CHAPTER X

BIANCA, OR THE YOUNG SPANISH MAIDEN, AND LE JOURNAL DE MADEMOISELLE D’ARVERS

AT the time of Toru’s death, her title to fame rested on A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields, the only book of hers which had as yet been published. This received, however, so warm a reception that her father examined her papers with a view to publishing whatever might prove to be of literary interest among them. A selection of English translations of the Sonnets of the Comte de Gramont, and an unfinished romance, also in English, entitled Bianca, or The Young Spanish Maiden, formed part of the harvest thus reaped. The most remarkable discovery, however, was that of a complete French novel, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers.

Bianca is a romance consisting of eight chapters, which was eventually published, not in the form of a book, but in the columns of the Bengal Magazine (January–April, 1878), with a short foot-note (see p. 319) appended to it by her father. There is a tender and pathetic interest attaching to this tale. It is full of promise and yet incomplete, and so in harmony with the life-story of its authoress. One wonders too if the portrait given of Bianca may not reflect to some extent Toru’s own feelings.

Bianca Garcia is the younger and only surviving daughter of a Spanish gentleman, who has settled in an English village. Her elder sister, Inez, has just died, and the narrative opens with an account of the burial on a dreary day in February.

Bianca and her father are the sole mourners. On her return home she cannot help contrasting her sheltered warm surroundings with the cold damp ground in which her sister’s dead form is lying, and out of very sympathy goes to sit in the garden, oblivious of the weather, until Martha, the old Scotch servant, finds her and calls her in; that evening the attention which she pays to her father helps her to forget for a while the intensity of her own grief. Her place in the household had been one of special esteem rather than of special affection. Her father had been wont to consult her, but had lavished the treasure of his love on Inez. Here is the description which the authoress has given of her heroine:—

‘She was not beautiful; of the middle height; her slight figure was very graceful; her face was not quite oval; her forehead was low; her lips were full, sensitive and mobile; her colour was dark; have you ever seen an Italian peasant girl? When she blushed or was excited, the colour mounted warm and deep to her pale olive cheek; she was beautiful then; her dark brown eyes—“just like Keeper’s” (the dog’s), her father would say, smiling,—were large and full; in fact this pair of eyes and her long black curls were her only points of beauty.’

Next morning her father was taken ill, and a week of patient nursing followed for her.

More than a year passes, and she is sought in marriage by Mr. Ingram, her dead sister’s fiancé, who nevertheless has not ceased to love Inez. She seeks to comfort him while telling him plainly that she can give him nothing more than sisterly affection. They meet a common acquaintance, Margaret Moore, the daughter of the widowed Lady Moore, who lives in the chief house of the village. Margaret urges Bianca to visit Moore Hall, and so next day she goes. Mr. Garcia had been reluctant to consent to this visit until he heard that the grown-up son of the house, young Lord Moore, would be away in London that day. He had no wish that his daughter should be accused of ‘husband-hunting’. However, Bianca was already deeply in love with this young man.

We are introduced to the Moore household—the aristocratic and frigid mother; the gracious daughter; the ‘Benjamin’ of the family, little Willie; and, at length, to Lord Moore himself in all the force and vigour of his manhood. Bianca was a great favourite of Willie’s, who was charmed to have her play with him. The elder son returns home unexpectedly, and his mother is vexed because he finds Bianca there. He escorts her to her home later on, and returning comes to the determination to seek her as his wife. Just at that juncture his mother enters his room with a suggestion of another lady as his bride, and when she finds that he has no inclination whatever in that quarter, she begins to speak disparagingly of Bianca. But without avail. Lord Moore vows that he can marry no one else but her.

