Brother and sister; a memoir and the letters of Ernest and Henriette Renan

Front matter

A Memoir and the Letters

OF

ERNEST AND HENRIETTE RENAN

II

FROM that day forward poverty was our appointed lot. My brother, then nineteen years of age, departed to Paris, and there entered on that life of labour and constant application which never was to know its full reward. We left Tre*guier, which had grown too sad a place of residence for us, and went to live at Lannion, where my mother's family resided. My sister was seventeen years old. Her religious faith had always been lively, and more than once the idea of entering the conventual life had much engaged her thoughts. On winter evenings she would take me to church underneath her own cloak. It was a great delight to me to tread the snow under its all-embracing shelter. But for me she would, without any doubt whatever, have adopted a state of life in evident accordance with her native piety, her lack of fortune, and the customs of her country. Her heart turned specially to the Convent of Ste. Anne at Lannion, which united the care of the sick with that of the education of young girls. Alas ! had she but followed her bent, she might have worked more suc-

HENRIETTE REMAN II

cessfully for her own ultimate happiness. But she was too good a daughter and too devoted a sister to prefer her own peace to her duties, even though the religious prejudices which she -then shared might have reassured her on that head.

From that time forth she looked upon herself as responsible for my future. Noticing my awkward movements one day, she perceived I was striving shyly to conceal the rents in a worn-out garment. She burst into tears. The sight of the poor child, destined to such black poverty, with instincts so removed therefrom, wrung her heart. She resolved to face the struggle with life, and undertook the task of filling up, by her unaided efforts, the abyss our father's misfortunes had opened at our feet. A young girl's manual labour was quite unequal to such an undertaking. The career she embraced was the bitterest of all others. It was decided that we should return to Treguier, and that she should there take up the duties of a professional teacher. Of all the conditions of existence open to the choice of a well-educated and undowered person, the education of girls in a small provincial town is, beyond all contradiction, that which demands the greatest courage. The period was that immediately succeeding the Revolution of 1830, an unfortunate and critical moment in those remote provinces. Under the Restoration, the nobility, seeing its privileges were uncontested, had shared frankly in the social movement. Now, in its fancied humiliation, it avenged itself by withdrawing within a narrow circle, and thus impoverished the development of society at large. All Legitimist families made a point of confiding their children to religious communities alone. The middle class, for the sake of being in the fashion, and aping people of quality, soon followed the same custom. My sister — -incapable of condescending to those vulgarlyclever methods without which it is well-nigh impossible for a private school to succeed — my sister, with her unusual distinction, her deep earnestness, and her thorough information, saw her little school deserted. The modesty, the reserve, the exquisite tone of mind which she carried into everything she did, were so many causes of her failure in this matter. Struggling with the most paltry touchiness, forced to reckon with the silliest pretensions, her great and noble spirit wore itself out in a hopeless, endless contest with a decadent society, robbed of the best of its former elements by a revolution which had not as yet endowed it with any of its benefits.

Some few people, superior to the "local small-mindedness, knew how to value her. An exceedingly intelligent man, free from the prejudices which have reigned supreme in provincial towns since their aristocratic population has either completely disappeared or grown warped in mind and stupidly reactionary, conceived a very deep affection for her. In spite of a birthmark to which it took some time to grow accustomed, my sister was at that age remarkably attractive. Those who only knew her late in life, and worn by a trying climate, cannot fancy the delicacy of her features and their languorous charm in earlier years. Her eyes were peculiarly soft, and her hand the prettiest and daintiest imaginable. Certain proposals were made, coupled with discreetly indicated conditions. The effect of these would, in fact, have been to separate her in a measure from her own people, for whom it was thought she had already toiled sufficiently. She refused them, although the clear-mindedness and justice of her own nature inspired her with a real regard for one in whom she recognised similar qualities. She preferred poverty to affluence unshared by her family. Yet her position was growing more and more distressing. The fees due to her were so irregularly paid, that we now and then regretted having left Lannion, where we had met with far greater kindness and sympathy. Then it was she resolved to drain the bitter cup to its very dregs. A lady friend of the family, who travelled to Paris about this time, spoke to her of a situation as under-mistress in a small school for girls.

