Short Stories - Penn State University

Short
Stories
by
Honore de
Balzac
AN ELECTRONIC CLASSICS SERIES
PUBLICATION

Short Stories by Honore de Balzac, trans. Clara Bell is a
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A Second
Home
by
Honore de
Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
A Penn State
Electronic Classics Series
Publication

Contents
A Second Home ......................................................................... 5
Adieu ....................................................................................... 72
Albert Savarus ........................................................................ 113
Another Study of Woman ...................................................... 217
The Atheist’s Mass ................................................................. 259
The Ball at Sceaux .................................................................. 277
The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan ................................ 333
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket ........................................... 394
Christ in Flanders ................................................................... 448
Colonel Chabert ..................................................................... 466
The Commission in Lunacy ................................................... 529
The Deserted Woman ............................................................ 602
Domestic Peace ...................................................................... 643

A Second Home
by
Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
Dedication
Balzac
To Madame la Comtesse Louise de Turheim as a token of remembrance
and affectionate respect.
THE RUE DU TOURNIQUET-SAINT-JEAN, formerly one of the
darkest and most tortuous of the streets about the Hotel de
Ville, zigzagged round the little gardens of the Paris Prefecture,
and ended at the Rue Martroi, exactly at the angle of an old wall
now pulled down. Here stood the turnstile to which the street owed
its name; it was not removed till 1823, when the Municipality built
a ballroom on the garden plot adjoining the Hotel de Ville, for the
fete given in honor of the Duc d’Angouleme on his return from
Spain.
The widest part of the Rue du Tourniquet was the end opening into
the Rue de la Tixeranderie, and even there it was less than six feet across.
Hence in rainy weather the gutter water was soon deep at the foot of
the old houses, sweeping down with it the dust and refuse deposited at
the corner-stones by the residents. As the dust-carts could not pass
through, the inhabitants trusted to storms to wash their always miry
alley; for how could it be clean? When the summer sun shed its per-
5

A Second Home
pendicular rays on Paris like a sheet of gold, but as piercing as the point
of a sword, it lighted up the blackness of this street for a few minutes
without drying the permanent damp that rose from the ground-floor
to the first story of these dark and silent tenements.
The residents, who lighted their lamps at five o’clock in the month
of June, in winter never put them out. To this day the enterprising
wayfarer who should approach the Marais along the quays, past the
end of the Rue du Chaume, the Rues de l’Homme Arme, des Billettes,
and des Deux-Portes, all leading to the Rue du Tourniquet, might
think he had passed through cellars all the way.
Almost all the streets of old Paris, of which ancient chronicles laud
the magnificence, were like this damp and gloomy labyrinth, where
the antiquaries still find historical curiosities to admire. For instance,
on the house then forming the corner where the Rue du Tourniquet
joined the Rue de la Tixeranderie, the clamps might still be seen of
two strong iron rings fixed to the wall, the relics of the chains put up
every night by the watch to secure public safety.
This house, remarkable for its antiquity, had been constructed in a
way that bore witness to the unhealthiness of these old dwellings; for, to
preserve the ground-floor from damp, the arches of the cellars rose about
two feet above the soil, and the house was entered up three outside steps.
The door was crowned by a closed arch, of which the keystone bore a
female head and some time-eaten arabesques. Three windows, their sills
about five feet from the ground, belonged to a small set of rooms looking
out on the Rue du Tourniquet, whence they derived their light. These
windows were protected by strong iron bars, very wide apart, and ending
below in an outward curve like the bars of a baker’s window.
If any passer-by during the day were curious enough to peep into
the two rooms forming this little dwelling, he could see nothing; for
only under the sun of July could he discern, in the second room, two
beds hung with green serge, placed side by side under the paneling of
an old-fashioned alcove; but in the afternoon, by about three o’clock,
when the candles were lighted, through the pane of the first room an
old woman might be seen sitting on a stool by the fireplace, where
she nursed the fire in a brazier, to simmer a stew, such as porters’
wives are expert in. A few kitchen utensils, hung up against the wall,
were visible in the twilight.
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Balzac
At that hour an old table on trestles, but bare of linen, was laid
with pewter-spoons, and the dish concocted by the old woman. Three
wretched chairs were all the furniture of this room, which was at
once the kitchen and the dining-room. Over the chimney-piece were
a piece of looking-glass, a tinder-box, three glasses, some matches,
and a large, cracked white jug. Still, the floor, the utensils, the fireplace,
all gave a pleasant sense of the perfect cleanliness and thrift that
pervaded the dull and gloomy home.
The old woman’s pale, withered face was quite in harmony with the
darkness of the street and the mustiness of the place. As she sat there,
motionless, in her chair, it might have been thought that she was as
inseparable from the house as a snail from its brown shell; her face,
alert with a vague expression of mischief, was framed in a flat cap made
of net, which barely covered her white hair; her fine, gray eyes were as
quiet as the street, and the many wrinkles in her face might be compared
to the cracks in the walls. Whether she had been born to poverty,
or had fallen from some past splendor, she now seemed to have been
long resigned to her melancholy existence.
From sunrise till dark, excepting when she was getting a meal ready,
or, with a basket on her arm, was out purchasing provisions, the old
woman sat in the adjoining room by the further window, opposite a
young girl. At any hour of the day the passer-by could see the
needlewoman seated in an old, red velvet chair, bending over an embroidery
frame, and stitching indefatigably.
Her mother had a green pillow on her knee, and busied herself
with hand-made net; but her fingers could move the bobbin but
slowly; her sight was feeble, for on her nose there rested a pair of
those antiquated spectacles which keep their place on the nostrils by
the grip of a spring. By night these two hardworking women set a
lamp between them; and the light, concentrated by two globe-shaped
bottles of water, showed the elder the fine network made by the
threads on her pillow, and the younger the most delicate details of
the pattern she was embroidering. The outward bend of the window
had allowed the girl to rest a box of earth on the window-sill, in
which grew some sweet peas, nasturtiums, a sickly little honeysuckle,
and some convolvulus that twined its frail stems up the iron bars.
These etiolated plants produced a few pale flowers, and added a touch
7

A Second Home
of indescribable sadness and sweetness to the picture offered by this
window, in which the two figures were appropriately framed.
The most selfish soul who chanced to see this domestic scene would
carry away with him a perfect image of the life led in Paris by the
working class of women, for the embroideress evidently lived by her
needle. Many, as they passed through the turnstile, found themselves
wondering how a girl could preserve her color, living in such a cellar.
A student of lively imagination, going that way to cross to the
Quartier-Latin, would compare this obscure and vegetative life to
that of the ivy that clung to these chill walls, to that of the peasants
born to labor, who are born, toil, and die unknown to the world
they have helped to feed. A house-owner, after studying the house
with the eye of a valuer, would have said, “What will become of
those two women if embroidery should go out of fashion?” Among
the men who, having some appointment at the Hotel de Ville or the
Palais de Justice, were obliged to go through this street at fixed hours,
either on their way to business or on their return home, there may have
been some charitable soul. Some widower or Adonis of forty, brought
so often into the secrets of these sad lives, may perhaps have reckoned
on the poverty of this mother and daughter, and have hoped to become
the master at no great cost of the innocent work-woman, whose
nimble and dimpled fingers, youthful figure, and white skin—a charm
due, no doubt, to living in this sunless street—had excited his admiration.
Perhaps, again, some honest clerk, with twelve hundred francs a
year, seeing every day the diligence the girl gave to her needle, and
appreciating the purity of her life, was only waiting for improved prospects
to unite one humble life with another, one form of toil to another,
and to bring at any rate a man’s arm and a calm affection, palehued
like the flowers in the window, to uphold this home.
Vague hope certainly gave life to the mother’s dim, gray eyes. Every
morning, after the most frugal breakfast, she took up her pillow,
though chiefly for the look of the thing, for she would lay her spectacles
on a little mahogany worktable as old as herself, and look out
of the window from about half-past eight till ten at the regular passers
in the street; she caught their glances, remarked on their gait, their
dress, their countenance, and almost seemed to be offering her daughter,
her gossiping eyes so evidently tried to attract some magnetic
8

Balzac
sympathy by manoeuvres worthy of the stage. It was evident that
this little review was as good as a play to her, and perhaps her single
amusement.
The daughter rarely looked up. Modesty, or a painful consciousness
of poverty, seemed to keep her eyes riveted to the work-frame;
and only some exclamation of surprise from her mother moved her
to show her small features. Then a clerk in a new coat, or who unexpectedly
appeared with a woman on his arm, might catch sight of
the girl’s slightly upturned nose, her rosy mouth, and gray eyes, always
bright and lively in spite of her fatiguing toil. Her late hours
had left a trace on her face by a pale circle marked under each eye on
the fresh rosiness of her cheeks. The poor child looked as if she were
made for love and cheerfulness—for love, which had drawn two
perfect arches above her eyelids, and had given her such a mass of
chestnut hair, that she might have hidden under it as under a tent,
impenetrable to the lover’s eye—for cheerfulness, which gave quivering
animation to her nostrils, which carved two dimples in her rosy
cheeks, and made her quick to forget her troubles; cheerfulness, the
blossom of hope, which gave her strength to look out without shuddering
on the barren path of life.
The girl’s hair was always carefully dressed. After the manner of
Paris needlewomen, her toilet seemed to her quite complete when
she had brushed her hair smooth and tucked up the little short curls
that played on each temple in contrast with the whiteness of her
skin. The growth of it on the back of her neck was so pretty, and the
brown line, so clearly traced, gave such a pleasing idea of her youth
and charm, that the observer, seeing her bent over her work, and
unmoved by any sound, was inclined to think of her as a coquette.
Such inviting promise had excited the interest of more than one young
man, who turned round in the vain hope of seeing that modest countenance.
“Caroline, there is a new face that passes regularly by, and not one
of the old ones to compare with it.”
These words, spoken in a low voice by her mother one August morning
in 1815, had vanquished the young needlewoman’s indifference,
and she looked out on the street; but in vain, the stranger was gone.
“Where has he flown to?” said she.
9

A Second Home
“He will come back no doubt at four; I shall see him coming, and
will touch your foot with mine. I am sure he will come back; he has
been through the street regularly for the last three days; but his hours
vary. The first day he came by at six o’clock, the day before yesterday
it was four, yesterday as early as three. I remember seeing him occasionally
some time ago. He is some clerk in the Prefet’s office who
has moved to the Marais.—Why!” she exclaimed, after glancing down
the street, “our gentleman of the brown coat has taken to wearing a
wig; how much it alters him!”
The gentleman of the brown coat was, it would seem, the individual
who commonly closed the daily procession, for the old woman put
on her spectacles and took up her work with a sigh, glancing at her
daughter with so strange a look that Lavater himself would have found
it difficult to interpret. Admiration, gratitude, a sort of hope for better
days, were mingled with pride at having such a pretty daughter.
At about four in the afternoon the old lady pushed her foot against
Caroline’s, and the girl looked up quickly enough to see the new
actor, whose regular advent would thenceforth lend variety to the
scene. He was tall and thin, and wore black, a man of about forty,
with a certain solemnity of demeanor; as his piercing hazel eye met
the old woman’s dull gaze, he made her quake, for she felt as though
he had the gift of reading hearts, or much practice in it, and his
presence must surely be as icy as the air of this dank street. Was the
dull, sallow complexion of that ominous face due to excess of work,
or the result of delicate health?
The old woman supplied twenty different answers to this question;
but Caroline, next day, discerned the lines of long mental suffering
on that brow that was so prompt to frown. The rather hollow
cheeks of the Unknown bore the stamp of the seal which sorrow sets
on its victims as if to grant them the consolation of common recognition
and brotherly union for resistance. Though the girl’s expression
was at first one of lively but innocent curiosity, it assumed a
look of gentle sympathy as the stranger receded from view, like a last
relation following in a funeral train.
The heat of the weather was so great, and the gentleman was so
absent-minded, that he had taken off his hat and forgotten to put it
on again as he went down the squalid street. Caroline could see the
10

Balzac
stern look given to his countenance by the way the hair was brushed
from his forehead. The strong impression, devoid of charm, made
on the girl by this man’s appearance was totally unlike any sensation
produced by the other passengers who used the street; for the first
time in her life she was moved to pity for some one else than herself
and her mother; she made no reply to the absurd conjectures that
supplied material for the old woman’s provoking volubility, and drew
her long needle in silence through the web of stretched net; she only
regretted not having seen the stranger more closely, and looked forward
to the morrow to form a definite opinion of him.
It was the first time, indeed, that a man passing down the street
had ever given rise to much thought in her mind. She generally had
nothing but a smile in response to her mother’s hypotheses, for the
old woman looked on every passer-by as a possible protector for her
daughter. And if such suggestions, so crudely presented, gave rise to
no evil thoughts in Caroline’s mind, her indifference must be ascribed
to the persistent and unfortunately inevitable toil in which the
energies of her sweet youth were being spent, and which would infallibly
mar the clearness of her eyes or steal from her fresh cheeks the
bloom that still colored them.
For two months or more the “Black Gentleman”—the name they
had given him—was erratic in his movements; he did not always
come down the Rue du Tourniquet; the old woman sometimes saw
him in the evening when he had not passed in the morning, and he
did not come by at such regular hours as the clerks who served Madame
Crochard instead of a clock; moreover, excepting on the first
occasion, when his look had given the old mother a sense of alarm,
his eyes had never once dwelt on the weird picture of these two female
gnomes. With the exception of two carriage-gates and a dark
ironmonger’s shop, there were in the Rue du Tourniquet only barred
windows, giving light to the staircases of the neighboring houses;
thus the stranger’s lack of curiosity was not to be accounted for by
the presence of dangerous rivals; and Madame Crochard was greatly
piqued to see her “Black Gentleman” always lost in thought, his eyes
fixed on the ground, or straight before him, as though he hoped to
read the future in the fog of the Rue du Tourniquet. However, one
morning, about the middle of September, Caroline Crochard’s roguish
11

A Second Home
face stood out so brightly against the dark background of the room,
looking so fresh among the belated flowers and faded leaves that
twined round the window-bars, the daily scene was gay with such
contrasts of light and shade, of pink and white blending with the
light material on which the pretty needlewoman was working, and
with the red and brown hues of the chairs, that the stranger gazed
very attentively at the effects of this living picture. In point of fact,
the old woman, provoked by her “Black Gentleman’s” indifference,
had made such a clatter with her bobbins that the gloomy and pensive
passer-by was perhaps prompted to look up by the unusual noise.
The stranger merely exchanged glances with Caroline, swift indeed,
but enough to effect a certain contact between their souls, and
both were aware that they would think of each other. When the
stranger came by again, at four in the afternoon, Caroline recognized
the sound of his step on the echoing pavement; they looked steadily
at each other, and with evident purpose; his eyes had an expression of
kindliness which made him smile, and Caroline colored; the old
mother noted them with satisfaction. Ever after that memorable afternoon,
the Gentleman in Black went by twice a day, with rare
exceptions, which both the women observed. They concluded from
the irregularity of the hours of his homecoming that he was not
released so early, nor so precisely punctual as a subordinate official.
All through the first three winter months, twice a day, Caroline and
the stranger thus saw each other for so long as it took him to traverse the
piece of road that lay along the length of the door and three windows of
the house. Day after day this brief interview had the hue of friendly
sympathy which at last had acquired a sort of fraternal kindness. Caroline
and the stranger seemed to understand each other from the first; and
then, by dint of scrutinizing each other’s faces, they learned to know
them well. Ere long it came to be, as it were, a visit that the Unknown
owed to Caroline; if by any chance her Gentleman in Black went by
without bestowing on her the half-smile of his expressive lips, or the
cordial glance of his brown eyes, something was missing to her all day.
She felt as an old man does to whom the daily study of a newspaper is
such an indispensable pleasure that on the day after any great holiday he
wanders about quite lost, and seeking, as much out of vagueness as for
want of patience, the sheet by which he cheats an hour of life.
12

Balzac
But these brief meetings had the charm of intimate friendliness, quite
as much for the stranger as for Caroline. The girl could no more hide a
vexation, a grief, or some slight ailment from the keen eye of her appreciative
friend than he could conceal anxiety from hers.
“He must have had some trouble yesterday,” was the thought that
constantly arose in the embroideress’ mind as she saw some change in
the features of the “Black Gentleman.”
“Oh, he has been working too hard!” was a reflection due to another
shade of expression which Caroline could discern.
The stranger, on his part, could guess when the girl had spent Sunday
in finishing a dress, and he felt an interest in the pattern. As
quarter-day came near he could see that her pretty face was clouded
by anxiety, and he could guess when Caroline had sat up late at work;
but above all, he noted how the gloomy thoughts that dimmed the
cheerful and delicate features of her young face gradually vanished by
degrees as their acquaintance ripened. When winter had killed the
climbers and plants of her window garden, and the window was kept
closed, it was not without a smile of gentle amusement that the
stranger observed the concentration of the light within, just at the
level of Caroline’s head. The very small fire and the frosty red of the
two women’s faces betrayed the poverty of their home; but if ever his
own countenance expressed regretful compassion, the girl proudly
met it with assumed cheerfulness.
Meanwhile the feelings that had arisen in their hearts remained
buried there, no incident occurring to reveal to either of them how
deep and strong they were in the other; they had never even heard the
sound of each other’s voice. These mute friends were even on their
guard against any nearer acquaintance, as though it meant disaster.
Each seemed to fear lest it should bring on the other some grief more
serious than those they felt tempted to share. Was it shyness or friendship
that checked them? Was it a dread of meeting with selfishness,
or the odious distrust which sunders all the residents within the walls
of a populous city? Did the voice of conscience warn them of approaching
danger? It would be impossible to explain the instinct which
made them as much enemies as friends, at once indifferent and attached,
drawn to each other by impulse, and severed by circumstance.
Each perhaps hoped to preserve a cherished illusion. It might almost
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A Second Home
have been thought that the stranger feared lest he should hear some
vulgar word from those lips as fresh and pure as a flower, and that
Caroline felt herself unworthy of the mysterious personage who was
evidently possessed of power and wealth.
As to Madame Crochard, that tender mother, almost angry at her
daughter’s persistent lack of decisiveness, now showed a sulky face to
the “Black Gentleman,” on whom she had hitherto smiled with a
sort of benevolent servility. Never before had she complained so bitterly
of being compelled, at her age, to do the cooking; never had her
catarrh and her rheumatism wrung so many groans from her; finally,
she could not, this winter, promise so many ells of net as Caroline
had hitherto been able to count on.
Under these circumstances, and towards the end of December, at
the time when bread was dearest, and that dearth of corn was beginning
to be felt which made the year 1816 so hard on the poor,
the stranger observed on the features of the girl whose name was
still unknown to him, the painful traces of a secret sorrow which
his kindest smiles could not dispel. Before long he saw in Caroline’s
eyes the dimness attributed to long hours at night. One night, towards
the end of the month, the Gentleman in Black passed down
the Rue du Tourniquet at the quite unwonted hour of one in the
morning. The perfect silence allowed of his hearing before passing
the house the lachrymose voice of the old mother, and Caroline’s
even sadder tones, mingling with the swish of a shower of sleet. He
crept along as slowly as he could; and then, at the risk of being
taken up by the police, he stood still below the window to hear the
mother and daughter, while watching them through the largest of
the holes in the yellow muslin curtains, which were eaten away by
wear as a cabbage leaf is riddled by caterpillars. The inquisitive
stranger saw a sheet of paper on the table that stood between the
two work-frames, and on which stood the lamp and the globes
filled with water. He at once identified it as a writ. Madame Crochard
was weeping, and Caroline’s voice was thick, and had lost its sweet,
caressing tone.
“Why be so heartbroken, mother? Monsieur Molineux will not
sell us up or turn us out before I have finished this dress; only two
nights more and I shall take it home to Madame Roguin.”
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Balzac
“And supposing she keeps you waiting as usual?—And will the
money for the gown pay the baker too?”
The spectator of this scene had long practice in reading faces; he
fancied he could discern that the mother’s grief was as false as the
daughter’s was genuine; he turned away, and presently came back.
When he next peeped through the hole in the curtain, Madame
Crochard was in bed. The young needlewoman, bending over her
frame, was embroidering with indefatigable diligence; on the table,
with the writ lay a triangular hunch of bread, placed there, no doubt,
to sustain her in the night and to remind her of the reward of her
industry. The stranger was tremulous with pity and sympathy; he
threw his purse in through a cracked pane so that it should fall at the
girl’s feet; and then, without waiting to enjoy her surprise, he escaped,
his cheeks tingling.
Next morning the shy and melancholy stranger went past with a
look of deep preoccupation, but he could not escape Caroline’s gratitude;
she had opened her window and affected to be digging in the
square window-box buried in snow, a pretext of which the clumsy
ingenuity plainly told her benefactor that she had been resolved not
to see him only through the pane. Her eyes were full of tears as she
bowed her head, as much as to say to her benefactor, “I can only
repay you from my heart.”
But the Gentleman in Black affected not to understand the meaning
of this sincere gratitude. In the evening, as he came by, Caroline was busy
mending the window with a sheet of paper, and she smiled at him,
showing her row of pearly teeth like a promise. Thenceforth the Stranger
went another way, and was no more seen in the Rue due Tourniquet.
IT WAS ONE DAY EARLY in the following May that, as Caroline was
giving the roots of the honeysuckle a glass of water, one Saturday
morning, she caught sight of a narrow strip of cloudless blue between
the black lines of houses, and said to her mother:
“Mamma, we must go to-morrow for a trip to Montmorency!”
She had scarcely uttered the words, in a tone of glee, when the
Gentleman in Black came by, sadder and more dejected than ever.
Caroline’s innocent and ingratiating glance might have been taken
for an invitation. And, in fact, on the following day, when Madame
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A Second Home
Crochard, dressed in a pelisse of claret-colored merinos, a silk bonnet,
and striped shawl of an imitation Indian pattern, came out to
choose seats in a chaise at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-
Denis and the Rue d’Enghien, there she found her Unknown standing
like a man waiting for his wife. A smile of pleasure lighted up the
Stranger’s face when his eye fell on Caroline, her neat feet shod in
plum-colored prunella gaiters, and her white dress tossed by a breeze
that would have been fatal to an ill-made woman, but which displayed
her graceful form. Her face, shaded by a rice-straw bonnet
lined with pink silk, seemed to beam with a reflection from heaven;
her broad, plum-colored belt set off a waist he could have spanned;
her hair, parted in two brown bands over a forehead as white as snow,
gave her an expression of innocence which no other feature contradicted.
Enjoyment seemed to have made Caroline as light as the straw
of her hat; but when she saw the Gentleman in Black, radiant hope
suddenly eclipsed her bright dress and her beauty. The Stranger, who
appeared to be in doubt, had not perhaps made up his mind to be
the girl’s escort for the day till this revelation of the delight she felt
on seeing him. He at once hired a vehicle with a fairly good horse, to
drive to Saint-Leu-Taverny, and he offered Madame Crochard and
her daughter seats by his side. The mother accepted without ado; but
presently, when they were already on the way to Saint-Denis, she was
by way of having scruples, and made a few civil speeches as to the
possible inconvenience two women might cause their companion.
“Perhaps, monsieur, you wished to drive alone to Saint-Leu-
Taverny,” said she, with affected simplicity.
Before long she complained of the heat, and especially of her cough,
which, she said, had hindered her from closing her eyes all night; and
by the time the carriage had reached Saint-Denis, Madame Crochard
seemed to be fast asleep. Her snores, indeed, seemed, to the Gentleman
in Black, rather doubtfully genuine, and he frowned as he looked
at the old woman with a very suspicious eye.
“Oh, she is fast asleep,” said Caroline quilelessly; “she never ceased
coughing all night. She must be very tired.”
Her companion made no reply, but he looked at the girl with a
smile that seemed to say:
“Poor child, you little know your mother!”
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Balzac
However, in spite of his distrust, as the chaise made its way down
the long avenue of poplars leading to Eaubonne, the Stranger thought
that Madame Crochard was really asleep; perhaps he did not care to
inquire how far her slumbers were genuine or feigned. Whether it
were that the brilliant sky, the pure country air, and the heady fragrance
of the first green shoots of the poplars, the catkins of willow,
and the flowers of the blackthorn had inclined his heart to open like
all the nature around him; or that any long restraint was too oppressive
while Caroline’s sparkling eyes responded to his own, the Gentleman
in Black entered on a conversation with his young companion,
as aimless as the swaying of the branches in the wind, as devious as
the flitting of the butterflies in the azure air, as illogical as the melodious
murmur of the fields, and, like it, full of mysterious love. At
that season is not the rural country as tremulous as a bride that has
donned her marriage robe; does it not invite the coldest soul to be
happy? What heart could remain unthawed, and what lips could keep
its secret, on leaving the gloomy streets of the Marais for the first
time since the previous autumn, and entering the smiling and picturesque
valley of Montmorency; on seeing it in the morning light, its
endless horizons receding from view; and then lifting a charmed gaze
to eyes which expressed no less infinitude mingled with love?
The Stranger discovered that Caroline was sprightly rather than witty,
affectionate, but ill educated; but while her laugh was giddy, her words
promised genuine feeling. When, in response to her companion’s shrewd
questioning, the girl spoke with the heartfelt effusiveness of which the
lower classes are lavish, not guarding it with reticence like people of the
world, the Black Gentleman’s face brightened, and seemed to renew its
youth. His countenance by degrees lost the sadness that lent sternness
to his features, and little by little they gained a look of handsome
youthfulness which made Caroline proud and happy. The pretty
needlewoman guessed that her new friend had been long weaned from
tenderness and love, and no longer believed in the devotion of woman.
Finally, some unexpected sally in Caroline’s light prattle lifted the last
veil that concealed the real youth and genuine character of the Stranger’s
physiognomy; he seemed to bid farewell to the ideas that haunted
him, and showed the natural liveliness that lay beneath the solemnity
of his expression.
17

A Second Home
Their conversation had insensibly become so intimate, that by the
time when the carriage stopped at the first houses of the straggling
village of Saint-Leu, Caroline was calling the gentleman Monsieur
Roger. Then for the first time the old mother awoke.
“Caroline, she has heard everything!” said Roger suspiciously in the
girl’s ear.
Caroline’s reply was an exquisite smile of disbelief, which dissipated
the dark cloud that his fear of some plot on the old woman’s
part had brought to this suspicious mortal’s brow. Madame Crochard
was amazed at nothing, approved of everything, followed her daughter
and Monsieur Roger into the park, where the two young people
had agreed to wander through the smiling meadows and fragrant
copses made famous by the taste of Queen Hortense.
“Good heavens! how lovely!” exclaimed Caroline when standing on
the green ridge where the forest of Montmorency begins, she saw lying
at her feet the wide valley with its combes sheltering scattered villages,
its horizon of blue hills, its church towers, its meadows and fields,
whence a murmur came up, to die on her ear like the swell of the
ocean. The three wanderers made their way by the bank of an artificial
stream and came to the Swiss valley, where stands a chalet that had
more than once given shelter to Hortense and Napoleon. When Caroline
had seated herself with pious reverence on the mossy wooden bench
where kings and princesses and the Emperor had rested, Madame
Crochard expressed a wish to have a nearer view of a bridge that hung
across between two rocks at some little distance, and bent her steps
towards that rural curiosity, leaving her daughter in Monsieur Roger’s
care, though telling them that she would not go out of sight.
“What, poor child!” cried Roger, “have you never longed for wealth
and the pleasures of luxury? Have you never wished that you might
wear the beautiful dresses you embroider?”
“It would not be the truth, Monsieur Roger, if I were to tell you that
I never think how happy people must be who are rich. Oh yes! I often
fancy, especially when I am going to sleep, how glad I should be to see
my poor mother no longer compelled to go out, whatever the weather,
to buy our little provisions, at her age. I should like her to have a
servant who, every morning before she was up, would bring her up her
coffee, nicely sweetened with white sugar. And she loves reading nov-
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Balzac
els, poor dear soul! Well, and I would rather see her wearing out her
eyes over her favorite books than over twisting her bobbins from morning
till night. And again, she ought to have a little good wine. In short,
I should like to see her comfortable—she is so good.”
“Then she has shown you great kindness?”
“Oh yes,” said the girl, in a tone of conviction. Then, after a short
pause, during which the two young people stood watching Madame
Crochard, who had got to the middle of the rustic bridge, and was
shaking her finger at them, Caroline went on:
“Oh yes, she has been so good to me. What care she took of me
when I was little! She sold her last silver forks to apprentice me to the
old maid who taught me to embroider.—And my poor father! What
did she not go through to make him end his days in happiness!” The
girl shivered at the remembrance, and hid her face in her hands.—
”Well! come! let us forget past sorrows!” she added, trying to rally
her high spirits. She blushed as she saw that Roger too was moved,
but she dared not look at him.
“What was your father?” he asked.
“He was an opera-dancer before the Revolution,” said she, with an
air of perfect simplicity, “and my mother sang in the chorus. My
father, who was leader of the figures on the stage, happened to be
present at the siege of the Bastille. He was recognized by some of the
assailants, who asked him whether he could not lead a real attack,
since he was used to leading such enterprises on the boards. My father
was brave; he accepted the post, led the insurgents, and was
rewarded by the nomination to the rank of captain in the army of
Sambre-et-Meuse, where he distinguished himself so far as to rise
rapidly to be a colonel. But at Lutzen he was so badly wounded that,
after a year’s sufferings, he died in Paris.—The Bourbons returned;
my mother could obtain no pension, and we fell into such abject
misery that we were compelled to work for our living. For some
time past she has been ailing, poor dear, and I have never known her
so little resigned; she complains a good deal, and, indeed, I cannot
wonder, for she has known the pleasures of an easy life. For my part,
I cannot pine for delights I have never known, I have but one thing
to wish for.”
“And that is?” said Roger eagerly, as if roused from a dream.
19

