L'Orme

<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN> <h3>DE L'ORME.</h3> <h5>BY</h5> <h4>G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.</h4> <br/> <h3>DE L'ORME.</h3> <br/> <h4>CHAPTER I.</h4> <br/> <p>I was born in the heart of Bearn, in the year 1619; and if the scenery amongst which we first open our eyes, and from which we receive our earliest impressions, could communicate its own peculiar character to our minds, I should certainly have possessed a thousand great and noble qualities, that might have taught me to play a very different part from that which I have done, in the great tragic farce of human life. Nevertheless, in contemplating the strange contrasts of scenery, the gay, the sparkling, the grand, the gloomy, the sublime, wherein my infant years were passed, I have often thought I saw a sort of picture of my own fate, with its abrupt and rapid changes; and even in some degree of my own character, or rather of my own mood, varying continually through all the different shades of disposition, from the lightest mirth to the most profound gloom, from the idlest heedlessness to the most anxious thought.</p> <p>However, it is not my own peculiar character that I sit down to depict--that will be sufficiently displayed in the detail of my adventures: but it is rather those strange and singular events which, contrary to all probability, mingled me with great men, and with great actions, and which, continually counteracting my own will, impelled me ever on the very opposite course from that which I straggled to pursue.</p> <p>For many reasons, it is necessary to commence this narrative with those early years, wherein the mind of man receives its first bias, when the seeds of all future actions are sown in the heart, and when causes, in themselves so trifling as almost to be imperceptible, chain us to good or evil, to fortune or misfortune, for ever. The character of man is like a piece of potter's clay, which, when fresh and new, is easily fashioned according to the will of those into whose hands it falls; but its form once given, and hardened, either by the slow drying of time, or by its passage through the ardent furnace of the world, men may break it to atoms, but never bend it again to another mould.</p> <p>Our parents, our teachers, our companions, all serve to modify our dispositions. The very proximity of their faults, their failings, or their virtues, leaves, as it were, an impress on the flexible mind of infancy, which the steadiest reason can hardly do more than modify, and years themselves can never erase. To the events of those early years I owe many of my errors in life; and my faults and their consequences are not without their moral: for in my history, as in that of every other man, it will be found that punishment of some kind never failed to tread fast upon the heels of each wrong action; and in one instance, a few hours of indiscretion mingled a dark and fearful current with the course of many an after year.</p> <p>To begin, then, with the beginning:--I was, as I have said, born in the heart of the little mountainous principality of Bearn, which, stretching along the northern side of the Pyrenees, contains within itself some of the most fertile and some of the most picturesque, some of the sweetest and some of the grandest scenes that any part of Europe can boast. The chain of my native mountains, interposing between France and Spain, forms a gigantic wall whereby the unerring hand of nature has marked the limits of either land; and although this immense bulwark is, in itself, scarcely broken by any but very narrow and difficult passes, yet the mountainous ridges which it sends off, like enormous buttresses, into the plain country on each side, are intersected by a number of wide and beautiful valleys, rich with all the gifts of summer, and glowing with all the loveliness of bright fertility.</p> <p>One of the most striking, though perhaps not one of the most extensive, of these valleys, is that which, running from east to west, lies in a direct line between Bagneres de Bigorre and the little town and castle of Lourdes.<SPAN name="div4Ref_01" href="#div4_01">^[1]</SPAN> Never have I seen, and certainly never shall I now see, any other valley so sweet, so fair, so tranquil;--never, one so bright in itself, or so surrounded by objects of grandeur and magnificence. I need not say after this, that it was my native place.</p> <p>The dwelling of my father, Roger De l'Orme, Count de Bigorre, was perched up high upon the hill-side, about two miles from Lourdes, and looked far over all the splendid scene below. The wide valley, with its rich carpet of verdure, the river dashing in liquid diamonds amidst the rocks and over the precipices; the long far windings of the deep purple mountains, filling the mind with vague, but grand imaginings; the dark majestic shadows of the pine forest that every here and there were cast like a black mantle round the enormous limbs of each giant hill; the long wavy perspective, of the passes towards Cauteretz, and the Pont d'Espagne, with the icy Vigne Malle raising up his frozen head, as if to dare the full power of the summer sun beyond,--all was spread out to the eye, offering in one grand view a thousand various sorts of loveliness.</p> <p>I must be pardoned for dilating upon those sweet scenes of my early childhood, whose very memory bestows a calm and placid joy, which I have never found in any other spot, or in any other feeling; neither in the gaiety and splendour of a court, the gratification of passion, the hurry and energy of political intrigue, the excitement and triumph of the battle field, the struggle of conflicting hosts, or the maddening thrill of victory.--But for a moment, let me indulge, and then I quit such memories for things and circumstances whose interest is more easily communicable to the minds of others.</p> <p>The château in which my eyes first opened to the light was little inferior in size to the castle of Lourdes, and infinitely too large for the small establishment of servants and retainers which my father's reduced finances enabled him to maintain. Our diminished household looked, within its enormous walls, like the shrunken form of some careful old miser, insinuated into the wide and hanging garments of his youth; and yet my excellent parent fondly insisted upon as much pomp and ceremony as his own father had kept up with a hundred and fifty retainers waiting in his hall. Still the trumpet sounded at the hour of dinner, though the weak lungs of the broken-winded old <i>maître d'hôtel</i> produced but a cacophonous sound from the hollow brass: still all the servants, who amounted to five, including the gardener, the shepherd, and the cook, were drawn up at the foot of the staircase, in unstarched ruffs and tarnished liveries of green and gold, while my father, with slow and solemn pace, handed down to dinner Madame la Comtesse; still would he talk of his vassals, and his seigneurial rights, though his domain scarce covered five hundred acres of wood and mountain, and vassals, God knows, he had but few. However, the banners still hung in the hall; and it was impossible to gaze upon the walls, the pinnacles, the towers, and the battlements of the old castle, without attaching the idea of power and influence to the lord of such a hold; so that it was not extraordinary he himself should, in some particulars forget the decay of his house, and fancy himself as great as his ancestors.