The poor girl accepted it. At the age of fourand-twenty, friendless, without advisers, she went out into a world which was utterly unknown to her, and in which she was doomed to serve a cruel apprenticeship. The beginning of her Paris life was terrible. That cold and arid world, so full of imposition and imposture, that populous desert, wherein she counted not one single friend, drove her desperate. The deep attachment which we Bretons bear our country, our national habits, and our domestic life, awoke in her with agonising bitterness. Lost in an ocean where her modesty was misunderstood, prevented by her extreme reserve from contracting those kindly acquaintanceships which console and support, even when they do not materially assist us, she fell into a state of nostalgia so profound as to compromise her health. What makes the Breton's condition so cruel in the early days of his transplanting from his home is that he feels forsaken at once by men and by God Himself. The heavens seem darkened to him. His happy belief in the general morality of the universe, his tranquil optimism, are shaken to their foundations. He feels himself cast out of paradise into a hell of icy indifference. The voice of all that is good and beautiful sounds hollow in his ears, and he is tempted to cry out, "How shall I sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?" To crown my sister's misfortunes, the first houses to which she was led by fate were quite unworthy of her. Let the reader imagine a

HENRIETTE REMAN 15

gentle girl, who had never left her God-fearing little town, her mother, and her friends, suddenly planted in the midst of a frivolous-minded school society, where her serious feelings were incessantly wounded, and whose leaders never betrayed any sentiments but such as proved their light-mindedness, indifference, or sordid love of personal interest. Owing to these early experiences she always maintained a very low opinion of the methods of female education in Paris. A score of times she was on the eve of departure, and all her invincible courage was needful to induce her to remain.

But, little by little, people learnt to value her. The management of the studies in a scholastic establishment, a very creditable one, this time was intrusted to her; but the obstacles she encountered to the realisation of her views, owing to the niggardliness inevitable in private institutions, and almost invariably countenanced by the proprietors for the sake of the paltry gain it brings, prevented her ever taking much pleasure in this particular line of teaching. She used to work sixteen hours a day. She passed all the public examinations prescribed by the regulations. This labour did not have the same effect on her mind as it might have on a more mediocre intelligence. Instead of exhausting, it strengthened it, and produced a prodigious mental development. Her information, already very considerable, became exceptional. She made a study of modern history, and in later years a few words of mine would suffice to enable her to seize the sense of the most delicate criticism. Simultaneously her religious ideas underwent modification. From history she learnt the insufficiency of any dogma; but the fundamental religious sentiment, which was hers by nature, as well as by reason of her early education, was too deeply rooted to be shaken. All that development of thought which might have been dangerous in another woman was harmless here, for she kept it in her own heart. The cultivation of the mind had its absolute and intrinsic value in her sight. She never dreamt of turning it into a means of satisfying her vanity. It was in the year 1838 that she brought me to Paris. Educated at Tre"guier by some worthy priests who managed a sort of seminary there, I had early given signs of an inclination towards the ecclesiastical state of life. The prizes I won at school delighted my sister, who mentioned them to a kind-hearted and distinguished man, physician to the school in which she taught, and a very zealous Catholic, Dr. Descuret, author of " La Me"decine des Passions." He mentioned the chance of getting a good pupil to Monseigneur Dupanloup, then the brilliantly successful manager of the small seminary of "St. Nicholas du Chardonnet,"

and came back to my sister with the news that he had the offer of a scholarship for me. I was then fifteen and a half years old. My sister, whose own Catholic convictions were beginning to totter, was already inclined to view the very clerical bent of my education with some regret. But she knew the respect due to a child's faith. Never did she breathe one word to dissuade me from a path which I was following of my freest volition. She came to see me every week, still wearing the plain green woollen shawl which had sheltered her proud poverty away in Brittany. She was just the same gentle, loving girl, but with a touch of firmness and wisdom which the trials of life and her severe studies had added to her.