A Second Home
“That women may continue to wear embroidered net dresses, so
that I may never lack work.”
The frankness of this confession interested the young man, who
looked with less hostile eyes on Madame Crochard as she slowly
made her way back to them.
“Well, children, have you had a long talk?” said she, with a halflaughing,
half-indulgent air. “When I think, Monsieur Roger, that
the ‘little Corporal’ has sat where you are sitting,” she went on after
a pause. “Poor man! how my husband worshiped him! Ah! Crochard
did well to die, for he could not have borne to think of him where /
they/ have sent him!”
Roger put his finger to his lips, and the good woman went on very
gravely, with a shake of her head:
“All right, mouth shut and tongue still! But,” added she, unhooking
a bit of her bodice, and showing a ribbon and cross tied round
her neck by a piece of black ribbon, “they shall never hinder me from
wearing what /he/ gave to my poor Crochard, and I will have it
buried with me.”
On hearing this speech, which at that time was regarded as seditious,
Roger interrupted the old lady by rising suddenly, and they
returned to the village through the park walks. The young man left
them for a few minutes while he went to order a meal at the best
eating-house in Taverny; then, returning to fetch them, he led the
way through the alleys cut in the forest.
The dinner was cheerful. Roger was no longer the melancholy shade
that was wont to pass along the Rue du Tourniquet; he was not the
“Black Gentleman,” but rather a confiding young man ready to take
life as it came, like the two hard-working women who, on the morrow,
might lack bread; he seemed alive to all the joys of youth, his
smile was quite affectionate and childlike.
When, at five o’clock, this happy meal was ended with a few glasses
of champagne, Roger was the first to propose that they should join
the village ball under the chestnuts, where he and Caroline danced
together. Their hands met with sympathetic pressure, their hearts
beat with the same hopes; and under the blue sky and the slanting,
rosy beams of sunset, their eyes sparkled with fires which, to them,
made the glory of the heavens pale. How strange is the power of an
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Balzac
idea, of a desire! To these two nothing seemed impossible. In such
magic moments, when enjoyment sheds its reflections on the future,
the soul foresees nothing but happiness. This sweet day had created
memories for these two to which nothing could be compared in all
their past existence. Would the source prove to be more beautiful
than the river, the desire more enchanting than its gratification, the
thing hoped for more delightful than the thing possessed?
“So the day is already at an end!” On hearing this exclamation
from her unknown friend when the dance was over, Caroline looked
at him compassionately, as his face assumed once more a faint shade
of sadness.
“Why should you not be as happy in Paris as you are here?” she
asked. “Is happiness to be found only at Saint-Leu? It seems to me
that I can henceforth never be unhappy anywhere.”
Roger was struck by these words, spoken with the glad unrestraint
that always carries a woman further than she intended, just as prudery
often lends her greater cruelty than she feels. For the first time
since that glance, which had, in a way, been the beginning of their
friendship, Caroline and Roger had the same idea; though they did
not express it, they felt it at the same instant, as a result of a common
impression like that of a comforting fire cheering both under the
frost of winter; then, as if frightened by each other’s silence, they
made their way to the spot where the carriage was waiting. But before
getting into it, they playfully took hands and ran together down
the dark avenue in front of Madame Crochard. When they could no
longer see the white net cap, which showed as a speck through the
leaves where the old woman was—”Caroline!” said Roger in a tremulous
voice, and with a beating heart.
The girl was startled, and drew back a few steps, understanding the
invitation this question conveyed; however, she held out her hand,
which was passionately kissed, but which she hastily withdrew, for
by standing on tiptoe she could see her mother.
Madame Crochard affected blindness, as if, with a reminiscence of
her old parts, she was only required to figure as a supernumerary.
THE ADVENTURES of these two young people were not continued in
the Rue du Tourniquet. To see Roger and Caroline once more, we
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A Second Home
must leap into the heart of modern Paris, where, in some of the
newly-built houses, there are apartments that seem made on purpose
for newly-married couples to spend their honeymoon in. There the
paper and paint are as fresh as the bride and bridegroom, and the
decorations are in blossom like their love; everything is in harmony
with youthful notions and ardent wishes.
Half-way down the Rue Taitbout, in a house whose stone walls
were still white, where the columns of the hall and the doorway were
as yet spotless, and the inner walls shone with the neat painting which
our recent intimacy with English ways had brought into fashion,
there was, on the second floor, a small set of rooms fitted by the
architect as though he had known what their use would be. A simple
airy ante-room, with a stucco dado, formed an entrance into a drawing-room
and dining-room. Out of the drawing-room opened a pretty
bedroom, with a bathroom beyond. Every chimney-shelf had over it
a fine mirror elegantly framed. The doors were crowded with arabesques
in good taste, and the cornices were in the best style. Any
amateur would have discerned there the sense of distinction and decorative
fitness which mark the work of modern French architects.
For above a month Caroline had been at home in this apartment,
furnished by an upholsterer who submitted to an artist’s guidance. A
short description of the principal room will suffice to give us an idea
of the wonders it offered to Caroline’s delighted eyes when Roger
installed her there. Hangings of gray stuff trimmed with green silk
adorned the walls of her bedroom; the seats, covered with light-colored
woolen sateen, were of easy and comfortable shapes, and in the
latest fashion; a chest of drawers of some simple wood, inlaid with
lines of a darker hue, contained the treasures of the toilet; a writingtable
to match served for inditing love-letters on scented paper; the
bed, with antique draperies, could not fail to suggest thoughts of
love by its soft hangings of elegant muslin; the window-curtains, of
drab silk with green fringe, were always half drawn to subdue the
light; a bronze clock represented Love crowning Psyche; and a carpet
of Gothic design on a red ground set off the other accessories of this
delightful retreat. There was a small dressing-table in front of a long
glass, and here the needlewoman sat, out of patience with Plaisir, the
famous hairdresser.
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Balzac
“Do you think you will have done to-day?” said she.
“Your hair is so long and so thick, madame,” replied Plaisir.
Caroline could not help smiling. The man’s flattery had no doubt
revived in her mind the memory of the passionate praises lavished by
her lover on the beauty of her hair, which he delighted in.
The hairdresser having done, a waiting-maid came and held counsel
with her as to the dress in which Roger would like best to see her.
It was the beginning of September 1816, and the weather was cold;
she chose a green /grenadine/ trimmed with chinchilla. As soon as
she was dressed, Caroline flew into the drawing-room and opened a
window, out of which she stepped on to the elegant balcony, that
adorned the front of the house; there she stood, with her arms crossed,
in a charming attitude, not to show herself to the admiration of the
passers-by and see them turn to gaze at her, but to be able to look out
on the Boulevard at the bottom of the Rue Taitbout. This side view,
really very comparable to the peephole made by actors in the dropscene
of a theatre, enabled her to catch a glimpse of numbers of
elegant carriages, and a crowd of persons, swept past with the rapidity
of /Ombres Chinoises/. Not knowing whether Roger would arrive
in a carriage or on foot, the needlewoman from the Rue du
Tourniquet looked by turns at the foot-passengers, and at the
tilburies—light cabs introduced into Paris by the English.
Expressions of refractoriness and of love passed by turns over her
youthful face when, after waiting for a quarter of an hour, neither her
keen eye nor her heart had announced the arrival of him whom she
knew to be due. What disdain, what indifference were shown in her
beautiful features for all the other creatures who were bustling like
ants below her feet. Her gray eyes, sparkling with fun, now positively
flamed. Given over to her passion, she avoided admiration
with as much care as the proudest devote to encouraging it when
they drive about Paris, certainly feeling no care as to whether her fair
countenance leaning over the balcony, or her little foot between the
bars, and the picture of her bright eyes and delicious turned-up nose
would be effaced or no from the minds of the passers-by who admired
them; she saw but one face, and had but one idea. When the
spotted head of a certain bay horse happened to cross the narrow
strip between the two rows of houses, Caroline gave a little shiver
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A Second Home
and stood on tiptoe in hope of recognizing the white traces and the
color of the tilbury. It was he!
Roger turned the corner of the street, saw the balcony, whipped
the horse, which came up at a gallop, and stopped at the bronzegreen
door that he knew as well as his master did. The door of the
apartment was opened at once by the maid, who had heard her mistress’
exclamation of delight. Roger rushed up to the drawing-room,
clasped Caroline in his arms, and embraced her with the effusive
feeling natural when two beings who love each other rarely meet. He
led her, or rather they went by a common impulse, their arms about
each other, into the quiet and fragrant bedroom; a settee stood ready
for them to sit by the fire, and for a moment they looked at each
other in silence, expressing their happiness only by their clasped hands,
and communicating their thoughts in a fond gaze.
“Yes, it is he!” she said at last. “Yes, it is you. Do you know, I have
not seen you for three long days, an age!—But what is the matter?
You are unhappy.”
“My poor Caroline—”
“There, you see! ‘poor Caroline’—”
“No, no, do not laugh, my darling; we cannot go to the Feydeau
Theatre together this evening.”
Caroline put on a little pout, but it vanished immediately.
“How absurd I am! How can I think of going to the play when I
see you? Is not the sight of you the only spectacle I care for?” she
cried, pushing her fingers through Roger’s hair.
“I am obliged to go to the Attorney-General’s. We have a knotty
case in hand. He met me in the great hall at the Palais; and as I am to
plead, he asked me to dine with him. But, my dearest, you can go to
the theatre with your mother, and I will join you if the meeting
breaks up early.”
“To the theatre without you!” cried she in a tone of amazement;
“enjoy any pleasure you do not share! O my Roger! you do not deserve
a kiss,” she added, throwing her arms round his neck with an
artless and impassioned impulse.
“Caroline, I must go home and dress. The Marais is some way off,
and I still have some business to finish.”
“Take care what you are saying, monsieur,” said she, interrupting
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Balzac
him. “My mother says that when a man begins to talk about his
business, he is ceasing to love.”
“Caroline! Am I not here? Have I not stolen this hour from my
pitiless—”
“Hush!” said she, laying a finger on his mouth. “Don’t you see that
I am in jest.”
They had now come back to the drawing-room, and Roger’s eye
fell on an object brought home that morning by the cabinetmaker.
Caroline’s old rosewood embroidery-frame, by which she and her
mother had earned their bread when they lived in the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean,
had been refitted and polished, and a net dress, of
elaborate design, was already stretched upon it.
“Well, then, my dear, I shall do some work this evening. As I
stitch, I shall fancy myself gone back to those early days when you
used to pass by me without a word, but not without a glance; the
days when the remembrance of your look kept me awake all night.
Oh my dear old frame —the best piece of furniture in my room,
though you did not give it me!—You cannot think,” said she, seating
herself on Roger’s knees; for he, overcome by irresistible feelings,
had dropped into a chair. “Listen.—All I can earn by my work
I mean to give to the poor. You have made me rich. How I love
that pretty home at Bellefeuille, less because of what it is than because
you gave it me! But tell me, Roger, I should like to call myself
Caroline de Bellefeuille—can I? You must know: is it legal or
permissible?”
As she saw a little affirmative grimace—for Roger hated the name
of Crochard—Caroline jumped for glee, and clapped her hands.
“I feel,” said she, “as if I should more especially belong to you.
Usually a woman gives up her own name and takes her husband’s—
” An idea forced itself upon her and made her blush. She took Roger’s
hand and led him to the open piano.—”Listen,” said she, “I can play
my sonata now like an angel!” and her fingers were already running
over the ivory keys, when she felt herself seized round the waist.
“Caroline, I ought to be far from hence!”
“You insist on going? Well, go,” said she, with a pretty pout, but
she smiled as she looked at the clock and exclaimed joyfully, “At any
rate, I have detained you a quarter of an hour!”
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A Second Home
“Good-bye, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille,” said he, with the gentle
irony of love.
She kissed him and saw her lover to the door; when the sound of
his steps had died away on the stairs she ran out on to the balcony to
see him get into the tilbury, to see him gather up the reins, to catch a
parting look, hear the crack of his whip and the sound of his wheels
on the stones, watch the handsome horse, the master’s hat, the tiger’s
gold lace, and at last to stand gazing long after the dark corner of the
street had eclipsed this vision.
FIVE YEARS AFTER Mademoiselle Caroline de Bellefeuille had taken up
her abode in the pretty house in the Rue Taitbout, we again look in
on one of those home-scenes which tighten the bonds of affection
between two persons who truly love. In the middle of the blue drawing-room,
in front of the window opening to the balcony, a little
boy of four was making a tremendous noise as he whipped the rocking-horse,
whose two curved supports for the legs did not move fast
enough to please him; his pretty face, framed in fair curls that fell
over his white collar, smiled up like a cherub’s at his mother when
she said to him from the depths of an easy-chair, “Not so much
noise, Charles; you will wake your little sister.”
The inquisitive boy suddenly got off his horse, and treading on
tiptoe as if he were afraid of the sound of his feet on the carpet, came
up with one finger between his little teeth, and standing in one of
those childish attitudes that are so graceful because they are so perfectly
natural, raised the muslin veil that hid the rosy face of a little
girl sleeping on her mother’s knee.
“Is Eugenie asleep, then?” said he, quite astonished. “Why is she
asleep when we are awake?” he added, looking up with large, liquid
black eyes.
“That only God can know,” replied Caroline, with a smile.
The mother and boy gazed at the infant, only that morning baptized.
Caroline, now about four-and-twenty, showed the ripe beauty
which had expanded under the influence of cloudless happiness and
constant enjoyment. In her the Woman was complete.
Delighted to obey her dear Roger’s every wish, she had acquired
the accomplishments she had lacked; she played the piano fairly well,
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Balzac
and sang sweetly. Ignorant of the customs of a world that would
have treated her as an outcast, and which she would not have cared
for even if it had welcomed her—for a happy woman does not care
for the world —she had not caught the elegance of manner or learned
the art of conversation, abounding in words and devoid of ideas,
which is current in fashionable drawing-rooms; on the other hand,
she worked hard to gain the knowledge indispensable to a mother
whose chief ambition is to bring up her children well. Never to lose
sight of her boy, to give him from the cradle that training of every
minute which impresses on the young a love of all that is good and
beautiful, to shelter him from every evil influence and fulfil both the
painful duties of a nurse and the tender offices of a mother,—these
were her chief pleasures.
The coy and gentle being had from the first day so fully resigned
herself never to step beyond the enchanted sphere where she found
all her happiness, that, after six years of the tenderest intimacy, she
still knew her lover only by the name of Roger. A print of the picture
of the Psyche lighting her lamp to gaze on Love in spite of his prohibition,
hung in her room, and constantly reminded her of the conditions
of her happiness. Through all these six years her humble pleasures
had never importuned Roger by a single indiscreet ambition,
and his heart was a treasure-house of kindness. Never had she longed
for diamonds or fine clothes, and had again and again refused the
luxury of a carriage which he had offered her. To look out from her
balcony for Roger’s cab, to go with him to the play or make excursions
with him, on fine days in the environs of Paris, to long for him,
to see him, and then to long again,—these made up the history of
her life, poor in incidents but rich in happiness.
As she rocked the infant, now a few months old, on her knee,
singing the while, she allowed herself to recall the memories of the
past. She lingered more especially on the months of September, when
Roger was accustomed to take her to Bellefeuille and spend the delightful
days which seem to combine the charms of every season.
Nature is equally prodigal of flowers and fruit, the evenings are mild,
the mornings bright, and a blaze of summer often returns after a
spell of autumn gloom. During the early days of their love, Caroline
had ascribed the even mind and gentle temper, of which Roger gave
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A Second Home
her so many proofs, to the rarity of their always longed-for meetings,
and to their mode of life, which did not compel them to be constantly
together, as a husband and wife must be. But now she could
remember with rapture that, tortured by foolish fears, she had watched
him with trembling during their first stay on this little estate in the
Gatinais. Vain suspiciousness of love! Each of these months of happiness
had passed like a dream in the midst of joys which never rang
false. She had always seen that kind creature with a tender smile on
his lips, a smile that seemed to mirror her own.
As she called up these vivid pictures, her eyes filled with tears; she
thought she could not love him enough, and was tempted to regard
her ambiguous position as a sort of tax levied by Fate on her love.
Finally, invincible curiosity led her to wonder for the thousandth time
what events they could be that led so tender a heart as Roger’s to find
his pleasure in clandestine and illicit happiness. She invented a thousand
romances on purpose really to avoid recognizing the true reason,
which she had long suspected but tried not to believe in. She rose, and
carrying the baby in her arms, went into the dining-room to superintend
the preparations for dinner.
It was the 6th of May 1822, the anniversary of the excursion to the
Park of Saint-Leu, which had been the turning-point of her life; each
year it had been marked by heartfelt rejoicing. Caroline chose the
linen to be used, and arranged the dessert. Having attended with joy
to these details, which touched Roger, she placed the infant in her
pretty cot and went out on to the balcony, whence she presently saw
the carriage which her friend, as he grew to riper years, now used
instead of the smart tilbury of his youth. After submitting to the
first fire of Caroline’s embraces and the kisses of the little rogue who
addressed him as papa, Roger went to the cradle, looked at his little
sleeping daughter, kissed her forehead, and then took out of his pocket
a document covered with black writing.
“Caroline,” said he, “here is the marriage portion of Mademoiselle
Eugenie de Bellefeuille.”
The mother gratefully took the paper, a deed of gift of securities in
the State funds.
“Buy why,” said she, “have you given Eugenie three thousand francs
a year, and Charles no more than fifteen hundred?”
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Balzac
“Charles, my love, will be a man,” replied he. “Fifteen hundred
francs are enough for him. With so much for certain, a man of courage
is above poverty. And if by chance your son should turn out a
nonentity, I do not wish him to be able to play the fool. If he is
ambitious, this small income will give him a taste for work.—Eugenie
is a girl; she must have a little fortune.”
The father then turned to play with his boy, whose effusive affection
showed the independence and freedom in which he was brought up.
No sort of shyness between the father and child interfered with the
charm which rewards a parent for his devotion; and the cheerfulness of
the little family was as sweet as it was genuine. In the evening a magiclantern
displayed its illusions and mysterious pictures on a white sheet
to Charles’ great surprise, and more than once the innocent child’s
heavenly rapture made Caroline and Roger laugh heartily.
Later, when the little boy was in bed, the baby woke and craved its
limpid nourishment. By the light of a lamp in the chimney corner,
Roger enjoyed the scene of peace and comfort, and gave himself up
to the happiness of contemplating the sweet picture of the child clinging
to Caroline’s white bosom as she sat, as fresh as a newly opened
lily, while her hair fell in long brown curls that almost hid her neck.
The lamplight enhanced the grace of the young mother, shedding
over her, her dress, and the infant, the picturesque effects of strong
light and shadow.
The calm and silent woman’s face struck Roger as a thousand times
sweeter than ever, and he gazed tenderly at the rosy, pouting lips
from which no harsh word had ever been heard. The very same thought
was legible in Caroline’s eyes as she gave a sidelong look at Roger, either
to enjoy the effect she was producing on him, or to see what the end of
the evening was to be. He, understanding the meaning of this cunning
glance, said with assumed regret, “I must be going. I have a serious case
to be finished, and I am expected at home. Duty before all things—
don’t you think so, my darling?”
Caroline looked him in the face with an expression at once sad and
sweet, with the resignation which does not, however, disguise the
pangs of a sacrifice.
“Good-bye, then,” said she. “Go, for if you stay an hour longer I
cannot so lightly bear to set you free.”
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A Second Home
“My dearest,” said he with a smile, “I have three days’ holiday, and
am supposed to be twenty leagues away from Paris.”
A FEW DAYS AFTER THIS anniversary of the 6th of May, Mademoiselle
de Bellefeuille hurried off one morning to the Rue Saint-Louis, in
the Marais, only hoping she might not arrive too late at a house
where she commonly went once a week. An express messenger had
just come to inform her that her mother, Madame Crochard, was
sinking under a complication of disorders produced by constant catarrh
and rheumatism.
While the hackney coach-driver was flogging up his horses at
Caroline’s urgent request, supported by the promise of a handsome
present, the timid old women, who had been Madame Crochard’s
friends during her later years, had brought a priest into the neat and
comfortable second-floor rooms occupied by the old widow. Madame
Crochard’s maid did not know that the pretty lady at whose house her
mistress so often dined was her daughter, and she was one of the first to
suggest the services of a confessor, in the hope that this priest might be
at least as useful to herself as to the sick woman. Between two games
of boston, or out walking in the Jardin Turc, the old beldames with
whom the widow gossiped all day had succeeded in rousing in their
friend’s stony heart some scruples as to her former life, some visions of
the future, some fears of hell, and some hopes of forgiveness if she
should return in sincerity to a religious life. So on this solemn morning
three ancient females had settled themselves in the drawing-room where
Madame Crochard was “at home” every Tuesday. Each in turn left her
armchair to go to the poor old woman’s bedside and sit with her,
giving her the false hopes with which people delude the dying.
At the same time, when the end was drawing near, when the physician
called in the day before would no longer answer for her life,
the three dames took counsel together as to whether it would not be
well to send word to Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille. Francoise having
been duly informed, it was decided that a commissionaire should go
to the Rue Taitbout to inform the young relation whose influence
was so disquieting to the four women; still, they hoped that the
Auvergnat would be too late in bringing back the person who so
certainly held the first place in the widow Crochard’s affections. The
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widow, evidently in the enjoyment of a thousand crowns a year, would
not have been so fondly cherished by this feminine trio, but that
neither of them, nor Francoise herself knew of her having any heir.
The wealth enjoyed by Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille, whom Madame
Crochard, in obedience to the traditions of the older opera,
never allowed herself to speak of by the affectionate name of daughter,
almost justified the four women in their scheme of dividing
among themselves the old woman’s “pickings.”
Presently the one of these three sibyls who kept guard over the sick
woman came shaking her head at the other anxious two, and said:
“It is time we should be sending for the Abbe Fontanon. In another
two hours she will neither have the wit nor the strength to
write a line.”
Thereupon the toothless old cook went off, and returned with a
man wearing a black gown. A low forehead showed a small mind in
this priest, whose features were mean; his flabby, fat cheeks and double
chin betrayed the easy-going egotist; his powdered hair gave him a
pleasant look, till he raised his small, brown eyes, prominent under a
flat forehead, and not unworthy to glitter under the brows of a Tartar.
“Monsieur l’Abbe,” said Francoise, “I thank you for all your advice;
but believe me, I have taken the greatest care of the dear soul.”
But the servant, with her dragging step and woe-begone look, was
silent when she saw that the door of the apartment was open, and
that the most insinuating of the three dowagers was standing on the
landing to be the first to speak with the confessor. When the priest
had politely faced the honeyed and bigoted broadside of words fired
off from the widow’s three friends, he went into the sickroom to sit
by Madame Crochard. Decency, and some sense of reserve, compelled
the three women and old Francoise to remain in the sittingroom,
and to make such grimaces of grief as are possible in perfection
only to such wrinkled faces.
“Oh, is it not ill-luck!” cried Francoise, heaving a sigh. “This is the
fourth mistress I have buried. The first left me a hundred francs a year,
the second a sum of fifty crowns, and the third a thousand crowns
down. After thirty years’ service, that is all I have to call my own.”
The woman took advantage of her freedom to come and go, to
slip into a cupboard, whence she could hear the priest.
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“I see with pleasure, daughter,” said Fontanon, “that you have pious
sentiments; you have a sacred relic round your neck.”
Madame Crochard, with a feeble vagueness which seemed to show
that she had not all her wits about her, pulled out the Imperial Cross
of the Legion of Honor. The priest started back at seeing the
Emperor’s head; he went up to the penitent again, and she spoke to
him, but in such a low tone that for some minutes Francoise could
hear nothing.
“Woe upon me!” cried the old woman suddenly. “Do not desert
me. What, Monsieur l’Abbe, do you think I shall be called to account
for my daughter’s soul?”
The Abbe spoke too low, and the partition was too thick for
Francoise to hear the reply.
“Alas!” sobbed the woman, “the wretch has left me nothing that I
can bequeath. When he robbed me of my dear Caroline, he parted
us, and only allowed me three thousand francs a year, of which the
capital belongs to my daughter.”
“Madame has a daughter, and nothing to live on but an annuity,”
shrieked Francoise, bursting into the drawing-room.
The three old crones looked at each other in dismay. One of them,
whose nose and chin nearly met with an expression that betrayed a
superior type of hypocrisy and cunning, winked her eyes; and as soon
as Francoise’s back was turned, she gave her friends a nod, as much as
to say, “That slut is too knowing by half; her name has figured in
three wills already.”
So the three old dames sat on.
However, the Abbe presently came out, and at a word from him
the witches scuttered down the stairs at his heels, leaving Francoise
alone with her mistress. Madame Crochard, whose sufferings increased
in severity, rang, but in vain, for this woman, who only called out,
“Coming, coming—in a minute!” The doors of cupboards and wardrobes
were slamming as though Francoise were hunting high and
low for a lost lottery ticket.
Just as this crisis was at a climax, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille came
to stand by her mother’s bed, lavishing tender words on her.
“Oh my dear mother, how criminal I have been! You are ill, and I did
not know it; my heart did not warn me. However, here I am—”
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“Caroline—”
“What is it?”
“They fetched a priest—”
“But send for a doctor, bless me!” cried Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille.
“Francoise, a doctor! How is it that these ladies never sent for a doctor?”
“They sent for a priest——” repeated the old woman with a gasp.
“She is so ill—and no soothing draught, nothing on her table!”
The mother made a vague sign, which Caroline’s watchful eye understood,
for she was silent to let her mother speak.
“They brought a priest—to hear my confession, as they said.—
Beware, Caroline!” cried the old woman with an effort, “the priest
made me tell him your benefactor’s name.”
“But who can have told you, poor mother?”
The old woman died, trying to look knowingly cunning. If Mademoiselle
de Bellefeuille had noted her mother’s face she might have
seen what no one ever will see—Death laughing.
To enter into the interests that lay beneath this introduction to my
tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at
certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned
with the death of Madame Crochard. The two parts will then form
a whole—a story which, by a law peculiar to life in Paris, was made
up of two distinct sets of actions.
Towards the close of the month of November 1805, a young barrister,
aged about six-and-twenty, was going down the stairs of the
hotel where the High Chancellor of the Empire resided, at about
three o’clock one morning. Having reached the courtyard in full
evening dress, under a keen frost, he could not help giving vent to an
exclamation of dismay—qualified, however, by the spirit which rarely
deserts a Frenchman—at seeing no hackney coach waiting outside
the gates, and hearing no noises such as arise from the wooden shoes
or harsh voices of the hackney-coachmen of Paris. The occasional
pawing of the horses of the Chief Justice’s carriage—the young man
having left him still playing /bouillote/ with Cambaceres—alone rang
out in the paved court, which was scarcely lighted by the carriage
lamps. Suddenly the young lawyer felt a friendly hand on his shoulder,
and turning round, found himself face to face with the Judge, to
whom he bowed. As the footman let down the steps of his carriage,
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the old gentleman, who had served the Convention, suspected the
junior’s dilemma.
“All cats are gray in the dark,” said he good-humoredly. “The Chief
Justice cannot compromise himself by putting a pleader in the right
way! Especially,” he went on, “when the pleader is the nephew of an
old colleague, one of the lights of the grand Council of State which
gave France the Napoleonic Code.”
At a gesture from the chief magistrate of France under the Empire,
the foot-passenger got into the carriage.
“Where do you live?” asked the great man, before the footman
who awaited his orders had closed the door.
“Quai des Augustins, monseigneur.”
The horses started, and the young man found himself alone with
the Minister, to whom he had vainly tried to speak before and after
the sumptuous dinner given by Cambaceres; in fact, the great man
had evidently avoided him throughout the evening.
“Well, Monsieur /de/ Granville, you are on the high road!”
“So long as I sit by your Excellency’s side—”
“Nay, I am not jesting,” said the Minister. “You were called two
years since, and your defence in the case of Simeuse and Hauteserre
had raised you high in your profession.”
“I had supposed that my interest in those unfortunate emigres had
done me no good.”
“You are still very young,” said the great man gravely. “But the High
Chancellor,” he went on, after a pause, “was greatly pleased with you
this evening. Get a judgeship in the lower courts; we want men. The
nephew of a man in whom Cambaceres and I take great interest must
not remain in the background for lack of encouragement. Your uncle
helped us to tide over a very stormy season, and services of that kind
are not forgotten.” The Minister sat silent for a few minutes. “Before
long,” he went on, “I shall have three vacancies open in the Lower
Courts and in the Imperial Court in Paris. Come to see me, and take
the place you prefer. Till then work hard, but do not be seen at my
receptions. In the first place, I am overwhelmed with work; and besides
that, your rivals may suspect your purpose and do you harm with
the patron. Cambaceres and I, by not speaking a word to you this
evening, have averted the accusation of favoritism.”
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As the great man ceased speaking, the carriage drew up on the Quai
des Augustins; the young lawyer thanked his generous patron for the
two lifts he had conferred on him, and then knocked at his door
pretty loudly, for the bitter wind blew cold about his calves. At last
the old lodgekeeper pulled up the latch; and as the young man passed
his window, called out in a hoarse voice, “Monsieur Granville, here is
a letter for you.”
The young man took the letter, and in spite of the cold, tried to
identify the writing by the gleam of a dull lamp fast dying out. “From
my father!” he exclaimed, as he took his bedroom candle, which the
porter at last had lighted. And he ran up to his room to read the
following epistle:—
“Set off by the next mail; and if you can get here soon enough, your
fortune is made. Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems has lost her sister;
she is now an only child; and, as we know, she does not hate you.
Madame Bontems can now leave her about forty thousand francs a
year, besides whatever she may give her when she marries. I have prepared
the way.
“Our friends will wonder to see a family of old nobility allying
itself to the Bontems; old Bontems was a red republican of the deepest
dye, owning large quantities of the nationalized land, that he bought
for a mere song. But he held nothing but convent lands, and the
monks will not come back; and then, as you have already so far
derogated as to become a lawyer, I cannot see why we should shrink
from a further concession to the prevalent ideas. The girl will have
three hundred thousand francs; I can give you a hundred thousand;
your mother’s property must be worth fifty thousand crowns, more
or less; so if you choose to take a judgeship, my dear son, you are
quite in a position to become a senator as much as any other man.
My brother-in-law the Councillor of State will not indeed lend you
a helping-hand; still, as he is not married, his property will some day
be yours, and if you are not senator by your own efforts, you will get
it through him. Then you will be perched high enough to look on at
events. Farewell. Yours affectionately.”
So young Granville went to bed full of schemes, each fairer than the
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A Second Home
last. Under the powerful protection of the High Chancellor, the Chief
Justice, and his mother’s brother—one of the originators of the Code
—he was about to make a start in a coveted position before the highest
court of the Empire, and he already saw himself a member of the
bench whence Napoleon selected the chief functionaries of the realm.
He could also promise himself a fortune handsome enough to keep up
his rank, for which the slender income of five thousand francs from an
estate left him by his mother would be quite insufficient.
To crown his ambitious dreams with a vision of happiness, he called
up the guileless face of Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems, the companion
of his childhood. Until he came to boyhood his father and
mother had made no objection to his intimacy with their neighbor’s
pretty little daughter; but when, during his brief holiday visits to
Bayeux, his parents, who prided themselves on their good birth, saw
what friends the young people were, they forbade his ever thinking
of her. Thus for ten years past Granville had only had occasional
glimpses of the girl, whom he still sometimes thought of as “his
little wife.” And in those brief moments when they met free from
the active watchfulness of their families, they had scarcely exchanged
a few vague civilities at the church door or in the street. Their happiest
days had been those when, brought together by one of those
country festivities known in Normandy as /Assemblees/, they could
steal a glance at each other from afar.
In the course of the last vacation Granville had twice seen Angelique,
and her downcast eyes and drooping attitude had led him to suppose
that she was crushed by some unknown tyranny.
He was off by seven next morning to the coach office in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, and was so lucky as to find a vacant seat
in the diligence then starting for Caen.
It was not without deep emotion that the young lawyer saw once
more the spires of the cathedral at Bayeux. As yet no hope of his life
had been cheated, and his heart swelled with the generous feelings
that expand in the youthful soul.
After the too lengthy feast of welcome prepared by his father, who
awaited him with some friends, the impatient youth was conducted
to a house, long familiar to him, standing in the Rue Teinture. His
heart beat high when his father—still known in the town of Bayeux
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Balzac
as the Comte de Granville—knocked loudly at a carriage gate off
which the green paint was dropping in scales. It was about four in the
afternoon. A young maid-servant, in a cotton cap, dropped a short
curtsey to the two gentlemen, and said that the ladies would soon be
home from vespers.
The Count and his son were shown into a low room used as a drawing-room,
but more like a convent parlor. Polished panels of dark
walnut made it gloomy enough, and around it some old-fashioned
chairs covered with worsted work and stiff armchairs were symmetrically
arranged. The stone chimney-shelf had no ornament but a discolored
mirror, and on each side of it were the twisted branches of a pair
of candle-brackets, such as were made at the time of the Peace of
Utrecht. Against a panel opposite, young Granville saw an enormous
crucifix of ebony and ivory surrounded by a wreath of box that had
been blessed. Though there were three windows to the room, looking
out on a country-town garden, laid out in formal square beds edged
with box, the room was so dark that it was difficult to discern, on the
wall opposite the windows, three pictures of sacred subjects painted by
a skilled hand, and purchased, no doubt, during the Revolution by old
Bontems, who, as governor of the district, had never neglected his
opportunities. From the carefully polished floor to the green checked
holland curtains everything shone with conventual cleanliness.
The young man’s heart felt an involuntary chill in this silent retreat
where Angelique dwelt. The habit of frequenting the glittering Paris
drawing-rooms, and the constant whirl of society, had effaced from
his memory the dull and peaceful surroundings of a country life, and
the contrast was so startling as to give him a sort of internal shiver. To
have just left a party at the house of Cambaceres, where life was so
large, where minds could expand, where the splendor of the Imperial
Court was so vividly reflected, and to be dropped suddenly into a
sphere of squalidly narrow ideas—was it not like a leap from Italy into
Greenland?—”Living here is not life!” said he to himself, as he looked
round the Methodistical room. The old Count, seeing his son’s dismay,
went up to him, and taking his hand, led him to a window,
where there was still a gleam of daylight, and while the maid was lighting
the yellow tapers in the candle branches he tried to clear away the
clouds that the dreary place had brought to his brow.
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A Second Home
“Listen, my boy,” said he. “Old Bontems’ widow is a frenzied bigot.
‘When the devil is old—’ you know! I see that the place goes against
the grain. Well, this is the whole truth; the old woman is priestridden;
they have persuaded her that it was high time to make sure of
heaven, and the better to secure Saint Peter and his keys she pays
before-hand. She goes to Mass every day, attends every service, takes
the communion every Sunday God has made, and amuses herself by
restoring chapels. She had given so many ornaments, and albs, and
chasubles, she has crowned the canopy with so many feathers, that
on the occasion of the last Corpus Christi procession as great a crowd
came together as to see a man hanged, just to stare at the priests in
their splendid dresses and all the vessels regilt. This house too is a sort
of Holy Land. It was I who hindered her from giving those three
pictures to the Church—a Domenichino, a Correggio, and an Andrea
del Sarto—worth a good deal of money.”
“But Angelique?” asked the young man.
“If you do not marry her, Angelique is done for,” said the Count.
“Our holy apostles counsel her to live a virgin martyr. I have had the
utmost difficulty in stirring up her little heart, since she has been the
only child, by talking to her of you; but, as you will easily understand,
as soon as she is married you will carry her off to Paris. There,
festivities, married life, the theatres, and the rush of Parisian society,
will soon make her forget confessionals, and fasting, and hair shirts,
and Masses, which are the exclusive nourishment of such creatures.”
“But the fifty thousand francs a year derived from Church property?
Will not all that return—”
“That is the point!” exclaimed the Count, with a cunning glance. “In
consideration of this marriage—for Madame Bontems’ vanity is not a
little flattered by the notion of grafting the Bontems on to the genealogical
tree of the Granvilles—the aforenamed mother agrees to settle her
fortune absolutely on the girl, reserving only a life-interest. The priesthood,
therefore, are set against the marriage; but I have had the banns
published, everything is ready, and in a week you will be out of the
clutches of the mother and her Abbes. You will have the prettiest girl in
Bayeux, a good little soul who will give you no trouble, because she has
sound principles. She has been mortified, as they say in their jargon, by
fasting and prayer—and,” he added in a low voice, “by her mother.”
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A modest tap at the door silenced the Count, who expected to see
the two ladies appear. A little page came in, evidently in a great hurry;
but, abashed by the presence of the two gentlemen, he beckoned to a
housekeeper, who followed him. Dressed in a blue cloth jacket with
short tails, and blue-and-white striped trousers, his hair cut short all
round, the boy’s expression was that of a chorister, so strongly was it
stamped with the compulsory propriety that marks every member
of a bigoted household.
“Mademoiselle Gatienne,” said he, “do you know where the books
are for the offices of the Virgin? The ladies of the Congregation of
the Sacred Heart are going in procession this evening round the
church.”
Gatienne went in search of the books.
“Will they go on much longer, my little man?” asked the Count.
“Oh, half an hour at most.”
“Let us go to look on,” said the father to his son. “There will be
some pretty women there, and a visit to the Cathedral can do us no
harm.”
The young lawyer followed him with a doubtful expression.
“What is the matter?” asked the Count.
“The matter, father, is that I am sure I am right.”
“But you have said nothing.”
“No; but I have been thinking that you have still ten thousand
francs a year left of your original fortune. You will leave them to
me—as long a time hence as possible, I hope. But if you are ready to
give me a hundred thousand francs to make a foolish match, you
will surely allow me to ask you for only fifty thousand to save me
from such a misfortune, and enjoy as a bachelor a fortune equal to
what your Mademoiselle Bontems would bring me.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No, father. These are the facts. The Chief Justice promised me
yesterday that I should have a seat on the Bench. Fifty thousand
francs added to what I have, and to the pay of my appointment, will
give me an income of twelve thousand francs a year. And I then shall
most certainly have a chance of marrying a fortune, better than this
alliance, which will be poor in happiness if rich in goods.”
“It is very clear,” said his father, “that you were not brought up
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A Second Home
under the old /regime/. Does a man of our rank ever allow his wife
to be in his way?”
“But, my dear father, in these days marriage is—”
“Bless me!” cried the Count, interrupting his son, “then what my
old /emigre/ friends tell me is true, I suppose. The Revolution has
left us habits devoid of pleasure, and has infected all the young men
with vulgar principles. You, like my Jacobin brother-in-law, will harangue
me, I suppose, on the Nation, Public Morals, and Disinterestedness!—Good
Heavens! But for the Emperor’s sisters, where
should we be?”
The still hale old man, whom the peasants on the estate persisted
in calling the Signeur de Granville, ended his speech as they entered
the Cathedral porch. In spite of the sanctity of the place, and even as
he dipped his fingers in the holy water, he hummed an air from the
opera of /Rose et Colas/, and then led the way down the side aisles,
stopping by each pillar to survey the rows of heads, all in lines like
ranks of soldiers on parade.
The special service of the Sacred Heart was about to begin. The
ladies affiliated to that congregation were in front near the choir, so the
Count and his son made their way to that part of the nave, and stood
leaning against one of the columns where there was least light, whence
they could command a view of this mass of faces, looking like a meadow
full of flowers. Suddenly, close to young Granville, a voice, sweeter
than it seemed possible to ascribe to a human being, broke into song,
like the first nightingale when winter is past. Though it mingled with
the voices of a thousand other women and the notes of the organ, that
voice stirred his nerves as though they vibrated to the too full and too
piercing sounds of a harmonium. The Parisian turned round, and, seeing
a young figure, though, the head being bent, her face was entirely
concealed by a large white bonnet, concluded that the voice was hers.
He fancied that he recognized Angelique in spite of a brown merino
pelisse that wrapped her, and he nudged his father’s elbow.
“Yes, there she is,” said the Count, after looking where his son
pointed, and then, by an expressive glance, he directed his attention
to the pale face of an elderly woman who had already detected the
strangers, though her false eyes, deep set in dark circles, did not seem
to have strayed from the prayer-book she held.
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Balzac
Angelique raised her face, gazing at the altar as if to inhale the heavy
scent of the incense that came wafted in clouds over the two women.
And then, in the doubtful light that the tapers shed down the nave,
with that of a central lamp and of some lights round the pillars, the
young man beheld a face which shook his determination. A white
watered-silk bonnet closely framed features of perfect regularity, the
oval being completed by the satin ribbon tie that fastened it under
her dimpled chin. Over her forehead, very sweet though low, hair of
a pale gold color parted in two bands and fell over her cheeks, like
the shadow of leaves on a flower. The arches of her eyebrows were
drawn with the accuracy we admire in the best Chinese paintings.
Her nose, almost aquiline in profile, was exceptionally firmly cut,
and her lips were like two rose lines lovingly traced with a delicate
brush. Her eyes, of a light blue, were expressive of innocence.
Though Granville discerned a sort of rigid reserve in this girlish
face, he could ascribe it to the devotion in which Angelique was rapt.
The solemn words of prayer, visible in the cold, came from between
rows of pearls, like a fragrant mist, as it were. The young man involuntarily
bent over her a little to breathe this diviner air. This movement
attracted the girl’s notice; her gaze, raised to the altar, was diverted
to Granville, whom she could see but dimly in the gloom;
but she recognized him as the companion of her youth, and a memory
more vivid than prayer brought a supernatural glow to her face; she
blushed. The young lawyer was thrilled with joy at seeing the hopes
of another life overpowered by those of love, and the glory of the
sanctuary eclipsed by earthly reminiscences; but his triumph was brief.
Angelique dropped her veil, assumed a calm demeanor, and went on
singing without letting her voice betray the least emotion.
Granville was a prey to one single wish, and every thought of prudence
vanished. By the time the service was ended, his impatience
was so great that he could not leave the ladies to go home alone, but
came at once to make his bow to “his little wife.” They bashfully
greeted each other in the Cathedral porch in the presence of the congregation.
Madame Bontems was tremulous with pride as she took
the Comte de Granville’s arm, though he, forced to offer it in the
presence of all the world was vexed enough with his son for his illadvised
impatience.
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A Second Home
For about a fortnight, between the official announcement of the
intended marriage of the Vicomte de Granville to Mademoiselle
Bontems and the solemn day of the wedding, he came assiduously to
visit his lady-love in the dismal drawing-room, to which he became
accustomed. His long calls were devoted to watching Angelique’s
character; for his prudence, happily, had made itself heard again in
the day after their first meeting. He always found her seated at a little
table of some West Indian wood, and engaged in marking the linen
of her trousseau. Angelique never spoke first on the subject of religion.
If the young lawyer amused himself with fingering the handsome
rosary that she kept in a little green velvet bag, if he laughed as
he looked at a relic such as usually is attached to this means of grace,
Angelique would gently take the rosary out of his hands and replace
it in the bag without a word, putting it away at once. When, now
and then, Granville was so bold as to make mischievous remarks as
to certain religious practices, the pretty girl listened to him with the
obstinate smile of assurance.
“You must either believe nothing, or believe everything the Church
teaches,” she would say. “Would you wish to have a woman without a
religion as the mother of your children?—No.—What man may dare
judge as between disbelievers and God? And how can I then blame
what the Church allows?”
Angelique appeared to be animated by such fervent charity, the young
man saw her look at him with such perfect conviction, that he sometimes
felt tempted to embrace her religious views; her firm belief that
she was in the only right road aroused doubts in his mind, which she
tried to turn to account.
But then Granville committed the fatal blunder of mistaking the
enchantment of desire for that of love. Angelique was so happy in
reconciling the voice of her heart with that of duty, by giving way to
a liking that had grown up with her from childhood, that the deluded
man could not discern which of the two spoke the louder. Are
not all young men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to
infer beauty of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse
leads them to believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical
perfection. If Angelique had not been at liberty to give vent to her
sentiments, they would soon have dried up in her heart like a plant
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Balzac
watered with some deadly acid. How should a lover be aware of
bigotry so well hidden?
This was the course of young Granville’s feelings during that fortnight,
devoured by him like a book of which the end is absorbing.
Angelique, carefully watched by him, seemed the gentlest of creatures,
and he even caught himself feeling grateful to Madame Bontems,
who, by implanting so deeply the principles of religion, had in some
degree inured her to meet the troubles of life.
On the day named for signing the inevitable contract, Madame
Bontems made her son-in-law pledge himself solemnly to respect
her daughter’s religious practices, to allow her entire liberty of conscience,
to permit her to go to communion, to church, to confession
as often as she pleased, and never to control her choice of priestly
advisers. At this critical moment Angelique looked at her future husband
with such pure and innocent eyes, that Granville did not hesitate
to give his word. A smile puckered the lips of the Abbe Fontanon,
a pale man, who directed the consciences of this household. Mademoiselle
Bontems, by a slight nod, seemed to promise that she would
never take an unfair advantage of this freedom. As to the old Count,
he gently whistled the tune of an old song, Va-t-en-voir s’ils viennent
(“Go and see if they are coming on!”)
A FEW DAYS AFTER the wedding festivities of which so much is thought
in the provinces, Granville and his wife went to Paris, whither the
young man was recalled by his appointment as public prosecutor to
the Supreme Court of the Seine circuit.
When the young couple set out to find a residence, Angelique used
the influence that the honeymoon gives to every wife in persuading
her husband to take a large apartment in the ground-floor of a house
at the corner of the Vieille Rue du Temple and the Rue Nueve Saint-
Francois. Her chief reason for this choice was that the house was
close to the Rue d’Orleans, where there was a church, and not far
from a small chapel in the Rue Saint-Louis.
“A good housewife provides for everything,” said her husband,
laughing.
Angelique pointed out to him that this part of Paris, known as the
Marais, was within easy reach of the Palais de Justice, and that the
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lawyers they knew lived in the neighborhood. A fairly large garden
made the apartment particularly advantageous to a young couple;
the children—if Heaven should send them any—could play in the
open air; the courtyard was spacious, and there were good stables.
The lawyer wished to live in the Chaussee d’Antin, where everything
is fresh and bright, where the fashions may be seen while still
new, where a well-dressed crowd throngs the Boulevards, and the
distance is less to the theatres or places of amusement; but he was