Matters soon reach a crisis. He and Willie call at her home, and he stays on chatting with her in the garden after his little brother has left. When he takes his departure, he is so carried away by his feelings that he kisses her. Bianca feels it her duty to tell her father, who is angry to hear of the incident, and while they are talking a letter is brought in, containing Lord Moore’s definite offer of marriage. Mr. Garcia is unwilling to grant his consent and, to please her father, Bianca agrees to decline the proposal; and when her lover arrives at the house that same evening to learn his fate, she goes to her room. The young man’s grief is so intense and genuine that the father relents and sends for Bianca. The strain of having had to relinquish her lover, as she thinks, has been too great for her, and she is seized with illness and delirium. Lord Moore hastily returns home to ride for the doctor, and his perturbation is noticed by his family. Another character in the story now begins to come into prominence, viz. Mr. Owen, a cousin of the Moores and also distantly related through his wife to the Garcias. He is a fascinating but unscrupulous man whose real character is apparently known only to the Garcias. Lord Moore’s distress over his beloved’s illness meets with scant sympathy from his mother. However, after some weeks of utter prostration Bianca recovers, and she and Lord Moore plight their troth. Mr. Owen supports Lady Moore in her disapproval of the match, and himself meets with so cold a reception from Bianca, later on, at a chance interview at Moore House, that her lover is surprised. The next chapter tells of the parting between the lovers on the eve of Lord Moore’s departure for the Crimean War, and here the story breaks off.

BIANCA

This romance is but a fragment—and apparently an unrevised fragment—and therefore it cannot be appraised as though it were a completed work. Had it been finished, inconsistencies which now exist would have been noted and corrected (e. g., Lord Moore would not be called ‘Colin’ in the earlier chapters and ‘Henry’ in the later ones, nor would the rainy weather of the opening scene so quickly turn to snow, nor would Lady Moore remain apparently in ignorance of the actual engagement of her son). Some of the incidents of the story also are rather too abrupt to be consistent with reality (e.g., Bianca’s sudden delirium and her quick recovery without such a period of convalescence as follows upon prolonged weakness are hardly in accord with ordinary experience). Mrs. Cranly’s departure from the home is overlooked. The story, as it is, reminds one of a piece of unfinished embroidery with loose threads still left hanging which need to be worked in. The attempt to reproduce the lisping language of a child is not always successful, nor is it likely that a girl betrothed to a nobleman would, after the establishment of such a relationship of intimacy, continue to address him as ‘My Lord’. These are, however, minor and remediable blemishes. Though the plot is not a very complex one, yet the story attracts and retains the reader’s interest. The flow of language, the facility of expression, the frequent touches of realism, and the acquaintance with English life are remarkable when one remembers that the authoress was writing in a language and of a land that were alike foreign to her. The story reflects her talents, attainments, and character, her poetic imagination and powers of description, her intimate acquaintance with English and French literature, and, above all, her deeply religious nature. Had the tale been carried to its proper conclusion and its defects remedied, it would have been healthier in tone and better written than much of the popular literature of the present day.[^2]

Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers

Originally this was to have been produced in collaboration—Toru’s sister, Aru, supplying the illustrations; but it is doubtful if the latter saw any portion of the work completed before she died, and Toru was left to draw solely from her own vivid imagination.

A manuscript copy of the novel was sent by Mr. Dutt to Mlle Clarisse Bader, the French lady with whom Toru had corresponded, and she has recorded its receipt as follows:

‘It was not without deep emotion that I received the copy of the MS. entirely written out by her old father. “My hand is not steady, and I have to copy slowly,” he wrote, but nothing in the beautiful and energetic writing betrays the trembling hand. The father has gathered strength to accomplish this bitter-sweet task from the illusion which it creates. “While I am writing,” he stated, “I feel as though I were speaking with her.”’

The book was dedicated to His Excellency Lord Lytton, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, with ‘témoignage de profonde reconnaissance’, and the title-page bears the following inscription:

O dying voice of human praise! The crude ambitions of my youth! I long to pour immortal lays, Great paeans of perennial truth! A larger wish! a loftier aim!… And what are laurel leaves and fame?

It was published by a Paris firm, Didier, in 1879, among the ‘Librairie Académique’, with a preface by Mademoiselle Bader, containing some account of the authoress’s life and works. It had been begun, apparently, during the visit to Europe, but nothing is known as to the time of its completion.

Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers is an attempt to reproduce scenes from the life of French society in the sixties of last century, and is peculiarly interesting because of the astonishing revelation it gives of the mind and accomplishments of its writer. James Darmesteter, the renowned French scholar, describes it as the work of ‘a young Hindu girl of nineteen, who had learnt French for a very few years, and had resided in France for a few months only. It is an extraordinary feat, without precedent. The Vathek of Beckford can alone be compared to it, though such comparison is hardly fair, because, to a gentleman of the eighteenth century, the French language was, so to speak, a second “mother-tongue”.’

