Chapter XI

Adèle--Her devotion to Rabbe--Strong meat--_Appel à
Dieu_--_L'âme et la comédie humaine_--_La mort_--_Ultime
lettere_--Suicide_--À Alphonse Rabbe_, by Victor Hugo

We have been forgetful, more than forgetful, even ungrateful, in saying that Rabbe's one and only consolation was his pipe; there was another.

A young girl, named Adèle, spent three years with him; but those three happy years only added fresh sorrows to Rabbe, for, soon, the beautiful fresh girl drooped like a flower at whose roots a worm is gnawing; she bowed her head, suffered for a year, then died.

History has made much stir about certain devoted attachments; no devotion could have been purer or more disinterested than the unnoticed devotion of this young girl, all the more complete that she crowned it with her death.

A subject of this nature is either stated in three brief lines of bald fact, or is extended over a couple of volumes as a psychological study. Poor Adèle! We have but four lines, and the memory of your devotion to offer you! Her death drove Rabbe to despair; from that time dates the most abandoned period of his life. Rabbe found out not only that the seeds of destruction were in him, but that they emanated from him. His wails of despair from that moment became bitter and frequent; and his thoughts turned incessantly towards suicide so that they might become accustomed to the idea. Certain memoranda hung always in his sight; he called them his _pain des forts_; they were, indeed, the spiritual bread he fed himself on.

We will give a few examples of his most remarkable thoughts from this lugubrious diary:--

"The whole life of man is but one journey towards death."

*

"Man, from whence comes thy pride? It was a mistake for thee
to have been conceived; thy birth is a misfortune; thy life
a labour; thy death inevitable."

*

"Thou living corpse! When wilt thou return to the dust?
O solitude! O death! I have drunk deep of thy austere
delights. You are my loves! the only ones that are faithful
to me!"

*

"Every hour that passes by drives us towards the tomb and is
hastened by the advance of those that precede it."

*

"Bitter and cruel is the absence of God's face from me. How
much longer wilt Thou make me suffer?"

*

"Reflect in the morning that by night you may be no longer
here; and at night, that by morning you may have died."

*

"Sometimes there is a melancholy remembrance of the glorious
days of youth, of that happiness which never seems so great
or so bitter as when remembered in the days of misfortune;
at times, such collections confront the unfortunate wretch
whose aspirations are towards death. Then, his despair turns
to melancholy--almost even to hope."

*

"But these illusions of the beautiful days of youth pass and
vanish away! Oh! what bitterness fills my soul! Inexorable
nature, fate, destiny of providence give me back the cup
of life and of happiness! My lips had scarcely touched it
before you snatched it out of my trembling hands. Give me
back the cup! Give it back! I am consumed by burning thirst;
I have deceived myself; you have deceived me; I have never
drunk, I have never satisfied my thirst, for the liquid
evaporated like blue flame, which leaves behind it nothing
but the smell of sulphur and volcanoes."

*

"Lightning from heaven! Why dost thou not rather strike the
lofty tops of those oaks and fir trees whose robust old age
has already braved a hundred winters? They, at least, have
lived; and have satiated themselves with the sweets of the
earth!"

*

"I have been struck down in my prime; for nine years I have
been a prey, fighting against death.... Miserable wretch
why has not the hand of God which smote me annihilated me
altogether?"

Then, in consequence of his pains, the soul of the unhappy Rabbe rises to the level of prayer; he, the sceptic, loses faith in unbelief and returns to God--

"O my God!" he exclaims in the solitudes of night, which
carries the plaint of his groans and tears to the ears of
his neighbours. "O my God! If Thou art just, Thou must have
a better world in store for us! O my God! Thou who knowest
all the thoughts that I bare here before Thee and the
remorse to which my scalding tears give expression; O my
God! if the groanings of an unfortunate soul are heard by
Thee, Thou must understand, O my God! the heart that Thou
didst give me, thou knowest the wishes it formed, and the
insatiable desires that still possess it. Oh! if afflictions
have broken it, if the absence of all consolation and
tenderness, if the most horrible solitude, have withered it,
O my God! help Thy wretched creature; give me faith in a
better world to come! Oh! may I find beyond the grave what
my soul, unrecognised and bewildered, has unceasingly craved
for on this earth...."

