CHAPTER III.

      Véteuil is a little town of ten thousand inhabitants, situated on the borders of Normandy. The streets are clean and deserted. It is a place that has had its day. People who want to travel by rail have to go fifteen miles by coach, and wait for the trains that pass through Mantes. Round the town, the open country is very fertile; it spreads out in rich grazing-land intersected by rows of poplars: a brook, on its way to the Seine, cuts a course through these broad flat tracts and traverses them with along line of trees and reeds.

      It was in this forsaken hole that William was born. His father, Monsieur de Viargue, was one of the last representatives of the old nobility of the district. Born in Germany, during the “emigration,” he came to France with the Bourbons, as into a foreign and hostile country. His mother had been cruelly banished, and was now lying in a cemetery at Berlin: his father had died on the scaffold. He could not pardon the soil which had drunk the blood of his guillotined father, and did not cover the corpse of his poor mother. The restoration gave him back his family possessions, he recovered the title and the position attached to his name, but he preserved a no less bitter hatred against that accursed France which he did not recognise as his country. He went and buried himself at Vétcuil, refusing preferment, turning a deaf ear to the offers of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and disdaining to live amongst a people who had assassinated his kindred. He would often repeat that he was no Frenchman; he called the Germans his fellow countrymen, and spoke of himself as though he were a, veritable exile.

      He was still young when he came to France. Tall, strong, and of fiery activity, he soon grew mortally bored in the inaction which he was imposing on himself. He wished to live alone, far from all public events. But his intelligence was of too high an order, the restlessness of his mind was too great, to be satisfied with the boorish pleasures of field sports. The dull unoccupied life which he was setting himself dismayed him. He looked round for something to do. By a singular inconsistency, he was fond of science, that new spirit of method the breath of which had turned upside down the old world that he regretted. He devoted himself to the study of chemistry, he who would dream of the splendour of the nobility under Louis XIV.

      He was a strange scholar, a solitary scholar who studied and made researches for himself only. He turned into a huge laboratory a room in La Noiraude, the name given in the country to the château which he lived in, at five minutes’ walk from Véteuil. In it he would spend whole days, bending over his crucibles, always eager, and yet never succeeding in satisfying his curiosity. He was a member of no learned society, and would shut the door in the face of people who came to talk with him about his researches. He wanted to be considered a gentleman. His servants were never, under pain of dismissal, to make any allusion to him, or to the employment of his time. He looked upon his taste for chemistry as a passion whose secret follies no one had a right to penetrate.

      For nearly forty years, he shut himself up every morning in his laboratory. There, his disregard for the bustle of the world became more pronounced. Though he never owned it, he buried his loves and his hatreds in his retorts and alembics. When he had weighed the substance in his powerful hands, he forgot all about France, and his father’s death on the scaffold, and his mother’s in a foreign land: nothing of the gentleman remained but his cold and haughty sceptical nature. The scholar had killed the man.

      No one, moreover, could get to the bottom of this strange organization. His own friends were ignorant of the sudden void that had been made in his heart. He kept to himself the secret of the blank, that blank which he thought he had touched with his finger. If he still lived far from the world in exile, as he never ceased to say, it was because he despised his fellowmen both rich and poor, and compared himself to a worm. But he remained solemn and disdainful, icy even in his coldness. He never lowered his mask of pride.

      There was, however, one shock in the calm existence of this man. A foolish young woman, the wife of a notary in Véteuil, threw herself into his arms. He was then forty, and still treated his neighbours like serfs. He kept the young woman as his mistress, publicly acknowledged her ten miles round, and even had the audacity to keep her at La Noiraude. This was an unprecedented scandal in the little town. The brusque ways of Monsieur dc Viargue had already caused the finger of dislike to be pointed at him. When he lived openly with the wife of the notary, people were for tearing him to pieces. The husband, a poor fellow who had a mortal dread of losing his place, kept quiet for the two years that the intimacy lasted. He shut his eyes and ears, and seemed to believe that his wife was merely spending a little holiday at Monsieur de Viargue’s. The woman became enciente and was delivered of her child in the château. A few months later, she grew tired of her lover, who was again passing his days in the laboratory. One fine morning, she went back to her husband, taking care to forget her child. The count was not fool enough to run after her. The notary quietly took her back, as if she had returned from a journey. Next day, he went for a walk with her on his arm, through the streets of the town, and from that day she became a model wife. Twenty years after, this scandal had not died out at Véteuil.

      William, the child of this singular intimacy, was brought up at La Noiraude. His father, who had had for his mistress only a passing affection, mingled with a little disdain, accepted this child of fortune with perfect indifference. He let him live with him, that he might not be accused of wishing to hide the living testimony of his folly: but, as the memory of the notary’s wife was disagreeable to him, he never troubled his head about him. The poor creature grew up in almost complete solitude. His mother, who had not even felt any reason for getting her husband to leave Véteuil, never tried to see him. This woman saw now how foolish she had been: she trembled as she thought of the consequences her fault might have: age was creeping on her, and she followed the dictates of her plebeian blood and became religious and prudish.

      The woman who proved a real mother to William, was an old servant who had been in the family when Monsieur de Viargue was born. Geneviève and the count’s mother bad been foster-sisters. The latter, who belonged to the nobility of central France, had taken Geneviève with her to Germany, at the time of the emigration, and Monsieur de Viargue, on his return to France, after the death of his mother, had brought her to Véteuil. She was a countrywoman from the Cévennes, belonging to the reformed religion, with a narrow zealous mind, filled with all the fanaticism of the early Calvinists, whose blood she felt flowing in her veins. Tall and lank, with sunken eyes, and a big pointed nose, she reminded one of those old witches who used to be burnt at the stake. She carried everywhere an enormous sombre-looking Bible with its binding strengthened with iron clasps; morning and night, she read a few verses from it in a high shrill voice. Sometimes she would come across some of those awful words of anger which the terrible God of the Jews heaped on his dismayed people. The count put up with what he called her madness: he knew the strict uprightness, the sovereign justice of this overexcited nature. Besides, he looked upon Geneviève as a sacred legacy from his mother. She was more a supreme mistress than a servant in the house.

      At seventy she was still doing heavy work. She had several servants under her, hut she took great pride in setting herself hard tasks. She was humble and yet incredibly vain. She managed everything at La Noiraude, getting up at daybreak, setting each the example of indefatigable activity, and fulfilling her duty with the toughness of a woman who has never felt ill.

      One of the greatest troubles of her life was the passion of her master for science. As she saw him shut himself up during long days in a room littered with strange apparatus, she firmly believed that he had become a wizard. When she passed the door