The educational career is such a thankless one for women, that after five years spent in Paris, and several illnesses brought on by over-work, my sister was still far from being able to suffice for all the charges she had taken upon herself. True it is that she took a view of them which would have discouraged any one else. Our father had left debts far exceeding the value of our paternal homestead, the only property remaining to us. But our mother was so beloved, and in those days, in that kindly country, business was still done after so patriarchal a fashion, that no creditor dreamt of pressing for the discharge of our liabilities. It was settled that my mother should keep the house and repay what and when she could. My sister would not listen to any idea of rest till all this old and heavy debt was cleared off. Thus it was that she ended by accepting proposals made her in 1840 to undertake private teaching in Poland. It was a question of years of expatriation and of accepting a state of trying personal dependence. But she had made a far greater effort when she had quitted Brittany to go out into the wide world. She started in January 1841, crossed the Black Forest and the whole of South Germany buried in snow, joined the family she was about to enter at Vienna, and then, crossing the Carpathian range, she reached the Chateau of Clemensow on the banks of the Bug, a dreary residence, where for ten long years she was to learn how bitter exile is, even when sweetened by a lofty motive.

This time, at all events, fate brought her one compensation for its many former injustices, by placing her in a family which I may mention without hesitation, since a contemporary glory which has brought its name to every lip has added lustre to its historic renown. It was that of Comte Andre* Zamoysky. The passionate eagerness with which she undertook her duties — the affection she conceived for her three pupils — the delight of seeing her efforts bear fruit, especially in the person of her whose youth caused her to remain longest under her care, the Princess

Cecile Lubomirska — the unusual esteem she earned from all the members of this noble family, who never ceased, even after her return to France, to appeal to her sagacity for timely counsel — the close affinity, in their mutual gravity and uprightness, between her own character and that of the household in which she dwelt — all helped her to forget the sadness inseparable from the nature of her position, and the rigours of a climate exceedingly unsuited to her constitution. She grew fond of Poland, and conceived a special feeling of esteem for the Polish peasant, in whom she recognised a good-hearted being, full of lofty religious instincts, not unlike the peasantry of Brittany, but of a less energetic nature. Her travels in Germany and Italy completed the process of ripening her intelligence. She made several and repeated stays at Warsaw, Vienna, and Dresden. Venice and Florence were a perfect dream of delight to her; but Rome especially enthralled her. In that imperial city she grew to see, and that calmly enough, the distinction the philosophic mind must draw between religion in its essence and its specific formula. She loved, with Lord Byron, to call it "dear city of my soul." Like all foreigners who have lived there, she even grew to feel indulgent towards those puerile and senseless details which environ the Papacy in these later days.

Ill

IN 1845 I left tne Seminary of St. Sulpice. Thanks to the wise and liberal spirit animating the managers of that establishment, I was far advanced in philological study, and my religious convictions were correspondingly shaken. Here again Henriette was my true helper. She had outstripped me in the path of doubt, and her faith in Catholicism had completely disappeared ; but she had always refrained from exercising the slightest influence over me in that respect. When I made known to her the doubts which tormented me, making me feel it a duty to relinquish a career which indispensably demands the most unquestioning faith, she was overjoyed, and offered her aid to support me on the thorny road. I was about entering on life, at the age of twentythree, old in thought, but as inexperienced, as ignorant of the world as a young man well could be. I literally did not know a soul ; I lacked the assurance of an ordinary boy of fifteen. I had not even taken my degree of bachelier h lettres. We agreed that I should seek for some employment in a school in Paris of the nature known as an pair, which would, that is to say, give me board and lodging, leaving me considerable leisure for my studies. My sister advanced me a sum of twelve hundred francs (fortyfour pounds), to enable me to wait, and supplement whatever insufficiency of income such a position might at first present.