obliged to give way to the coaxing ways of a young wife, who asked
this as his first favor; so, to please her, he settled in the Marais.
Granville’s duties required him to work hard—all the more, because
they were new to him—so he devoted himself in the first place to
furnishing his private study and arranging his books. He was soon
established in a room crammed with papers, and left the decoration of
the house to his wife. He was all the better pleased to plunge Angelique
into the bustle of buying furniture and fittings, the source of so much
pleasure and of so many associations to most young women, because
he was rather ashamed of depriving her of his company more often
than the usages of early married life require. As soon as his work was
fairly under way, he gladly allowed his wife to tempt him out of his
study to consider the effect of furniture or hangings, which he had
before only seen piecemeal or unfinished.
If the old adage is true that says a woman may be judged of from
her front door, her rooms must express her mind with even greater
fidelity. Madame de Granville had perhaps stamped the various things
she had ordered with the seal of her own character; the young lawyer
was certainly startled by the cold, arid solemnity that reigned in these
rooms; he found nothing to charm his taste; everything was discordant,
nothing gratified the eye. The rigid mannerism that prevailed
in the sitting-room at Bayeux had invaded his home; the broad panels
were hollowed in circles, and decorated with those arabesques of
which the long, monotonous mouldings are in such bad taste. Anxious
to find excuses for his wife, the young husband began again,
looking first at the long and lofty ante-room through which the
apartment was entered. The color of the panels, as ordered by his
wife, was too heavy, and the very dark green velvet used to cover the
benches added to the gloom of this entrance—not, to be sure, an
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important room, but giving a first impression—just as we measure a
man’s intelligence by his first address. An ante-room is a kind of
preface which announces what is to follow, but promises nothing.
The young husband wondered whether his wife could really have
chosen the lamp of an antique pattern, which hung in the centre of
this bare hall, the pavement of black and white marble, and the paper
in imitation of blocks of stone, with green moss on them in places.
A handsome, but not new, barometer hung on the middle of one of
the walls, as if to accentuate the void. At the sight of it all, he looked
round at his wife; he saw her so much pleased by the red braid binding
to the cotton curtains, so satisfied with the barometer and the
strictly decent statue that ornamented a large Gothic stove, that he
had not the barbarous courage to overthrow such deep convictions.
Instead of blaming his wife, Granville blamed himself, accusing himself
of having failed in his duty of guiding the first steps in Paris of a
girl brought up at Bayeux.
From this specimen, what might not be expected of the other
rooms? What was to be looked for from a woman who took fright
at the bare legs of a Caryatid, and who would not look at a chandelier
or a candle-stick if she saw on it the nude outlines of an Egyptian
bust? At this date the school of David was at the height of its glory;
all the art of France bore the stamp of his correct design and his love
of antique types, which indeed gave his pictures the character of colored
sculpture. But none of these devices of Imperial luxury found
civic rights under Madame de Granville’s roof. The spacious, square
drawing-room remained as it had been left from the time of Louis
XV., in white and tarnished gold, lavishly adorned by the architect
with checkered lattice-work and the hideous garlands due to the uninventive
designers of the time. Still, if harmony at least had prevailed,
if the furniture of modern mahogany had but assumed the
twisted forms of which Boucher’s corrupt taste first set the fashion,
Angelique’s room would only have suggested the fantastic contrast
of a young couple in the nineteenth century living as though they
were in the eighteenth; but a number of details were in ridiculous
discord. The consoles, the clocks, the candelabra, were decorated with
the military trophies which the wars of the Empire commended to
the affections of the Parisians; and the Greek helmets, the Roman
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crossed daggers, and the shields so dear to military enthusiasm that
they were introduced on furniture of the most peaceful uses, had no
fitness side by side with the delicate and profuse arabesques that delighted
Madame de Pompadour.
Bigotry tends to an indescribably tiresome kind of humility which
does not exclude pride. Whether from modesty or by choice, Madame
de Granville seemed to have a horror of light and cheerful
colors; perhaps, too, she imagined that brown and purple beseemed
the dignity of a magistrate. How could a girl accustomed to an austere
life have admitted the luxurious divans that may suggest evil
thoughts, the elegant and tempting boudoirs where naughtiness may
be imagined?
The poor husband was in despair. From the tone in which he approved,
only seconding the praises she bestowed on herself, Angelique
understood that nothing really pleased him; and she expressed so much
regret at her want of success, that Granville, who was very much in
love, regarded her disappointment as a proof of her affection instead of
resentment for an offence to her self-conceit. After all, could he expect
a girl just snatched from the humdrum of country notions, with no
experience of the niceties and grace of Paris life, to know or do any
better? Rather would he believe that his wife’s choice had been overruled
by the tradesmen than allow himself to own the truth. If he had
been less in love, he would have understood that the dealers, always
quick to discern their customers’ ideas, had blessed Heaven for sending
them a tasteless little bigot, who would take their old-fashioned goods
off their hands. So he comforted the pretty provincial.
“Happiness, dear Angelique, does not depend on a more or less
elegant piece of furniture; it depends on the wife’s sweetness, gentleness,
and love.”
“Why, it is my duty to love you,” said Angelique mildly, “and I can
have no more delightful duty to carry out.”
Nature has implanted in the heart of woman so great a desire to
please, so deep a craving for love, that, even in a youthful bigot, the
ideas of salvation and a future existence must give way to the happiness
of early married life. And, in fact, from the month of April,
when they were married, till the beginning of winter, the husband
and wife lived in perfect union. Love and hard work have the grace
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of making a man tolerably indifferent to external matters. Being
obliged to spend half the day in court fighting for the gravest interests
of men’s lives or fortunes, Granville was less alive than another
might have been to certain facts in his household.
If, on a Friday, he found none but Lenten fare, and by chance asked
for a dish of meat without getting it, his wife, forbidden by the
Gospel to tell a lie, could still, by such subterfuges as are permissible
in the interests of religion, cloak what was premeditated purpose
under some pretext of her own carelessness or the scarcity in the
market. She would often exculpate herself at the expense of the cook,
and even go so far as to scold him. At that time young lawyers did
not, as they do now, keep the fasts of the Church, the four rogation
seasons, and the vigils of festivals; so Granville was not at first aware
of the regular recurrence of these Lenten meals, which his wife took
care should be made dainty by the addition of teal, moor-hen, and
fish-pies, that their amphibious meat or high seasoning might cheat
his palate. Thus the young man unconsciously lived in strict orthodoxy,
and worked out his salvation without knowing it.
On week-days he did not know whether his wife went to Mass or
no. On Sundays, with very natural amiability, he accompanied her
to church to make up to her, as it were, for sometimes giving up
vespers in favor of his company; he could not at first fully enter into
the strictness of his wife’s religious views. The theatres being impossible
in summer by reason of the heat, Granville had not even the
opportunity of the great success of a piece to give rise to the serious
question of play-going. And, in short, at the early stage of a union to
which a man has been led by a young girl’s beauty, he can hardly be
exacting as to his amusements. Youth is greedy rather than dainty,
and possession has a charm in itself. How should he be keen to note
coldness, dignity, and reserve in the woman to whom he ascribes the
excitement he himself feels, and lends the glow of the fire that burns
within him? He must have attained a certain conjugal calm before he
discovers that a bigot sits waiting for love with her arms folded.
Granville, therefore, believed himself happy till a fatal event brought
its influence to bear on his married life. In the month of November
1808 the Canon of Bayeux Cathedral who had been the keeper of
Madame Bontems’ conscience and her daughter’s, came to Paris,
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spurred by the ambition to be at the head of a church in the capital—
a position which he regarded perhaps as the stepping-stone to a bishopric.
On resuming his former control of this wandering lamb, he
was horrified to find her already so much deteriorated by the air of
Paris, and strove to reclaim her to his chilly fold. Frightened by the
exhortations of this priest, a man of about eight-and-thirty, who
brought with him, into the circle of the enlightened and tolerant
Paris clergy, the bitter provincial catholicism and the inflexible bigotry
which fetter timid souls with endless exactions, Madame de
Granville did penance and returned from her Jansenist errors.
It would be tiresome to describe minutely all the circumstances
which insensibly brought disaster on this household; it will be enough
to relate the simple facts without giving them in strict order of time.
The first misunderstanding between the young couple was, however,
a serious one.
When Granville took his wife into society she never declined solemn
functions, such as dinners, concerts, or parties given by the Judges
superior to her husband in the legal profession; but for a long time
she constantly excused herself on the plea of a sick headache when
they were invited to a ball. One day Granville, out of patience with
these assumed indispositions, destroyed a note of invitation to a ball
at the house of a Councillor of State, and gave his wife only a verbal
invitation. Then, on the evening, her health being quite above suspicion,
he took her to a magnificent entertainment.
“My dear,” said he, on their return home, seeing her wear an offensive
air of depression, “your position as a wife, the rank you hold in
society, and the fortune you enjoy, impose on you certain duties of
which no divine law can relieve you. Are you not your husband’s
pride? You are required to go to balls when I go, and to appear in a
becoming manner.”
“And what is there, my dear, so disastrous in my dress?”
“It is your manner, my dear. When a young man comes up to
speak to you, you look so serious that a spiteful person might believe
you doubtful of your own virtue. You seem to fear lest a smile should
undo you. You really look as if you were asking forgiveness of God
for the sins that may be committed around you. The world, my
dearest, is not a convent.—But, as you mentioned your dress, I may
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confess to you that it is no less a duty to conform to the customs and
fashions of Society.”
“Do you wish that I should display my shape like those indecent
women who wear gowns so low that impudent eyes can stare at their
bare shoulders and their—”
“There is a difference, my dear,” said her husband, interrupting her,
“between uncovering your whole bust and giving some grace to your
dress. You wear three rows of net frills that cover your throat up to
your chin. You look as if you had desired your dressmaker to destroy
the graceful line of your shoulders and bosom with as much care as a
coquette would devote to obtaining from hers a bodice that might
emphasize her covered form. Your bust is wrapped in so many folds
that every one was laughing at your affectation of prudery. You would
be really grieved if I were to repeat the ill-natured remarks made on
your appearance.”
“Those who admire such obscenity will not have to bear the burthen
if we sin,” said the lady tartly.
“And you did not dance?” asked Granville.
“I shall never dance,” she replied.
“If I tell you that you ought to dance!” said her husband sharply.
“Yes, you ought to follow the fashions, to wear flowers in your hair,
and diamonds. Remember, my dear, that rich people—and we are
rich—are obliged to keep up luxury in the State. Is it not far better to
encourage manufacturers than to distribute money in the form of
alms through the medium of the clergy?”
“You talk as a statesman!” said Angelique.
“And you as a priest,” he retorted.
The discussion was bitter. Madame de Granville’s answers, though
spoken very sweetly and in a voice as clear as a church bell, showed an
obstinacy that betrayed priestly influence. When she appealed to the
rights secured to her by Granville’s promise, she added that her director
specially forbade her going to balls; then her husband pointed out to
her that the priest was overstepping the regulations of the Church.
This odious theological dispute was renewed with great violence
and acerbity on both sides when Granville proposed to take his wife
to the play. Finally, the lawyer, whose sole aim was to defeat the
pernicious influence exerted over his wife by her old confessor, placed
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the question on such a footing that Madame de Granville, in a spirit
of defiance, referred it by writing to the Court of Rome, asking in so
many words whether a woman could wear low gowns and go to the
play and to balls without compromising her salvation.
The reply of the venerable Pope Pius VII. came at once, strongly
condemning the wife’s recalcitrancy and blaming the priest. This letter,
a chapter on conjugal duties, might have been dictated by the
spirit of Fenelon, whose grace and tenderness pervaded every line.
“A wife is right to go wherever her husband may take her. Even if
she sins by his command, she will not be ultimately held answerable.”
These two sentences of the Pope’s homily only made Madame
de Granville and her director accuse him of irreligion.
But before this letter had arrived, Granville had discovered the strict
observance of fast days that his wife forced upon him, and gave his
servants orders to serve him with meat every day in the year. However
much annoyed his wife might be by these commands, Granville,
who cared not a straw for such indulgence or abstinence, persisted
with manly determination.
Is it not an offence to the weakest creature that can think at all to
be compelled to do, by the will of another, anything that he would
otherwise have done simply of his own accord? Of all forms of tyranny,
the most odious is that which constantly robs the soul of the
merit of its thoughts and deeds. It has to abdicate without having
reigned. The word we are readiest to speak, the feelings we most love
to express, die when we are commanded to utter them.
Ere long the young man ceased to invite his friends, to give parties
or dinners; the house might have been shrouded in crape. A house
where the mistress is a bigot has an atmosphere of its own. The servants,
who are, of course, under her immediate control, are chosen
among a class who call themselves pious, and who have an unmistakable
physiognomy. Just as the jolliest fellow alive, when he joins the
/gendarmerie/, has the countenance of a gendarme, so those who
give themselves over to the habit of lowering their eyes and preserving
a sanctimonious mien clothes them in a livery of hypocrisy which
rogues can affect to perfection.
And besides, bigots constitute a sort of republic; they all know
each other; the servants they recommend and hand on from one to
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another are a race apart, and preserved by them, as horse-breeders will
admit no animal into their stables that has not a pedigree. The more
the impious—as they are thought—come to understand a household
of bigots, the more they perceive that everything is stamped
with an indescribable squalor; they find there, at the same time, an
appearance of avarice and mystery, as in a miser’s home, and the dank
scent of cold incense which gives a chill to the stale atmosphere of a
chapel. This methodical meanness, this narrowness of thought, which
is visible in every detail, can only be expressed by one word—Bigotry.
In these sinister and pitiless houses Bigotry is written on the
furniture, the prints, the pictures; speech is bigoted, the silence is
bigoted, the faces are those of bigots. The transformation of men
and things into bigotry is an inexplicable mystery, but the fact is
evident. Everybody can see that bigots do not walk, do not sit, do
not speak, as men of the world walk, sit, and speak. Under their roof
every one is ill at ease, no one laughs, stiffness and formality infect
everything, from the mistress’ cap down to her pincushion; eyes are
not honest, the folks are more like shadows, and the lady of the
house seems perched on a throne of ice.
One morning poor Granville discerned with grief and pain that all
the symptoms of bigotry had invaded his home. There are in the
world different spheres in which the same effects are seen though
produced by dissimilar causes. Dulness hedges such miserable homes
round with walls of brass, enclosing the horrors of the desert and the
infinite void. The home is not so much a tomb as that far worse
thing—a convent. In the center of this icy sphere the lawyer could
study his wife dispassionately. He observed, not without keen regret,
the narrow-mindedness that stood confessed in the very way that her
hair grew, low on the forehead, which was slightly depressed; he discovered
in the perfect regularity of her features a certain set rigidity
which before long made him hate the assumed sweetness that had
bewitched him. Intuition told him that one day of disaster those
thin lips might say, “My dear, it is for your good!”
Madame de Granville’s complexion was acquiring a dull pallor and
an austere expression that were a kill-joy to all who came near her. Was
this change wrought by the ascetic habits of a pharisaism which is not
piety any more than avarice is economy? It would be hard to say. Beauty
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without expression is perhaps an imposture. This imperturbable set
smile that the young wife always wore when she looked at Granville
seemed to be a sort of Jesuitical formula of happiness, by which she
thought to satisfy all the requirements of married life. Her charity was
an offence, her soulless beauty was monstrous to those who knew her;
the mildness of her speech was an irritation: she acted, not on feeling,
but on duty.
There are faults which may yield in a wife to the stern lessons of
experience, or to a husband’s warnings; but nothing can counteract
false ideas of religion. An eternity of happiness to be won, set in the
scale against worldly enjoyment, triumphs over everything and makes
every pang endurable. Is it not the apotheosis of egotism, of Self
beyond the grave? Thus even the Pope was censured at the tribunal of
the priest and the young devotee. To be always in the right is a feeling
which absorbs every other in these tyrannous souls.
For some time past a secret struggle had been going on between the
ideas of the husband and wife, and the young man was soon weary of
a battle to which there could be no end. What man, what temper,
can endure the sight of a hypocritically affectionate face and categorical
resistance to his slightest wishes? What is to be done with a wife
who takes advantage of his passion to protect her coldness, who seems
determined on being blandly inexorable, prepares herself ecstatically
to play the martyr, and looks on her husband as a scourge from God,
a means of flagellation that may spare her the fires of purgatory?
What picture can give an idea of these women who make virtue
hateful by defying the gentle precepts of that faith which Saint John
epitomized in the words, “Love one another”?
If there was a bonnet to be found in a milliner’s shop that was
condemned to remain in the window, or to be packed off to the
colonies, Granville was certain to see it on his wife’s head; if a material
of bad color or hideous design were to be found, she would select
it. These hapless bigots are heart-breaking in their notions of dress.
Want of taste is a defect inseparable from false pietism.
And so, in the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville
had no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the
theatres. Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that
hung between his bed and Angelique’s seemed figurative of his des-
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tiny. Does it not represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done
to death in all the prime of life and beauty? The ivory of that cross
was less cold than Angelique crucifying her husband under the plea
of virtue. This it was that lay at the root of their woes; the young
wife saw nothing but duty where she should have given love. Here,
one Ash Wednesday, rose the pale and spectral form of Fasting in
Lent, of Total Abstinence, commanded in a severe tone—and
Granville did not deem it advisable to write in his turn to the Pope
and take the opinion of the Consistory on the proper way of observing
Lent, the Ember days, and the eve of great festivals.
His misfortune was too great! He could not even complain, for what
could he say? He had a pretty young wife attached to her duties, virtuous—nay,
a model of all the virtues. She had a child every year, nursed
them herself, and brought them up in the highest principles. Being
charitable, Angelique was promoted to rank as an angel. The old women
who constituted the circle in which she moved—for at that time it was
not yet “the thing” for young women to be religious as a matter of
fashion—all admired Madame de Granville’s piety, and regarded her,
not indeed as a virgin, but as a martyr. They blamed not the wife’s
scruples, but the barbarous philoprogenitiveness of the husband.
Granville, by insensible degrees, overdone with work, bereft of conjugal
consolations, and weary of a world in which he wandered alone, by
the time he was two-and-thirty had sunk into the Slough of Despond.
He hated life. Having too lofty a notion of the responsibilities imposed
on him by his position to set the example of a dissipated life, he tried to
deaden feeling by hard study, and began a great book on Law.
But he was not allowed to enjoy the monastic peace he had hoped
for. When the celestial Angelique saw him desert worldly society to
work at home with such regularity, she tried to convert him. It had
been a real sorrow to her to know that her husband’s opinions were
not strictly Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if
her husband should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so
that she could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell.
Thus Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments,
the narrow views by which his wife—fancying she had achieved
the first victory—tried to gain a second by bringing him back within
the pale of the Church.
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This was the last straw. What can be more intolerable than the blind
struggle in which the obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of
a lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pinpricks
to which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville
neglected his home. Everything there was unendurable. His children,
broken by their mother’s frigid despotism, dared not go with him to
the play; indeed, Granville could never give them any pleasure without
bringing down punishment from their terrible mother. His loving nature
was weaned to indifference, to a selfishness worse than death. His boys,
indeed, he saved from this hell by sending them to school at an early
age, and insisting on his right to train them. He rarely interfered between
his wife and her daughters; but he was resolved that they should
marry as soon as they were old enough.
Even if he had wished to take violent measures, he could have
found no justification; his wife, backed by a formidable army of
dowagers, would have had him condemned by the whole world.
Thus Granville had no choice but to live in complete isolation; but,
crushed under the tyranny of misery, he could not himself bear to see
how altered he was by grief and toil. And he dreaded any connection
or intimacy with women of the world, having no hope of finding
any consolation.
The improving history of this melancholy household gave rise to
no events worthy of record during the fifteen years between 1806
and 1825. Madame de Granville was exactly the same after losing
her husband’s affection as she had been during the time when she
called herself happy. She paid for Masses, beseeching God and the
Saints to enlighten her as to what the faults were which displeased
her husband, and to show her the way to restore the erring sheep; but
the more fervent her prayers, the less was Granville to be seen at
home.
For about five years now, having achieved a high position as a judge,
Granville had occupied the /entresol/ of the house to avoid living with
the Comtesse de Granville. Every morning a little scene took place,
which, if evil tongues are to be believed, is repeated in many households
as the result of incompatibility of temper, of moral or physical
malady, or of antagonisms leading to such disaster as is recorded in this
history. At about eight in the morning a housekeeper, bearing no small
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resemblance to a nun, rang at the Comte de Granville’s door. Admitted
to the room next to the Judge’s study, she always repeated the same
message to the footman, and always in the same tone:
“Madame would be glad to know whether Monsieur le Comte has
had a good night, and if she is to have the pleasure of his company at
breakfast.”
“Monsieur presents his compliments to Madame la Comtesse,”
the valet would say, after speaking with his master, “and begs her to
hold him excused; important business compels him to be in court
this morning.”
A minute later the woman reappeared and asked on madame’s behalf
whether she would have the pleasure of seeing Monsieur le Comte
before he went out.
“He is gone,” was always the rely, though often his carriage was still
waiting.
This little dialogue by proxy became a daily ceremonial. Granville’s
servant, a favorite with his master, and the cause of more than one
quarrel over his irreligious and dissipated conduct, would even go
into his master’s room, as a matter of form, when the Count was not
there, and come back with the same formula in reply.
The aggrieved wife was always on the watch for her husband’s return,
and standing on the steps so as to meet him like an embodiment
of remorse. The petty aggressiveness which lies at the root of
the monastic temper was the foundation of Madame de Granville’s;
she was now five-and-thirty, and looked forty. When the count was
compelled by decency to speak to his wife or to dine at home, she
was only too well pleased to inflict her company upon him, with her
acid-sweet remarks and the intolerable dulness of her narrow-minded
circle, and she tried to put him in the wrong before the servants and
her charitable friends.
When, at this time, the post of President in a provincial court was
offered to the Comte de Granville, who was in high favor, he begged to
be allowed to remain in Paris. This refusal, of which the Keeper of the
Seals alone knew the reasons, gave rise to extraordinary conjectures on
the part of the Countess’ intimate friends and of her director. Granville,
a rich man with a hundred thousand francs a year, belonged to one of the
first families of Normandy. His appointment to be Presiding Judge would
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have been the stepping-stone to a peer’s seat; whence this strange lack of
ambition? Why had he given up his great book on Law? What was the
meaning of the dissipation which for nearly six years had made him a
stranger to his home, his family, his study, to all he ought to hold dear?
The Countess’ confessor, who based his hopes of a bishopric quite as
much on the families he governed as on the services he rendered to an
association of which he was an ardent propagator, was much disappointed
by Granville’s refusal, and tried to insinuate calumnious explanations: “If
Monsieur le Comte had such an objection to provincial life, it was perhaps
because he dreaded finding himself under the necessity of leading a
regular life, compelled to set an example of moral conduct, and to live
with the Countess, from whom nothing could have alienated him but
some illicit connection; for how could a woman so pure as Madame de
Granville ever tolerate the disorderly life into which her husband had
drifted?” The sanctimonious woman accepted as facts these hints, which
unluckily were not merely hypothetical, and Madame de Granville was
stricken as by a thunderbolt.
Angelique, knowing nothing of the world, of love and its follies,
was so far from conceiving of any conditions of married life unlike
those that had alienated her husband as possible, that she believed
him to be incapable of the errors which are crimes in the eyes of
any wife. When the Count ceased to demand anything of her, she
imagined that the tranquillity he now seemed to enjoy was in the
course of nature; and, as she had really given to him all the love
which her heart was capable of feeling for a man, while the priest’s
conjectures were the utter destruction of the illusions she had hitherto
cherished, she defended her husband; at the same time, she
could not eradicate the suspicion that had been so ingeniously sown
in her soul.
These alarms wrought such havoc in her feeble brain that they
made her ill; she was worn by low fever. These incidents took place
during Lent 1822; she would not pretermit her austerities, and fell
into a decline that put her life in danger. Granville’s indifference was
added torture; his care and attention were such as a nephew feels
himself bound to give to some old uncle.
Though the Countess had given up her persistent nagging and remonstrances,
and tried to receive her husband with affectionate words,
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the sharpness of the bigot showed through, and one speech would
often undo the work of a week.
Towards the end of May, the warm breath of spring, and more
nourishing diet than her Lenten fare, restored Madame de Granville
to a little strength. One morning, on coming home from Mass, she
sat down on a stone bench in the little garden, where the sun’s kisses
reminded her of the early days of her married life, and she looked
back across the years to see wherein she might have failed in her duty
as a wife and mother. She was broken in upon by the Abbe Fontanon
in an almost indescribable state of excitement.
“Has any misfortune befallen you, Father?” she asked with filial
solicitude.
“Ah! I only wish,” cried the Normandy priest, “that all the woes
inflicted on you by the hand of God were dealt out to me; but, my
admirable friend, there are trials to which you can but bow.”
“Can any worse punishments await me than those with which Providence
crushes me by making my husband the instrument of His wrath?”
“You must prepare yourself, daughter, to yet worse mischief than
we and your pious friends had ever conceived of.”
“Then I may thank God,” said the Countess, “for vouchsafing to
use you as the messenger of His will, and thus, as ever, setting the
treasures of mercy by the side of the scourges of His wrath, just as in
bygone days He showed a spring to Hagar when He had driven her
into the desert.”
“He measures your sufferings by the strength of your resignation
and the weight of your sins.”
“Speak; I am ready to hear!” As she said it she cast her eyes up to
heaven. “Speak, Monsieur Fontanon.”
“For seven years Monsieur Granville has lived in sin with a concubine,
by whom he has two children; and on this adulterous connection
he has spent more than five hundred thousand francs, which
ought to have been the property of his legitimate family.”
“I must see it to believe it!” cried the Countess.
“Far be it from you!” exclaimed the Abbe. “You must forgive, my
daughter, and wait in patience and prayer till God enlightens your
husband; unless, indeed, you choose to adopt against him the means
offered you by human laws.”
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The long conversation that ensued between the priest and his penitent
resulted in an extraordinary change in the Countess; she abruptly
dismissed him, called her servants who were alarmed at her flushed
face and crazy energy. She ordered her carriage—countermanded it—
changed her mind twenty times in the hour; but at last, at about
three o’clock, as if she had come to some great determination, she
went out, leaving the whole household in amazement at such a sudden
transformation.
“Is the Count coming home to dinner?” she asked of his servant, to
whom she would never speak.
“No, madame.”
“Did you go with him to the Courts this morning?”
“Yes, madame.”
“And to-day is Monday?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Then do the Courts sit on Mondays nowadays?”
“Devil take you!” cried the man, as his mistress drove off after
saying to the coachman:
“Rue Taitbout.”
MADEMOISELLE DE BELLEFEUILLE was weeping: Roger, sitting by her
side, held one of her hands between his own. He was silent, looking
by turns at little Charles—who, not understanding his mother’s grief,
stood speechless at the sight of her tears—at the cot where Eugenie
lay sleeping, and Caroline’s face, on which grief had the effect of rain
falling across the beams of cheerful sunshine.
“Yes, my darling,” said Roger, after a long silence, “that is the great
secret: I am married. But some day I hope we may form but one
family. My wife has been given over ever since last March. I do not
wish her dead; still, if it should please God to take her to Himself, I
believe she will be happier in Paradise than in a world to whose griefs
and pleasures she is equally indifferent.”
“How I hate that woman! How could she bear to make you unhappy?
And yet it is to that unhappiness that I owe my happiness!”
Her tears suddenly ceased.
“Caroline, let us hope,” cried Roger. “Do not be frightened by
anything that priest may have said to you. Though my wife’s confes-
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sor is a man to be feared for his power in the congregation, if he
should try to blight our happiness I would find means—”
“What could you do?”
“We would go to Italy: I would fly—”
A shriek that rang out from the adjoining room made Roger start
and Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille quake; but she rushed into the drawing-room,
and there found Madame de Granville in a dead faint.
When the Countess recovered her senses, she sighed deeply on finding
herself supported by the Count and her rival, whom she instinctively
pushed away with a gesture of contempt. Mademoiselle de
Bellefeuille rose to withdraw.
“You are at home, madame,” said Granville, taking Caroline by the
arm. “Stay.”
The Judge took up his wife in his arms, carried her to the carriage,
and got into it with her.
“Who is it that has brought you to the point of wishing me dead,
of resolving to fly?” asked the Countess, looking at her husband with
grief mingled with indignation. “Was I not young? you thought me
pretty—what fault have you to find with me? Have I been false to
you? Have I not been a virtuous and well-conducted wife? My heart
has cherished no image but yours, my ears have listened to no other
voice. What duty have I failed in? What have I ever denied you?”
“Happiness, madame,” said the Count severely. “You know, madame,
that there are two ways of serving God. Some Christians imagine
that by going to church at fixed hours to say a /Paternoster/, by
attending Mass regularly and avoiding sin, they may win heaven—
but they, madame, will go to hell; they have not loved God for
himself, they have not worshiped Him as He chooses to be worshiped,
they have made no sacrifice. Though mild in seeming, they
are hard on their neighbors; they see the law, the letter, not the spirit.—
This is how you have treated me, your earthly husband; you have
sacrificed my happiness to your salvation; you were always absorbed
in prayer when I came to you in gladness of heart; you wept when
you should have cheered my toil; you have never tried to satisfy any
demands I have made on you.”
“And if they were wicked,” cried the Countess hotly, “was I to lose
my soul to please you?”
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A Second Home
“It is a sacrifice which another, a more loving woman, has dared to
make,” said Granville coldly.
“Dear God!” she cried, bursting into tears, “Thou hearest! Has he
been worthy of the prayers and penance I have lived in, wearing
myself out to atone for his sins and my own?—Of what avail is
virtue?”
“To win Heaven, my dear. A woman cannot be at the same time
the wife of a man and the spouse of Christ. That would be bigamy;
she must choose between a husband and a nunnery. For the sake of
future advantage you have stripped your soul of all the love, all the
devotion, which God commands that you should have for me, you
have cherished no feeling but hatred—”
“Have I not loved you?” she put in.
“No, madame.”
“Then what is love?” the Countess involuntarily inquired.
“Love, my dear,” replied Granville, with a sort of ironical surprise,
“you are incapable of understanding it. The cold sky of Normandy is
not that of Spain. This difference of climate is no doubt the secret of
our disaster.—To yield to our caprices, to guess them, to find pleasure
in pain, to sacrifice the world’s opinion, your pride, your religion
even, and still regard these offerings as mere grains of incense
burnt in honor of the idol—that is love—”
“The love of ballet-girls!” cried the Countess in horror. “Such flames
cannot last, and must soon leave nothing but ashes and cinders, regret
or despair. A wife ought, in my opinion, to bring you true friendship,
equable warmth—”
“You speak of warmth as negroes speak of ice,” retorted the Count,
with a sardonic smile. “Consider that the humblest daisy has more
charms than the proudest and most gorgeous of the red hawthorns
that attract us in spring by their strong scent and brilliant color.—At
the same time,” he went on, “I will do you justice. You have kept so
precisely in the straight path of imaginary duty prescribed by law,
that only to make you understand wherein you have failed towards
me, I should be obliged to enter into details which would offend
your dignity, and instruct you in matters which would seem to you
to undermine all morality.”
“And you dare to speak of morality when you have but just left the
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house where you have dissipated your children’s fortune in debaucheries?”
cried the Countess, maddened by her husband’s reticence.
“There, madame, I must correct you,” said the Count, coolly interrupting
his wife. “Though Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille is rich, it
is at nobody’s expense. My uncle was master of his fortune, and had
several heirs. In his lifetime, and out of pure friendship, regarding her
as his niece, he gave her the little estate of Bellefeuille. As for anything
else, I owe it to his liberality—”
“Such conduct is only worthy of a Jacobin!” said the sanctimonious
Angelique.
“Madame, you are forgetting that your own father was one of the
Jacobins whom you scorn so uncharitably,” said the Count severely.
“Citizen Bontems was signing death-warrants at a time when my uncle
was doing France good service.”
Madame de Granville was silenced. But after a short pause, the
remembrance of what she had just seen reawakened in her soul the
jealousy which nothing can kill in a woman’s heart, and she murmured,
as if to herself— “How can a woman thus destroy her own
soul and that of others?”
“Bless me, madame,” replied the Count, tired of this dialogue, “you
yourself may some day have to answer that question.” The Countess
was scared. “You perhaps will be held excused by the merciful Judge,
who will weigh our sins,” he went on, “in consideration of the conviction
with which you have worked out my misery. I do not hate you—
I hate those who have perverted your heart and your reason. You have
prayed for me, just as Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has given me her
heart and crowned my life with love. You should have been my mistress
and the prayerful saint by turns.—Do me the justice to confess
that I am no reprobate, no debauchee. My life was cleanly. Alas! after
seven years of wretchedness, the craving for happiness led me by an
imperceptible descent to love another woman and make a second home.
And do not imagine that I am singular; there are in this city thousands
of husbands, all led by various causes to live this twofold life.”
“Great God!” cried the Countess. “How heavy is the cross Thou
hast laid on me to bear! If the husband Thou hast given me here
below in Thy wrath can only be made happy through my death, take
me to Thyself!”
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A Second Home
“If you had always breathed such admirable sentiments and such
devotion, we should be happy yet,” said the Count coldly.
“Indeed,” cried Angelique, melting into a flood of tears, “forgive
me if I have done any wrong. Yes, monsieur, I am ready to obey you
in all things, feeling sure that you will desire nothing but what is just
and natural; henceforth I will be all you can wish your wife to be.”
“If your purpose, madame, is to compel me to say that I no longer
love you, I shall find the cruel courage to tell you so. Can I command
my heart? Can I wipe out in an instant the traces of fifteen
years of suffering?—I have ceased to love.—These words contain a
mystery as deep as lies the words /I love/. Esteem, respect, friendship
may be won, lost, regained; but as to love—I might school myself
for a thousand years, and it would not blossom again, especially for a
woman too old to respond to it.”
“I hope, Monsieur le Comte, I sincerely hope, that such words
may not be spoken to you some day by the woman you love, and in
such a tone and accent—”
“Will you put on a dress /a la Grecque/ this evening, and come to
the Opera?”
The shudder with which the Countess received the suggestion was
a mute reply.
EARLY IN DECEMBER 1833, a man, whose perfectly white hair and
worn features seemed to show that he was aged by grief rather than
by years, was walking at midnight along the Rue Gaillon. Having
reached a house of modest appearance, and only two stories high, he
paused to look up at one of the attic windows that pierced the roof
at regular intervals. A dim light scarcely showed through the humble
panes, some of which had been repaired with paper. The man below
was watching the wavering glimmer with the vague curiosity of a
Paris idler, when a young man came out of the house. As the light of
the street lamp fell full on the face of the first comer, it will not seem
surprising that, in spite of the darkness, this young man went towards
the passer-by, though with the hesitancy that is usual when we
have any fear of making a mistake in recognizing an acquaintance.
“What, is it you,” cried he, “Monsieur le President? Alone at this
hour, and so far from the Rue Saint-Lazare. Allow me to have the
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honor of giving you my arm.—The pavement is so greasy this morning,
that if we do not hold each other up,” he added, to soothe the
elder man’s susceptibilities, “we shall find it hard to escape a tumble.”
“But, my dear sir, I am no more than fifty-five, unfortunately for
me,” replied the Comte de Granville. “A physician of your celebrity
must know that at that age a man is still hale and strong.”
“Then you are in waiting on a lady, I suppose,” replied Horace
Bianchon. “You are not, I imagine, in the habit of going about Paris
on foot. When a man keeps such fine horses—”
“Still, when I am not visiting in the evening, I commonly return
from the Courts or the club on foot,” replied the Count.
“And with large sums of money about you, perhaps!” cried the
doctor. “It is a positive invitation to the assassin’s knife.”
“I am not afraid of that,” said Granville, with melancholy indifference.
“But, at least, do not stand about,” said the doctor, leading the
Count towards the boulevard. “A little more and I shall believe that
you are bent of robbing me of your last illness, and dying by some
other hand than mine.”
“You caught me playing the spy,” said the Count. “Whether on
foot or in a carriage, and at whatever hour of the night I may come
by, I have for some time past observed at a window on the third
floor of your house the shadow of a person who seems to work with
heroic constancy.”
The Count paused as if he felt some sudden pain. “And I take as
great an interest in that garret,” he went on, “as a citizen of Paris must
feel in the finishing of the Palais Royal.”
“Well,” said Horace Bianchon eagerly, “I can tell you—”
“Tell me nothing,” replied Granville, cutting the doctor short. “I
would not give a centime to know whether the shadow that moves
across that shabby blind is that of a man or a woman, nor whether
the inhabitant of that attic is happy or miserable. Though I was surprised
to see no one at work there this evening, and though I stopped
to look, it was solely for the pleasure of indulging in conjectures as
numerous and as idiotic as those of idlers who see a building left half
finished. For nine years, my young—” the Count hesitated to use a
word; then he waved his hand, exclaiming—”No, I will not say friend
—I hate everything that savors of sentiment.—Well, for nine years
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A Second Home
past I have ceased to wonder that old men amuse themselves with
growing flowers and planting trees; the events of life have taught
them disbelief in all human affection; and I grew old within a few
days. I will no longer attach myself to any creature but to unreasoning
animals, or plants, or superficial things. I think more of Taglioni’s
grace than of all human feeling. I abhor life and the world in which I
live alone. Nothing, nothing,” he went on, in a tone that startled the
younger man, “no, nothing can move or interest me.”
“But you have children?”
“My children!” he repeated bitterly. “Yes—well, is not my eldest
daughter the Comtesse de Vandenesse? The other will, through her
sister’s connections, make some good match. As to my sons, have
they not succeeded? The Viscount was public prosecutor at Limoges,
and is now President of the Court at Orleans; the younger is public
prosecutor in Paris.—My children have their own cares, their own
anxieties and business to attend to. If of all those hearts one had been
devoted to me, if one had tried by entire affection to fill up the void
I have here,” and he struck his breast, “well, that one would have
failed in life, have sacrificed it to me. And why should he? Why? To
bring sunshine into my few remaining years—and would he have
succeeded? Might I not have accepted such generosity as a debt? But,
doctor,” and the Count smiled with deep irony, “it is not for nothing
that we teach them arithmetic and how to count. At this moment
perhaps they are waiting for my money.”
“O Monsieur le Comte, how could such an idea enter your head—you
who are kind, friendly, and humane! Indeed, if I were not myself a living
proof of the benevolence you exercise so liberally and so nobly—”
“To please myself,” replied the Count. “I pay for a sensation, as I
would to-morrow pay a pile of gold to recover the most childish
illusion that would but make my heart glow.—I help my fellowcreatures
for my own sake, just as I gamble; and I look for gratitude
from none. I should see you die without blinking; and I beg of you
to feel the same with regard to me. I tell you, young man, the events
of life have swept over my heart like the lavas of Vesuvius over
Herculaneum. The town is there—dead.”
“Those who have brought a soul as warm and as living as yours was
to such a pitch of indifference are indeed guilty!”
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Balzac
“Say no more,” said the Count, with a shudder of aversion.
“You have a malady which you ought to allow me to treat,” said
Bianchon in a tone of deep emotion.
“What, do you know of a cure for death?” cried the Count irritably.
“I undertake, Monsieur le Comte, to revive the heart you believe
to be frozen.”
“Are you a match for Talma, then?” asked the Count satirically.
“No, Monsieur le Comte. But Nature is as far above Talma as Talma
is superior to me.—Listen: the garret you are interested in is inhabited
by a woman of about thirty, and in her love is carried to fanaticism.
The object of her adoration is a young man of pleasing appearance but
endowed by some malignant fairy with every conceivable vice. This
fellow is a gambler, and it is hard to say which he is most addicted to—
wine or women; he has, to my knowledge, committed acts deserving
punishment by law. Well, and to him this unhappy woman sacrificed
a life of ease, a man who worshiped her, and the father of her children.
—But what is wrong, Monsieur le Comte?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“She has allowed him to squander a perfect fortune; she would, I
believe, give him the world if she had it; she works night and day;
and many a time she has, without a murmur, seen the wretch she
adores rob her even of the money saved to buy the clothes the children
need, and their food for the morrow. Only three days ago she
sold her hair, the finest hair I ever saw; he came in, she could not hide
the gold piece quickly enough, and he asked her for it. For a smile,
for a kiss, she gave up the price of a fortnight’s life and peace. Is it not
dreadful, and yet sublime?—But work is wearing her cheeks hollow.
Her children’s crying has broken her heart; she is ill, and at this moment
on her wretched bed. This evening they had nothing to eat; the
children have not strength to cry, they were silent when I went up.”
Horace Bianchon stood still. Just then the Comte de Granville, in
spite of himself, as it were, had put his hand into his waistcoat pocket.
“I can guess, my young friend, how it is that she is yet alive if you
attend her,” said the elder man.
“O poor soul!” cried the doctor, “who could refuse to help her? I
only wish I were richer, for I hope to cure her of her passion.”
“But how can you expect me to pity a form of misery of which the
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A Second Home
joys to me would seem cheaply purchased with my whole fortune!”
exclaimed the Count, taking his hand out of his pocket empty of the
notes which Bianchon had supposed his patron to be feeling for.
“That woman feels, she is alive! Would not Louis XV. have given his
kingdom to rise from the grave and have three days of youth and life!
And is not that the history of thousands of dead men, thousands of
sick men, thousands of old men?”
“Poor Caroline!” cried Bianchon.
As he heard the name the Count shuddered, and grasped the doctor’s
arm with the grip of an iron vise, as it seemed to Bianchon.
“Her name is Caroline Crochard?” asked the President, in a voice
that was evidently broken.
“Then you know her?” said the doctor, astonished.
“And the wretch’s name is Solvet.—Ay, you have kept your word!”
exclaimed Granville; “you have roused my heart to the most terrible
pain it can suffer till it is dust. That emotion, too, is a gift from hell,
and I always know how to pay those debts.”
By this time the Count and the doctor had reached the corner of
the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin. One of those night-birds who wonder
round with a basket on their back and crook in hand, and were,
during the Revolution, facetiously called the Committee of Research,
was standing by the curbstone where the two men now stopped.
This scavenger had a shriveled face worthy of those immortalized by
Charlet in his caricatures of the sweepers of Paris.
“Do you ever pick up a thousand-franc note?”
“Now and then, master.”
“And you restore them?”
“It depends on the reward offered.”
“You’re the man for me,” cried the Count, giving the man a thousand-franc
note. “Take this, but, remember, I give it to you on
condition of your spending it at the wineshop, of your getting
drunk, fighting, beating your wife, blacking your friends’ eyes. That
will give work to the watch, the surgeon, the druggist—perhaps to
the police, the public prosecutor, the judge, and the prison warders.
Do not try to do anything else, or the devil will be revenged on
you sooner or later.”
A draughtsman would need at once the pencil of Charlet and of
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Balzac
Callot, the brush of Teniers and of Rembrandt, to give a true notion
of this night-scene.
“Now I have squared accounts with hell, and had some pleasure
for my money,” said the Count in a deep voice, pointing out the
indescribable physiognomy of the gaping scavenger to the doctor,
who stood stupefied. “As for Caroline Crochard!—she may die of
hunger and thirst, hearing the heartrending shrieks of her starving
children, and convinced of the baseness of the man she loves. I will
not give a sou to rescue her; and because you have helped her, I will
see you no more—”
The Count left Bianchon standing like a statue, and walked as
briskly as a young man to the Rue Saint-Lazare, soon reaching the
little house where he resided, and where, to his surprise, he found a
carriage waiting at the door.
“Monsieur, your son, the attorney-general, came about an hour since,”
said the man-servant, “and is waiting for you in your bedroom.”
Granville signed to the man to leave him.
“What motive can be strong enough to require you to infringe the
order I have given my children never to come to me unless I send for
them?” asked the Count of his son as he went into the room.
“Father,” replied the younger man in a tremulous voice, and with
great respect, “I venture to hope that you will forgive me when you
have heard me.”
“Your reply is proper,” said the Count. “Sit down,” and he pointed
to a chair, “But whether I walk up and down, or take a seat, speak
without heeding me.”
“Father,” the son went on, “this afternoon, at four o’clock, a very
young man who was arrested in the house of a friend of mine, whom
he had robbed to a considerable extent, appealed to you.—He says
he is your son.”
“His name?” asked the Count hoarsely.
“Charles Crochard.”
“That will do,” said the father, with an imperious wave of the hand.
Granville paced the room in solemn silence, and his son took care
not to break it.
“My son,” he began, and the words were pronounced in a voice so
mild and fatherly, that the young lawyer started, “Charles Crochard
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A Second Home
spoke the truth.—I am glad you came to me to-night, my good
Eugene,” he added. “Here is a considerable sum of money”—and he
gave him a bundle of banknotes—”you can make any use of them
you think proper in this matter. I trust you implicitly, and approve
beforehand whatever arrangements you may make, either in the
present or for the future.—Eugene my dear son, kiss me. We part
perhaps for the last time. I shall to-morrow crave my dismissal from
the King, and I am going to Italy.
“Though a father owes no account of his life to his children, he is
bound to bequeath to them the experience Fate sells him so dearly—
is it not a part of their inheritance?—When you marry,” the count
went on, with a little involuntary shudder, “do not undertake it lightly;
that act is the most important of all which society requires of us.
Remember to study at your leisure the character of the woman who
is to be your partner; but consult me too, I will judge of her myself.
A lack of union between husband and wife, from whatever cause,
leads to terrible misfortune; sooner or later we are always punished
for contravening the social law.—But I will write to you on this
subject from Florence. A father who has the honor of presiding over
a supreme court of justice must not have to blush in the presence of
his son. Good-bye.”
68
Paris, February 1830-January 1842.

