The Letter

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Title:     The Letter
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

If you ask me why it is now three weeks since I received your letter and why it is only today that I answer it, I must tell you the truth lest further things I may have to tell you should not be worthy of your dignity or of mine. It was because at first I dared not, then later I reasoned with myself, and so bred delay, and at last took refuge in more delay. I will offer no excuse: I will not tell you that I suffered illness, or that some accident of war had taken me away from this old house, or that I have but just returned from a journey to my hill and my view over the Plain and the great River.

Your messenger I have kept, and I have entertained him well. I looked at him a little narrowly at his first coming, thinking perhaps he might be a gentleman of yours, but I soon found that he was not such, and that he bore no disguise, but was a plain rider of your household. I put him in good quarters by the Hunting Stables. He has had nothing to do but to await my resolution, which is now at last taken, and which you receive in this.

But how shall I begin, or how express to you what not distance but a slow and bitter conclusion of the mind has done?

I shall not return to Meudon. I shall not see the woods, the summer woods turning to autumn, nor follow the hunt, nor take pleasure again in what is still the best of Europe at Versailles. And now that I have said it, you must read it so; for I am unalterably determined. Believe me, it is something much more deep than courtesy which compels me to give you my reasons for this final and irrevocable doom.

We were children together. Though we leant so lightly in our conversations of this spring upon all we knew in common, I know your age and all your strong early experience--and you know mine. Your mother will recall that day's riding when I came back from my first leave and you were home, not, I think, for good, from the convent. A fixed domestic habit blinded her, so that she could then still see in us no more than two children; yet I was proud of my sword, and had it on, and you that day were proud of a beauty which could no longer be hidden even from yourself; I would then have sacrificed, and would now, all I had or was or had or am to have made that beauty immortal.

I say, you remember that day's riding, and how after it the world was changed for you and me, and how that same evening the elders saw that it was changed.

You will remember that for two years we were not allowed to meet again. When the two years were passed we met indeed by a mere accident of that rich and tedious life wherein we were both now engaged. I was returned from leave before Tournay; you had heard, I think, a false report that I had been wounded in the dreadful business at Fontenoy (which to remember even now horrifies me a little). I had heard and knew which of the great names you now bore by marriage. The next day it was your husband who rode with me to Marly. I liked him well enough. I have grown to like him better. He is an honest man, though I confess his philosophers weary me. When I say "an honest man" I am giving the highest praise I know.

My dear, that was sixteen years ago.

You may not even now understand, so engrossing is the toilsome and excited ritual of that rich world at Versailles, how blest you are: your children are growing round you: your daughters are beginning to reveal your own beauty, and your sons will show in these next years immediately before us that temper which in you was a spirit and a height of being, and in them, men, will show as plain courage. During that long space of years your house has remained well ordered (it was your husband's doing). His great fortune and yours have jointly increased: if I may tell you so, it is a pleasure to all who understand fitness to know that this is so, and that your lineage and his will hold so great a place in the State.

As you review those sixteen years you may, if you will--I trust you will not--recall those occasions when I saw the woods of Meudon and mixed by chance with your world, and when we renewed the rides which had ended our childhood. As for me I have not to recall those things. They are, alas, myself, and beyond them there is nothing that I can call a memory or a being at all. Nevertheless, as I have told you, I shall not come to Meudon: I shall not hear again the delightful voices of those many friends (now in mid-life as am I) who are my equals at Versailles. I shall not see your face.

I did not take service with the Empire from any pique or folly, but from a necessity for adventure and for the refounding of my house. It might have chanced that I should marry: the land demanded an heir. My impoverishment weighed upon me like an ill deed, for all this belt of land is dependent upon the old house, which I can with such difficulty retain and from which I write to-day. I spent all those years in the service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life and all that will perish with me when I die.

But now, to tell you the very core of my decision, it is this: The years that pass carry with them an increasing weight at once sombre and majestic. There are things belonging to youth which habit continues strangely longer than the season to which they properly belong: if, when we discover them to be too prolonged as cling to their survival, why, then, we eat dust. So long as we possess the illusion and so long as the dearest things of youth maintain unchanged, in one chamber of our life at least, our twentieth year, so long all is well. But there is a cold river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness and age. In the passage of that stream we change: and you and I have passed it. There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than in any other human thing. One always wakes from it at last. One sees what it is. The soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which a continuance of such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has a prevision of the evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is reached by each of us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of the world.

Therefore I must not return.

Foolishly and without thinking of real things, acting as though indeed that life of dream and of illusion were still possible to me, I yesterday cut with great care a rose, one from the many that have now grown almost wild upon the great wall overlooking the Danube. Then ... I could not but smile to myself when I remembered how by the time that rose should have reached you every petal would be wasted and fallen in the long week's ride. There is a fixed term of life for roses also as for men. I do not cite this to you by way of parable. I have no heart for tricks of the pen to-night; but the two images came together, and you will understand. If I do not return, it is for the same reason that I could not send the rose.

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: The Letter

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