</p> <p>A thousand excellent qualities of the heart covered any little foibles in my father's character. He was liberal to a fault; kind, with that minute and discriminating benevolence which weighs every word ere it be spoken, lest it should hurt the feelings of another; brave, to that degree that scarcely believes in fear, yet at the same time so humane, that his sympathy with others often proved the torture of his own heart; but----</p> <p>Oh! that in this world there should still be a <i>but</i>, to qualify everything that is good and excellent!--but, still he had one fault that served greatly to counteract all the high qualities which he possessed. He was invincibly lazy in mind. He could endure nothing that gave him trouble; and, though the natural quickness of his disposition would lead him to purpose a thousand great undertakings, yet long ere the time came for executing them, various little obstacles and impediments had gradually worn down his resolution; or else the trouble of thinking about one thing for long was too much for him, and the enterprise dropped by its own weight. Had fortune brought him great opportunities, no one would have seized them more willingly, or used them to better or to nobler purposes; but fortune was to seek--and he did nothing.</p> <p>The wars of the League, in which his father had taken a considerable part, had gradually lopped away branch after branch of our estates, and even hewn deeply into the trunk; and my father was not a man, either by active enterprise or by court intrigue, to mend the failing fortunes of his family. On the contrary, after having served in two campaigns, and distinguished himself in several battles, out of pure weariness, he retired to our château of De l'Orme, where, being once fixed in quiet, he passed the rest of his days, never having courage to undertake a longer journey than to Pau or to Tarbes; and forming in his solitude a multitude of fine and glorious schemes, which fell to nothing almost in the same moment that they were erected: as we may see a child build up, with a pack of cards, many a high and ingenious structure, which the least breath of air will instantly reduce to the same flat nonentities from which they were reared at the first.</p> <p>My mother's character is soon told. It was all excellence; or if there was, indeed, in its composition, one drop of that evil from which human nature is probably never entirely free, it consisted in a touch of family pride--and yet, while I write it, my heart reproaches me, and says that it was not so. However, the reader shall judge by the sequel; but if she had this fault, it was her only one, and all the rest was virtue and gentleness. Restricted as were her means of charity, still every one that came within the sphere of her influence experienced her kindness, or partook of her bounty. Nor was her charity alone the charity that gives; it was the charity that feels, that excuses, that forgives.</p> <p>A willing aid in all that was amiable and benevolent was to be found in good Father Francis of Allurdi, the chaplain of the château. In his young days they said he had been a soldier; and on some slight, received from a world for which he was too good, he threw away the corslet and took the gown, not with the feeling of a misanthrope, but of a philanthropist. For many years he remained as cure at the little village of Allurdi, in the Val d'Ossau; but his sight and his strength both failing him, and the cure being an arduous one, he resigned it to a younger man, (who, he thought, might better perform the duties of the station,) and brought as gentle a heart and as pure a spirit as ever rested in a mortal frame, to dwell with the two others I have described in the Château de l'Orme.</p> <p>It may be asked, if he too had his foible? Believe me, dear reader, whoever thou art, that every one on this earth has some; nor was he without one: and, strange as it may appear, his was superstition--I say, strange as it may appear, for he was a man of a strong and vigorous mind, calm, reflective, rational, without any of that hurried and perturbed indistinctness of judgment which suffers imagination to usurp the place of reason. But still he was superstitious to a great degree, affording a striking instance of that union of opposite qualities, which every one who takes the trouble of examining his own bosom will find more or less exemplified in himself. His superstition, however, grew in a mild and benevolent soil, and was, indeed, but as one of those tender climbing plants which hang upon the ruined tower or the shattered oak, and clothe them with a verdure not their own: thus he fondly adhered to the imaginative tenets of ancient days fast falling into decay. He peopled the air with spirits, and in his fancy gave them visible shapes, and in some degree even corporeal qualities. However, on an ardent and youthful mind like mine, such picturesque superstitions were most likely to have effect; and so far, indeed, did they influence me, that though reason in after-life exerted her power to sweep them all away, imagination often rebelled, and clung fondly to the delusion still.</p> <p>Such as I have described them were the denizens of the Château de l'Orme at the time of my birth, which was unmarked by any other peculiarity than that of my mother having been married, and yet childless, for more than eight years. The joy which the unexpected birth of an heir produced, may easily be imagined, though little indeed was the inheritance which I came to claim. All with one consent gave themselves up to hope and to gladness; and more substantial signs of rejoicing were displayed in the hall than the château had known for many a day.</p> <p>My father declared that I should infallibly retrieve the fortunes of my house. Father Francis, with tears in his eyes, exclaimed that it was evidently a blessing from Heaven; and even my mother discovered that, though futurity was still misty and indistinct, there was now a landmark to guide on hope across the wide ocean of the years to come.</p> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />