They say at Geneva; which is such a long, long way off that one must ride two days, all day long, to reach you: surely, mamma, you don’t intend to go round the world? my little pappa is set out this morning for Etange; my little grand pappa is gone a hunting; my little mamma is gone into her closet to write; and there is nobody with me but Pernette and the Frenchwoman. Indeed, mamma, I don’t know how it is; but, since our good friend has left us, we are all scattered about strangely. You began first, mamma; you soon began to be tired, when you had nobody left to tease: but what is much worse since you are gone, is, that my little mamma is not so good humour’d as when you were here. My little boy is very well, but he does not love you; because you did not dance him yesterday as you used to do. As for me, I believe I should love you a little bit still, if you would return quickly, that one might not be so dull. But, if you would make it up with me quite, you must bring my little boy something that would please him. To quiet him indeed, would not be very easy, you would be puzzled to know what to do with him. O that our good friend was but here now! for it is as he said, my fine fan is broke to pieces, my blue skirt is torn all to pieces, my white frock is in tatters; my mittens are no worth a farthing. Fare you well, mamma, I must here end my letter; for my little mamma has finished hers, and is coming out of her closet. I think her eyes are red, but I durst not say so: in reading this, however, she will see I observed it. My good mamma, you are certainly very naughty, to make my little mamma cry.

P. S. Give my love to my grand pappa, to my uncles, to my new aunt and her mamma, and to every body: tell them I would kiss them all, and you too, mamma; but that you are all so far of, I can’t reach you.

Letter CLI. Mrs. Orbe to Mrs. Wolmar.

I cannot leave Lausanne without writing you a line, to acquaint you of my safe arrival here; not however so chearfully disposed as I could wish. I promised myself much pleasure in a journey, which you have been too often tempted to take; but, in refusing to accompany me, you have made it almost disagreeable; and how should it be otherwise? when it is troublesome, I have all the trouble to myself, and when it is tolerably agreeable, I regret your not being with me to partake of the pleasure. I had nothing to say, it is true, against your reasons for staying at home; but you must not think I was therefore satisfied with them. If you do, indeed, my good cousin, you are mistaken; for the very reason why I am dissatisfied is, that I have no right to be so. I wonder you are not ashamed of yourself, to have always the best of the argument, and to prevent your friend from having what she likes, without leaving her one good reason to find fault with you. All had gone to rack and ruin, no doubt, had you left your husband, your family, and your little marmots in the lurch for one week; it had been a wild scheme, to be sure; but I should have liked you a hundred times the better for it: whereas, in aiming to be all perfection, you are good for nothing at all, and are only sit to keep company with angels.

Notwithstanding our past disagreement, I could not help being moved at the sight of my friends and relations; who, on their part, received me with pleasure; or, at least, with a profusion of civilities. I can give you no account of my brother, till I am better acquainted with him. With a tolerable figure, he has a good deal of the formal air of the country he comes from. He is serious, cold, and I think has a surly haughtiness in his disposition, which makes me apprehensive for his wife, that he will not prove so tractable a husband as ours; but will take upon him a good deal of the lord and master.

My father was so delighted to see me, that he even left unfinished the perusal of an account of a great battle which the French, as if to verify the prediction of our friend, have lately gained in Flanders. Thank heaven, he was not there! Can you conceive the intrepid Lord B---- would stand to see his countrymen run away, or that he would have joined them in their flight? No, never; he would sooner have rushed a thousand times on death.

But, a propos of our friend,----our other friend hath not written for some time. Was not yesterday the day for the courier to come from Italy? If you receive any letters, I hope you will not forget I am a party concerned in the news.

Adieu, my dear cousin; I must set out. I shall expect your letters at Geneva; where we hope to arrive tomorrow by dinner time. As for the rest, you may be assured, that, by some means or other, you shall be at the wedding; and that, if you absolutely will not come to Lausanne, I will come with my whole company to plunder Clarens, and drink up all the wine that is to be found in the town.

Letter CLII. Mrs. Orbe to Mrs. Wolmar

Upon my word, my dear, you have read me a charming lecture! you keep it up to a miracle! you seem to depend, however, too much on the salutary effect of your sermons. Without pretending to judge whether they would formerly have lull’d your preceptor to sleep, I can assure you they do not put me to sleep at present; on the contrary, that which you sent me yesterday was so far from affecting me with drowsiness that it kept me awake all night. I bar, however, the remarks of that Argus your husband, if he should see the letter. But I will write in some order, and I protest to you, you had better burn your fingers, than shew it him.

