War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [545]
The first time the young foreign person allowed himself to reproach her, she proudly raised her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said firmly:
“Voilà l’égoisme et la cruauté des hommes! Je ne m’attendais pas à autre chose. La femme se sacrifie pour vous, elle souffre, et voilà sa récompense. Quel droit avez vous, Monseigneur, de me demander compte de mes amitiés, de mes affections? C’est un homme qui a été plus qu’un père pour moi.”*513
The person wanted to say something. Hélène interrupted him.
“Eh bien, oui,” she said, “peut-être qu’il a pour moi d’autres sentiments que ceux d’un père, mais ce n’est pas une raison pour que je lui ferme ma porte. Je ne suis pas un homme pour être ingrate. Sachez, Monseigneur, pour tout ce qui a rapport à mes sentiments intimes, je ne rends compte qu’à Dieu et à ma conscience,”†514 she concluded, touching her high, beautiful breasts with her hand and glancing up at the sky.
“Mais écoutez-moi, au nom de Dieu.”
“Epousez-moi, et je serai votre esclave.”
“Mais c’est impossible.”
“Vous ne daignez pas descendre jusqu’à moi, vous…”‡515 said Hélène, bursting into tears.
The person began to comfort her; Hélène said through her tears (as if forgetting herself) that nothing could prevent her from marrying, that there were examples (there were still few examples then, but she named Napoleon and other highly placed persons), that she had never been a wife to her husband, that she had been sacrificed.
“But laws, religion…” said the person, already yielding.
“Laws, religion…Why would they have been invented, if they couldn’t do that!” said Hélène.
The important person was astonished that such a simple argument could have failed to occur to him, and turned for advice to the holy brothers of the Society of Jesus,6 with whom he was in close relations.
Several days later, at one of the enchanting fêtes given by Hélène at her summer house on Kamenny Island, the enchanting M. de Jobert was introduced to her, a man no longer young, with snow-white hair and shining black eyes, un Jésuite à robe courte,§516 who had a long conversation with Hélène, in the light of the garden illuminations and to the sounds of music, about the love of God, of Christ, of the heart of the Mother of God, and about the comforts provided in this life and the next by the one true Catholic religion. Hélène was moved, and several times both she and M. de Jobert had tears in their eyes and a tremor in their voices. A dance to which a partner came to invite Hélène disrupted her conversation with her future directeur de conscience; but the next day M. Jobert came alone in the evening to see Hélène, and after that began to frequent her.
One day he took the countess to the Catholic church, where she knelt before the altar she had been brought to. The enchanting, not-too-young Frenchman placed his hands on her head and, as she herself recounted later, she felt something like a breath of fresh wind descend into her soul. It was explained to her that this was la grâce.
Then an abbé à robe longue*517 was brought to her, and he confessed her and gave her absolution of her sins. The next day a box with communion in it was brought to her and left for home use. A few days later Hélène, to her satisfaction, learned that she had now joined the true Catholic church and that one of those days the pope himself would learn of her and send her some document.
All that was happening around her and to her at this time, all this attention paid to her by so many intelligent people and expressed in such pleasant, refined