Then God took pity on him. He did not restore his health or hope, his youth, beauty and loves in this life; those three illusions vanished all too soon: but God granted him the gift of tears. And he thanked God for it. Towards the close of the year 1829, the disease made such progress that Rabbe resolved he would not live to see the opening of the year 1830. Thus, as he had addressed God, as he had addressed his soul, so he now addresses death--

DEATH

"Thou diest! Thou hast reached the limit to which all things
comes at last; the end of thy miseries, the beginning of
thy happiness. Behold, death stands face to face with thee!
Thou wilt not longer be able to wish for, nor to dread it.
Pains and weakness of body, sad heart-searchings, piercing
spiritual anguish, devouring griefs, all are over! Thou wilt
never suffer them again; thou goest in peace to brave the
insolent pride of the successful evil-doer, the despising
of fools and the abortive pity of those who dare to style
themselves _good._

"The deprivation of many evils will not be an evil in
itself; I have seen thee chafing at thy bit, shaking the
humiliating chains of an adverse fate in despair; I have
often heard the distressing complaints which issued from
the depths of thy oppressed heart.... Thou art satisfied at
last. Haste thee to empty the cup of an unfortunate life,
and perish the vase from which thou wast compelled to drink
such bitter draughts.

"But thou dost stop and tremble! Thou dost curse the
duration of thy suffering and yet dost dread and regret that
the end has come! Thou apprisest without reason or justice,
and dost lament equally both what things are and what they
cease to be. Listen, and think for one moment.

"In dying, thou dost but follow the path thy forefathers
have trodden; thousands of generations before thee have
fallen into the abyss into which thou hast to descend;
many thousands will fall into it after thee. The cruel
vicissitude of life and death cannot be altered for thee
alone. Onward then towards thy journey's end, follow where
others have gone, and be not afraid of straying from it
or losing thyself when thou hast so many other travelling
companions. Let there be no signs of weakness, no tears!
The man who weeps over his own death is the vilest and
most despicable of all beings. Submit unmurmuringly to the
inevitable; thou must die, as thou hast had to live, without
will of thy own. Give back, therefore, without anxiety, thy
life which thou receivest unconsciously. Neither birth nor
death are in thy power. Rather rejoice, for thou art at
the beginning of an immortal dawn. Those who surround thy
deathbed, all those whom thou hast ever seen, of whom thou
hast heard speak or read, the small number of those thou
hast known especially well, the vast multitude of those who
have lived formerly or been born or are to be born in ages
to come throughout the world, all these have gone or will go
the road thou art going. Look with wise eyes upon the long
caravan of successive generations which have crossed the
deserts of life, fighting as they travel across the burning
sands for one drop of the water which inflames their thirst
more than it appeases it! Thou art swallowed up in the crowd
directly thou fallest: but look how many others are falling
too at the same time with thee!

"Wouldst thou desire to live for ever? Wouldst thou only
wish thy life to last for a thousand years? Remember the
long hours of weariness in thy short career, thy frequent
fainting under the burden. Thou wast aghast at the limited
horizon of a short, uncertain and fugitive life: what
wouldst thou have said if thou hadst seen an immeasurable,
inevitably long future of weariness and sorrow stretch
before thy eyes!

"O mortals! you weep over death, as though life were
something great and precious! And yet the vilest insects
that crawl share this rare treasure of life with you! All
march towards death because all yearn towards rest and
perfect peace.

"Behold! the approach of the day that thou fain wouldst
have tried to bring nearer by thy prayers, if a jealous
fate had not deferred it; for which thou didst often sigh;
behold the moment which is to remove the capricious yoke
of fortune from the trammels of human society, from the
venomous attacks of thy fellow-creatures. Thou thinkest thou
wilt cease to exist and that thought torments thee.... Well,
but what proves to thee that thou wilt be annihilated? All
the ages have retained a hope in immortality. The belief in
a spiritual life was not merely a dogma of a few religious
creeds; it was the need and the cry of all nations that have
covered the face of the earth. The European, in the luxuries
of his capital towns, the aboriginal American-Indian under
his rude huts, both equally dream of an immortal state; all
cry to the tribunal of nature against the incompleteness of
this life.

"If thou sufferest, it is well to die; if thou art happy
or thinkest thou art so, thou wilt gain by death since thy
illusion would not have lasted long. Thou passest from a
terrestrial habitation to a pure and celestial one. Why look
back when thy foot is upon the threshold of its portals? The
eternal distributor of good and evil, our Sovereign Master,
calls thee to Himself; it is by His desire thy prison flies
open; thy heavy chains are broken and thy exile is ended;
therefore rejoice! Thou wilt soar to the throne of thy King
and Saviour!

"Ah! if thou art not shackled with the weight of some
unexpiated crime, thou wilt sing as thou diest; and, like
the Roman emperor, thou wilt rise up in thy agony at the
very thought, and thou wouldst die standing with eyes turned
towards the promised land!

"O Saint Preux and Werther! O Jacob Ortis! how far were you
from reaching such heights as that! Orators even to the
death agony, your brains alone it is which lament; man in
his death throes, this actually dying creature, it is his
heart that groans, his flesh that cries out, his spirit
which doubts. Oh! how well one feels that all that hollow
philosophising does not reassure him as to the pain of
the supreme moment, and especially against that terror of
annihilation, which brought drops of sweat to the brow of
Hamlet!

"One more cry--the last, then silence shall fall on him who
suffered much."

Moreover, Alphonse Rabbe wished there to be no doubt of how he died; hear this, his will, which he signed; there was to his mind no dishonour in digging himself a grave with his own hands between those of Cato of Utica and of Brutus--

"31 _December_ 1829

"Like Ugo Foscolo, I must write my _ultime lettere._ If
every man who had thought and felt deeply could die before
the decline of his faculties from age, and leave behind him
his _philosophical testament_, that is to say, a profession
of faith bold and sincere, written upon the planks of his
coffin, there would be more truths recognised and saved from
the regions of foolishness and the contemptible opinion of
the vulgar.

"I have other motives for executing this project. There
are in the world various interesting men who have been my
friends; I wish them to know how I ended my life. I desire
that even the indifferent, namely, the bulk of the general
public (to whom I shall be a subject of conversation for
about ten minutes--perhaps even that is an exaggerated
supposition), should know, however poor an opinion I have of
the majority of people, that I did not yield to cowardice,
but that the cup of my weariness was already filled, when
fresh wrongs came and overthrew it. I wish, in conclusion,
that my friends, those indifferent to me, and even my
enemies, should know that I have but exercised quietly and
with dignity the privilege that every man acquires from
nature--the right to dispose of himself as he likes. This is
the last thing that has interest for me this side the grave.
All my hopes lie beyond it ...if perchance there be anything
beyond."

Thus, poor Rabbe, after all thy philosophy, sifted as fine as ripe grain; after all thy philosophising; after many prayers to God and dialogues with thy soul, and many conversations with death, these supreme interlocutors have taught thee nothing and thy last thought is a doubt!

Rabbe had said he would not see the year 1830: and he died during the night of the 31 December 1829.

Now, how did he die? That gloomy mystery was kept locked in the hearts of the last friends who were present with him. But one of his friends told me that, the evening before his death, his sufferings were so unendurable, that the doctor ordered an opium plaster to be put on the sick man's chest. Next day, they hunted in vain for the opium plaster but could not find it....

On 17 September 1835, Victor Hugo addresses these lines to him

À ALPHONSE RABBE

_Mort le_ 31 _décembre_ 1829

"Hélas! que fais tu donc, ô Rabbe, ô mon ami,
Sévère historien dans la tombe endormi?

Je l'ai pensé souvent dans les heures funèbres,
Seul, près de mon flambeau qui rayait les ténèbres,
O noble ami! pareil aux hommes d'autrefois,
Il manque parmi nous ta voix; ta forte voix,
Pleine de l'équité qui gonflait ta poitrine.

Il nous manque ta main, qui grave et qui burine,
Dans ce siècle où par l'or les sages sont distraits,
Où l'idée est servante auprès des intérêts;
Temps de fruits avortés et de tiges rompues,
D'instincts dénaturés, de raisons corrompues,
Où, dans l'esprit humain tout étant dispersé,
Le présent au hasard flotte sur le passé!

Si, parmi nous, ta tête était debout encore,
Cette cime où vibrait l'éloquence sonore,
Au milieu de nos flots tu serais calme et grand;
Tu serais comme un pont posé sur le courant.
Tu serais pour chacun la boix haute et sensée
Qui fait que, brouillard s'en va de la pensée,
Et que la vérité, qu'en vain nous repoussions,
Sort de l'amas confus des sombres visions!

Tu dirais aux partis qu'ils font trop be poussière
Autour de la raison pour qu'on la voie entière;
Au peuple, que la loi du travail est sur tous,
Et qu'il est assez fort pour n'être pas jaloux;
Au pouvoir, que jamais le pouvoir ne se venge,
Et que, pour le penseur, c'est un spectacle étrange.
Et triste, quand la loi, figure au bras d'airain,
Déesse qui ne doit avoir qu'un front serein,
Sort, à de certains jours, de l'urne consulaire,
L'œil hagard, écumante et folle de colère!