That sum was the corner-stone of my whole life. I never exhausted it, but it secured me the calm of mind so indispensable if I was to think in peace, and saved me from being overwhelmed by taskwork which would have broken me down. At this crucial moment in my life, Henriette's beautiful letters were my support and consolation. While I was struggling with difficulties increased by my total inexperience of the world, her health was suffering severely from the severity of the Polish winters ; a chronic affection of the larynx developed, and in 1850 took so serious a form that her return was deemed necessary. Her task, moreover, was accomplished ; our father's liabilities had been completely discharged ; the small property he had left us was safe in my mother's hands, freed from all debt, and my brother's work had earned him a position which promised to become a wealthy one. The idea of a meeting occurred to both of us. I joined her in Berlin in September 1850. Those ten years of exile had utterly transformed her.

Premature old age had wrinkled her brow. Of the charms she still possessed when she bade me farewell in the parlour of the Seminary of St. Nicholas, naught remained save her delightful expression of ineffable goodness.

Then began those happy years, the recollection of which still draws tears from my eyes.

We hired a small apartment at the bottom of a garden near the Val de Grace. Here we enjoyed the most perfect solitude. She had no relations with the outer world, and desired none. Our windows looked over the garden of the Carmelite nuns in the Rue de 1'Enfer. The life led by these recluses gave, in a measure, the pattern of her own, and was her only interest during the long hours I was absent at the Bibliotheque Nationale. She had the extremest respect for my work; I have known her sit of an evening for hours by my side, holding her breath lest she should disturb me. Yet she liked to see me, and the door between our two rooms was always open. So judicious and so ripened had her affection for me grown, that the secret communion of our thoughts sufficed her. Naturally exacting and jealous-hearted, she was satisfied with but a few minutes each day, so long as she felt assured she was the sole object of my affection. Thanks to her vigorous economy, she managed my home on exceedingly limited means, so that nothing ever lacked, and even endued it with a simple charm of its own. So perfect was the union of our minds that we scarcely needed to communicate our thoughts. Our general views concerning the universe and the deity were identical. There was not a delicate shade in the theories I was then evolving which she did not appreciate. She surpassed me in knowledge on many points of modern history, which she had studied at the fountain-head. The general plan of my career, the scheme of inflexible sincerity I had mapped out, was so essentially the combined product of our two consciences, that, had I been tempted to fail in any particular of it, she, like a second self, would have been found beside me to call me back to duty.

Thus her influence in my mental sphere was very great. She was my incomparable amanuensis. She copied all my works, and understood them so thoroughly that I could trust to her as to the living index of my own intelligence. In the matter of form I owe her an immensity. She read everything I wrote in the proofs, and her invaluable criticism would discover delicate shades of negligence in style which might otherwise have escaped me. She had formed an admirable one of her own, modelled on the classics, so severely correct that I doubt whether, since the days of Port Royal, any writer has ever set himself a loftier ideal of perfect diction. This made her a very severe critic. She favoured but few of our contemporary writers, and when she saw the essays I had composed before our reunion, and which had not had time to reach her in Poland, she was only half contented with them. She shared the tendency of their ideas, and she felt, at all events, that the measured exposition of deep thoughts of such an order should be expressed by each person with perfect freedom of individual speech ; but she thought their form abrupt and careless. Some passages in them struck her as being exaggerated, harsh in tone, and as treating our language after a fashion which was barely respectful.

She convinced me that everything may be clearly expressed in the simple and correct style of the best authors, and that novel forms and violent imagery always denote either misplaced pretension or ignorance of the writer's real resources. Thus a fundamental change in my own style dates from this period. I formed a habit of composing with an eye to her remarks, writing various passages to see what effect they would produce on her, and resolved to sacrifice them should she demand it.

