The Pastoral Symphony Read Online

And it was not until later that evening, after the children had gone to bed, that I took her aside and asked her severely,

“Are you angry that I took Gertrude to a concert?”

She gave me this response, “You do things for her that you would have never done for any of your own children.”

So it was always the same grief and the same refusal to understand that one celebrates the child who comes back but not those who remain, as the parable shows. It also pained me to see that she took no notice of the infirmity of Gertrude, who could hope for no other celebration than this one. Since I was fortunate to have some free time today, although I am normally very busy, the reproach of Amélie was even more unjust because she knew very well that each of the children had work to do or were occupied by other things, and that Amélie herself had no taste for music. In fact, she would never choose to go to a concert even if it was being played at our front door.

What gave me even more chagrin was that Amelie dared to say all this in front of Gertrude, for even though I had taken my wife aside, she raised her voice enough for Gertrude to hear her. I felt more indignation than sadness, and several instants after Amélie had left us, I went up to Gertrude and held her frail hand to my face.

“You see! This time I am not crying.”

“No, this time it is my turn,” she said while forcing herself to smile at me. And suddenly I could see that the beautiful face she lifted towards me was inundated with tears.

8 March

The only pleasure that I can give to Amélie is to abstain from doing things that displease her. These negative testimonies of love are all that she will permit me. She cannot understand to what point she has already narrowed my life. Ah! God only grant that she would ask me to complete some difficult task! With what joy would I accomplish the reckless, the perilous, for her! But one could say that she is repugnant to all that is not customary, in such a way that for her, progress in life only consists of adding together similar days from the past. She does not desire and she will not even accept from me any kind of new virtues or even any increment of old virtues. She looks at any effort of the soul that wants to see in Christianity anything other than a domestication of instincts either with concern or outright reprobation.

I must confess that I had completely forgotten, once we got to Neuchâtel, to pay our account with the tailor and bring him a box of thread as Amélie had asked me to do. I was angrier with myself than she could have been with me, even more so because I promised myself not to forget to do this knowing also that “He who is faithful with little things will also be so with important things.” And I also feared what conclusions she might draw from my omission. I would have even liked for her to give me some kind of reproach, for I certainly deserved it. But, as it usually happens, imaginary grief outweighed the actual. Ah! How beautiful life would be and how easily we could support our misery if we were content to think about only real pains without listening to the ghosts and monsters in our spirit. But I will let myself note here that this could be the subject of a sermon (Matt., XII, 29: “Do not have a troubled mind”). But it is the intellectual and moral development of Gertrude that I am recording here. I will thus return to it.

I was hoping to be able to follow this development step-by-step, and I have begun to outline some details. But beyond the fact that I don’t have the time to meticulously note all the phases, it is extremely difficult for me today to remember the exact chain of events. As my story moved along, I reported at first about some reflections of Gertrude, some conversations with her, and someone who by chance would read these pages would no doubt be astonished to hear her speak so aptly and reason so judiciously. In fact her progress was disconcertingly rapid. I often admired how quickly her mind seized upon the intellectual food that I fed her and all that it encompassed. She made it her own through an effort of assimilation and of continual maturation. She often surprised me, anticipating my thoughts and going beyond them, and often, from one session to another, I no longer recognized my student.

After only a couple of months it did not seem any longer like her intelligence had been sleeping for so long. But she was already showing more wisdom than most young ladies who become dissipated by the exterior world and to whom many useless preoccupations cause them to lose attention. Moreover, I believe she was a bit older than we had assumed she was at first. It seemed that she was able to take advantage of her blindness in such a way that I began to think that perhaps this infirmity might have been a benefit for her in numerous ways. Despite myself I compared her to Charlotte, and sometimes when I helped her with her lessons, seeing her mind distracted by the least little insect that was flying around, I thought, “All the same, how she would listen to me more carefully if she could not see!”

It goes without saying that Gertrude was avid about reading, but wanting to control her thoughts as much as possible, I preferred that she did not read a lot, especially without me. In particular, I did not want her to read the Bible by herself, which might seem strange for a Protestant. I will explain that later, but before going into a question of such importance, I want to relate a little fact that was related to music that took place, such as I remember, shortly after the concert at Neuchâtel.

Yes, this concert took place, I believe, three weeks before the beginning of the summer vacation which brought Jacques back home to us.