Addendum
Balzac
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human
Comedy.
Beaumesnil, Mademoiselle
The Middle Classes
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
The Atheist’s Mass
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
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A Second Home
Crochard, Charles
The Middle Classes
Fontanon, Abbe
The Government Clerks
Honorine
The Member for Arcis
Granville, Vicomte de (later Comte)
The Gondreville Mystery
Honorine
Farewell (Adieu)
Cesar Birotteau
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Pons
Granville, Comtesse Angelique de
The Thirteen
A Daughter of Eve
Granville, Vicomte de
A Daughter of Eve
The Country Parson
Granville, Baron Eugene de
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Molineux, Jean-Baptiste
The Purse
Cesar Birotteau
Regnier, Claude-Antoine
The Gondreville Mystery
Roguin, Madame
Cesar Birotteau
70

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Pierrette
A Daughter of Eve
Vandenesse, Comtesse Felix de
A Daughter of Eve
The Muse of the Department
Balzac
71

Adieu
72
Adieu
by
Honore de Balzac
Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Prince Frederic Schwartzenburg.
CHAPTER I
AN OLD MONASTERY
“COME, deputy of the Centre, forward! Quick step! march! if we
want to be in time to dine with the others. Jump, marquis! there,
that’s right! why, you can skip across a stubble-field like a deer!”
These words were said by a huntsman peacefully seated at the edge
of the forest of Ile-Adam, who was finishing an Havana cigar while
waiting for his companion, who had lost his way in the tangled under-