Since I lost her, this habit of my mind has grown to be a semblance of the anguish of a patient who has suffered amputation, and who has the limb he was deprived of constantly within his sight. She was a radical factor in my intellectual existence, and with her a part of my actual being passed away. On all philosophical subjects we had grown to see with the same eyes and feel as with one heart. She so thoroughly comprehended my method of thought that she almost always anticipated what I was about to say, the idea striking us both at the same moment. But on one point she far surpassed me. While I still sought, in matters of the soul, for interesting controversy or artistic study, nothing ever tarnished the purity of her close communion with Good. Her religious worship of the truth suffered not the smallest note of discord. One quality of my work which gave her pain was the sarcastic spirit which possessed me, and which I was apt to carry into my best work. Never having known real suffering, I took the cautious smile which human vanity or weakness will provoke to be a sort of token of my philosophy. This habit of mine distressed her, and I relinquished it little by little for her sake. I now see how right she was. Good men should be simply good. Every touch of sarcasm implies some residuum of vanity and personal defiance, which in the long-run surely degenerates into want of taste.

Her religion had reached the acme of simplicity. She absolutely rejected the supernatural, but she preserved the deepest attachment to the Christian practice. It was not Protestantism exactly, even in its broadest sense, which attracted her. She had the tenderest recollection of Catholicism, of the chanting, and Psalms, and pious practices amid which her childhood had been spent. She was a saint minus the saint's precise faith in religious symbolism and its narrow observances.

About a month before her death we had a religious conversation with that excellent man Dr. Gaillardot on the terrace of our house at Ghazir. She would fain have checked my strong inclination towards the formulated conception of an impersonal Deity and a purely ideal immortality. Without being what is vulgarly called a Deist, she could not tolerate the thought of reducing religion to a mere abstract idea. In practice, at all events, all was clear to her. "Yes," she said, " when my last hour comes, I shall have the consolation of telling myself I have done all the good I could. If there is a thought on earth which is not vanity, that is one."

A keen appreciation of Nature was the source of some of her most exquisite pleasures. A fine day, a sunbeam, a flower, would suffice to delight her. She had a perfect comprehension of the delicate art of the great Italian idealist schools, but she could find no pleasure in that brutal or violent style which seeks for something else than beauty.

A special circumstance gave her an unusual acquaintance with the history of the Art of the Middle Ages. She it was who collected for me all the notes for the paper on the condition of the Fine Arts in the fourteenth century which will be incorporated in the twenty-fourth volume of the "Histoire Litteraire de France." For this purpose, and with the most admirable patience and care, she examined every great archaeological work published during the last halfcentury, and collected every item that could serve our purpose. Her own conclusions, which she noted down at the same time, were remarkable for their accuracy, and I almost invariably had to adopt them in the end. To complete our researches, we travelled together into the country which was the cradle of Gothic art, the Vexin, the Valois, and the Beauvois regions, and the localities lying round Noyon, Laon, and Rheims. During all this inquiry, in which she took the deepest interest, she displayed extraordinary activity. The ideal life to her was one of labour and retirement lapped in affection. Often she would repeat those words of Thomas a Kempis, " In angello cum libello." Amid such peaceful avocations many happy hours were spent, her mind perfectly tranquil, and her heart, generally so anxious, in deepest repose. Her power of work was prodigious. I have known her never quit her self-imposed task from morning till night for days together. She assisted in editing several educational journals, one managed by her friend Mdlle. Ulliac-Tre'madeure in particular. She never signed her articles, and such was her modesty that she gave herself no opportunity of gaining anything beyond the esteem of a small minority. But indeed the vile taste prevailing in the composition of all French works intended for the purposes of female education prevented her ever looking for great pecuniary remuneration or success. This work was undertaken more especially to oblige her friend, who had grown old and infirm. It was in her letters that her whole being revealed itself. Her travelling journals, too, were excellent. I had looked to her to relate the unscientific details of our journey in the East. Alas ! the history of that aspect of my enterprise, which I had confided to her care, has perished with her. The fragment I have discovered among her papers is excellent. We hope to publish it, and complete what is lacking with her letters. Later on we shall bring out a description written by her of the great maritime expeditions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She had studied deeply for the purpose of this work, and had brought a critical acumen to bear upon it rarely found in books intended for the young. She never did anything by halves. Her fine taste for absolute truthfulness proved the accuracy of her judgment.