Et ces jeunes esprits, à qui tu souriais,
Et que leur âge livre aux rêves inquiets,
Tu leur dirais: Amis nés pour des temps prospères,
Oh! n'allez pas errer comme ont erré vos pères!
Laissez murir vos fronts! gardez-vous, jeunes gens,
Des systèmes dorés aux plumages changeants,
Qui, dans les carrefours, s'en vont faire la roue!
Et de ce qu'en vos cœurs l'Amérique secoue,
Peuple à peine essayé, nation de hasard,
Sans tige, sans passé, sans histoire et sans art!
Et de cette sagesse impie, envenimée,
Du cerveau de Voltaire éclose tout armée,
Fille de l'ignorance et de l'orgueil, posant
Les lois des anciens jours sur les mœurs d'à présent;
Qui refait un chaos partout où fut un monde;
Qui rudement enfoncé,--ô démence profonde!
Le casque étroit de Sparte au front du vieux Paris;
Qui, dans les temps passés, mal lus et mal compris,
Viole effrontément tout sage, pour lui faire
Un monstre qui serait la terreur de son père!
Si bien que les héros antiques tout tremblants
S'en sont voilé la face, et qu'après deux mille ans,
Par ses embrassements réveillé sous la pierre,
Lycurgue, qu'elle épouse, enfante Robespierre!"

Tu nous dirais à tous: 'Ne vous endormez pas!
Veillez et soyez prêts! Car déjà, pas à pas,
La main de l'oiseleur dans l'ombre s'est glissée
Partout où chante un nid couvé par la pensée!
Car les plus nobles fronts sont vaincus ou sont las!
Car la Pologne, aux fers, ne peut plus même, hêlas!
Mordre le pied tartare appuyé sur sa gorge!
Car on voit, chaque jour, s'allonger dans la forge
La chaîne que les rois, craignant la liberté,
Font pour cette géante, endormie à côté!
Ne vous endormez pas! travaillez sans relâche!
Car les grands ont leur œuvre et les petits leur tâche;
Chacun a son ouvrage à faire, chacun met
Sa pierre à l'édifice encor loin du sommet--
Qui croit avoir fini, pour un roi qu'on dépose,
Se trompe: un roi qui tombe est toujours peu de chose;
Il est plus difficile et c'est un plus grand poids
De relever les mœurs que d'abattre les rois.
Rien chez vous n'est complet: la ruine ou l'ébauche!
L'épi n'est pas formé que votre main le fauche!
Vous êtes encombrés de plans toujours rêvés
Et jamais accomplis ... Hommes, vous ne savez,
Tant vous connaissez peu ce qui convient aux âmes,
Que faire des enfants, ni que faire des femmes!
Où donc en êtes-vous? Vous vous applaudissez
Pour quelques blocs de lois au hasard entassés!
Ah! l'heure du repos pour aucun n'est venue;
Travaillez! vous cherchez une chose inconnue;
Vous n'avez pas de foi, vous n'avez pas d'amour;
Rien chez vous n'est encore éclairé du vrai jour!
Crépuscule et brouillards que vos plus clairs systèmes
Dans vos lois, dans vos mœurs et dans vos esprits
mêmes,
Partout l'aube blanchâtre ou le couchant vermeil!
Nulle part le midi! nulle part le soleil!'

Tu parlerais ainsi dans des livres austères,
Comme parlaient jadis les anciens solitaires,
Comme parlent tous ceux devant qui l'on se tait,
Et l'on t'écouterait comme on les écoutait;
Et l'on viendrait vers toi, dans ce siècle plein d'ombre,
Où, chacun se heurtant aux obstacles sans nombre
Que, faute de lumière, on tâte avec la main,
Le conseil manque à l'âme, et le guide au chemin!

Hélas! à chaque instant, des souffles de tempêtes
Amassent plus de brume et d'ombre sur nos têtes;
De moment en moment l'avenir s'assombrit.
Dans le calme du cœur, dans la paix de l'esprit,
Je l'adressais ces vers, où mon âme sereine
N'a laissé sur ta pierre écumer nulle haine,
À toi qui dors couché dans le tombeau profond,
À toi qui ne sais plus ce que les hommes font!
Je l'adressais ces vers, pleins de tristes présages;
Car c'est bien follement que nous nous croyons sages.
Le combat furieux recommence à gronder
Entre le droit de croître et le droit d'émonder;
La bataille où les lois attaquent les idées
Se mêle de nouveau sur des mers mal sondées;
Chacun se sent troublé comme l'eau sous le vent ...
Et moi-même, à cette heure, à mon foyer rêvant,
Voilà, depuis cinq ans qu'on oubliait Procuste,
Que j'entends aboyer, au seuil du drame auguste,
La censure à l'haleine immonde, aux ongles noirs,
Cette chienne au front has qui suit tous les pouvoirs,
Vile et mâchant toujours dans sa gueule souillée,
O muse! quelque pan de ta robe étoilée!
Hélas! que fais-tu donc, ô Rabbe, ô mon ami!
Sévère historien dans la tombe endormi?"

If anything of poor Rabbe still survives, he will surely tremble with joy in his tomb at this tribute. Indeed, few kings have had such an epitaph!