Balzac
brush of the wood. At his side four panting dogs were watching, as he
did, the personage he addressed. To understand how sarcastic were these
exhortations, repeated at intervals, we should state that the approaching
huntsman was a stout little man whose protuberant stomach was
the evidence of a truly ministerial “embonpoint.” He was struggling
painfully across the furrows of a vast wheat-field recently harvested,
the stubble of which considerably impeded him; while to add to his
other miseries the sun’s rays, striking obliquely on his face, collected an
abundance of drops of perspiration. Absorbed in the effort to maintain
his equilibrium, he leaned, now forward, now back, in close imitation
of the pitching of a carriage when violently jolted. The weather
looked threatening. Though several spaces of blue sky still parted the
thick black clouds toward the horizon, a flock of fleecy vapors were
advancing with great rapidity and drawing a light gray curtain from
east to west. As the wind was acting only on the upper region of the air,
the atmosphere below it pressed down the hot vapors of the earth.
Surrounded by masses of tall trees, the valley through which the hunter
struggled felt like a furnace. Parched and silent, the forest seemed thirsty.
The birds, even the insects, were voiceless; the tree-tops scarcely waved.
Those persons who may still remember the summer of 1819 can imagine
the woes of the poor deputy, who was struggling along, drenched
in sweat, to regain his mocking friend. The latter, while smoking his
cigar, had calculated from the position of the sun that it must be about
five in the afternoon.
“Where the devil are we?” said the stout huntsman, mopping his
forehead and leaning against the trunk of a tree nearly opposite to his
companion, for he felt unequal to the effort of leaping the ditch
between them.
“That’s for me to ask you,” said the other, laughing, as he lay among
the tall brown brake which crowned the bank. Then, throwing the
end of his cigar into the ditch, he cried out vehemently: “I swear by
Saint Hubert that never again will I trust myself in unknown territory
with a statesman, though he be, like you, my dear d’Albon, a
college mate.”
“But, Philippe, have you forgotten your French? Or have you left
your wits in Siberia?” replied the stout man, casting a sorrowfully
comic look at a sign-post about a hundred feet away.
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“True, true,” cried Philippe, seizing his gun and springing with a
bound into the field and thence to the post. “This way, d’Albon, this
way,” he called back to his friend, pointing to a broad paved path and
reading aloud the sign: “‘From Baillet to Ile-Adam.’ We shall certainly
find the path to Cassan, which must branch from this one
between here and Ile-Adam.”
“You are right, colonel,” said Monsieur d’Albon, replacing upon
his head the cap with which he had been fanning himself.
“Forward then, my respectable privy councillor,” replied Colonel
Philippe, whistling to the dogs, who seemed more willing to obey
him than the public functionary to whom they belonged.
“Are you aware, marquis,” said the jeering soldier, “that we still
have six miles to go? That village over there must be Baillet.”
“Good heavens!” cried the marquis, “go to Cassan if you must, but
you’ll go alone. I prefer to stay here, in spite of the coming storm, and
wait for the horse you can send me from the chateau. You’ve played me
a trick, Sucy. We were to have had a nice little hunt not far from
Cassan, and beaten the coverts I know. Instead of that, you have kept
me running like a hare since four o’clock this morning, and all I’ve had
for breakfast is a cup of milk. Now, if you ever have a petition before
the Court, I’ll make you lose it, however just your claim.”
The poor discouraged huntsman sat down on a stone that supported
the signpost, relieved himself of his gun and his gamebag, and heaved
a long sigh.
“France! such are thy deputies!” exclaimed Colonel de Sucy, laughing.
“Ah! my poor d’Albon, if you had been like me six years in the
wilds of Siberia—”
He said no more, but he raised his eyes to heaven as if that anguish
were between himself and God.
“Come, march on!” he added. “If you sit still you are lost.”
“How can I, Philippe? It is an old magisterial habit to sit still. On
my honor! I’m tired out— If I had only killed a hare!”
The two men presented a rather rare contrast: the public functionary
was forty-two years of age and seemed no more than thirty, whereas
the soldier was thirty, and seemed forty at the least. Both wore the
red rosette of the officers of the Legion of honor. A few spare locks
of black hair mixed with white, like the wing of a magpie, escaped
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from the colonel’s cap, while handsome brown curls adorned the
brow of the statesman. One was tall, gallant, high-strung, and the
lines of his pallid face showed terrible passions or frightful griefs.
The other had a face that was brilliant with health, and jovially worth
of an epicurean. Both were deeply sun-burned, and their high gaiters
of tanned leather showed signs of the bogs and the thickets they had
just come through.
“Come,” said Monsieur de Sucy, “let us get on. A short hour’s
march, and we shall reach Cassan in time for a good dinner.”
“It is easy to see you have never loved,” replied the councillor, with
a look that was pitifully comic; “you are as relentless as article 304 of
the penal code.”
Philippe de Sucy quivered; his broad brow contracted; his face became
as sombre as the skies above them. Some memory of awful
bitterness distorted for a moment his features, but he said nothing.
Like all strong men, he drove down his emotions to the depths of his
heart; thinking perhaps, as simple characters are apt to think, that
there was something immodest in unveiling griefs when human language
cannot render their depths and may only rouse the mockery of
those who do not comprehend them. Monsieur d’Albon had one of
those delicate natures which divine sorrows, and are instantly sympathetic
to the emotion they have involuntarily aroused. He respected
his friend’s silence, rose, forgot his fatigue, and followed him silently,
grieved to have touched a wound that was evidently not healed.
“Some day, my friend,” said Philippe, pressing his hand, and thanking
him for his mute repentance by a heart-rending look, “I will
relate to you my life. To-day I cannot.”
They continued their way in silence. When the colonel’s pain seemed
soothed, the marquis resumed his fatigue; and with the instinct, or
rather the will, of a wearied man his eye took in the very depths of the
forest; he questioned the tree-tops and examined the branching paths,
hoping to discover some dwelling where he could ask hospitality. Arriving
at a cross-ways, he thought he noticed a slight smoke rising
among the trees; he stopped, looked more attentively, and saw, in the
midst of a vast copse, the dark-green branches of several pine-trees.
“A house! a house!” he cried, with the joy the sailor feels in
crying “Land!”
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Then he sprang quickly into the copse, and the colonel, who had
fallen into a deep reverie, followed him mechanically.
“I’d rather get an omelet, some cottage bread, and a chair here,” he
said, “than go to Cassan for sofas, truffles, and Bordeaux.”
These words were an exclamation of enthusiasm, elicited from the
councillor on catching sight of a wall, the white towers of which glimmered
in the distance through the brown masses of the tree trunks.
“Ha! ha! this looks to me as if it had once been a priory,” cried the
marquis, as they reached a very old and blackened gate, through which
they could see, in the midst of a large park, a building constructed in the
style of the monasteries of old. “How those rascals the monks knew
how to choose their sites!”
This last exclamation was an expression of surprise and pleasure at
the poetical hermitage which met his eyes. The house stood on the
slope of the mountain, at the summit of which is the village of
Nerville. The great centennial oaks of the forest which encircled the
dwelling made the place an absolute solitude. The main building,
formerly occupied by the monks, faced south. The park seemed to
have about forty acres. Near the house lay a succession of green meadows,
charmingly crossed by several clear rivulets, with here and there
a piece of water naturally placed without the least apparent artifice.
Trees of elegant shape and varied foliage were distributed about. Grottos,
cleverly managed, and massive terraces with dilapidated steps
and rusty railings, gave a peculiar character to this lone retreat. Art
had harmonized her constructions with the picturesque effects of
nature. Human passions seemed to die at the feet of those great trees,
which guarded this asylum from the tumult of the world as they
shaded it from the fires of the sun.
“How desolate!” thought Monsieur d’Albon, observing the sombre
expression which the ancient building gave to the landscape,
gloomy as though a curse were on it. It seemed a fatal spot deserted
by man. Ivy had stretched its tortuous muscles, covered by its rich
green mantle, everywhere. Brown or green, red or yellow mosses and
lichen spread their romantic tints on trees and seats and roofs and
stones. The crumbling window-casings were hollowed by rain, defaced
by time; the balconies were broken, the terraces demolished.
Some of the outside shutters hung from a single hinge. The rotten
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doors seemed quite unable to resist an assailant. Covered with shining
tufts of mistletoe, the branches of the neglected fruit-trees gave
no sign of fruit. Grass grew in the paths. Such ruin and desolation
cast a weird poesy on the scene, filling the souls of the spectators
with dreamy thoughts. A poet would have stood there long, plunged
in a melancholy reverie, admiring this disorder so full of harmony,
this destruction which was not without its grace. Suddenly, the brown
tiles shone, the mosses glittered, fantastic shadows danced upon the
meadows and beneath the trees; fading colors revived; striking contrasts
developed, the foliage of the trees and shrubs defined itself
more clearly in the light. Then—the light went out. The landscape
seemed to have spoken, and now was silent, returning to its gloom,
or rather to the soft sad tones of an autumnal twilight.
“It is the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,” said the marquis, beginning
to view the house with the eyes of a land owner. “I wonder to
whom it belongs! He must be a stupid fellow not to live in such an
exquisite spot.”
At that instant a woman sprang from beneath a chestnut-tree standing
to the right of the gate, and, without making any noise, passed
before the marquis as rapidly as the shadow of a cloud. This vision
made him mute with surprise.
“Why, Albon, what’s the matter?” asked the colonel.
“I am rubbing my eyes to know if I am asleep or awake,” replied
the marquis, with his face close to the iron rails as he tried to get
another sight of the phantom.
“She must be beneath that fig-tree,” he said, pointing to the foliage
of a tree which rose above the wall to the left of the gate.
“She! who?”
“How can I tell?” replied Monsieur d’Albon. “A strange woman
rose up there, just before me,” he said in a low voice; “she seemed to
come from the world of shades rather than from the land of the
living. She is so slender, so light, so filmy, she must be diaphanous.
Her face was as white as milk; her eyes, her clothes, her hair jet black.
She looked at me as she flitted by, and though I may say I’m no
coward, that cold immovable look froze the blood in my veins.”
“Is she pretty?” asked Philippe.
“I don’t know. I could see nothing but the eyes in that face.”
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“Well, let the dinner at Cassan go to the devil!” cried the colonel.
“Suppose we stay here. I have a sudden childish desire to enter that
singular house. Do you see those window-frames painted red, and
the red lines on the doors and shutters? Doesn’t the place look to you
as if it belonged to the devil?—perhaps he inherited it from the
monks. Come, let us pursue the black and white lady—forward,
march!” cried Philippe, with forced gaiety.
At that instant the two huntsmen heard a cry that was something
like that of a mouse caught in a trap. They listened. The rustle of a
few shrubs sounded in the silence like the murmur of a breaking
wave. In vain they listened for other sounds; the earth was dumb,
and kept the secret of those light steps, if, indeed, the unknown
woman moved at all.
“It is very singular!” said Philippe, as they skirted the park wall.
The two friends presently reached a path in the forest which led to
the village of Chauvry. After following this path some way toward
the main road to Paris, they came to another iron gate which led to
the principal facade of the mysterious dwelling. On this side the
dilapidation and disorder of the premises had reached their height.
Immense cracks furrowed the walls of the house, which was built on
three sides of a square. Fragments of tiles and slates lying on the
ground, and the dilapidated condition of the roofs, were evidence of
a total want of care on the part of the owners. The fruit had fallen
from the trees and lay rotting on the ground; a cow was feeding on
the lawn and treading down the flowers in the borders, while a goat
browsed on the shoots of the vines and munched the unripe grapes.
“Here all is harmony; the devastation seems organized,” said the colonel,
pulling the chain of a bell; but the bell was without a clapper.
The huntsmen heard nothing but the curiously sharp noise of a
rusty spring. Though very dilapidated, a little door made in the wall
beside the iron gates resisted all their efforts to open it.
“Well, well, this is getting to be exciting,” said de Sucy to his
companion.
“If I were not a magistrate,” replied Monsieur d’Albon, “I should
think that woman was a witch.”
As he said the words, the cow came to the iron gate and pushed her
warm muzzle towards them, as if she felt the need of seeing human
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beings. Then a woman, if that name could be applied to the indefinable
being who suddenly issued from a clump of bushes, pulled away
the cow by its rope. This woman wore on her head a red handkerchief,
beneath which trailed long locks of hair in color and shape like
the flax on a distaff. She wore no fichu. A coarse woollen petticoat in
black and gray stripes, too short by several inches, exposed her legs.
She might have belonged to some tribe of Red-Skins described by
Cooper, for her legs, neck, and arms were the color of brick. No ray
of intelligence enlivened her vacant face. A few whitish hairs served
her for eyebrows; the eyes themselves, of a dull blue, were cold and
wan; and her mouth was so formed as to show the teeth, which were
crooked, but as white as those of a dog.
“Here, my good woman!” called Monsieur de Sucy.
She came very slowly to the gate, looking with a silly expression at
the two huntsmen, the sight of whom brought a forced and painful
smile to her face.
“Where are we? Whose house is this? Who are you? Do you belong
here?”
To these questions and several others which the two friends alternately
addressed to her, she answered only with guttural sounds that
seemed more like the growl of an animal than the voice of a human
being.
“She must be deaf and dumb,” said the marquis.
“Bons-Hommes!” cried the peasant woman.
“Ah! I see. This is, no doubt, the old monastery of the Bons-
Hommes,” said the marquis.
He renewed his questions. But, like a capricious child, the peasant
woman colored, played with her wooden shoe, twisted the rope of
the cow, which was now feeding peaceably, and looked at the two
hunters, examining every part of their clothing; then she yelped,
growled, and clucked, but did not speak.
“What is your name?” said Philippe, looking at her fixedly, as if he
meant to mesmerize her.
“Genevieve,” she said, laughing with a silly air.
“The cow is the most intelligent being we have seen so far,” said
the marquis. “I shall fire my gun and see if that will being some one.”
Just as d’Albon raised his gun, the colonel stopped him with a ges-
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ture, and pointed to the form of a woman, probably the one who had
so keenly piqued his curiosity. At this moment she seemed lost in the
deepest meditation, and was coming with slow steps along a distant
pathway, so that the two friends had ample time to examine her.
She was dressed in a ragged gown of black satin. Her long hair fell
in masses of curls over her forehead, around her shoulders, and below
her waist, serving her for a shawl. Accustomed no doubt to this
disorder, she seldom pushed her hair from her forehead; and when
she did so, it was with a sudden toss of her head which only for a
moment cleared her forehead and eyes from the thick veil. Her gesture,
like that of an animal, had a remarkable mechanical precision,
the quickness of which seemed wonderful in a woman. The huntsmen
were amazed to see her suddenly leap up on the branch of an
apple-tree, and sit there with the ease of a bird. She gathered an apple
and ate it; then she dropped to the ground with the graceful ease we
admire in a squirrel. Her limbs possessed an elasticity which took
from every movement the slightest appearance of effort or constraint.
She played upon the turf, rolling herself about like a child; then,
suddenly, she flung her feet and hands forward, and lay at full length
on the grass, with the grace and natural ease of a young cat asleep in
the sun. Thunder sounded in the distance, and she turned suddenly,
rising on her hands and knees with the rapidity of a dog which hears
a coming footstep.
The effects of this singular attitude was to separate into two heavy
masses the volume of her black hair, which now fell on either side of
her head, and allowed the two spectators to admire the white shoulders
glistening like daisies in a field, and the throat, the perfection of
which allowed them to judge of the other beauties of her figure.
Suddenly she uttered a distressful cry and rose to her feet. Her
movements succeeded each other with such airiness and grace that
she seemed not a creature of this world but a daughter of the atmosphere,
as sung in the poems of Ossian. She ran toward a piece of
water, shook one of her legs lightly to cast off her shoe, and began to
dabble her foot, white as alabaster, in the current, admiring, perhaps,
the undulations she thus produced upon the surface of the water.
Then she knelt down at the edge of the stream and amused herself,
like a child, in casting in her long tresses and pulling them abruptly
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out, to watch the shower of drops that glittered down, looking, as
the sunlight struck athwart them, like a chaplet of pearls.
“That woman is mad!” cried the marquis.
A hoarse cry, uttered by Genevieve, seemed uttered as a warning to the
unknown woman, who turned suddenly, throwing back her hair from
either side of her face. At this instant the colonel and Monsieur d’Albon
could distinctly see her features; she, herself, perceiving the two friends,
sprang to the iron railing with the lightness and rapidity of a deer.
“Adieu!” she said, in a soft, harmonious voice, the melody of which
did not convey the slightest feeling or the slightest thought.
Monsieur d’Albon admired the long lashes of her eyelids, the blackness
of her eyebrows, and the dazzling whiteness of a skin devoid of
even the faintest tinge of color. Tiny blue veins alone broke the uniformity
of its pure white tones. When the marquis turned to his
friend as if to share with him his amazement at the sight of this
singular creature, he found him stretched on the ground as if dead.
D’Albon fired his gun in the air to summon assistance, crying out
“Help! help!” and then endeavored to revive the colonel. At the sound
of the shot, the unknown woman, who had hitherto stood motionless,
fled away with the rapidity of an arrow, uttering cries of fear like
a wounded animal, and running hither and thither about the meadow
with every sign of the greatest terror.
Monsieur d’Albon, hearing the rumbling of a carriage on the highroad
to Ile-Adam, waved his handkerchief and shouted to its occupants
for assistance. The carriage was immediately driven up to the
old monastery, and the marquis recognized his neighbors, Monsieur
and Madame de Granville, who at once gave up their carriage to the
service of the two gentlemen. Madame de Granville had with her, by
chance, a bottle of salts, which revived the colonel for a moment.
When he opened his eyes he turned them to the meadow, where the
unknown woman was still running and uttering her distressing cries.
A smothered exclamation escaped him, which seemed to express a
sense of horror; then he closed his eyes again, and made a gesture as if
to implore his friend to remove him from that sight.
Monsieur and Madame de Granville placed their carriage entirely
at the disposal of the marquis, assuring him courteously that they
would like to continue their way on foot.
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“Who is that lady?” asked the marquis, signing toward the unknown
woman.
“I believe she comes from Moulins,” replied Monsieur de Granville.
“She is the Comtesse de Vandieres, and they say she is mad; but as
she has only been here two months I will not vouch for the truth of
these hearsays.”
Monsieur d’Albon thanked his friends, and placing the colonel in
the carriage, started with him for Cassan.
“It is she!” cried Philippe, recovering his senses.
“Who is she?” asked d’Albon.
“Stephanie. Ah, dead and living, living and mad! I fancied I was
dying.”
The prudent marquis, appreciating the gravity of the crisis through
which his friend was passing, was careful not to question or excite
him; he was only anxious to reach the chateau, for the change which
had taken place in the colonel’s features, in fact in his whole person,
made him fear for his friend’s reason. As soon, therefore, as the carriage
had reached the main street of Ile-Adam, he dispatched the
footman to the village doctor, so that the colonel was no sooner
fairly in his bed at the chateau than the physician was beside him.
“If monsieur had not been many hours without food the shock would
have killed him,” said the doctor.
After naming the first precautions, the doctor left the room, to
prepare, himself, a calming potion. The next day, Monsieur de Sucy
was better, but the doctor still watched him carefully.
“I will admit to you, monsieur le marquis,” he said, “that I have
feared some affection of the brain. Monsieur de Sucy has received a
violent shock; his passions are strong; but, in him, the first blow
decides all. To-morrow he may be entirely out of danger.”
The doctor was not mistaken; and the following day he allowed
the marquis to see his friend.
“My dear d’Albon,” said Philippe, pressing his hand, “I am going
to ask a kindness of you. Go to the Bons-Hommes, and find out all
you can of the lady we saw there; and return to me as quickly as you
can; I shall count the minutes.”
Monsieur d’Albon mounted his horse at once, and galloped to the
old abbey. When he arrived there, he saw before the iron gate a tall,
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spare man with a very kindly face, who answered in the affirmative
when asked if he lived there. Monsieur d’Albon then informed him
of the reasons for his visit.
“What! monsieur,” said the other, “was it you who fired that fatal
shot? You very nearly killed my poor patient.”
“But, monsieur, I fired in the air.”
“You would have done the countess less harm had you fired at her.”
“Then we must not reproach each other, monsieur, for the sight of
the countess has almost killed my friend, Monsieur de Sucy.”
“Heavens! can you mean Baron Philippe de Sucy?” cried the doctor,
clasping his hands. “Did he go to Russia; was he at the passage of
the Beresina?”
“Yes,” replied d’Albon, “he was captured by the Cossacks and kept
for five years in Siberia; he recovered his liberty a few months ago.”
“Come in, monsieur,” said the master of the house, leading the
marquis into a room on the lower floor where everything bore the
marks of capricious destruction. The silken curtains beside the windows
were torn, while those of muslin remained intact.
“You see,” said the tall old man, as they entered, “the ravages committed
by that dear creature, to whom I devote myself. She is my
niece; in spite of the impotence of my art, I hope some day to restore
her reason by attempting a method which can only be employed,
unfortunately, by very rich people.”
Then, like all persons living in solitude who are afflicted with an
ever present and ever renewed grief, he related to the marquis at length
the following narrative, which is here condensed, and relieved of the
many digressions made by both the narrator and the listener.
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84
CHAPTER II
THE PASSAGE OF THE
BERESINA
MARECHAL VICTOR, when he started, about nine at night, from the
heights of Studzianka, which he had defended, as the rear-guard of
the retreating army, during the whole day of November 28th, 1812,
left a thousand men behind him, with orders to protect to the last
possible moment whichever of the two bridges across the Beresina
might still exist. This rear-guard had devoted itself to the task of
saving a frightful multitude of stragglers overcome by the cold, who
obstinately refused to leave the bivouacs of the army. The heroism of
this generous troop proved useless. The stragglers who flocked in
masses to the banks of the Beresina found there, unhappily, an immense
number of carriages, caissons, and articles of all kinds which
the army had been forced to abandon when effecting its passage of
the river on the 27th and 28th of November. Heirs to such unlookedfor
riches, the unfortunate men, stupid with cold, took up their abode
in the deserted bivouacs, broke up the material which they found
there to build themselves cabins, made fuel of everything that came
to hand, cut up the frozen carcasses of the horses for food, tore the
cloth and the curtains from the carriages for coverlets, and went to
sleep, instead of continuing their way and crossing quietly during the
night that cruel Beresina, which an incredible fatality had already
made so destructive to the army.
The apathy of these poor soldiers can only be conceived by those
who remember to have crossed vast deserts of snow without other
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without other bed than snow, without other food than snow or a
few frozen beet-roots, a few handfuls of flour, or a little horseflesh.
Dying of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and want of sleep, these unfortunates
reached a shore where they saw before them wood, provisions,
innumerable camp equipages, and carriages,—in short a whole town
at their service. The village of Studzianka had been wholly taken to
pieces and conveyed from the heights on which it stood to the plain.
However forlorn and dangerous that refuge might be, its miseries
and its perils only courted men who had lately seen nothing before
them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was, in fact, a vast asylum
which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.
Utter lassitude, and the sense of unexpected comfort, made that mass
of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the
artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this
mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the
trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures
only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised
by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here
and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in
groups continually; but once here those perambulating corpses separated;
each begged for himself a place near a fire; repulsed repeatedly,
they met again, to obtain by force the hospitality already refused to
them. Deaf to the voice of some of their officers, who warned them of
probable destruction on the morrow, they spent the amount of courage
necessary to cross the river in building that asylum of a night, in
making one meal that they themselves doomed to be their last. The
death that awaited them they considered no evil, provided they could
have that one night’s sleep. They thought nothing evil but hunger,
thirst, and cold. When there was no more wood or food or fire, horrible
struggles took place between fresh-comers and the rich who possessed
a shelter. The weakest succumbed.
At last there came a moment when a number, pursued by the Russians,
found only snow on which to bivouac, and these lay down to
rise no more. Insensibly this mass of almost annihilated beings became
so compact, so deaf, so torpid, so happy perhaps, that Marechal
Victor, who had been their heroic defender by holding twenty thousand
Russians under Wittgenstein at bay, was forced to open a pas-
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sage by main force through this forest of men in order to cross the
Beresina with five thousand gallant fellows whom he was taking to
the emperor. The unfortunate malingerers allowed themselves to be
crushed rather than stir; they perished in silence, smiling at their extinguished
fires, without a thought of France.
It was not until ten o’clock that night that Marechal Victor reached
the bank of the river. Before crossing the bridge which led to Zembin,
he confided the fate of his own rear-guard now left in Studzianka to
Eble, the savior of all those who survived the calamities of the Beresina.
It was towards midnight when this great general, followed by one
brave officer, left the cabin he occupied near the bridge, and studied
the spectacle of that improvised camp placed between the bank of
the river and Studzianka. The Russian cannon had ceased to thunder.
Innumerable fires, which, amid that trackless waste of snow, burned
pale and scarcely sent out any gleams, illumined here and there by
sudden flashes forms and faces that were barely human. Thirty thousand
poor wretches, belonging to all nations, from whom Napoleon
had recruited his Russian army, were trifling away their lives with
brutish indifference.
“Let us save them!” said General Eble to the officer who accompanied
him. “To-morrow morning the Russians will be masters of
Studzianka. We must burn the bridge the moment they appear. Therefore,
my friend, take your courage in your hand! Go to the heights.
Tell General Fournier he has barely time to evacuate his position, force
a way through this crowd, and cross the bridge. When you have seen
him in motion follow him. Find men you can trust, and the moment
Fournier had crossed the bridge, burn, without pity, huts, equipages,
caissons, carriages,—everything! Drive that mass of men to the bridge.
Compel all that has two legs to get to the other side of the river. The
burning of everything—everything—is now our last resource. If Berthier
had let me destroy those damned camp equipages, this river would
swallow only my poor pontoniers, those fifty heroes who will save the
army, but who themselves will be forgotten.”
The general laid his hand on his forehead and was silent. He felt
that Poland would be his grave, and that no voice would rise to do
justice to those noble men who stood in the water, the icy water of
Beresina, to destroy the buttresses of the bridges. One alone of those
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heroes still lives—or, to speak more correctly, suffers—in a village,
totally ignored.
The aide-de-camp started. Hardly had this generous officer gone a
hundred yards towards Studzianka than General Eble wakened a
number of his weary pontoniers, and began the work,—the charitable
work of burning the bivouacs set up about the bridge, and
forcing the sleepers, thus dislodged, to cross the river.
Meanwhile the young aide-de-camp reached, not without difficulty,
the only wooden house still left standing in Studzianka.
“This barrack seems pretty full, comrade,” he said to a man whom
he saw by the doorway.
“If you can get in you’ll be a clever trooper,” replied the officer,
without turning his head or ceasing to slice off with his sabre the
bark of the logs of which the house was built.
“Is that you, Philippe?” said the aide-de-camp, recognizing a friend
by the tones of his voice.
“Yes. Ha, ha! is it you, old fellow?” replied Monsieur de Sucy,
looking at the aide-de-camp, who, like himself, was only twentythree
years of age. “I thought you were the other side of that cursed
river. What are you here for? Have you brought cakes and wine for
our dessert? You’ll be welcome,” and he went on slicing off the bark,
which he gave as a sort of provender to his horse.
“I am looking for your commander to tell him, from General Eble,
to make for Zembin. You’ll have barely enough time to get through
that crowd of men below. I am going presently to set fire to their
camp and force them to march.”
“You warm me up—almost! That news makes me perspire. I have
two friends I must save. Ah! without those two to cling to me, I
should be dead already. It is for them that I feed my horse and don’t
eat myself. Have you any food,—a mere crust? It is thirty hours since
anything has gone into my stomach, and yet I have fought like a
madman —just to keep a little warmth and courage in me.”
“Poor Philippe, I have nothing—nothing! But where’s your general,—in
this house?”
“No, don’t go there; the place is full of wounded. Go up the street;
you’ll find on your left a sort of pig-pen; the general is there. Goodbye,
old fellow. If we ever dance a trenis on a Paris floor—”
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He did not end his sentence; the north wind blew at that moment
with such ferocity that the aide-de-camp hurried on to escape being
frozen, and the lips of Major de Sucy stiffened. Silence reigned, broken
only by the moans which came from the house, and the dull sound
made by the major’s horse as it chewed in a fury of hunger the icy bark
of the trees with which the house was built. Monsieur de Sucy replaced
his sabre in its scabbard, took the bridle of the precious horse he
had hitherto been able to preserve, and led it, in spite of the animal’s
resistance, from the wretched fodder it appeared to think excellent.
“We’ll start, Bichette, we’ll start! There’s none but you, my beauty,
who can save Stephanie. Ha! by and bye you and I may be able to
rest—and die,” he added.
Philippe, wrapped in a fur pelisse, to which he owed his preservation
and his energy, began to run, striking his feet hard upon the
frozen snow to keep them warm. Scarcely had he gone a few hundred
yards from the village than he saw a blaze in the direction of the
place where, since morning, he had left his carriage in charge of his
former orderly, an old soldier. Horrible anxiety laid hold of him.
Like all others who were controlled during this fatal retreat by some
powerful sentiment, he found a strength to save his friends which he
could not have put forth to save himself.
Presently he reached a slight declivity at the foot of which, in a spot
sheltered from the enemy’s balls, he had stationed the carriage, containing
a young woman, the companion of his childhood, the being
most dear to him on earth. At a few steps distant from the vehicle he
now found a company of some thirty stragglers collected around an
immense fire, which they were feeding with planks, caisson covers,
wheels, and broken carriages. These soldiers were, no doubt, the last
comers of that crowd who, from the base of the hill of Studzianka to
the fatal river, formed an ocean of heads intermingled with fires and
huts,—a living sea, swayed by motions that were almost imperceptible,
and giving forth a murmuring sound that rose at times to frightful
outbursts. Driven by famine and despair, these poor wretches must
have rifled the carriage before de Sucy reached it. The old general and
his young wife, whom he had left lying in piles of clothes and wrapped
in mantles and pelisses, were now on the snow, crouching before the
fire. One door of the carriage was already torn off.
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No sooner did the men about the fire hear the tread of the major’s
horse than a hoarse cry, the cry of famine, arose,—
“A horse! a horse!”
Those voices formed but one voice.
“Back! back! look out for yourself!” cried two or three soldiers,
aiming at the mare. Philippe threw himself before his animal, crying
out,—
“You villains! I’ll throw you into your own fire. There are plenty of
dead horses up there. Go and fetch them.”
“Isn’t he a joker, that officer! One, two—get out of the way,” cried
a colossal grenadier. “No, you won’t, hey! Well, as you please, then.”
A woman’s cry rose higher than the report of the musket. Philippe
fortunately was not touched, but Bichette, mortally wounded, was
struggling in the throes of death. Three men darted forward and
dispatched her with their bayonets.
“Cannibals!” cried Philippe, “let me at any rate take the horse-cloth
and my pistols.”
“Pistols, yes,” replied the grenadier. “But as for that horse-cloth,
no! here’s a poor fellow afoot, with nothing in his stomach for two
days, and shivering in his rags. It is our general.”
Philippe kept silence as he looked at the man, whose boots were
worn out, his trousers torn in a dozen places, while nothing but a
ragged fatigue-cap covered with ice was on his head. He hastened,
however, to take his pistols. Five men dragged the mare to the fire,
and cut her up with the dexterity of a Parisian butcher. The pieces
were instantly seized and flung upon the embers.
The major went up to the young woman, who had uttered a cry
on recognizing him. He found her motionless, seated on a cushion
beside the fire. She looked at him silently, without smiling. Philippe
then saw the soldier to whom he had confided the carriage; the man
was wounded. Overcome by numbers, he had been forced to yield to
the malingerers who attacked him; and, like the dog who defended to
the last possible moment his master’s dinner, he had taken his share of
the booty, and was now sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a white
sheet by way of cloak, and turning carefully on the embers a slice of the
mare. Philippe saw upon his face the joy these preparations gave him.
The Comte de Vandieres, who, for the last few days, had fallen into a
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state of second childhood, was seated on a cushion beside his wife,
looking fixedly at the fire, which was beginning to thaw his torpid
limbs. He had shown no emotion of any kind, either at Philippe’s
danger, or at the fight which ended in the pillage of the carriage and
their expulsion from it.
At first de Sucy took the hand of the young countess, as if to show
her his affection, and the grief he felt at seeing her reduced to such utter
misery; then he grew silent; seated beside her on a heap of snow which
was turning into a rivulet as it melted, he yielded himself up to the
happiness of being warm, forgetting their peril, forgetting all things.
His face assumed, in spite of himself, an expression of almost stupid
joy, and he waited with impatience until the fragment of the mare
given to his orderly was cooked. The smell of the roasting flesh increased
his hunger, and his hunger silenced his heart, his courage, and
his love. He looked, without anger, at the results of the pillage of his
carriage. All the men seated around the fire had shared his blankets,
cushions, pelisses, robes, also the clothing of the Comte and Comtesse
de Vandieres and his own. Philippe looked about him to see if there
was anything left in or near the vehicle that was worth saving. By the
light of the flames he saw gold and diamonds and plate scattered everywhere,
no one having thought it worth his while to take any.
Each of the individuals collected by chance around this fire maintained
a silence that was almost horrible, and did nothing but what
he judged necessary for his own welfare. Their misery was even grotesque.
Faces, discolored by cold, were covered with a layer of mud,
on which tears had made a furrow from the eyes to the beard, showing
the thickness of that miry mask. The filth of their long beards
made these men still more repulsive. Some were wrapped in the
countess’s shawls, others wore the trappings of horses and muddy
saddlecloths, or masses of rags from which the hoar-frost hung; some
had a boot on one leg and a shoe on the other; in fact, there were
none whose costume did not present some laughable singularity. But
in presence of such amusing sights the men themselves were grave
and gloomy. The silence was broken only by the snapping of the
wood, the crackling of the flames, the distant murmur of the camps,
and the blows of the sabre given to what remained of Bichette in
search of her tenderest morsels. A few miserable creatures, perhaps
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more weary than the rest, were sleeping; when one of their number
rolled into the fire no one attempted to help him out. These stern
logicians argued that if he were not dead his burns would warn him
to find a safer place. If the poor wretch waked in the flames and
perished, no one cared. Two or three soldiers looked at each other to
justify their own indifference by that of others. Twice this scene had
taken place before the eyes of the countess, who said nothing. When
the various pieces of Bichette, placed here and there upon the embers,
were sufficiently broiled, each man satisfied his hunger with the
gluttony that disgusts us when we see it in animals.
“This is the first time I ever saw thirty infantrymen on one horse,”
cried the grenadier who had shot the mare.
It was the only jest made that night which proved the national
character.
Soon the great number of these poor soldiers wrapped themselves
in what they could find and lay down on planks, or whatever would
keep them from contact with the snow, and slept, heedless of the
morrow. When the major was warm, and his hunger appeased, an
invincible desire to sleep weighed down his eyelids. During the short
moment of his struggle against that desire he looked at the young
woman, who had turned her face to the fire and was now asleep,
leaving her closed eyes and a portion of her forehead exposed to sight.
She was wrapped in a furred pelisse and a heavy dragoon’s cloak; her
head rested on a pillow stained with blood; an astrakhan hood, kept
in place by a handkerchief knotted round her neck, preserved her face
from the cold as much as possible. Her feet were wrapped in the
cloak. Thus rolled into a bundle, as it were, she looked like nothing
at all. Was she the last of the “vivandieres”? Was she a charming
woman, the glory of a lover, the queen of Parisian salons? Alas! even
the eye of her most devoted friend could trace no sign of anything
feminine in that mass of rags and tatters. Love had succumbed to
cold in the heart of a woman!
Through the thick veils of irresistible sleep, the major soon saw
the husband and wife as mere points or formless objects. The flames
of the fire, those outstretched figures, the relentless cold, waiting,
not three feet distant from that fugitive heat, became all a dream.
One importunate thought terrified Philippe:
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“If I sleep, we shall all die; I will not sleep,” he said to himself.
And yet he slept.
A terrible clamor and an explosion awoke him an hour later. The
sense of his duty, the peril of his friend, fell suddenly on his heart. He
uttered a cry that was like a roar. He and his orderly were alone afoot.
A sea of fire lay before them in the darkness of the night, licking up
the cabins and the bivouacs; cries of despair, howls, and imprecations
reached their ears; they saw against the flames thousands of human
beings with agonized or furious faces. In the midst of that hell, a
column of soldiers was forcing its way to the bridge, between two
hedges of dead bodies.
“It is the retreat of the rear-guard!” cried the major. “All hope is
gone!”
“I have saved your carriage, Philippe,” said a friendly voice.
Turning round, de Sucy recognized the young aide-de-camp in the
flaring of the flames.
“Ah! all is lost!” replied the major, “they have eaten my horse; and
how can I make this stupid general and his wife walk?”
“Take a brand from the fire and threaten them.”
“Threaten the countess!”
“Good-bye,” said the aide-de-camp, “I have scarcely time to get
across that fatal river—and I must; I have a mother in France. What a
night! These poor wretches prefer to lie here in the snow; half will
allow themselves to perish in those flames rather than rise and move
on. It is four o’clock, Philippe! In two hours the Russians will begin
to move. I assure you you will again see the Beresina choked with
corpses. Philippe! think of yourself! You have no horses, you cannot
carry the countess in your arms. Come—come with me!” he said
urgently, pulling de Sucy by the arm.
“My friend! abandon Stephanie!”
De Sucy seized the countess, made her stand upright, shook her
with the roughness of a despairing man, and compelled her to wake
up. She looked at him with fixed, dead eyes.
“You must walk, Stephanie, or we shall all die here.”
For all answer the countess tried to drop again upon the snow and
sleep. The aide-de-camp seized a brand from the fire and waved it in
her face.
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“We will save her in spite of herself!” cried Philippe, lifting the
countess and placing her in the carriage.
He returned to implore the help of his friend. Together they lifted
the old general, without knowing whether he were dead or alive, and
put him beside his wife. The major then rolled over the men who
were sleeping on his blankets, which he tossed into the carriage, together
with some roasted fragments of his mare.
“What do you mean to do?” asked the aide-de-camp.
“Drag them.”
“You are crazy.”
“True,” said Philippe, crossing his arms in despair.
Suddenly, he was seized by a last despairing thought.
“To you,” he said, grasping the sound arm of his orderly, “I confide
her for one hour. Remember that you must die sooner than let any
one approach her.”
The major then snatched up the countess’s diamonds, held them
in one hand, drew his sabre with the other, and began to strike with
the flat of its blade such of the sleepers as he thought the most intrepid.
He succeeded in awaking the colossal grenadier, and two other
men whose rank it was impossible to tell.
“We are done for!” he said.
“I know it,” said the grenadier, “but I don’t care.”
“Well, death for death, wouldn’t you rather sell your life for a pretty
woman, and take your chances of seeing France?”
“I’d rather sleep,” said a man, rolling over on the snow, “and if you
trouble me again, I’ll stick my bayonet into your stomach.”
“What is the business, my colonel?” said the grenadier. “That man
is drunk; he’s a Parisian; he likes his ease.”
“That is yours, my brave grenadier,” cried the major, offering him
a string of diamonds, “if you will follow me and fight like a madman.
The Russians are ten minutes’ march from here; they have horses;
we are going up to their first battery for a pair.”
“But the sentinels?”
“One of us three—” he interrupted himself, and turned to the
aide-de-camp. “You will come, Hippolyte, won’t you?”
Hippolyte nodded.
“One of us,” continued the major, “will take care of the sentinel.
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Besides, perhaps they are asleep too, those cursed Russians.”
“Forward! major, you’re a brave one! But you’ll give me a lift on
your carriage?” said the grenadier.
“Yes, if you don’t leave your skin up there— If I fall, Hippolyte, and
you, grenadier, promise me to do your utmost to save the countess.”
“Agreed!” cried the grenadier.
They started for the Russian lines, toward one of the batteries which
had so decimated the hapless wretches lying on the banks of the river.
A few moments later, the gallop of two horses echoed over the snow,
and the wakened artillery men poured out a volley which ranged
above the heads of the sleeping men. The pace of the horses was so
fleet that their steps resounded like the blows of a blacksmith on his
anvil. The generous aide-de-camp was killed. The athletic grenadier
was safe and sound. Philippe in defending Hippolyte had received a
bayonet in his shoulder; but he clung to his horse’s mane, and clasped
him so tightly with his knees that the animal was held as in a vice.
“God be praised!” cried the major, finding his orderly untouched,
and the carriage in its place.
“If you are just, my officer, you will get me the cross for this,” said the
man. “We’ve played a fine game of guns and sabres here, I can tell you.”
“We have done nothing yet— Harness the horses. Take these ropes.”
“They are not long enough.”
“Grenadier, turn over those sleepers, and take their shawls and linen,
to eke out.”
“Tiens! that’s one dead,” said the grenadier, stripping the first man
he came to. “Bless me! what a joke, they are all dead!”
“All?”
“Yes, all; seems as if horse-meat must be indigestible if eaten with
snow.”
The words made Philippe tremble. The cold was increasing.
“My God! to lose the woman I have saved a dozen times!”
The major shook the countess.
“Stephanie! Stephanie!”
The young woman opened her eyes.
“Madame! we are saved.”
“Saved!” she repeated, sinking down again.
The horses were harnessed as best they could. The major, holding
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his sabre in his well hand, with his pistols in his belt, gathered up the
reins with the other hand and mounted one horse while the grenadier
mounted the other. The orderly, whose feet were frozen, was
thrown inside the carriage, across the general and the countess. Excited
by pricks from a sabre, the horses drew the carriage rapidly,
with a sort of fury, to the plain, where innumerable obstacles awaited
it. It was impossible to force a way without danger of crushing the
sleeping men, women, and even children, who refused to move when
the grenadier awoke them. In vain did Monsieur de Sucy endeavor
to find the swathe cut by the rear-guard through the mass of human
beings; it was already obliterated, like the wake of a vessel through
the sea. They could only creep along, being often stopped by soldiers
who threatened to kill their horses.
“Do you want to reach the bridge?” said the grenadier.
“At the cost of my life—at the cost of the whole world!”
“Then forward, march! you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.”
And the grenadier of the guard urged the horses over men and
bivouacs with bloody wheels and a double line of corpses on either
side of them. We must do him the justice to say that he never spared
his breath in shouting in stentorian tones,—
“Look out there, carrion!”
“Poor wretches!” cried the major.
“Pooh! that or the cold, that or the cannon,” said the grenadier,
prodding the horses, and urging them on.
A catastrophe, which might well have happened to them much
sooner, put a stop to their advance. The carriage was overturned.
“I expected it,” cried the imperturbable grenadier. “Ho! ho! your
man is dead.”
“Poor Laurent!” said the major.
“Laurent? Was he in the 5th chasseurs?”
“Yes.”
“Then he was my cousin. Oh, well, this dog’s life isn’t happy enough
to waste any joy in grieving for him.”
The carriage could not be raised; the horses were taken out with
serious and, as it proved, irreparable loss of time. The shock of the
overturn was so violent that the young countess, roused from her
lethargy, threw off her coverings and rose.
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“Philippe, where are we?” she cried in a gentle voice, looking
about her.
“Only five hundred feet from the bridge. We are now going to
cross the Beresina, Stephanie, and once across I will not torment you
any more; you shall sleep; we shall be in safety, and can reach Wilna
easily.—God grant that she may never know what her life has cost!”
he thought.
“Philippe! you are wounded!”
“That is nothing.”
Too late! the fatal hour had come. The Russian cannon sounded
the reveille. Masters of Studzianka, they could sweep the plain, and
by daylight the major could see two of their columns moving and
forming on the heights. A cry of alarm arose from the multitude,
who started to their feet in an instant. Every man now understood
his danger instinctively, and the whole mass rushed to gain the bridge
with the motion of a wave.
The Russians came down with the rapidity of a conflagration. Men,
women, children, horses,—all rushed tumultuously to the bridge.
Fortunately the major, who was carrying the countess, was still some
distance from it. General Eble had just set fire to the supports on the
other bank. In spite of the warnings shouted to those who were rushing
upon the bridge, not a soul went back. Not only did the bridge
go down crowded with human beings, but the impetuosity of that
flood of men toward the fatal bank was so furious that a mass of
humanity poured itself violently into the river like an avalanche. Not
a cry was heard; the only sound was like the dropping of monstrous
stones into the water. Then the Beresina was a mass of floating corpses.
The retrograde movement of those who now fell back into the
plain to escape the death before them was so violent, and their concussion
against those who were advancing from the rear so terrible,
that numbers were smothered or trampled to death. The Comte and
Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to their carriage, behind which
Philippe forced them, using it as a breastwork. As for the major and
the grenadier, they found their safety in their strength. They killed to
escape being killed.
This hurricane of human beings, the flux and reflux of living bodies,
had the effect of leaving for a few short moments the whole bank
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of the Beresina deserted. The multitude were surging to the plain. If
a few men rushed to the river, it was less in the hope of reaching the
other bank, which to them was France, than to rush from the horrors
of Siberia. Despair proved an aegis to some bold hearts. One
officer sprang from ice-cake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite
shore. A soldier clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies
and heaps of ice. The multitude finally comprehended that the
Russians would not put to death a body of twenty thousand men,
without arms, torpid, stupid, unable to defend themselves; and each
man awaited his fate with horrible resignation. Then the major and
the grenadier, the general and his wife, remained almost alone on the
river bank, a few steps from the spot where the bridge had been.
They stood there, with dry eyes, silent, surrounded by heaps of dead.
A few sound soldiers, a few officers to whom the emergency had
restored their natural energy, were near them. This group consisted
of some fifty men in all. The major noticed at a distance of some
two hundred yards the remains of another bridge intended for carriages
and destroyed the day before.
“Let us make a raft!” he cried.
He had hardly uttered the words before the whole group rushed to
the ruins, and began to pick up iron bolts, and screws, and pieces of
wood and ropes, whatever materials they could find that were suitable
for the construction of a raft. A score of soldiers and officers,
who were armed, formed a guard, commanded by the major, to
protect the workers against the desperate attacks which might be
expected from the crowd, if their scheme was discovered. The instinct
of freedom, strong in all prisoners, inspiring them to miraculous
acts, can only be compared with that which now drove to action
these unfortunate Frenchmen.
“The Russians! the Russians are coming!” cried the defenders to
the workers; and the work went on, the raft increased in length and
breadth and depth. Generals, soldiers, colonel, all put their shoulders
to the wheel; it was a true image of the building of Noah’s ark. The
young countess, seated beside her husband, watched the progress of
the work with regret that she could not help it; and yet she did assist
in making knots to secure the cordage.
At last the raft was finished. Forty men launched it on the river, a
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dozen others holding the cords which moored it to the shore. But no
sooner had the builders seen their handiwork afloat, than they sprang
from the bank with odious selfishness. The major, fearing the fury of
this first rush, held back the countess and the general, but too late he
saw the whole raft covered, men pressing together like crowds at a
theatre.
“Savages!” he cried, “it was I who gave you the idea of that raft. I
have saved you, and you deny me a place.”
A confused murmur answered him. The men at the edge of the
raft, armed with long sticks, pressed with violence against the shore
to send off the frail construction with sufficient impetus to force its
way through corpses and ice-floes to the other shore.
“Thunder of heaven! I’ll sweep you into the water if you don’t take
the major and his two companions,” cried the stalwart grenadier,
who swung his sabre, stopped the departure, and forced the men to
stand closer in spite of furious outcries.
“I shall fall,”—”I am falling,”—”Push off! push off!—Forward!”
resounded on all sides.
The major looked with haggard eyes at Stephanie, who lifted hers
to heaven with a feeling of sublime resignation.
“To die with thee!” she said.
There was something even comical in the position of the men in
possession of the raft. Though they were uttering awful groans and
imprecations, they dared not resist the grenadier, for in truth they
were so closely packed together, that a push to one man might send
half of them overboard. This danger was so pressing that a cavalry
captain endeavored to get rid of the grenadier; but the latter, seeing
the hostile movement of the officer, seized him round the waist and
flung him into the water, crying out,—
“Ha! ha! my duck, do you want to drink? Well, then, drink!— Here
are two places,” he cried. “Come, major, toss me the little woman and
follow yourself. Leave that old fossil, who’ll be dead by to-morrow.”
“Make haste!” cried the voice of all, as one man.
“Come, major, they are grumbling, and they have a right to do so.”
The Comte de Vandieres threw off his wrappings and showed himself
in his general’s uniform.
“Let us save the count,” said Philippe.
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Stephanie pressed his hand, and throwing herself on his breast, she
clasped him tightly.
“Adieu!” she said.
They had understood each other.
The Comte de Vandieres recovered sufficient strength and presence
of mind to spring upon the raft, whither Stephanie followed
him, after turning a last look to Philippe.
“Major! will you take my place? I don’t care a fig for life,” cried the
grenadier. “I’ve neither wife nor child nor mother.”
“I confide them to your care,” said the major, pointing to the count
and his wife.
“Then be easy; I’ll care for them, as though they were my very
eyes.”
The raft was now sent off with so much violence toward the opposite
side of the river, that as it touched ground, the shock was felt
by all. The count, who was at the edge of it, lost his balance and fell
into the river; as he fell, a cake of sharp ice caught him, and cut off
his head, flinging it to a great distance.
“See there! major!” cried the grenadier.
“Adieu!” said a woman’s voice.
Philippe de Sucy fell to the ground, overcome with horror and
fatigue.
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100
CHAPTER III
THE CURE
“MY POOR NIECE became insane,” continued the physician, after a few
moment’s silence. “Ah! monsieur,” he said, seizing the marquis’s hand,
“life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young, so
delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the grenadier,
whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two years at the
heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches. She was often,
they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for months together,
she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes kept
in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God alone knows
the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived. She was locked
up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the time her relatives,
thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816, the grenadier
Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went after making her
escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the grenadier that she
had lived for a whole month in the forest, where they had tracked her
in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always escaped them. I was
then staying a few miles from Strasburg. Hearing much talk of a wild
woman caught in the woods, I felt a desire to ascertain the truth of the
ridiculous stories which were current about her. What were my feelings
on beholding my own niece! Fleuriot told me all he knew of her
dreadful history. I took the poor man with my niece back to my home
in Auvergne, where, unfortunately, I lost him some months later. He
had some slight control over Madame de Vandieres; he alone could
induce her to wear clothing. ‘Adieu,’ that word, which is her only
language, she seldom uttered at that time. Fleuriot had endeavored to