She was not witty, if that word is taken, in the French acceptation, to mean something light and bantering — she never made game of any living being. She hated all malice, and thought it cruelty. I remember once, at a pardon in Lower Brittany, to which we went by water, our boat was preceded by one filled with poor ladies, who, in their desire to be smart for the occasion, had indulged in a style of toilet decoration at once paltry and tasteless. Our companions laughed at them, and the poor ladies perceived it. I saw her burst into tears. To her it seemed barbarous cruelty to make a mock of harmless beings who were forgetting their troubles in a day's pleasuring, and who perhaps had pinched themselves sorely out of deference to public opinion. A person who attracted ridicule at once acquired her pity. With pity she gave love, and set herself between the mocker and his prey.

Hence arose her indifference to society, and her lack of that ordinary conversation which is almost invariably a tissue of ill-nature and frivolity. She had grown old before her time, and she had a habit of exaggerating her age, both in her dress and manner. She had a sort of worship for sorrow. She welcomed, she almost cultivated, every opportunity of shedding tears. Grief became an enduring and almost an enjoyable sensation with her. Middle-class people, as a rule, misunderstood her, and thought her stiff and embarrassed in manner. Nothing which was not completely good in its way found favour in her eyes. She could not be false to her own self. The lower orders and peasants, on the contrary, found her exquisitely kind, and those who knew how to touch the finest chords of her nature soon learnt to appreciate its depth and its distinction.

She had charming womanly flashes now and then. Her youth would return to her for the nonce; she would seem to smile at life, and the veil that parted her from the outer world would drop.

These passing moments of enchanting weakness, fleeting gleams of a dawn long past, were full of melancholy tenderness. She was far superior in this particular to those persons who profess the indifference preached by the Mystic school in all its gloomy abstraction. She loved life, she was full of good taste, she could smile over a jewel or some womanly trifle as she would smile upon a flower. She had never pronounced the ascetic Christian's sweeping renunciation of Nature. Virtue, in her eyes, was an austere endeavour, a deliberate effort, the natural instinct of a pure soul, tending in spontaneous striving towards good, serving God without fear or trembling.

Thus for six years we lived a very pure and elevated life. My position was always a very modest one, but that was her own desire. Even had I thought of it, she would not have permitted me to sacrifice one tittle of my independence to my worldly advancement. The unexpected disasters which befell our brother, and led to the loss of all our savings, did not dismay her. She would have gone abroad again, had that been necessary to ensure the steady development of my literary life. Oh ! my God, have I done all that in me lay to ensure her happiness? With what bitterness do I now reproach myself for my habit of reserve towards her, for not having told her oftener how dear I held her, for having yielded too easily to my love of silent meditation, for not having made the most of every hour in which she was spared to me ! But I take that rare soul to witness that she was always in my heart of hearts, that she ruled my whole moral life as none other ever ruled, that she was the constant beginning and end of all my existence, in sorrow and in joy. If I failed her, it was by a certain stiffness of manner which should never give pause to those who know me well, and by a feeling of respect, misplaced perhaps, which caused me instinctively to avoid anything resembling a desecration of her holiness. A similar feeling checked her in her intercourse with me. My lengthened clerical education, one of absolute seclusion during four years, had given me a habit of mind in this respect which her inherent and delicate reserve prevented her opposing as much as she might have done perhaps.