Gilbert Before Paris

Gilbert had read every book in Baron Taverney's modest library twice over by the time he was sixteen, a fact that gave him a private, complicated sense of his own worth that the actual circumstances of his position at Taverney did almost nothing to confirm. He was neither servant nor guest in the household, occupying instead an ambiguous status that satisfied no one, least of all Gilbert himself. He was educated enough, through his own fierce and largely self-directed reading, to recognize with painful clarity exactly how little his education actually counted for in a household that judged a person's worth primarily by birth and by usefulness, in that order.

He had absorbed, from his reading, an entire philosophy of natural human equality that struck him as self-evidently true and that the actual arrangement of his daily life at Taverney contradicted at every turn: a philosophy that argued a man's worth derived from his character and his capabilities rather than from the accident of his birth, encountered in books whose authors, Gilbert understood with a bitterness he rarely permitted himself to examine too closely, had mostly enjoyed considerably more comfortable circumstances than his own while formulating such elevated ideas about universal human dignity.

What made his position at Taverney particularly difficult to bear, as he grew into adolescence, was his growing and entirely unrequited fascination with Andrée, the Baron's daughter, whose casual, unthinking condescension toward him (not cruel, exactly, but entirely unreflective, the natural unconsidered manner of someone who had simply never been taught to imagine a servant's interior life as comparable in depth or dignity to her own) struck Gilbert as a small, continuously renewed wound that his considerable private reading offered him no actual remedy for, however thoroughly it equipped him to analyze the wound's exact philosophical dimensions.

He told himself, across the years of this unrequited fascination, several different stories about its actual nature. That it was true love, deserving, by the logic of his own philosophical reading, of consideration entirely apart from the accident of Andrée's higher birth. That it was, at other moments, merely a natural response to proximity, likely to fade once circumstance separated them, as circumstance eventually and unavoidably would. That it was, in his more clear-eyed private moments, something considerably more complicated than either of these simpler accounts, bound up not purely with Andrée's own particular qualities but with everything she represented about a social position Gilbert's own philosophy told him he deserved equal access to and his actual circumstances made entirely, humiliatingly unavailable to him.

The specific incident that finally crystallized his decision to leave Taverney arrived through a small, almost trivial humiliation: a task assigned to him by the Baron in language that made unmistakably clear the gulf the household assumed to exist between Gilbert's considerable self-taught learning and his actual social standing, delivered with the casual assumption that Gilbert's evident intelligence changed nothing whatsoever about the deference his position required of him. Gilbert performed the task as instructed, with an outward compliance that gave no visible indication of the internal reckoning it provoked, and he began, that same evening, the careful private planning that would eventually carry him away from Taverney entirely.

He did not leave immediately, understanding correctly that a hasty, unplanned departure would leave him considerably worse positioned than a more patient exit, timed to circumstances that might actually improve his prospects rather than simply exchanging one form of powerlessness for another, more precarious one. He waited, watching for exactly the kind of disruption that eventually arrived in the form of the mysterious traveler Balsamo's disturbing influence over the household, a disruption Gilbert did not fully understand in its supernatural particulars but recognized, with the practical clarity his difficult circumstances had trained into him, as an opportunity to depart amid confusion that would draw considerably less scrutiny than a departure timed to ordinary, unremarkable circumstances.

What he carried with him, leaving Taverney for a Paris he had read about extensively and understood almost nothing of in actual practical terms, was not merely the modest possessions his position had allowed him to accumulate, but a philosophy considerably sharpened by years of humiliating practical contradiction: a conviction that the natural equality his reading had taught him to believe in was not, in fact, self-executing, and that a man born without inherited advantage would need to seize, through his own effort and his own hard-won capability, whatever standing the accident of his birth had declined to grant him. It was a harder, more determined version of the philosophy he had first encountered in Taverney's modest library, tempered by years of lived contradiction into something considerably less naive and considerably more dangerous, both to the social order he intended eventually to challenge and, in ways Gilbert himself did not yet fully anticipate, to his own eventual peace of mind.