When the Doors of the World Closed on Them

Alphonse de Lamartine, translated by Eugène Plunkett · Down to Earth Series · 16 pages

From Alphonse de Lamartine's Les Confidences, Note XVII, in Eugène Plunkett's translation from the French, first published in New York by D. Appleton & Co. in 1849 and reprinted in The World's Great Romances under the title “Abbé Dumont's Mystery,” New York: Black's Readers Service Co., 1929, pages 476–84. The front-page illustration is by Frans Van Lamsweerde, and a footnote gives Lamartine's dates, 1790–1869. The running head names the theme as woman's heavenly gifts.

The narrator recalls the evenings of a country friendship. When sleep began to clog the words on their lips he would take up his gun, call his dog, and the Abbé Dumont would walk with him as far as the end of the meadow at the foot of the valley of Bussières, where they shook hands; he would climb the stony hill alone, sometimes in the light of soft summer nights and sometimes through humid shadows made heavier by the mists of early autumn, find the aged servant waiting and twirling her distaff by the light of the brazen lamp in the kitchen, and retire to wake to a day like the one before. What deepened his attachment to the poor curate, he says, was the cloud of melancholy that saddened his face — a shadow that extinguished the last fires of youth in his glance and lent a faint-hearted languor to his words and his voice, in harmony with the narrator's own languidness of mind. Behind the priest's disclosures one could feel a painful and smothered mystery, and the remainder of the piece is the disclosure of it. Like the other pieces of literature gathered into this section, it is included for what the story shows rather than for its own sake, and the running head says which part of it the compiler had in view.

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