If I should be very methodical, and recapitulate with you article for article, I should usurp your privilege; I had better, therefore, set them down as they come into my head; to affect a little modesty also, and not give you too much fair-play, I will not begin with our travellers, or the courier from Italy. At the worst, if it should so happen, I shall only have my letter to write over again, and to reverse it, by putting the beginning at the latter end. I am determined however to begin with the supposed Lady B----. I can assure you, I am offended at the very title; nor shall I ever forgive St. Preux for permitting her to take it, Lord B---- for conferring it on her, or you for acknowledging it. Shall Eloisa Wolmar receive Lauretta Pisana into her house! permit her to live with her! think of it, child, again. Would not such a condescension in you be the most cruel mortification to her? can you be ignorant that the air you breathe is fatal to infamy? will the poor unfortunate dare to mix her breath with yours? will she dare to approach you? She would be as much affected by your presence as a creature possessed would be at the sacred relics in the hand of the exorcist: your looks would make her sink into the earth; the very sight of you would kill her.

Not that I despise the unhappy Laura; God forbid! on the contrary, I admire and respect her, the more as her reformation is heroic and extraordinary. But is it sufficient to authorise those mean comparisons by which you debase yourself; as if in the indulgence of the greatest weakness, there was not something in true love that is a constant security to our person, and which made us tenacious of our honour? but I comprehend and excuse you. You have but a confused view of low and distant objects: you look down from your sublime and elevated station upon the earth, and see no inequalities on its surface. Your devout humility knows how to take an advantage even of your virtue.

But what end will all this serve? will our natural sensations make the less impression? will our self-love be less active? in spite of your arguments you feel a repugnance at this match: you tax your sensations with pride; you would strive against them and attribute them to prejudice. But tell me, my dear, how long has the scandal attendant on vice consisted in mere opinion? what friendship do you think can possibly subsist between you and a woman, before whom, one cannot mention chastity, or virtue, without making her burst into tears of shame, without renewing her sorrows, without even insulting her penitence? believe me, my dear, we may respect Laura, but we ought not to see her; to avoid her is the regard which modest women owe to her merit: it would be cruel to make her suffer in our company.

I will go farther, you say your heart tells you, this marriage ought not to take place. Is not this as much as to tell you it will not. Your friend says nothing about it in his letter! in the letter which he wrote to me! and yet you say that letter is a very long one----and then comes the discourse between you and your husband----that husband of yours is a slyboots, and ye are a couple of cheats thus to trick me out of the news ye have heard. But then your husband’s sentiments!---- methinks his sentiments were not so necessary; particularly for you who have seen the letter, nor indeed were they for me, who have not seen it: for I am more certain of the conduct of your friend from my own sentiments, than from all the wisdom of philosophy.

See there now!----did I not tell you so? that intruder will be thrusting himself in, no body knows how. For fear he should come again, however, as we are now got into his chapter, let us go through it, that it may be over, and we may have nothing to do with him again.

Let us not bewilder ourselves with conjectures, had you not been Eloisa, had not your friend been your lover, I know not what business he would now have had with you, nor what I should have had to do with him. All I know is, that, if my ill fears had so ordered it that he had first made love to me, it had been all over with his poor head; for, whether I am a fool or not, I should certainly have made him one. But what signifies what I might have been? let us come to what I am. Attached by inclination to you, from our earliest infancy, my heart has been in a manner absorbed by yours; affectionate and susceptible as I was, I of myself was incapable of love or sensibility. All my sentiments came from you; you alone stood in the place of the whole world, and I lived only to be your friend. Chaillot saw all this, and founded on it the judgment she passed on me. In what particular, my dear, have you found her mistaken?

You know I looked upon your friend as a brother: as the son of my mother was the lover of my friend. Neither was it my reason, but my heart that gave him this preference. I should have been even more susceptible than I am, had I never experienced any other love. I caressed you, in caressing the dearest part of yourself, and the chearfulness which attended my embraces was a proof of their purity. For doth a modest woman ever behave so to the man she loves? did you behave thus to him? no, Eloisa, love in a female heart is cautious and timid; reserve and modesty are all its advances; it discloses by endeavouring to hide itself, and whenever it confers the favour of its caresses, it well knows how to set a value upon them. Friendship is prodigal, but love is avaricious and sparing.

I confess indeed, that too intimate connections at his age and mine, are dangerous; but, with both our hearts engaged by the same object, we were so accustomed to place it between us, that, without annihilating you at least, it was impossible for us to come together. Even that familiarity, so dangerous on every other occasion, was then my security. Our sentiments depend on our ideas, and when these have once taken a certain turn, they are not easily perverted. We had talked together too much in one strain, to begin upon another; we had advanced too far to return back the way we came: love is jealous of its prerogative, and will make its own progress; it does not chuse that friendship should meet it half way. In short, I am still of the same opinion, that criminal caresses never take place between those that have been long used to the endearing embraces of innocence. In aid of my sentiments, came the man destined by heaven to constitute the momentary happiness of my life. You know, cousin, he was young, well made, honest, complaisant and solicitous to please; it is true, he was not so great a master in love as your friend; but it was me that he loved: and, when the heart is free, the passion which is addressed to ourselves, hath always in it something contagious. I returned his affections therefore, with all that remained of mine, and his share was such as left him no room to complain of his choice. With all this, what had I to apprehend. I will even go so far as to confess that the prerogatives of the husband, joined to the duties of a wife, relaxed for a moment the ties of friendship; and that, after my change of condition, giving myself up to the duties of my new station, I became a more affectionate wife than I was a friend: but, in returning to you, I have brought back two hearts instead of one, and have not since forgot that I alone am charged with that double obligation.