Darmesteter is not exaggerating when he refers to this book as being ‘an extraordinary feat’. In a criticism of it which appeared in a Dutch paper in 1879 we read that ‘nothing in the book betrays the fact that the writer is a “foreigner”’. The ordinary foreigner who possesses but an average knowledge of the French tongue is surprised, as he peruses it, to find how copious is the vocabulary and how facile and idiomatic the mode of expression. What few inaccuracies or infelicities occur are such as only a Frenchman or one who had been long a resident in France would be likely to note. We question if, in the whole of the history of literature, another such example can be found of a foreign language being so completely mastered in so short a time that the production of an entire book in that tongue was possible, and that too in the finished style which this book displays. Toru Dutt was certainly a linguistic prodigy. At the age of nineteen she had mastered three languages and she wrote fluently in two. Nor is it only in connexion with the easy and graceful way in which she wrote this book that her genius is manifested. She has imparted to it a French ‘atmosphere’, not only in matters social but also in matters religious. She has written it from the standpoint of a devout Roman Catholic. It is true that Mlle Bader, who saw the book through the press, feels that there are evidences in it of Oriental customs and modes of thought, which stamp it, so to speak, with the hall-mark of the authoress’s own personality. Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, in spite of the thoroughly French form and inspiration, ‘reminds us of exotic flowers transplanted in our country, which, though they may be acclimatized, keep the very scent of their native soil’. We feel, however, that only a very acute critic would detect such traces, and that the general public would agree rather with the enthusiastic tribute of the poetess, Madame de Saffray: ‘This one surpasses all the prodigies. She is a Frenchwoman in this book, and a Frenchwoman like ourselves: she thinks, she writes, like one of us.’

A brief outline of the story will be helpful for the better estimate of the merits of the work. The book purports to consist of extracts from the diary of a French maiden, which range over a period of about a year and a half, a period beginning with her leaving the convent school, where she had been educated, and ending with her premature death within the first year of her married life. The account of her illness and death is inserted as an epilogue to the diary. The beginning of the journal—to quote again from Mlle Bader—is ‘the pretty prattle of a young girl who has known no sorrow and whose heart is filled with pure and simple joys’. Marguerite d’Arvers is the only child of her parents—a retired general and his wife who are living in Brittany, and she returns home in time to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. At her birthday party she meets friends whom she had known in her childhood’s days: Madame Goserelle, with her daughter, and the widowed Countess of Plonarven, with her two sons, Dunois and Gaston. Three days later a young officer, Louis Lefèvre, comes on a visit to her home. He is the orphan son of old friends of Marguerite’s parents. A glimpse is given of the way in which Marguerite fills up her days: in walks with her father, in tending her domestic pets, and in visiting the poor and aged in the neighbouring village. She obtains a place for one of the village girls, Jeannette, as lady’s maid to the Countess, and, later on, goes herself to visit at the château, where the Countess gives her a warm welcome. She there meets her hostess’s brother, Colonel Desclée. Another trip which she takes is to Paris, to stay with her great-aunt Geneviève. Marguerite’s parents would fain see her united to Louis, but when he solicits her, she refuses him. She has fallen in love with Count Dunois, and the Countess one day at the château discovers the fact and rejoices. Dunois and Gaston, however, are both secretly enamoured of Jeannette, and in a fit of madness the Count kills his brother. Only on recovering sanity does he become aware of his crime and also of Marguerite’s love, and then he has to confess his infatuation for his mother’s maid. He is condemned to penal servitude, but in another fit of insanity takes his own life, and the Countess loses her reason in consequence. Marguerite has a very severe illness, but, when convalescent, she feels that it is her duty to marry Louis and so please her parents. Both at the wedding ceremony and subsequently she has a premonition of her early death. However, she is resigned, feeling that God knows best what is best for man’s good. The sisterly affection she had at the outset for Louis develops into a deep love, and the end of the story is taken up with an account of her happy days of married life at Nice, her return home and death there, leaving a little son.