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awaken in her a few ideas, a few memories of the past; but he failed; all
that he gained was to make her say that melancholy word a little oftener.
Still, the grenadier knew how to amuse her and play with her; my
hope was in him, but—”
He was silent for a moment.
“Here,” he continued, “she has found another creature, with whom
she seems to have some strange understanding. It is a poor idiotic
peasant-girl, who, in spite of her ugliness and stupidity, loved a man,
a mason. The mason was willing to marry her, as she had some property.
Poor Genevieve was happy for a year; she dressed in her best to
dance with her lover on Sunday; she comprehended love; in her heart
and soul there was room for that one sentiment. But the mason,
Dallot, reflected. He found a girl with all her senses, and more land
than Genevieve, and he deserted the poor creature. Since then she has
lost the little intellect that love developed in her; she can do nothing
but watch the cows, or help at harvesting. My niece and this poor
girl are friends, apparently by some invisible chain of their common
destiny, by the sentiment in each which has caused their madness.
See!” added Stephanie’s uncle, leading the marquis to a window.
The latter then saw the countess seated on the ground between
Genevieve’s legs. The peasant-girl, armed with a huge horn comb, was
giving her whole attention to the work of disentangling the long black
hair of the poor countess, who was uttering little stifled cries, expressive
of some instinctive sense of pleasure. Monsieur d’Albon shuddered
as he saw the utter abandonment of the body, the careless animal
ease which revealed in the hapless woman a total absence of soul.
“Philippe, Philippe!” he muttered, “the past horrors are nothing!—
Is there no hope?” he asked.
The old physician raised his eyes to heaven.
“Adieu, monsieur,” said the marquis, pressing his hand. “My friend
is expecting me. He will soon come to you.”
“Then it was really she!” cried de Sucy at d’Albon’s first words. “Ah! I
still doubted it,” he added, a few tears falling from his eyes, which were
habitually stern.
“Yes, it is the Comtesse de Vandieres,” replied the marquis.
The colonel rose abruptly from his bed and began to dress.
“Philippe!” cried his friend, “are you mad?”
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“I am no longer ill,” replied the colonel, simply. “This news has
quieted my suffering. What pain can I feel when I think of Stephanie?
I am going to the Bons-Hommes, to see her, speak to her, cure her.
She is free. Well, happiness will smile upon us—or Providence is not
in this world. Think you that that poor woman could hear my voice
and not recover reason?”
“She has already seen you and not recognized you,” said his friend,
gently, for he felt the danger of Philippe’s excited hopes, and tried to
cast a salutary doubt upon them.
The colonel quivered; then he smiled, and made a motion of incredulity.
No one dared to oppose his wish, and within a very short
time he reached the old priory.
“Where is she?” he cried, on arriving.
“Hush!” said her uncle, “she is sleeping. See, here she is.”
Philippe then saw the poor insane creature lying on a bench in the
sun. Her head was protected from the heat by a forest of hair which
fell in tangled locks over her face. Her arms hung gracefully to the
ground; her body lay easily posed like that of a doe; her feet were
folded under her without effort; her bosom rose and fell at regular
intervals; her skin, her complexion, had that porcelain whiteness,
which we admire so much in the clear transparent faces of children.
Standing motionless beside her, Genevieve held in her hand a branch
which Stephanie had doubtless climbed a tall poplar to obtain, and
the poor idiot was gently waving it above her sleeping companion,
to chase away the flies and cool the atmosphere.
The peasant-woman gazed at Monsieur Fanjat and the colonel;
then, like an animal which recognizes its master, she turned her
head slowly to the countess, and continued to watch her, without
giving any sign of surprise or intelligence. The air was stifling; the
stone bench glittered in the sunlight; the meadow exhaled to heaven
those impish vapors which dance and dart above the herbage like
silvery dust; but Genevieve seemed not to feel this all-consuming
heat.
The colonel pressed the hand of the doctor violently in his own.
Tears rolled from his eyes along his manly cheeks, and fell to the
earth at the feet of his Stephanie.
“Monsieur,” said the uncle, “for two years past, my heart is broken
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day by day. Soon you will be like me. You may not always weep, but
you will always feel your sorrow.”
The two men understood each other; and again, pressing each
other’s hands, they remained motionless, contemplating the exquisite
calmness which sleep had cast upon that graceful creature. From
time to time she gave a sigh, and that sigh, which had all the semblance
of sensibilities, made the unhappy colonel tremble with hope.
“Alas!” said Monsieur Fanjat, “do not deceive yourself, monsieur;
there is no meaning in her sigh.”
Those who have ever watched for hours with delight the sleep of
one who is tenderly beloved, whose eyes will smile to them at waking,
can understand the sweet yet terrible emotion that shook the
colonel’s soul. To him, this sleep was an illusion; the waking might
be death, death in its most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped
in three bounds to the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at
the sound. She sprang to her feet, but so lightly that the movement
did not frighten the freakish animal; then she caught sight of Philippe,
and darted away, followed by her four-footed friend, to a hedge of
elders; there she uttered the same little cry like a frightened bird,
which the two men had heard near the other gate. Then she climbed
an acacia, and nestling into its tufted top, she watched the stranger
with the inquisitive attention of the forest birds.
“Adieu, adieu, adieu,” she said, without the soul communicating
one single intelligent inflexion to the word.
It was uttered impassively, as the bird sings his note.
“She does not recognize me!” cried the colonel, in despair.
“Stephanie! it is Philippe, thy Philippe, Philippe!”
And the poor soldier went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps
from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a slight
expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a single bound
she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a Norway fir,
where she darted from branch to branch with extraordinary agility.
“Do not pursue her,” said Monsieur Fanjat to the colonel, “or you
will arouse an aversion which might become insurmountable. I will
help you to tame her and make her come to you. Let us sit on this
bench. If you pay no attention to her, she will come of her own
accord to examine you.”
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“She! not to know me! to flee me!” repeated the colonel, seating
himself on a bench with his back to a tree that shaded it, and letting
his head fall upon his breast.
The doctor said nothing. Presently, the countess came gently down
the fir-tree, letting herself swing easily on the branches, as the wind
swayed them. At each branch she stopped to examine the stranger;
but seeing him motionless, she at last sprang to the ground and came
slowly towards him across the grass. When she reached a tree about
ten feet distant, against which she leaned, Monsieur Fanjat said to
the colonel in a low voice,—
“Take out, adroitly, from my right hand pocket some lumps of sugar
you will feel there. Show them to her, and she will come to us. I will
renounce in your favor my sole means of giving her pleasure. With
sugar, which she passionately loves, you will accustom her to approach
you, and to know you again.”
“When she was a woman,” said Philippe, sadly, “she had no taste
for sweet things.”
When the colonel showed her the lump of sugar, holding it between
the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, she again uttered her little
wild cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against
the instinctive fear he caused her; she looked at the sugar and turned
away her head alternately, precisely like a dog whose master forbids
him to touch his food until he has said a letter of the alphabet which he
slowly repeats. At last the animal desire triumphed over fear. Stephanie
darted to Philippe, cautiously putting out her little brown hand to
seize the prize, touched the fingers of her poor lover as she snatched the
sugar, and fled away among the trees. This dreadful scene overcame the
colonel; he burst into tears and rushed into the house.
“Has love less courage than friendship?” Monsieur Fanjat said to
him. “I have some hope, Monsieur le baron. My poor niece was in a
far worse state than that in which you now find her.”
“How was that possible?” cried Philippe.
“She went naked,” replied the doctor.
The colonel made a gesture of horror and turned pale. The doctor saw
in that sudden pallor alarming symptoms; he felt the colonel’s pulse,
found him in a violent fever, and half persuaded, half compelled him to
go to bed. Then he gave him a dose of opium to ensure a calm sleep.
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Eight days elapsed, during which Colonel de Sucy struggled against
mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often lacerated,
could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie’s insanity; but
he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation, and found some
assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly tame the countess
by bringing her sweetmeats; he took such pains in choosing them,
and he learned so well how to keep the little conquests he sought to
make upon her instincts—that last shred of her intellect —that he
ended by making her much TAMER than she had ever been.
Every morning he went into the park, and if, after searching for
her long, he could not discover on what tree she was swaying, nor
the covert in which she crouched to play with a bird, nor the roof
on which she might have clambered, he would whistle the wellknown
air of “Partant pour la Syrie,” to which some tender memory
of their love attached. Instantly, Stephanie would run to him with
the lightness of a fawn. She was now so accustomed to see him,
that he frightened her no longer. Soon she was willing to sit upon
his knee, and clasp him closely with her thin and agile arm. In that
attitude—so dear to lovers!—Philippe would feed her with sugarplums.
Then, having eaten those that he gave her, she would often
search his pockets with gestures that had all the mechanical velocity
of a monkey’s motions. When she was very sure there was nothing
more, she looked at Philippe with clear eyes, without ideas, with
recognition. Then she would play with him, trying at times to take
off his boots to see his feet, tearing his gloves, putting on his hat;
she would even let him pass his hands through her hair, and take
her in his arms; she accepted, but without pleasure, his ardent kisses.
She would look at him silently, without emotion, when his tears
flowed; but she always understood his “Partant pour la Syrie,” when
he whistled it, though he never succeeded in teaching her to say her
own name Stephanie.
Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which
never abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found
the countess sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now
yellowing, the poor lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes
as long as she would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in
them would become intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded
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him that he saw those hard immovable rays softening, vibrating,
living, and he cried out,—
“Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!”
But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she
climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,—despair
that was new each day.
One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that
rural haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was
loading his pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had
ceased to hope; he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he conquered
the vertigo that threatened him, it was because he would rather
see his niece living and mad than dead. He hastened up.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“That is for me,” replied the colonel, pointing to a pistol already
loaded, which was lying on the bench; “and this is for her,” he added,
as he forced the wad into the weapon he held.
The countess was lying on the ground beside him, playing with
the balls.
“Then you do not know,” said the doctor, coldly, concealing his
terror, “that in her sleep last night she called you: Philippe!”
“She called me!” cried the baron, dropping his pistol, which
Stephanie picked up. He took it from her hastily, caught up the one
that was on the bench, and rushed away.
“Poor darling!” said the doctor, happy in the success of his lie. He
pressed the poor creature to his breast, and continued speaking to
himself: “He would have killed thee, selfish man! because he suffers.
He does not love thee for thyself, my child! But we forgive, do we
not? He is mad, out of his senses, but thou art only senseless. No,
God alone should call thee to Him. We think thee unhappy, we pity
thee because thou canst not share our sorrows, fools that we are!—
But,” he said, sitting down and taking her on his knee, “nothing
troubles thee; thy life is like that of a bird, of a fawn—”
As he spoke she darted upon a young blackbird which was hopping
near them, caught it with a little note of satisfaction, strangled
it, looked at it, dead in her hand, and flung it down at the foot of a
tree without a thought.
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The next day, as soon as it was light, the colonel came down into
the gardens, and looked about for Stephanie,—he believed in the
coming happiness. Not finding her he whistled. When his darling
came to him, he took her on his arm; they walked together thus for
the first time, and he led her within a group of trees, the autumn
foliage of which was dropping to the breeze. The colonel sat down.
Of her own accord Stephanie placed herself on his knee. Philippe
trembled with joy.
“Love,” he said, kissing her hands passionately, “I am Philippe.”
She looked at him with curiosity.
“Come,” he said, pressing her to him, “dost thou feel my heart? It
has beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is
not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am
thy Philippe.”
“Adieu,” she said, “adieu.”
The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement
communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from
him by despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious passion,
was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.
“Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy.”
She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash
of vague intelligence.
“She knows me!—Stephanie!”
His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly,
the countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket
while he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought
the amount of reason required for a monkey’s trick. Philippe dropped
to the ground unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting
on the colonel’s body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying
her pleasure by pretty gestures and affectations with which, had she
her reason, she might have imitated her parrot or her cat.
“Ah! my friend,” said Philippe, when he came to his senses, “I die
every day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if, in her
madness, she had kept her woman’s nature. But to see her always a
savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her—”
“You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,”
said the doctor, bitterly. “Your love and your devotion yield be-
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fore a prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the
sad happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure
of playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While
you have slept, I have watched, I have— Go, monsieur, go! abandon
her! leave this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling
creature; I comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her
secrets. Some day you will thank me for thus sending you away.”
The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The
doctor was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon
his guest, whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely,
if either of the two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he
not bear alone the burden of their dreadful sorrow?
After the colonel’s departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had
formed a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his
darling. Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in
preparing for his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park
and inundated during the winter the marshes on either side of it,
giving it some resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on
the heights above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror.
The colonel collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the
help of his memory, he copied in his park the shore where General
Eble destroyed the bridge. He planted piles, and made buttresses and
burned them, leaving their charred and blackened ruins, standing in
the water from shore to shore. Then he gathered fragments of all
kinds, like those of which the raft was built. He ordered dilapidated
uniforms and clothing of every grade, and hired hundreds of peasants
to wear them; he erected huts and cabins for the purpose of
burning them. In short, he forgot nothing that might recall that
most awful of all scenes, and he succeeded.
Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its
thick, white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the
Beresina. This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his
army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur
de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation,
which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity.
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Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and
Comtesse de Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses,
too, were like those he had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from
the Russian outposts. He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing,
the same weapons, as on the 29th of November, 1812. He had let
his beard grow, also his hair, which was tangled and matted, and his
face was neglected, so that nothing might be wanting to represent
the awful truth.
“I can guess your purpose,” cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw
the colonel getting out of the carriage. “If you want to succeed, do
not let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her
opium. During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka,
and place her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle.”
About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw Genevieve
coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she slept.
“Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!” she cried, weeping hot tears.
“Genevieve, what troubles you?” asked the doctor.
Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm
to heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with
every sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.
“That is a good omen!” cried the colonel. “She feels she is to lose
her companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her
reason.”
“God grant it!” said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by
the incident.
Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had
met with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of
second sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds,
and which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes
of savages.
As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain
of the Beresina at nine o’clock in the morning, when she was awakened
by a cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the
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experiment was to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants
made a frightful clamor like that on the shore of the river that memorable
night, when twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death
or slavery by their own folly.
At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and
ran, with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river;
she saw the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge,
and the fatal raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters
of the Beresina. The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the
crowd with his sabre. Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went
to all hearts, and threw herself before the colonel, whose heart beat
wildly. She seemed to gather herself together, and, at first, looked
vaguely at the singular scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning’s
flash, her eyes had that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in
the eye of birds; then passing her hand across her brow with the keen
expression of one who meditates, she contemplated the living memory
of a past scene spread before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe,
she SAW him. An awful silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel
gasped, but dared not speak; the doctor wept. Stephanie’s sweet face
colored faintly; then, from tint to tint, it returned to the brightness
of youth, till it glowed with a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness,
lighted by intelligence, came nearer and nearer like a conflagration.
Convulsive trembling rose from her feet to her heart. Then these
phenomena seemed to blend in one as Stephanie’s eyes cast forth a
celestial ray, the flame of a living soul. She lived, she thought! She
shuddered, with fear perhaps, for God himself unloosed that silent
tongue, and cast anew His fires into that long-extinguished soul.
Human will came with its full electric torrent, and vivified the body
from which it had been driven.
“Stephanie!” cried the colonel.
“Oh! it is Philippe,” said the poor countess.
She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held
out to her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators.
Stephanie burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened
as though the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,—
“Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!”
“Oh! she is dead,” cried the colonel, opening his arms.
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The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it
as though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with
it still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and
placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer
beat.
“It is true,” he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood motionless,
and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that resplendent
beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of the
glorious future—”Yes, she is dead.”
“Ah! that smile,” cried Philippe, “do you see that smile? Can it be
true?”
“She is turning cold,” replied Monsieur Fanjat.
Monsieur de Sucy made a few steps to tear himself away from the
sight; but he stopped, whistled the air that Stephanie had known,
and when she did not come to him, went on with staggering steps
like a drunken man, still whistling, but never turning back.
General Philippe de Sucy was thought in the social world to be a
very agreeable man, and above all a very gay one. A few days ago, a
lady complimented him on his good humor, and the charming equability
of his nature.
“Ah! madame,” he said, “I pay dear for my liveliness in my lonely
evenings.”
“Are you ever alone?” she said.
“No,” he replied smiling.
If a judicious observer of human nature could have seen at that
moment the expression on the Comte de Sucy’s face, he would perhaps
have shuddered.
“Why don’t you marry?” said the lady, who had several daughters
at school. “You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have talents,
and a great future before you; all things smile upon you.”
“Yes,” he said, “but a smile kills me.”
The next day the lady heard with great astonishment that Monsieur
de Sucy had blown his brains out during the night. The upper
ranks of society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event,
and each person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities
of each reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices,
explained the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812.
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Two men alone, a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician,
knew that Philippe de Sucy was one of those strong men to
whom God has given the unhappy power of issuing daily in triumph
from awful combats which they fight with an unseen monster. If,
for a moment, God withdraws from such men His all-powerful hand,
they succumb.
112
ADDENDUM
The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Note: Adieu is also entitled Farewell.
Granville, Vicomte de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Second Home
Farewell (Adieu)
Cesar Birotteau
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Pons