What, my dear friend, shall I say farther? at the return of our old preceptor, I had, as it were, a new acquaintance to cultivate: methought I looked upon him with very different eyes; my heart fluttered as he saluted me, in a manner I had never felt before; and the more pleasure that emotion gave me, the more it made me afraid. I was alarmed at a sentiment which seemed criminal, and which perhaps would not have existed had it not been innocent. I too plainly perceived that he was not, nor could be any longer your lover; I was too sensible that his heart was disengaged, and that mine was so too. You know the rest, my dear cousin; my fears, my scruples were, I see, as well known to you as to myself. My unexperienced heart, was so intimidated by sensations so new to it, that I even reproached myself for the earnest desire I felt to rejoin you; as if that desire had not been the same before the return of our friend. I was uneasy that he should be in the very place where I myself most inclined to be, and believe I should not have been so much displeased to find myself less desirous of it, as at conceiving that it was not entirely on your account. At length, however, I returned to you, and began to recover my confidence. I was less ashamed of my weakness after having confessed it to you. I was even less ashamed of it in your company: I thought myself protected in turn, and ceased to be afraid of myself. I resolved, agreeable to your advice, not to change my conduct towards him. Certainly a greater reserve would have been a kind of declaration, and I was but too likely to let slip involuntary ones, to induce me to make any directly. I continued, therefore, to trifle with him through bashfulness, and to treat him familiarly through modesty: but perhaps all this, not being so natural as formerly, was not attended with the same propriety, nor exerted to the same degree. From being a trifler, I turned a downright fool; and what perhaps increased my assurance was, I found I could be so with impunity. Whether it was your example that inspired me, or whether it be that Eloisa refines every thing that approaches her, I found myself perfectly tranquil, while nothing remained of my first emotions, but the most pleasing, yet peaceful sensations, which required nothing more than the tranquillity I possessed.

Yes, my dear friend, I am as susceptible and affectionate as you; but I am so in a different manner. Perhaps, with more lively passions, I am less able to govern them; and that very chearfulness, which has been so fatal to the innocence of others has preserved mine. Not that it has been always easy, I confess; any more than it is to remain a widow at my years, and not be sometimes sensible that the daytime constitutes but one half of our lives. Nay, notwithstanding the grave face you put on the matter, I imagine your case does not differ in that greatly from mine. Mirth and pleasantry may then afford no unseasonable relief; and perhaps be a better preservative than graver lessons. How many times, in the stillness of the night, when the heart is all open to itself, have I driven impertinent thoughts out of my mind, by studying tricks for the next day! how many times have I not averted the danger of a private conversation by an extravagant fancy! there is always, my dear, when one is weak, a time wherein gaiety becomes serious; but that time will not come to me.

These are at least my sentiments of the matter, and what I am not ashamed to confess in answer to you. I readily confirm all that I said in the elysium, as to the growing passion I perceived, and the happiness I had enjoyed during the winter. I indulged myself freely in the pleasing reflections of being always in company with the person I loved, while I desired nothing farther; and, if that opportunity had still subsisted, I should have coveted no other. My chearfulness was the effect of contentment, and not of artifice. I turned the pleasure of conversing with him into drollery, and perceived that, in contenting myself with laughing, I was not paving the way for future sorrow.

I could not indeed help thinking sometimes, that my continual playing upon him gave him less real displeasure than he affected. The cunning creature was not angry at being offended, and if he was a long time before he could be brought to temper, it was only, that he might enjoy the pleasure of being intreated. Again, I in my turn have frequently laid hold of such occasions to express a real tenderness for him, appearing all the while to make a jest of him: so that you would have been puzzled to say which was the most of a child. One day, I remember that you was absent, he was playing at chess with your husband, while I and the little Frenchwoman were diverting ourselves at shuttlecock in the same room; I gave her the signal, and kept my eye on our philosopher; who, I found by the boldness of his looks and the readiness of his moves, had the best of the game. As the table was small, the chessboard hung over its edge, I watched my opportunity, therefore, and without seeming to design it, gave the board a knock with a back stroke of my racquet, and overturned the whole game on the floor. You never in your life law a man in such a passion: he was even so enraged that, when I gave him his choice of a kiss, or a box in the ear by way of penance, he sullenly turned away from me as I presented him my cheek. I asked pardon, but to no purpose: he was inflexible, and I doubt not that he would lave left me on my knees, had I condescended to kneel for it. I put an end to his resentment, however, by another offence which made him forget the former, and we were better friends than ever.