“The Cormons end as they began; there’s only a hand’s breadth between a steward and a purveyor.”

CHAPTER VII

OTHER RESULTS

The news of Mademoiselle Cormon’s choice stabbed poor Athanase Granson to the heart; but he showed no outward sign of the terrible agitation within him.  When he first heard of the marriage he was at the house of the chief-justice, du Ronceret, where his mother was playing boston.  Madame Granson looked at her son in a mirror, and thought him pale; but he had been so all day, for a vague rumor of the matter had already reached him.

Mademoiselle Cormon was the card on which Athanase had staked his life; and the cold presentiment of a catastrophe was already upon him.  When the soul and the imagination have magnified a misfortune and made it too heavy for the shoulders and the brain to bear; when a hope long cherished, the realization of which would pacify the vulture feeding on the heart, is balked, and the man has faith neither in himself, despite his powers, nor in the future, despite of the Divine power, —­then that man is lost.  Athanase was a fruit of the Imperial system of education.  Fatality, the Emperor’s religion, had filtered down from the throne to the lowest ranks of the army and the benches of the lyceums.  Athanase sat still, with his eyes fixed on Madame du Ronceret’s cards, in a stupor that might so well pass for indifference that Madame Granson herself was deceived about his feelings.  This apparent unconcern explained her son’s refusal to make a sacrifice for this marriage of his liberal opinions,—­the term “liberal” having lately been created for the Emperor Alexander by, I think, Madame de Stael, through the lips of Benjamin Constant.

After that fatal evening the young man took to rambling among the picturesque regions of the Sarthe, the banks of which are much frequented by sketchers who come to Alencon for points of view.  Windmills are there, and the river is gay in the meadows.  The shores of the Sarthe are bordered with beautiful trees, well grouped.  Though the landscape is flat, it is not without those modest graces which distinguish France, where the eye is never wearied by the brilliancy of Oriental skies, nor saddened by constant fog.  The place is solitary.  In the provinces no one pays much attention to a fine view, either because provincials are blases on the beauty around them, or because they have no poesy in their souls.  If there exists in the provinces a mall, a promenade, a vantage-ground from which a fine view can be obtained, that is the point to which no one goes.  Athanase was fond of this solitude, enlivened by the sparkling water, where the fields were the first to green under the earliest smiling of the springtide sun.  Those persons who saw him sitting beneath a poplar, and who noticed the vacant eye which he turned to them, would say to Madame Granson:—­

“Something is the matter with your son.”