Dedication
Albert Savarus
To Madame Emile Girardin.
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
Balzac
ONE OF THE FEW DRAWING-ROOMS where, under the Restoration, the
Archbishop of Besancon was sometimes to be seen, was that of the
Baronne de Watteville, to whom he was particularly attached on account
of her religious sentiments.
A word as to this lady, the most important lady of Besancon.
Monsieur de Watteville, a descendant of the famous Watteville,
the most successful and illustrious of murderers and renegades—his
extraordinary adventures are too much a part of history to be related
here—this nineteenth century Monsieur de Watteville was as gentle
and peaceable as his ancestor of the Grand Siecle had been passionate
and turbulent. After living in the Comte (La Franche Comte) like a
wood-louse in the crack of a wainscot, he had married the heiress of
the celebrated house of Rupt. Mademoiselle de Rupt brought twenty
thousand francs a year in the funds to add to the ten thousand francs
a year in real estate of the Baron de Watteville. The Swiss gentleman’s
coat-of-arms (the Wattevilles are Swiss) was then borne as an escutcheon
of pretence on the old shield of the Rupts. The marriage, ar-
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ranged in 1802, was solemnized in 1815 after the second Restoration.
Within three years of the birth of a daughter all Madame de
Watteville’s grandparents were dead, and their estates wound up. Monsieur
de Watteville’s house was then sold, and they settled in the Rue
de la Prefecture in the fine old mansion of the Rupts, with an immense
garden stretching to the Rue du Perron. Madame de Watteville,
devout as a girl, became even more so after her marriage. She is one
of the queens of the saintly brotherhood which gives the upper circles
of Besancon a solemn air and prudish manners in harmony with the
character of the town.
Monsieur le Baron de Watteville, a dry, lean man devoid of intelligence,
looked worn out without any one knowing whereby, for he
enjoyed the profoundest ignorance; but as his wife was a red-haired
woman, and of a stern nature that became proverbial (we still say “as
sharp as Madame de Watteville”), some wits of the legal profession
declared that he had been worn against that rock—Rupt is obviously
derived from rupes. Scientific students of social phenomena will not
fail to have observed that Rosalie was the only offspring of the union
between the Wattevilles and the Rupts.
Monsieur de Watteville spent his existence in a handsome workshop
with a lathe; he was a turner! As subsidiary to this pursuit, he
took up a fancy for making collections. Philosophical doctors, devoted
to the study of madness, regard this tendency towards collecting
as a first degree of mental aberration when it is set on small things.
The Baron de Watteville treasured shells and geological fragments of
the neighborhood of Besancon. Some contradictory folk, especially
women, would say of Monsieur de Watteville, “He has a noble soul!
He perceived from the first days of his married life that he would
never be his wife’s master, so he threw himself into a mechanical
occupation and good living.”
The house of the Rupts was not devoid of a certain magnificence
worthy of Louis XIV., and bore traces of the nobility of the two
families who had mingled in 1815. The chandeliers of glass cut in
the shape of leaves, the brocades, the damask, the carpets, the gilt
furniture, were all in harmony with the old liveries and the old servants.
Though served in blackened family plate, round a lookingglass
tray furnished with Dresden china, the food was exquisite. The
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wines selected by Monsieur de Watteville, who, to occupy his time
and vary his employments, was his own butler, enjoyed a sort of
fame throughout the department. Madame de Watteville’s fortune
was a fine one; while her husband’s, which consisted only of the
estate of Rouxey, worth about ten thousand francs a year, was not
increased by inheritance. It is needless to add that in consequence of
Madame de Watteville’s close intimacy with the Archbishop, the three
or four clever or remarkable Abbes of the diocese who were not averse
to good feeding were very much at home at her house.
At a ceremonial dinner given in honor of I know not whose wedding,
at the beginning of September 1834, when the women were
standing in a circle round the drawing-room fire, and the men in
groups by the windows, every one exclaimed with pleasure at the
entrance of Monsieur l’Abbe de Grancey, who was announced.
“Well, and the lawsuit?” they all cried.
“Won!” replied the Vicar-General. “The verdict of the Court, from
which we had no hope, you know why—”
This was an allusion to the members of the First Court of Appeal
of 1830; the Legitimists had almost all withdrawn.
“The verdict is in our favor on every point, and reverses the decision
of the Lower Court.”
“Everybody thought you were done for.”
“And we should have been, but for me. I told our advocate to be
off to Paris, and at the crucial moment I was able to secure a new
pleader, to whom we owe our victory, a wonderful man—”
“At Besancon?” said Monsieur de Watteville, guilelessly.
“At Besancon,” replied the Abbe de Grancey.
“Oh yes, Savaron,” said a handsome young man sitting near the
Baroness, and named de Soulas.
“He spent five or six nights over it; he devoured documents and
briefs; he had seven or eight interviews of several hours with me,”
continued Monsieur de Grancey, who had just reappeared at the Hotel
de Rupt for the first time in three weeks. “In short, Monsieur Savaron
has just completely beaten the celebrated lawyer whom our adversaries
had sent for from Paris. This young man is wonderful, the bigwigs
say. Thus the chapter is twice victorious; it has triumphed in
law and also in politics, since it has vanquished Liberalism in the
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person of the Counsel of our Municipality.—’Our adversaries,’ so
our advocate said, ‘must not expect to find readiness on all sides to
ruin the Archbishoprics.’—The President was obliged to enforce silence.
All the townsfolk of Besancon applauded. Thus the possession
of the buildings of the old convent remains with the Chapter of the
Cathedral of Besancon. Monsieur Savaron, however, invited his Parisian
opponent to dine with him as they came out of court. He
accepted, saying, ‘Honor to every conqueror,’ and complimented
him on his success without bitterness.”
“And where did you unearth this lawyer?” said Madame de
Watteville. “I never heard his name before.”
“Why, you can see his windows from hence,” replied the Vicar-
General. “Monsieur Savaron lives in the Rue du Perron; the garden
of his house joins on to yours.”
“But he is not a native of the Comte,” said Monsieur de Watteville.
“So little is he a native of any place, that no one knows where he
comes from,” said Madame de Chavoncourt.
“But who is he?” asked Madame de Watteville, taking the Abbe’s
arm to go into the dining-room. “If he is a stranger, by what chance
has he settled at Besancon? It is a strange fancy for a barrister.”
“Very strange!” echoed Amedee de Soulas, whose biography is here
necessary to the understanding of this tale.
In all ages France and England have carried on an exchange of trifles,
which is all the more constant because it evades the tyranny of the
Custom-house. The fashion that is called English in Paris is called
French in London, and this is reciprocal. The hostility of the two
nations is suspended on two points—the uses of words and the fashions
of dress. God Save the King, the national air of England, is a
tune written by Lulli for the Chorus of Esther or of Athalie. Hoops,
introduced at Paris by an Englishwoman, were invented in London,
it is known why, by a Frenchwoman, the notorious Duchess of Portsmouth.
They were at first so jeered at that the first Englishwoman
who appeared in them at the Tuileries narrowly escaped being crushed
by the crowd; but they were adopted. This fashion tyrannized over
the ladies of Europe for half a century. At the peace of 1815, for a
year, the long waists of the English were a standing jest; all Paris went
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to see Pothier and Brunet in Les Anglaises pour rire; but in 1816 and
1817 the belt of the Frenchwoman, which in 1814 cut her across the
bosom, gradually descended till it reached the hips.
Within ten years England has made two little gifts to our language.
The Incroyable, the Merveilleux, the Elegant, the three successes of
the petit-maitre of discreditable etymology, have made way for the
“dandy” and the “lion.” The lion is not the parent of the lionne. The
lionne is due to the famous song by Alfred de Musset:
Avez vou vu dans Barcelone
. . . . . .
C’est ma maitresse et ma lionne.
There has been a fusion—or, if you prefer it, a confusion—of the
two words and the leading ideas. When an absurdity can amuse Paris,
which devours as many masterpieces as absurdities, the provinces can
hardly be deprived of them. So, as soon as the lion paraded Paris with
his mane, his beard and moustaches, his waistcoats and his eyeglass,
maintained in its place, without the help of his hands, by the contraction
of his cheek, and eye-socket, the chief towns of some departments
had their sub-lions, who protested by the smartness of their trouserstraps
against the untidiness of their fellow-townsmen.
Thus, in 1834, Besancon could boast of a lion, in the person of
Monsieur Amedee-Sylvain de Soulas, spelt Souleyas at the time of
the Spanish occupation. Amedee de Soulas is perhaps the only man
in Besancon descended from a Spanish family. Spain sent men to
manage her business in the Comte, but very few Spaniards settled
there. The Soulas remained in consequence of their connection with
Cardinal Granvelle. Young Monsieur de Soulas was always talking of
leaving Besancon, a dull town, church-going, and not literary, a military
centre and garrison town, of which the manners and customs
and physiognomy are worth describing. This opinion allowed of his
lodging, like a man uncertain of the future, in three very scantily
furnished rooms at the end of the Rue Neuve, just where it opens
into the Rue de la Prefecture.
Young Monsieur de Soulas could not possibly live without a tiger.
This tiger was the son of one of his farmers, a small servant aged
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fourteen, thick-set, and named Babylas. The lion dressed his tiger
very smartly—a short tunic-coat of iron-gray cloth, belted with patent
leather, bright blue plush breeches, a red waistcoat, polished leather
top-boots, a shiny hat with black lacing, and brass buttons with the
arms of Soulas. Amedee gave this boy white cotton gloves and his
washing, and thirty-six francs a month to keep himself—a sum that
seemed enormous to the grisettes of Besancon: four hundred and
twenty francs a year to a child of fifteen, without counting extras!
The extras consisted in the price for which he could sell his turned
clothes, a present when Soulas exchanged one of his horses, and the
perquisite of the manure. The two horses, treated with sordid
economy, cost, one with another, eight hundred francs a year. His
bills for articles received from Paris, such as perfumery, cravats, jewelry,
patent blacking, and clothes, ran to another twelve hundred
francs. Add to this the groom, or tiger, the horses, a very superior
style of dress, and six hundred francs a year for rent, and you will see
a grand total of three thousand francs.
Now, Monsieur de Soulas’ father had left him only four thousand
francs a year, the income from some cottage farms which lent painful
uncertainty to the rents. The lion had hardly three francs a day left
for food, amusements, and gambling. He very often dined out, and
breakfasted with remarkable frugality. When he was positively obliged
to dine at his own cost, he sent his tiger to fetch a couple of dishes
from a cookshop, never spending more than twenty-five sous.
Young Monsieur de Soulas was supposed to be a spendthrift, recklessly
extravagant, whereas the poor man made the two ends meet in
the year with a keenness and skill which would have done honor to a
thrifty housewife. At Besancon in those days no one knew how great
a tax on a man’s capital were six francs spent in polish to spread on his
boots or shoes, yellow gloves at fifty sous a pair, cleaned in the deepest
secrecy to make them three times renewed, cravats costing ten
francs, and lasting three months, four waistcoats at twenty-five francs,
and trousers fitting close to the boots. How could he do otherwise,
since we see women in Paris bestowing their special attention on
simpletons who visit them, and cut out the most remarkable men by
means of these frivolous advantages, which a man can buy for fifteen
louis, and get his hair curled and a fine linen shirt into the bargain?
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If this unhappy youth should seem to you to have become a lion
on very cheap terms, you must know that Amedee de Soulas had
been three times to Switzerland, by coach and in short stages, twice
to Paris, and once from Paris to England. He passed as a well-informed
traveler, and could say, “In England, where I went …” The
dowagers of the town would say to him, “You, who have been in
England …” He had been as far as Lombardy, and seen the shores of
the Italian lakes. He read new books. Finally, when he was cleaning
his gloves, the tiger Babylas replied to callers, “Monsieur is very busy.”
An attempt had been made to withdraw Monsieur Amedee de Soulas
from circulation by pronouncing him “A man of advanced ideas.”
Amedee had the gift of uttering with the gravity of a native the
commonplaces that were in fashion, which gave him the credit of
being one of the most enlightened of the nobility. His person was
garnished with fashionable trinkets, and his head furnished with ideas
hall-marked by the press.
In 1834 Amedee was a young man of five-and-twenty, of medium
height, dark, with a very prominent thorax, well-made shoulders, rather
plump legs, feet already fat, white dimpled hands, a beard under his
chin, moustaches worthy of the garrison, a good-natured, fat, rubicund
face, a flat nose, and brown expressionless eyes; nothing Spanish
about him. He was progressing rapidly in the direction of obesity,
which would be fatal to his pretensions. His nails were well kept, his
beard trimmed, the smallest details of his dress attended to with English
precision. Hence Amedee de Soulas was looked upon as the finest
man in Besancon. A hairdresser who waited upon him at a fixed hour—
another luxury, costing sixty francs a year—held him up as the sovereign
authority in matters of fashion and elegance.
Amedee slept late, dressed and went out towards noon, to go to
one of his farms and practise pistol-shooting. He attached as much
importance to this exercise as Lord Byron did in his later days. Then,
at three o’clock he came home, admired on horseback by the grisettes
and the ladies who happened to be at their windows. After an affectation
of study or business, which seemed to engage him till four, he
dressed to dine out, spent the evening in the drawing-rooms of the
aristocracy of Besancon playing whist, and went home to bed at
eleven. No life could be more above board, more prudent, or more
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irreproachable, for he punctually attended the services at church on
Sundays and holy days.
To enable you to understand how exceptional is such a life, it is
necessary to devote a few words to an account of Besancon. No town
ever offered more deaf and dumb resistance to progress. At Besancon
the officials, the employes, the military, in short, every one engaged in
governing it, sent thither from Paris to fill a post of any kind, are all
spoken of by the expressive general name of the Colony. The colony is
neutral ground, the only ground where, as in church, the upper rank
and the townsfolk of the place can meet. Here, fired by a word, a look,
or gesture, are started those feuds between house and house, between a
woman of rank and a citizen’s wife, which endure till death, and widen
the impassable gulf which parts the two classes of society. With the
exception of the Clermont-Mont-Saint-Jean, the Beauffremont, the
de Scey, and the Gramont families, with a few others who come only
to stay on their estates in the Comte, the aristocracy of Besancon dates
no further back than a couple of centuries, the time of the conquest by
Louis XIV. This little world is essentially of the parlement, and arrogant,
stiff, solemn, uncompromising, haughty beyond all comparison,
even with the Court of Vienna, for in this the nobility of Besancon
would put the Viennese drawing-rooms to shame. As to Victor Hugo,
Nodier, Fourier, the glories of the town, they are never mentioned, no
one thinks about them. The marriages in these families are arranged in
the cradle, so rigidly are the greatest things settled as well as the smallest.
No stranger, no intruder, ever finds his way into one of these houses,
and to obtain an introduction for the colonels or officers of title belonging
to the first families in France when quartered there, requires
efforts of diplomacy which Prince Talleyrand would gladly have mastered
to use at a congress.
In 1834 Amedee was the only man in Besancon who wore trouserstraps;
this will account for the young man’s being regarded as a lion.
And a little anecdote will enable you to understand the city of Besancon.
Some time before the opening of this story, the need arose at the
prefecture for bringing an editor from Paris for the official newspaper,
to enable it to hold its own against the little Gazette, dropped at
Besancon by the great Gazette, and the Patriot, which frisked in the
hands of the Republicans. Paris sent them a young man, knowing noth-
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ing about la Franche Comte, who began by writing them a leading
article of the school of the Charivari. The chief of the moderate party,
a member of the municipal council, sent for the journalist and said to
him, “You must understand, monsieur, that we are serious, more than
serious—tiresome; we resent being amused, and are furious at having
been made to laugh. Be as hard of digestion as the toughest disquisitions
in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and you will hardly reach the
level of Besancon.”
The editor took the hint, and thenceforth spoke the most incomprehensible
philosophical lingo. His success was complete.
If young Monsieur de Soulas did not fall in the esteem of Besancon
society, it was out of pure vanity on its part; the aristocracy were happy
to affect a modern air, and to be able to show any Parisians of rank
who visited the Comte a young man who bore some likeness to them.
All this hidden labor, all this dust thrown in people’s eyes, this
display of folly and latent prudence, had an object, or the lion of
Besancon would have been no son of the soil. Amedee wanted to
achieve a good marriage by proving some day that his farms were not
mortgaged, and that he had some savings. He wanted to be the talk
of the town, to be the finest and best-dressed man there, in order to
win first the attention, and then the hand, of Mademoiselle Rosalie
de Watteville.
In 1830, at the time when young Monsieur de Soulas was setting
up in business as a dandy, Rosalie was but fourteen. Hence, in 1834,
Mademoiselle de Watteville had reached the age when young persons
are easily struck by the peculiarities which attracted the attention of
the town to Amedee. There are so many lions who become lions out
of self-interest and speculation. The Wattevilles, who for twelve years
had been drawing an income of fifty thousand francs a year, did not
spend more than four-and-twenty thousand francs a year, while receiving
all the upper circle of Besancon every Monday and Friday.
On Monday they gave a dinner, on Friday an evening party. Thus, in
twelve years, what a sum must have accumulated from twenty-six
thousand francs a year, saved and invested with the judgment that
distinguishes those old families! It was very generally supposed that
Madame de Watteville, thinking she had land enough, had placed
her savings in the three per cents, in 1830. Rosalie’s dowry would
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therefore, as the best informed opined, amount to about twenty thousand
francs a year. So for the last five years Amedee had worked like
a mole to get into the highest favor of the severe Baroness, while
laying himself out to flatter Mademoiselle de Watteville’s conceit.
Madame de Watteville was in the secret of the devices by which
Amedee succeeded in keeping up his rank in Besancon, and esteemed
him highly for it. Soulas had placed himself under her wing when
she was thirty, and at that time had dared to admire her and make her
his idol; he had got so far as to be allowed—he alone in the world—
to pour out to her all the unseemly gossip which almost all very
precise women love to hear, being authorized by their superior virtue
to look into the gulf without falling, and into the devil’s snares without
being caught. Do you understand why the lion did not allow
himself the very smallest intrigue? He lived a public life, in the street
so to speak, on purpose to play the part of a lover sacrificed to duty
by the Baroness, and to feast her mind with the sins she had forbidden
to her senses. A man who is so privileged as to be allowed to
pour light stories into the ear of a bigot is in her eyes a charming
man. If this exemplary youth had better known the human heart, he
might without risk have allowed himself some flirtations among the
grisettes of Besancon who looked up to him as a king; his affairs
might perhaps have been all the more hopeful with the strict and
prudish Baroness. To Rosalie our Cato affected prodigality; he professed
a life of elegance, showing her in perspective the splendid part
played by a woman of fashion in Paris, whither he meant to go as
Depute.
All these manoeuvres were crowned with complete success. In 1834
the mothers of the forty noble families composing the high society of
Besancon quoted Monsieur Amedee de Soulas as the most charming
young man in the town; no one would have dared to dispute his place
as cock of the walk at the Hotel de Rupt, and all Besancon regarded
him as Rosalie de Watteville’s future husband. There had even been
some exchange of ideas on the subject between the Baroness and
Amedee, to which the Baron’s apparent nonentity gave some certainty.
Mademoiselle de Watteville, to whom her enormous prospective
fortune at that time lent considerable importance, had been brought
up exclusively within the precincts of the Hotel de Rupt—which her
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mother rarely quitted, so devoted was she to her dear Archbishop—
and severely repressed by an exclusively religious education, and by
her mother’s despotism, which held her rigidly to principles. Rosalie
knew absolutely nothing. Is it knowledge to have learned geography
from Guthrie, sacred history, ancient history, the history of France,
and the four rules all passed through the sieve of an old Jesuit? Dancing
and music were forbidden, as being more likely to corrupt life
than to grace it. The Baroness taught her daughter every conceivable
stitch in tapestry and women’s work—plain sewing, embroidery,
netting. At seventeen Rosalie had never read anything but the Lettres
edifiantes and some works on heraldry. No newspaper had ever defiled
her sight. She attended mass at the Cathedral every morning,
taken there by her mother, came back to breakfast, did needlework
after a little walk in the garden, and received visitors, sitting with the
baroness until dinner-time. Then, after dinner, excepting on Mondays
and Fridays, she accompanied Madame de Watteville to other
houses to spend the evening, without being allowed to talk more
than the maternal rule permitted.
At eighteen Mademoiselle de Watteville was a slight, thin girl with
a flat figure, fair, colorless, and insignificant to the last degree. Her
eyes, of a very light blue, borrowed beauty from their lashes, which,
when downcast, threw a shadow on her cheeks. A few freckles marred
the whiteness of her forehead, which was shapely enough. Her face
was exactly like those of Albert Durer’s saints, or those of the painters
before Perugino; the same plump, though slender modeling, the
same delicacy saddened by ecstasy, the same severe guilelessness. Everything
about her, even to her attitude, was suggestive of those virgins,
whose beauty is only revealed in its mystical radiance to the eyes
of the studious connoisseur. She had fine hands though red, and a
pretty foot, the foot of an aristocrat.
She habitually wore simple checked cotton dresses; but on Sundays
and in the evening her mother allowed her silk. The cut of her
frocks, made at Besancon, almost made her ugly, while her mother
tried to borrow grace, beauty, and elegance from Paris fashions; for
through Monsieur de Soulas she procured the smallest trifles of her
dress from thence. Rosalie had never worn a pair of silk stockings or
thin boots, but always cotton stockings and leather shoes. On high
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days she was dressed in a muslin frock, her hair plainly dressed, and
had bronze kid shoes.
This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in Rosalie a
spirit of iron. Physiologists and profound observers will tell you,
perhaps to your astonishment, that tempers, characteristics, wit, or
genius reappear in families at long intervals, precisely like what are
known as hereditary diseases. Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes
skips over two generations. We have an illustrious example of this
phenomenon in George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force,
the power, and the imaginative faculty of the Marechal de Saxe, whose
natural granddaughter she is.
The decisive character and romantic daring of the famous Watteville
had reappeared in the soul of his grand-niece, reinforced by the tenacity
and pride of blood of the Rupts. But these qualities—or faults, if you
will have it so—were as deeply buried in this young girlish soul, apparently
so weak and yielding, as the seething lavas within a hill before it
becomes a volcano. Madame de Watteville alone, perhaps, suspected
this inheritance from two strains. She was so severe to her Rosalie, that
she replied one day to the Archbishop, who blamed her for being too
hard on the child, “Leave me to manage her, monseigneur. I know her!
She has more than one Beelzebub in her skin!”
The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, because she
considered her honor as a mother to be at stake. After all, she had nothing
else to do. Clotilde de Rupt, at this time five-and-thirty, and as good as
widowed, with a husband who turned egg-cups in every variety of wood,
who set his mind on making wheels with six spokes out of iron-wood,
and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his acquaintance, flirted in
strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas. When this young man was in the
house, she alternately dismissed and recalled her daughter, and tried to
detect symptoms of jealousy in that youthful soul, so as to have occasion
to repress them. She imitated the police in its dealings with the republicans;
but she labored in vain. Rosalie showed no symptoms of rebellion.
Then the arid bigot accused her daughter of perfect insensibility. Rosalie
knew her mother well enough to be sure that if she had thought young
Monsieur de Soulas nice, she would have drawn down on herself a smart
reproof. Thus, to all her mother’s incitement she replied merely by such
phrases as are wrongly called Jesuitical—wrongly, because the Jesuits were
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strong, and such reservations are the chevaux de frise behind which weakness
takes refuge. Then the mother regarded the girl as a dissembler. If by
mischance a spark of the true nature of the Wattevilles and the Rupts
blazed out, the mother armed herself with the respect due from children to
their parents to reduce Rosalie to passive obedience.
This covert battle was carried on in the most secret seclusion of domestic
life, with closed doors. The Vicar-General, the dear Abbe
Grancey, the friend of the late Archbishop, clever as he was in his capacity
of the chief Father Confessor of the diocese, could not discover
whether the struggle had stirred up some hatred between the mother
and daughter, whether the mother were jealous in anticipation, or
whether the court Amedee was paying to the girl through her mother
had not overstepped its due limits. Being a friend of the family, neither
mother nor daughter, confessed to him. Rosalie, a little too much
harried, morally, about young de Soulas, could not abide him, to use a
homely phrase, and when he spoke to her, trying to take her heart by
surprise, she received him but coldly. This aversion, discerned only by
her mother’s eyes, was a constant subject of admonition.
“Rosalie, I cannot imagine why you affect such coldness towards
Amedee. Is it because he is a friend of the family, and because we like
him—your father and I?”
“Well, mamma,” replied the poor child one day, “if I made him
welcome, should I not be still more in the wrong?”
“What do you mean by that?” cried Madame de Watteville. “What is
the meaning of such words? Your mother is unjust, no doubt, and
according to you, would be so in any case! Never let such an answer
pass your lips again to your mother—” and so forth.
This quarrel lasted three hours and three-quarters. Rosalie noted the
time. Her mother, pale with fury, sent her to her room, where Rosalie
pondered on the meaning of this scene without discovering it, so guileless
was she. Thus young Monsieur de Soulas, who was supposed by
every one to be very near the end he was aiming at, all neckcloths set,
and by dint of pots of patent blacking—an end which required so
much waxing of his moustaches, so many smart waistcoats, wore out
so many horseshoes and stays—for he wore a leather vest, the stays of
the lion—Amedee, I say, was further away than any chance comer,
although he had on his side the worthy and noble Abbe de Grancey.
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“Madame,” said Monsieur de Soulas, addressing the Baroness, while
waiting till his soup was cool enough to swallow, and affecting to
give a romantic turn to his narrative, “one fine morning the mailcoach
dropped at the Hotel National a gentleman from Paris, who,
after seeking apartments, made up his mind in favor of the first floor
in Mademoiselle Galard’s house, Rue du Perron. Then the stranger
went straight to the Mairie, and had himself registered as a resident
with all political qualifications. Finally, he had his name entered on
the list of the barristers to the Court, showing his title in due form,
and he left his card on all his new colleagues, the Ministerial officials,
the Councillors of the Court, and the members of the bench, with
the name, ‘Albert Savaron.’”
“The name of Savaron is famous,” said Mademoiselle de Watteville,
who was strong in heraldic information. “The Savarons of Savarus
are one of the oldest, noblest, and richest families in Belgium.”
“He is a Frenchman, and no man’s son,” replied Amedee de Soulas.
“If he wishes to bear the arms of the Savarons of Savarus, he must
add a bar-sinister. There is no one left of the Brabant family but a
Mademoiselle de Savarus, a rich heiress, and unmarried.”
“The bar-sinister is, of course, the badge of a bastard; but the bastard
of a Comte de Savarus is noble,” answered Rosalie.
“Enough, that will do, mademoiselle!” said the Baroness.
“You insisted on her learning heraldry,” said Monsieur de Watteville,
“and she knows it very well.”
“Go on, I beg, Monsieur de Soulas.”
“You may suppose that in a town where everything is classified,
known, pigeon-holed, ticketed, and numbered, as in Besancon, Albert
Savaron was received without hesitation by the lawyers of the town.
They were satisfied to say, ‘Here is a man who does not know his
Besancon. Who the devil can have sent him here? What can he hope
to do? Sending his card to the Judges instead of calling in person!
What a blunder!’ And so, three days after, Savaron had ceased to
exist. He took as his servant old Monsieur Galard’s man—Galard
being dead—Jerome, who can cook a little. Albert Savaron was all
the more completely forgotten, because no one had seen him or met
him anywhere.”
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“Then, does he not go to mass?” asked Madame de Chavoncourt.
“He goes on Sundays to Saint-Pierre, but to the early service at
eight in the morning. He rises every night between one and two in
the morning, works till eight, has his breakfast, and then goes on
working. He walks in his garden, going round fifty, or perhaps sixty
times; then he goes in, dines, and goes to bed between six and seven.”
“How did you learn all that?” Madame de Chavoncourt asked
Monsieur de Soulas.
“In the first place, madame, I live in the Rue Neuve, at the corner
of the Rue du Perron; I look out on the house where this mysterious
personage lodges; then, of course, there are communications between
my tiger and Jerome.”
“And you gossip with Babylas?”
“What would you have me do out riding?”
“Well—and how was it that you engaged a stranger for your defence?”
asked the Baroness, thus placing the conversation in the hands
of the Vicar-General.
“The President of the Court played this pleader a trick by appointing
him to defend at the Assizes a half-witted peasant accused of
forgery. But Monsieur Savaron procured the poor man’s acquittal by
proving his innocence and showing that he had been a tool in the
hands of the real culprits. Not only did his line of defence succeed,
but it led to the arrest of two of the witnesses, who were proved
guilty and condemned. His speech struck the Court and the jury.
One of these, a merchant, placed a difficult case next day in the hands
of Monsieur Savaron, and he won it. In the position in which we
found ourselves, Monsieur Berryer finding it impossible to come to
Besancon, Monsieur de Garcenault advised him to employ this
Monsieur Albert Savaron, foretelling our success. As soon as I saw
him and heard him, I felt faith in him, and I was not wrong.”
“Is he then so extraordinary?” asked Madame de Chavoncourt.
“Certainly, madame,” replied the Vicar-General.
“Well, tell us about it,” said Madame de Watteville.
“The first time I saw him,” said the Abbe de Grancey, “he received
me in his outer room next the ante-room—old Galard’s drawingroom—which
he has had painted like old oak, and which I found
entirely lined with law-books, arranged on shelves also painted as old
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oak. The painting and the books are the sole decoration of the room,
for the furniture consists of an old writing table of carved wood, six
old armchairs covered with tapestry, window curtains of gray stuff
bordered with green, and a green carpet over the floor. The anteroom
stove heats this library as well. As I waited there I did not
picture my advocate as a young man. But this singular setting is in
perfect harmony with his person; for Monsieur Savaron came out in
a black merino dressing-gown tied with a red cord, red slippers, a red
flannel waistcoat, and a red smoking-cap.”
“The devil’s colors!” exclaimed Madame de Watteville.
“Yes,” said the Abbe; “but a magnificent head. Black hair already
streaked with a little gray, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul
in pictures, with thick shining curls, hair as stiff as horse-hair; a round
white throat like a woman’s; a splendid forehead, furrowed by the
strong median line which great schemes, great thoughts, deep meditations
stamp on a great man’s brow; an olive complexion marbled
with red, a square nose, eyes of flame, hollow cheeks, with two long
lines, betraying much suffering, a mouth with a sardonic smile, and
a small chin, narrow, and too short; crow’s feet on his temples; deepset
eyes, moving in their sockets like burning balls; but, in spite of all
these indications of a violently passionate nature, his manner was
calm, deeply resigned, and his voice of penetrating sweetness, which
surprised me in Court by its easy flow; a true orator’s voice, now
clear and appealing, sometimes insinuating, but a voice of thunder
when needful, and lending itself to sarcasm to become incisive.
“Monsieur Albert Savaron is of middle height, neither stout nor
thin. And his hands are those of a prelate.
“The second time I called on him he received me in his bed-room,
adjoining the library, and smiled at my astonishment when I saw
there a wretched chest of drawers, a shabby carpet, a camp-bed, and
cotton window-curtains. He came out of his private room, to which
no one is admitted, as Jerome informed me; the man did not go in,
but merely knocked at the door.
“The third time he was breakfasting in his library on the most
frugal fare; but on this occasion, as he had spent the night studying
our documents, as I had my attorney with me, and as that worthy
Monsieur Girardet is long-winded, I had leisure to study the stranger.
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He certainly is no ordinary man. There is more than one secret behind
that face, at once so terrible and so gentle, patient and yet impatient,
broad and yet hollow. I saw, too, that he stooped a little, like
all men who have some heavy burden to bear.”
“Why did so eloquent a man leave Paris? For what purpose did he
come to Besancon?” asked pretty Madame de Chavoncourt. “Could
no one tell him how little chance a stranger has of succeeding here? The
good folks of Besancon will make use of him, but they will not allow
him to make use of them. Why, having come, did he make so little
effort that it needed a freak of the President’s to bring him forward?”
“After carefully studying that fine head,” said the Abbe, looking
keenly at the lady who had interrupted him, in such a way as to
suggest that there was something he would not tell, “and especially
after hearing him this morning reply to one of the bigwigs of the
Paris Bar, I believe that this man, who may be five-and-thirty, will by
and by make a great sensation.”
“Why should we discuss him? You have gained your action, and paid
him,” said Madame de Watteville, watching her daughter, who, all the
time the Vicar-General had been speaking, seemed to hang on his lips.
The conversation changed, and no more was heard of Albert Savaron.
The portrait sketched by the cleverest of the Vicars-General of the
diocese had all the greater charm for Rosalie because there was a romance
behind it. For the first time in her life she had come across the
marvelous, the exceptional, which smiles on every youthful imagination,
and which curiosity, so eager at Rosalie’s age, goes forth to meet
half-way. What an ideal being was this Albert—gloomy, unhappy,
eloquent, laborious, as compared by Mademoiselle de Watteville to
that chubby fat Count, bursting with health, paying compliments,
and talking of the fashions in the very face of the splendor of the old
counts of Rupt. Amedee had cost her many quarrels and scoldings,
and, indeed, she knew him only too well; while this Albert Savaron
offered many enigmas to be solved.
“Albert Savaron de Savarus,” she repeated to herself.
Now, to see him, to catch sight of him! This was the desire of the
girl to whom desire was hitherto unknown. She pondered in her
heart, in her fancy, in her brain, the least phrases used by the Abbe de
Grancey, for all his words had told.
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“A fine forehead!” said she to herself, looking at the head of every man
seated at the table; “I do not see one fine one.—Monsieur de Soulas’ is
too prominent; Monsieur de Grancey’s is fine, but he is seventy, and has
no hair, it is impossible to see where his forehead ends.”
“What is the matter, Rosalie; you are eating nothing?”
“I am not hungry, mamma,” said she. “A prelate’s hands——” she
went on to herself. “I cannot remember our handsome Archbishop’s
hands, though he confirmed me.”
Finally, in the midst of her coming and going in the labyrinth of
her meditations, she remembered a lighted window she had seen
from her bed, gleaming through the trees of the two adjoining gardens,
when she had happened to wake in the night. . . . “Then that
was his light!” thought she. “I might see him!—I will see him.”
“Monsieur de Grancey, is the Chapter’s lawsuit quite settled?” said
Rosalie point-blank to the Vicar-General, during a moment of silence.
Madame de Watteville exchanged rapid glances with the Vicar-
General.
“What can that matter to you, my dear child?” she said to Rosalie,
with an affected sweetness which made her daughter cautious for the
rest of her days.
“It might be carried to the Court of Appeal, but our adversaries
will think twice about that,” replied the Abbe.
“I never could have believed that Rosalie would think about a lawsuit
all through a dinner,” remarked Madame de Watteville.
“Nor I either,” said Rosalie, in a dreamy way that made every one
laugh. “But Monsieur de Grancey was so full of it, that I was interested.”
The company rose from table and returned to the drawing-room.
All through the evening Rosalie listened in case Albert Savaron should
be mentioned again; but beyond the congratulations offered by each
newcomer to the Abbe on having gained his suit, to which no one
added any praise of the advocate, no more was said about it. Mademoiselle
de Watteville impatiently looked forward to bedtime. She
had promised herself to wake at between two and three in the morning,
and to look at Albert’s dressing-room windows. When the hour
came, she felt almost pleasure in gazing at the glimmer from the
lawyer’s candles that shone through the trees, now almost bare of
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their leaves. By the help of the strong sight of a young girl, which
curiosity seems to make longer, she saw Albert writing, and fancied
she could distinguish the color of the furniture, which she thought
was red. From the chimney above the roof rose a thick column of
smoke.
“While all the world is sleeping, he is awake—like God!” thought she.
The education of girls brings with it such serious problems—for the
future of a nation is in the mother—that the University of France long
since set itself the task of having nothing to do with it. Here is one of
these problems: Ought girls to be informed on all points? Ought their
minds to be under restraint? It need not be said that the religious system
is one of restraint. If you enlighten them, you make them demons
before their time; if you keep them from thinking, you end in the
sudden explosion so well shown by Moliere in the character of Agnes,
and you leave this suppressed mind, so fresh and clear-seeing, as swift
and as logical as that of a savage, at the mercy of an accident. This
inevitable crisis was brought on in Mademoiselle de Watteville by the
portrait which one of the most prudent Abbes of the Chapter of
Besancon imprudently allowed himself to sketch at a dinner party.
Next morning, Mademoiselle de Watteville, while dressing, necessarily
looked out at Albert Savaron walking in the garden adjoining
that of the Hotel de Rupt.
“What would have become of me,” thought she, “if he had lived
anywhere else? Here I can, at any rate, see him.—What is he thinking
about?”
Having seen this extraordinary man, though at a distance, the only
man whose countenance stood forth in contrast with crowds of
Besancon faces she had hitherto met with, Rosalie at once jumped at
the idea of getting into his house, of ascertaining the reason of so
much mystery, of hearing that eloquent voice, of winning a glance
from those fine eyes. All this she set her heart on, but how could she
achieve it?
All that day she drew her needle through her embroidery with the
obtuse concentration of a girl who, like Agnes, seems to be thinking of
nothing, but who is reflecting on things in general so deeply, that her
artifice is unfailing. As a result of this profound meditation, Rosalie
thought she would go to confession. Next morning, after Mass, she
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Albert Savarus
had a brief interview with the Abbe Giroud at Saint-Pierre, and managed
so ingeniously that the hour of her confession was fixed for Sunday
morning at half-past seven, before the eight o’clock Mass. She
committed herself to a dozen fibs in order to find herself, just for once,
in the church at the hour when the lawyer came to Mass. Then she was
seized with an impulse of extreme affection for her father; she went to
see him in his workroom, and asked him for all sorts of information
on the art of turning, ending by advising him to turn larger pieces,
columns. After persuading her father to set to work on some twisted
pillars, one of the difficulties of the turner’s art, she suggested that he
should make use of a large heap of stones that lay in the middle of the
garden to construct a sort of grotto on which he might erect a little
temple or Belvedere in which his twisted pillars could be used and
shown off to all the world.
At the climax of the pleasure the poor unoccupied man derived
from this scheme, Rosalie said, as she kissed him, “Above all, do not
tell mamma who gave you the notion; she would scold me.”
“Do not be afraid!” replied Monsieur de Watteville, who groaned
as bitterly as his daughter under the tyranny of the terrible descendant
of the Rupts.
So Rosalie had a certain prospect of seeing ere long a charming
observatory built, whence her eye would command the lawyer’s private
room. And there are men for whose sake young girls can carry
out such masterstrokes of diplomacy, while, for the most part, like
Albert Savaron, they know it not.
The Sunday so impatiently looked for arrived, and Rosalie dressed
with such carefulness as made Mariette, the ladies’-maid, smile.
“It is the first time I ever knew mademoiselle to be so fidgety,” said
Mariette.
“It strikes me,” said Rosalie, with a glance at Mariette, which
brought poppies to her cheeks, “that you too are more particular on
some days than on others.”
As she went down the steps, across the courtyard, and through the
gates, Rosalie’s heart beat, as everybody’s does in anticipation of a great
event. Hitherto, she had never known what it was to walk in the streets;
for a moment she had felt as though her mother must read her schemes
on her brow, and forbid her going to confession, and she now felt new
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blood in her feet, she lifted them as though she trod on fire. She had,
of course, arranged to be with her confessor at a quarter-past eight,
telling her mother eight, so as to have about a quarter of an hour near
Albert. She got to church before Mass, and after a short prayer, went to
see if the Abbe Giroud were in his confessional, simply to pass the
time; and she thus placed herself in such a way as to see Albert as he
came into church.
The man must have been atrociously ugly who did not seem handsome
to Mademoiselle de Watteville in the frame of mind produced
by her curiosity. And Albert Savaron, who was really very striking,
made all the more impression on Rosalie because his mien, his walk,
his carriage, everything down to his clothing, had the indescribable
stamp which can only be expressed by the word Mystery.
He came in. The church, till now gloomy, seemed to Rosalie to be
illuminated. The girl was fascinated by his slow and solemn demeanor,
as of a man who bears a world on his shoulders and whose deep gaze,
whose very gestures, combine to express a devastating or absorbing
thought. Rosalie now understood the Vicar-General’s words in their
fullest extent. Yes, those eyes of tawny brown, shot with golden lights,
covered ardor which revealed itself in sudden flashes. Rosalie, with a
recklessness which Mariette noted, stood in the lawyer’s way, so as to
exchange glances with him; and this glance turned her blood, for it
seethed and boiled as though its warmth were doubled.
As soon as Albert had taken a seat, Mademoiselle de Watteville
quickly found a place whence she could see him perfectly during all
the time the Abbe might leave her. When Mariette said, “Here is
Monsieur Giroud,” it seemed to Rosalie that the interview had lasted
no more than a few minutes. By the time she came out from the
confessional, Mass was over. Albert had left the church.
“The Vicar-General was right,” thought she. “He is unhappy. Why
should this eagle—for he has the eyes of an eagle—swoop down on
Besancon? Oh, I must know everything! But how?”
Under the smart of this new desire Rosalie set the stitches of her
worsted-work with exquisite precision, and hid her meditations under
a little innocent air, which shammed simplicity to deceive Madame
de Watteville.
From that Sunday, when Mademoiselle de Watteville had met that
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look, or, if you please, received this baptism of fire—a fine expression
of Napoleon’s which may be well applied to love—she eagerly
promoted the plan for the Belvedere.
“Mamma,” said she one day when two columns were turned, “my
father has taken a singular idea into his head; he is turning columns
for a Belvedere he intends to erect on the heap of stones in the middle
of the garden. Do you approve of it? It seems to me—”
“I approve of everything your father does,” said Madame de
Watteville drily, “and it is a wife’s duty to submit to her husband
even if she does not approve of his ideas. Why should I object to a
thing which is of no importance in itself, if only it amuses Monsieur
de Watteville?”
“Well, because from thence we shall see into Monsieur de Soulas’
rooms, and Monsieur de Soulas will see us when we are there. Perhaps
remarks may be made—”
“Do you presume, Rosalie, to guide your parents, and think you
know more than they do of life and the proprieties?”
“I say no more, mamma. Besides, my father said that there would
be a room in the grotto, where it would be cool, and where we can
take coffee.”
“Your father has had an excellent idea,” said Madame de Watteville,
who forthwith went to look at the columns.
She gave her entire approbation to the Baron de Watteville’s design,
while choosing for the erection of this monument a spot at the bottom
of the garden, which could not be seen from Monsieur de Soulas’
windows, but whence they could perfectly see into Albert Savaron’s
rooms. A builder was sent for, who undertook to construct a grotto,
of which the top should be reached by a path three feet wide through
the rock-work, where periwinkles would grow, iris, clematis, ivy, honeysuckle,
and Virginia creeper. The Baroness desired that the inside
should be lined with rustic wood-work, such as was then the fashion
for flower-stands, with a looking-glass against the wall, an ottoman
forming a box, and a table of inlaid bark. Monsieur de Soulas proposed
that the floor should be of asphalt. Rosalie suggested a hanging
chandelier of rustic wood.
“The Wattevilles are having something charming done in their garden,”
was rumored in Besancon.
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“They are rich, and can afford a thousand crowns for a whim—”
“A thousand crowns!” exclaimed Madame de Chavoncourt.
“Yes, a thousand crowns,” cried young Monsieur de Soulas. “A
man has been sent for from Paris to rusticate the interior but it will
be very pretty. Monsieur de Watteville himself is making the chandelier,
and has begun to carve the wood.”
“Berquet is to make a cellar under it,” said an Abbe.
“No,” replied young Monsieur de Soulas, “he is raising the kiosk
on a concrete foundation, that it may not be damp.”
“You know the very least things that are done in that house,” said
Madame de Chavoncourt sourly, as she looked at one of her great
girls waiting to be married for a year past.
Mademoiselle de Watteville, with a little flush of pride in thinking
of the success of her Belvedere, discerned in herself a vast superiority
over every one about her. No one guessed that a little girl, supposed
to be a witless goose, had simply made up her mind to get a closer
view of the lawyer Savaron’s private study.
Albert Savaron’s brilliant defence of the Cathedral Chapter was all
the sooner forgotten because the envy of the other lawyers was aroused.
Also, Savaron, faithful to his seclusion, went nowhere. Having no
friends to cry him up, and seeing no one, he increased the chances of
being forgotten which are common to strangers in Besancon. Nevertheless,
he pleaded three times at the Commercial Tribunal in three
knotty cases which had to be carried to the superior Court. He thus
gained as clients four of the chief merchants of the place, who discerned
in him so much good sense and sound legal purview that they
placed their claims in his hands.
On the day when the Watteville family inaugurated the Belvedere,
Savaron also was founding a monument. Thanks to the connections
he had obscurely formed among the upper class of merchants in
Besancon, he was starting a fortnightly paper, called the Eastern Review,
with the help of forty shares of five hundred francs each, taken
up by his first ten clients, on whom he had impressed the necessity
for promoting the interests of Besancon, the town where the traffic
should meet between Mulhouse and Lyons, and the chief centre between
Mulhouse and Rhone.
To compete with Strasbourg, was it not needful that Besancon
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Albert Savarus
should become a focus of enlightenment as well as of trade? The
leading questions relating to the interests of Eastern France could
only be dealt with in a review. What a glorious task to rob Strasbourg
and Dijon of their literary importance, to bring light to the East of
France, and compete with the centralizing influence of Paris! These
reflections, put forward by Albert, were repeated by the ten merchants,
who believed them to be their own.
Monsieur Savaron did not commit the blunder of putting his name
in front; he left the finance of the concern to his chief client, Monsieur
Boucher, connected by marriage with one of the great publishers
of important ecclesiastical works; but he kept the editorship, with
a share of the profits as founder. The commercial interest appealed to
Dole, to Dijon, to Salins, to Neufchatel, to the Jura, Bourg, Nantua,
Lous-le-Saulnier. The concurrence was invited of the learning and
energy of every scientific student in the districts of le Bugey, la Bresse,
and Franche Comte. By the influence of commercial interests and
common feeling, five hundred subscribers were booked in consideration
of the low price; the Review cost eight francs a quarter.
To avoid hurting the conceit of the provincials by refusing their
articles, the lawyer hit on the good idea of suggesting a desire for the
literary management of this Review to Monsieur Boucher’s eldest
son, a young man of two-and-twenty, very eager for fame, to whom
the snares and woes of literary responsibilities were utterly unknown.
Albert quietly kept the upper hand and made Alfred Boucher his
devoted adherent. Alfred was the only man in Besancon with whom
the king of the bar was on familiar terms. Alfred came in the morning
to discuss the articles for the next number with Albert in the
garden. It is needless to say that the trial number contained a “Meditation”
by Alfred, which Savaron approved. In his conversations with
Alfred, Albert would let drop some great ideas, subjects for articles
of which Alfred availed himself. And thus the merchant’s son fancied
he was making capital out of the great man. To Alfred, Albert was a
man of genius, of profound politics. The commercial world, enchanted
at the success of the Review, had to pay up only three-tenths
of their shares. Two hundred more subscribers, and the periodical
would pay a dividend to the share-holders of five per cent, the editor
remaining unpaid. This editing, indeed, was beyond price.
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After the third number the Review was recognized for exchange by
all the papers published in France, which Albert henceforth read at
home. This third number included a tale signed “A. S.,” and attributed
to the famous lawyer. In spite of the small attention paid by the
higher circle of Besancon to the Review which was accused of Liberal
views, this, the first novel produced in the county, came under discussion
that mid-winter at Madame de Chavoncourt’s.
“Papa,” said Rosalie, “a Review is published in Besancon; you ought
to take it in; and keep it in your room, for mamma would not let me
read it, but you will lend it to me.”
Monsieur de Watteville, eager to obey his dear Rosalie, who for the
last five months had given him so many proofs of filial affection,—
Monsieur de Watteville went in person to subscribe for a year to the
Eastern Review, and lent the four numbers already out to his daughter.
In the course of the night Rosalie devoured the tale—the first she
had ever read in her life—but she had only known life for two months
past. Hence the effect produced on her by this work must not be
judged by ordinary rules. Without prejudice of any kind as to the
greater or less merit of this composition from the pen of a Parisian
who had thus imported into the province the manner, the brilliancy,
if you will, of the new literary school, it could not fail to be a masterpiece
to a young girl abandoning all her intelligence and her innocent
heart to her first reading of this kind.
Also, from what she had heard said, Rosalie had by intuition conceived
a notion of it which strangely enhanced the interest of this
novel. She hoped to find in it the sentiments, and perhaps something
of the life of Albert. From the first pages this opinion took so
strong a hold on her, that after reading the fragment to the end she
was certain that it was no mistake. Here, then, is this confession, in
which, according to the critics of Madame de Chavoncourt’s drawing-room,
Albert had imitated some modern writers who, for lack
of inventiveness, relate their private joys, their private griefs, or the
mysterious events of their own life.
* * *
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138
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.