Such is an epitome of the story. Simple though it is, it nevertheless elicits and sustains the reader’s interest in a way that many a novel with a more elaborate plot and a more crowded array of characters fails to do. It is told very skilfully. When first the two possible claimants for Marguerite’s hand appear on the scene, we cannot tell which will be the favoured one, and, later on, when Louis has been refused, and there appears no obstacle in the way of Marguerite’s becoming the future Countess, stray hints are thrown out that all is not right with Dunois, yet at the same time the exact nature of the trouble is so carefully concealed that the tragic dénouement is one which startles and surprises the reader. Perhaps in no part of the book is the writer’s genius more evident than in the description of the scene after the murder. The awfulness of the tragedy is brought home fully, but without gruesomeness. There are no ghastly details, no sordid or vulgar incidents, such as too often characterize accounts of such events. This episode in the story is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the whole book. The novel, though written in French, is very different from the ordinary ‘French novel’, as that expression is frequently used in modern parlance. Literature of this latter kind, with its predilection for low intrigue, would have devoted much space to details of Dunois’s trial and to the love-affair which occasioned the crime. There is nothing of this nature in Toru’s work. A high-toned spirit pervades the whole. The particulars of the trial are not mentioned—simply the verdict. The love displayed by the brothers for the servant-maid may have been ill-placed, but there is no suggestion that it was anything but honourable.

Though the simple nature of the narrative does not on the whole afford much opportunity for forcible writing, yet we meet with passages that exhibit a highly developed imaginative faculty and poetic thought. Just two specimens must suffice. The madman’s dream of his brother lying dead, with eyes staring at him, while from the motionless lips there issued the hoarse cry of ‘Caïn’, is a brilliant conception. The following, too, is a passage which contains a beautiful and original idea:

‘J’ai aperçu un moineau qui y étanchait sa soif. Chaque fois qu’il buvait, il levait la tête vers les cieux comme pour remercier son Créateur.’

There are many artistic settings and quaint ‘conceits’ scattered through the book, and some of the descriptions of scenery are specially fine and picturesque. Toru was evidently keenly susceptible to the varied beauties of nature, sea and sky, woodland and meadows, the changing seasons and the solemn grandeur of night. Here is one of her ‘word pictures’:

‘J’ai laissé ma fenêtre ouverte; les brillantes étoiles me regardent, et la lune argentine entrecoupe de clair et d’ombre ma petite chambre. Tout se tait; pas un bruit, pas le moindre souffle de l’air. La lune me faisait penser à la sœur Véronique de mon couvent, elle aussi est chaste et belle et pâle, comme l’astre de la nuit; loin du bruit du monde, dans la sainte enceinte du couvent elle mène une calme et pieuse vie.’

There are not a few such passages in the book, simple in their wording and not marred by any exuberance of verbiage or thought.

Toru is happy too in her portrayal of personalities. Though there are not very many characters, the majority are clearly and distinctly drawn. Louis Lefèvre is a splendid type of a gallant soldier, a noble-minded gentleman, and a devoted lover and husband. Count Dunois is not perhaps so perfectly sketched, yet he so comports himself in prosperity that he elicits the sympathy of the reader when the dread calamity overtakes him. Mlle Goserelle is evidently intended to serve as a foil to the heroine. Her vivacity, frivolity, and gaiety, her witty and lively remarks, her attachment to the pleasures of life, are in utter contrast to the sobriety of mind, the unselfish devotion and unworldliness exhibited by Marguerite. She is the butterfly of the story—attractive and beautiful but without qualities of solidity, and was possibly suggested by one of the types of French girlhood that the authoress had met. Two other characters, though in the background, are nevertheless carefully worked out, viz. the aristocratic and elderly aunt, a relic from a previous generation and yet keenly interested in the young life around her, and Thérèse, the old and devoted domestic who had been in the service of the family for so many years. The character of Marguerite herself, however, is hardly as perfect or natural as some of the subsidiary characters are. She represents a noble ideal of girlhood, and no one can read her story without being both attracted by her and stimulated to more unselfish living, but she is hardly drawn from life like the others. In portraying her, the authoress has in all probability portrayed to a very large extent her own self and her own ideals of life; but Toru was an exceptional and not an average girl. Marguerite, we feel, is too old for her age. She manifests the experience of womanhood while yet in her teens. Her saving the life of the child in its convulsive fit and her influence in the homes of the poor are scarcely true to actual experience. So too her deep-seated faith in Providence, her unfailing religiousness of spirit, and her calm resignation are such as we associate, not with girlhood, but with the after years when, through longer and more varied acquaintance with life and its commingled lights and shadows, the soul has been brought into closer touch with reality.

