AMBITION FOR LOVE'S SAKE
In 1823 two young men, having agreed as a plan for a holiday to make a
tour through Switzerland, set out from Lucerne one fine morning in the
month of July in a boat pulled by three oarsmen. They started for
Fluelen, intending to stop at every notable spot on the lake of the
Four Cantons. The views which shut in the waters on the way from
Lucerne to Fluelen offer every combination that the most exacting
fancy can demand of mountains and rivers, lakes and rocks, brooks and
pastures, trees and torrents. Here are austere solitudes and charming
headlands, smiling and trimly kept meadows, forests crowning
perpendicular granite cliffs, like plumes, deserted but verdant
reaches opening out, and valleys whose beauty seems the lovelier in
the dreamy distance.
As they passed the pretty hamlet of Gersau, one of the friends looked
for a long time at a wooden house which seemed to have been recently
built, enclosed by a paling, and standing on a promontory, almost
bathed by the waters. As the boat rowed past, a woman's head was
raised against the background of the room on the upper story of this
house, to admire the effect of the boat on the lake. One of the young
men met the glance thus indifferently given by the unknown fair.
"Let us stop here," said he to his friend. "We meant to make Lucerne
our headquarters for seeing Switzerland; you will not take it amiss, Leopold, if I change my mind and stay here to take charge of our possessions. Then you can go where you please; my journey is ended. Pull to land, men, and put us out at this village; we will breakfast here. I will go back to Lucerne to fetch all our luggage, and before you leave you will know in which house I take a lodging, where you will find me on your return."
"Here or at Lucerne," replied Leopold, "the difference is not so great
that I need hinder you from following your whim."
These two youths were friends in the truest sense of the word. They
were of the same age; they had learned at the same school; and after
studying the law, they were spending their holiday in the classical
tour in Switzerland. Leopold, by his father's determination, was
already pledged to a place in a notary's office in Paris. His spirit
of rectitude, his gentleness, and the coolness of his senses and his
brain, guaranteed him to be a docile pupil. Leopold could see himself
a notary in Paris; his life lay before him like one of the highroads
that cross the plains of France, and he looked along its whole length
with philosophical resignation.
The character of his companion, whom we will call Rodolphe, presented
a strong contrast with Leopold's, and their antagonism had no doubt
had the result of tightening the bond that united them. Rodolphe was
the natural son of a man of rank, who was carried off by a premature
death before he could make any arrangements for securing the means of
existence to a woman he fondly loved and to Rodolphe. Thus cheated by
a stroke of fate, Rodolphe's mother had recourse to a heroic measure. She sold everything she owed to the munificence of her child's father for a sum of more than a hundred thousand francs, bought with it a life annuity for herself at a high rate, and thus acquired an income of about fifteen thousand francs, resolving to devote the whole of it to the education of her son, so as to give him all the personal advantages that might help to make his fortune, while saving, by strict economy, a small capital to be his when he came of age. It was bold; it was counting on her own life; but without this boldness the good mother would certainly have found it impossible to live and to bring her child up suitably, and he was her only hope, her future, the spring of all her joys.