It must not be forgotten that the book is written in the form of a diary. When it is viewed from this standpoint, some criticisms which naturally arise in the reader’s mind lose much of their force. For instance, in an ordinary story, Marguerite’s self-centredness and her constant expression of personal feelings, as well as her frequent reference to her charity to the poor, would be out of place and a distinct defect, but they are not incongruous if found within the pages of what purports to be a private journal. There is, too, a sense of incompleteness associated with the account of Jeannette. As the cause—though, apparently, the irresponsible cause—of the tragedy of the two brothers and of the consequent wreck of Marguerite’s hopes, she is of some importance in the story. Yet very little is said about her, and no details are given of her subsequent history. The interest which is aroused in the reader’s mind concerning her is left unsatisfied. Many a writer would have utilized the episode to tell us much—even too much—about her; Toru went to the other extreme. The book would have been better also if the lengthy conversations and remarks about the expected birth of the child had been considerably condensed. But the beauties of the book far outweigh its defects. For its pathos and poetic touches, for its simplicity, lit up by flashes of imaginative genius, and for its high-souled sentiments, it is well worth perusal.

The subjoined tributes show the nature of the reception accorded to the book in France. M. James Darmesteter included an appreciation of it in his Essays on English Literature, inserting it next to his critiques of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Shelley’s Poetry. He wrote:

‘The crowning quality of this child’s work, and the most striking feature, is one that would hardly be expected from a child and a Hindu—it is its moderation, its sobriety of details. There are no developments, but only indications, of facts—a masterful quality generally unknown in India, and one which betokens really great minds.’

‘It is a simple and touching narrative,’ wrote M. Adrien Desprez, ‘in which the writer has poured forth all the treasures of a young and loving soul. Nothing can be simpler than this idyll, and yet nothing can be more fresh; nothing can be more chaste, and yet nothing more full of passion. It is a soul that we find here, a sympathetic soul which appeals to us like a sister.’

M. Garcin de Tassy, the eminent Orientalist, also paid a tribute to the genius of the young Indian girl, and deplored her loss on account of the literary hopes which her writings had raised.

England also joined in the chorus of praise, as is shown by the following extract from the Saturday Review of August 23, 1879:

‘There is every reason to believe that in intellectual power Toru Dutt was one of the most remarkable women that ever lived. Had George Sand or George Eliot died at the age of twenty-one, they would certainly not have left behind them any proof of application or of originality superior to those bequeathed to us by Toru Dutt; and we discover little of merely ephemeral precocity in the attainments of this singular girl.’

It is indeed a book which is a marvel, merely when considered from a linguistic point of view. It gives promise of further work, more brilliant and beautiful still. Had Toru’s life been spared, who knows but that she might have devoted her unique abilities and her poetic powers to the task of giving the world a similar picture of Indian maidenhood, or of telling of the beauties, secrets, and wonders of her own motherland and her own people?

No one can read this story without feeling that in it much of the inner life of Toru is consciously or unconsciously revealed. It cannot be regarded as an autobiography in the strict sense of the term. The outward incidents of the heroine’s life do not harmonize with the authoress’s own career, and yet the feelings and sentiments must have undoubtedly reflected Toru’s own. Mlle Bader felt this resemblance very strongly, and has directed attention to it in the Introduction which she wrote to the book. And so the story supplies a portrait of its writer. We see in it her deeply devout and religious mind, her sensitiveness of spirit and her unselfish readiness for service and sacrifice. We see in it a heart that was more susceptible to the shadows than to the sunshine of life, and that had premonitions of a premature decease. And when we reach the final page and read there the description of Marguerite’s passing away, we wonder if Toru was hoping that it would typify her own:

‘Dieu nous ait en sa garde,’ soupira-t-elle. ‘Il était son habitude depuis l’enfance de faire cette prière juste avant de s’endormir. Elle ferma les yeux; ses lèvres s’entr’ouvrirent, et son âme pure s’envola par là vers le sein de son Dieu, et Marguerite s’endormit du sommeil de la mort.’