Balzac
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.
Rodolphe, the son of a most charming Parisian woman, and a man
of mark, a nobleman of Brabant, was cursed with extreme sensitiveness.
From his infancy he had in everything shown a most ardent
nature. In him mere desire became a guiding force and the motive
power of his whole being, the stimulus to his imagination, the reason
of his actions. Notwithstanding the pains taken by a clever mother,
who was alarmed when she detected this predisposition, Rodolphe
wished for things as a poet imagines, as a mathematician calculates,
as a painter sketches, as a musician creates melodies. Tender-hearted,
like his mother, he dashed with inconceivable violence and impetus
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Albert Savarus
of thought after the object of his desires; he annihilated time. While
dreaming of the fulfilment of his schemes, he always overlooked the
means of attainment. “When my son has children,” said his other,
“he will want them born grown up.”
This fine frenzy, carefully directed, enabled Rodolphe to achieve
his studies with brilliant results, and to become what the English call
an accomplished gentleman. His mother was then proud of him,
though still fearing a catastrophe if ever a passion should possess a
heart at once so tender and so susceptible, so vehement and so kind.
Therefore, the judicious mother had encouraged the friendship which
bound Leopold to Rodolphe and Rodolphe to Leopold, since she
saw in the cold and faithful young notary, a guardian, a comrade,
who might to a certain extent take her place if by some misfortune
she should be lost to her son. Rodolphe’s mother, still handsome at
three-and-forty, had inspired Leopold with an ardent passion. This
circumstance made the two young men even more intimate.
So Leopold, knowing Rodolphe well, was not surprised to find
him stopping at a village and giving up the projected journey to
Saint-Gothard, on the strength of a single glance at the upper window
of a house. While breakfast was prepared for them at the Swan
Inn, the friends walked round the hamlet and came to the neighborhood
of the pretty new house; here, while gazing about him and
talking to the inhabitants, Rodolphe discovered the residence of some
decent folk, who were willing to take him as a boarder, a very frequent
custom in Switzerland. They offered him a bedroom looking
over the lake and the mountains, and from whence he had a view of
one of those immense sweeping reaches which, in this lake, are the
admiration of every traveler. This house was divided by a roadway
and a little creek from the new house, where Rodolphe had caught
sight of the unknown fair one’s face.
For a hundred francs a month Rodolphe was relieved of all thought
for the necessaries of life. But, in consideration of the outlay the
Stopfer couple expected to make, they bargained for three months’
residence and a month’s payment in advance. Rub a Swiss ever so
little, and you find the usurer. After breakfast, Rodolphe at once
made himself at home by depositing in his room such property as he
had brought with him for the journey to the Saint-Gothard, and he
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watched Leopold as he set out, moved by the spirit of routine, to
carry out the excursion for himself and his friend. When Rodolphe,
sitting on a fallen rock on the shore, could no longer see Leopold’s
boat, he turned to examine the new house with stolen glances, hoping
to see the fair unknown. Alas! he went in without its having
given a sign of life. During dinner, in the company of Monsieur and
Madame Stopfer, retired coopers from Neufchatel, he questioned
them as to the neighborhood, and ended by learning all he wanted to
know about the lady, thanks to his hosts’ loquacity; for they were
ready to pour out their budget of gossip without any pressing.
The fair stranger’s name was Fanny Lovelace. This name (pronounced
Loveless) is that of an old English family, but Richardson
has given it to a creation whose fame eclipses all others! Miss Lovelace
had come to settle by the lake for her father’s health, the physicians
having recommended him the air of Lucerne. These two English
people had arrived with no other servant than a little girl of fourteen,
a dumb child, much attached to Miss Fanny, on whom she waited
very intelligently, and had settled, two winters since, with monsieur
and Madame Bergmann, the retired head-gardeners of His Excellency
Count Borromeo of Isola Bella and Isola Madre in the Lago
Maggoire. These Swiss, who were possessed of an income of about a
thousand crowns a year, had let the top story of their house to the
Lovelaces for three years, at a rent of two hundred francs a year. Old
Lovelace, a man of ninety, and much broken, was too poor to allow
himself any gratifications, and very rarely went out; his daughter
worked to maintain him, translating English books, and writing some
herself, it was said. The Lovelaces could not afford to hire boats to
row on the lake, or horses and guides to explore the neighborhood.
Poverty demanding such privation as this excites all the greater compassion
among the Swiss, because it deprives them of a chance of
profit. The cook of the establishment fed the three English boarders
for a hundred francs a month inclusive. In Gersau it was generally
believed, however, that the gardener and his wife, in spite of their
pretensions, used the cook’s name as a screen to net the little profits
of this bargain. The Bergmanns had made beautiful gardens round
their house, and had built a hothouse. The flowers, the fruit, and the
botanical rarities of this spot were what had induced the young lady
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to settle on it as she passed through Gersau. Miss Fanny was said to
be nineteen years old; she was the old man’s youngest child, and the
object of his adulation. About two months ago she had hired a piano
from Lucerne, for she seemed to be crazy about music.
“She loves flowers and music, and she is unmarried!” thought
Rodolphe; “what good luck!”
The next day Rodolphe went to ask leave to visit the hothouses
and gardens, which were beginning to be somewhat famous. The
permission was not immediately granted. The retired gardeners asked,
strangely enough, to see Rodolphe’s passport; it was sent to them at
once. The paper was not returned to him till next morning, by the
hands of the cook, who expressed her master’s pleasure in showing
him their place. Rodolphe went to the Bergmanns’, not without a
certain trepidation, known only to persons of strong feelings, who
go through as much passion in a moment as some men experience in
a whole lifetime.
After dressing himself carefully to gratify the old gardeners of the
Borromean Islands, whom he regarded as the warders of his treasure,
he went all over the grounds, looking at the house now and again,
but with much caution; the old couple treated him with evident
distrust. But his attention was soon attracted by the little English
deaf-mute, in whom his discernment, though young as yet, enabled
him to recognize a girl of African, or at least of Sicilian, origin. The
child had the golden-brown color of a Havana cigar, eyes of fire,
Armenian eyelids with lashes of very un-British length, hair blacker
than black; and under this almost olive skin, sinews of extraordinary
strength and feverish alertness. She looked at Rodolphe with amazing
curiosity and effrontery, watching his every movement.
“To whom does that little Moresco belong?” he asked worthy
Madame Bergmann.
“To the English,” Monsieur Bergmann replied.
“But she never was born in England!”
“They may have brought her from the Indies,” said Madame
Bergmann.
“I have been told that Miss Lovelace is fond of music. I should be
delighted if, during my residence by the lake to which I am condemned
by my doctor’s orders, she would allow me to join her.”
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“They receive no one, and will not see anybody,” said the old gardener.
Rodolphe bit his lips and went away, without having been invited
into the house, or taken into the part of the garden that lay between
the front of the house and the shore of the little promontory. On
that side the house had a balcony above the first floor, made of wood,
and covered by the roof, which projected deeply like the roof of a
chalet on all four sides of the building, in the Swiss fashion. Rodolphe
had loudly praised the elegance of this arrangement, and talked of
the view from that balcony, but all in vain. When he had taken leave
of the Bergmanns it struck him that he was a simpleton, like any
man of spirit and imagination disappointed of the results of a plan
which he had believed would succeed.
In the evening he, of course, went out in a boat on the lake, round
and about the spit of land, to Brunnen and to Schwytz, and came in
at nightfall. From afar he saw the window open and brightly lighted;
he heard the sound of a piano and the tones of an exquisite voice. He
made the boatman stop, and gave himself up to the pleasure of listening
to an Italian air delightfully sung. When the singing ceased,
Rodolphe landed and sent away the boat and rowers. At the cost of
wetting his feet, he went to sit down under the water-worn granite
shelf crowned by a thick hedge of thorny acacia, by the side of which
ran a long lime avenue in the Bergmanns’ garden. By the end of an
hour he heard steps and voices just above him, but the words that
reached his ears were all Italian, and spoken by two women.
He took advantage of the moment when the two speakers were at
one end of the walk to slip noiselessly to the other. After half an hour
of struggling he got to the end of the avenue, and there took up a
position whence, without being seen or heard, he could watch the
two women without being observed by them as they came towards
him. What was Rodolphe’s amazement on recognizing the deaf-mute
as one of them; she was talking to Miss Lovelace in Italian.
It was now eleven o’clock at night. The stillness was so perfect on
the lake and around the dwelling, that the two women must have
thought themselves safe; in all Gersau there could be no eyes open
but theirs. Rodolphe supposed that the girl’s dumbness must be a
necessary deception. From the way in which they both spoke Italian,
Rodolphe suspected that it was the mother tongue of both girls, and
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Albert Savarus
concluded that the name of English also hid some disguise.
“They are Italian refugees,” said he to himself, “outlaws in fear of
the Austrian or Sardinian police. The young lady waits till it is dark
to walk and talk in security.”
He lay down by the side of the hedge, and crawled like a snake to
find a way between two acacia shrubs. At the risk of leaving his coat
behind him, or tearing deep scratches in his back, he got through the
hedge when the so-called Miss Fanny and her pretended deaf-anddumb
maid were at the other end of the path; then, when they had
come within twenty yards of him without seeing him, for he was in
the shadow of the hedge, and the moon was shining brightly, he
suddenly rose.
“Fear nothing,” said he in French to the Italian girl, “I am not a spy.
You are refugees, I have guessed that. I am a Frenchman whom one
look from you has fixed at Gersau.”
Rodolphe, startled by the acute pain caused by some steel instrument
piercing his side, fell like a log.
“Nel lago con pietra!” said the terrible dumb girl.
“Oh, Gina!” exclaimed the Italian.
“She has missed me,” said Rodolphe, pulling from his wound a stiletto,
which had been turned by one of the false ribs. “But a little
higher up it would have been deep in my heart.—I was wrong,
Francesca,” he went on, remembering the name he had heard little
Gina repeat several times; “I owe her no grudge, do not scold her. The
happiness of speaking to you is well worth the prick of a stiletto. Only
show me the way out; I must get back to the Stopfer’s house. Be easy;
I shall tell nothing.”
Francesca, recovering from her astonishment, helped Rodolphe to
rise, and said a few words to Gina, whose eyes filled with tears. The
two girls made him sit down on a bench and take off his coat, his
waistcoat and cravat. Then Gina opened his shirt and sucked the
wound strongly. Francesca, who had left them, returned with a large
piece of sticking-plaster, which she applied to the wound.
“You can now walk as far as your house,” she said.
Each took an arm, and Rodolphe was conducted to a side gate, of
which the key was in Francesca’s apron pocket.
“Does Gina speak French?” said Rodolphe to Francesca.
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“No. But do not excite yourself,” replied Francesca with some impatience.
“Let me look at you,” said Rodolphe pathetically, “for it may be
long before I am able to come again—”
He leaned against one of the gate-posts contemplating the beautiful
Italian, who allowed him to gaze at her for a moment under the
sweetest silence and the sweetest night which ever, perhaps, shone on
this lake, the king of Swiss lakes.
Francesca was quite of the Italian type, and such as imagination supposes
or pictures, or, if you will, dreams, that Italian women are. What
first struck Rodolphe was the grace and elegance of a figure evidently
powerful, though so slender as to appear fragile. An amber paleness
overspread her face, betraying sudden interest, but it did not dim the
voluptuous glance of her liquid eyes of velvety blackness. A pair of
hands as beautiful as ever a Greek sculptor added to the polished arms
of a statue grasped Rodolphe’s arm, and their whiteness gleamed against
his black coat. The rash Frenchman could but just discern the long,
oval shape of her face, and a melancholy mouth showing brilliant teeth
between the parted lips, full, fresh, and brightly red. The exquisite lines
of this face guaranteed to Francesca permanent beauty; but what most
struck Rodolphe was the adorable freedom, the Italian frankness of
this woman, wholly absorbed as she was in her pity for him.
Francesca said a word to Gina, who gave Rodolphe her arm as far
as the Stopfers’ door, and fled like a swallow as soon as she had rung.
“These patriots do not play at killing!” said Rodolphe to himself as he
felt his sufferings when he found himself in his bed. “ ‘Nel lago!’ Gina
would have pitched me into the lake with a stone tied to my neck.”
Next day he sent to Lucerne for the best surgeon there, and when
he came, enjoined on him absolute secrecy, giving him to understand
that his honor depended on it.
Leopold returned from his excursion on the day when his friend
first got out of bed. Rodolphe made up a story, and begged him to
go to Lucerne to fetch their luggage and letters. Leopold brought
back the most fatal, the most dreadful news: Rodolphe’s mother was
dead. While the two friends were on their way from Bale to Lucerne,
the fatal letter, written by Leopold’s father, had reached Lucerne the
day they left for Fluelen.
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In spite of Leopold’s utmost precautions, Rodolphe fell ill of a nervous
fever. As soon as Leopold saw his friend out of danger, he set out for France
with a power of attorney, and Rodolphe could thus remain at Gersau, the
only place in the world where his grief could grow calmer. The young
Frenchman’s position, his despair, the circumstances which made such a
loss worse for him than for any other man, were known, and secured him
the pity and interest of every one in Gersau. Every morning the pretended
dumb girl came to see him and bring him news of her mistress.
As soon as Rodolphe could go out he went to the Bergmanns’
house, to thank Miss Fanny Lovelace and her father for the interest
they had taken in his sorrow and his illness. For the first time since he
had lodged with the Bergmanns the old Italian admitted a stranger
to his room, where Rodolphe was received with the cordiality due to
his misfortunes and to his being a Frenchman, which excluded all
distrust of him. Francesca looked so lovely by candle-light that first
evening that she shed a ray of brightness on his grieving heart. Her
smiles flung the roses of hope on his woe. She sang, not indeed gay
songs, but grave and solemn melodies suited to the state of Rodolphe’s
heart, and he observed this touching care.
At about eight o’clock the old man left the young people without
any sign of uneasiness, and went to his room. When Francesca was
tired of singing, she led Rodolphe on to the balcony, whence they
perceived the sublime scenery of the lake, and signed to him to be
seated by her on a rustic wooden bench.
“Am I very indiscreet in asking how old you are, cara Francesca?”
said Rodolphe.
“Nineteen,” said she, “well past.”
“If anything in the world could soothe my sorrow,” he went on, “it
would be the hope of winning you from your father, whatever your
fortune may be. So beautiful as you are, you seem to be richer than a
prince’s daughter. And I tremble as I confess to you the feelings with
which you have inspired me; but they are deep—they are eternal.”
“Zitto!” said Francesca, laying a finger of her right hand on her lips.
“Say no more; I am not free. I have been married these three years.”
For a few minutes utter silence reigned. When the Italian girl, alarmed
at Rodolphe’s stillness, went close to him, she found that he had fainted.
“Povero!” she said to herself. “And I thought him cold.”
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She fetched him some salts, and revived Rodolphe by making him
smell at them.
“Married!” said Rodolphe, looking at Francesca. And then his tears
flowed freely.
“Child!” said she. “But there is still hope. My husband is—”
“Eighty?” Rodolphe put in.
“No,” said she with a smile, “but sixty-five. He has disguised himself
as much older to mislead the police.”
“Dearest,” said Rodolphe, “a few more shocks of this kind and I
shall die. Only when you have known me twenty years will you
understand the strength and power of my heart, and the nature of its
aspirations for happiness. This plant,” he went on, pointing to the
yellow jasmine which covered the balustrade, “does not climb more
eagerly to spread itself in the sunbeams than I have clung to you for
this month past. I love you with unique passion. That love will be
the secret fount of my life—I may possibly die of it.”
“Oh! Frenchman, Frenchman!” said she, emphasizing her exclamation
with a little incredulous grimace.
“Shall I not be forced to wait, to accept you at the hands of time?”
said he gravely. “But know this: if you are in earnest in what you have
allowed to escape you, I will wait for you faithfully, without suffering
any other attachment to grow up in my heart.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
“None,” said he, “not even a passing fancy. I have my fortune to
make; you must have a splendid one, nature created you a princess—”
At this word Francesca could not repress a faint smile, which gave
her face the most bewildering expression, something subtle, like what
the great Leonardo has so well depicted in the Gioconda. This smile
made Rodolphe pause. “Ah yes!” he went on, “you must suffer much
from the destitution to which exile has brought you. Oh, if you
would make me happy above all men, and consecrate my love, you
would treat me as a friend. Ought I not to be your friend?—My
poor mother has left sixty thousand francs of savings; take half.”
Francesca looked steadily at him. This piercing gaze went to the
bottom of Rodolphe’s soul.
“We want nothing; my work amply supplies our luxuries,” she
replied in a grave voice.
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“And can I endure that a Francesca should work?” cried he. “One
day you will return to your country and find all you left there.”
Again the Italian girl looked at Rodolphe. “And you will then repay
me what you may have condescended to borrow,” he added, with an
expression full of delicate feeling.
“Let us drop the subject,” said she, with incomparable dignity of
gesture, expression, and attitude. “Make a splendid fortune, be one
of the remarkable men of your country; that is my desire. Fame is a
drawbridge which may serve to cross a deep gulf. Be ambitious if
you must. I believe you have great and powerful talents, but use
them rather for the happiness of mankind than to deserve me; you
will be all the greater in my eyes.”
In the course of this conversation, which lasted two hours, Rodolphe
discovered that Francesca was an enthusiast for Liberal ideas, and for
that worship of liberty which had led to the three revolutions in Naples,
Piemont, and Spain. On leaving, he was shown to the door by Gina,
the so-called mute. At eleven o’clock no one was astir in the village,
there was no fear of listeners; Rodolphe took Gina into a corner, and
asked her in a low voice and bad Italian, “Who are your master and
mistress, child? Tell me, I will give you this fine new gold piece.”
“Monsieur,” said the girl, taking the coin, “my master is the famous
bookseller Lamparini of Milan, one of the leaders of the revolution,
and the conspirator of all others whom Austria would most
like to have in the Spielberg.”
“A bookseller’s wife! Ah, so much the better,” thought he; “we are
on an equal footing.—And what is her family?” he added, “for she
looks like a queen.”
“All Italian women do,” replied Gina proudly. “Her father’s name
is Colonna.”
Emboldened by Francesca’s modest rank, Rodolphe had an awning
fitted to his boat and cushions in the stern. When this was done, the
lover came to propose to Francesca to come out on the lake. The
Italian accepted, no doubt to carry out her part of a young English
Miss in the eyes of the villagers, but she brought Gina with her.
Francesca Colonna’s lightest actions betrayed a superior education
and the highest social rank. By the way in which she took her place at
the end of the boat Rodolphe felt himself in some sort cut off from
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her, and, in the face of a look of pride worthy of an aristocrat, the
familiarity he had intended fell dead. By a glance Francesca made
herself a princess, with all the prerogatives she might have enjoyed in
the Middle Ages. She seemed to have read the thoughts of this vassal
who was so audacious as to constitute himself her protector.
Already, in the furniture of the room where Francesca had received
him, in her dress, and in the various trifles she made use of, Rodolphe
had detected indications of a superior character and a fine fortune.
All these observations now recurred to his mind; he became thoughtful
after having been trampled on, as it were, by Francesca’s dignity. Gina,
her half-grown-up confidante, also seemed to have a mocking expression
as she gave a covert or a side glance at Rodolphe. This obvious
disagreement between the Italian lady’s rank and her manners was a
fresh puzzle to Rodolphe, who suspected some further trick like Gina’s
assumed dumbness.
“Where would you go, Signora Lamporani?” he asked.
“Towards Lucerne,” replied Francesca in French.
“Good!” said Rodolphe to himself, “she is not startled by hearing
me speak her name; she had, no doubt, foreseen that I should ask
Gina—she is so cunning.—What is your quarrel with me?” he went
on, going at last to sit down by her side, and asking her by a gesture
to give him her hand, which she withdrew. “You are cold and ceremonious;
what, in colloquial language, we should call short.”
“It is true,” she replied with a smile. “I am wrong. It is not good
manners; it is vulgar. In French you would call it inartistic. It is better
to be frank than to harbor cold or hostile feelings towards a friend,
and you have already proved yourself my friend. Perhaps I have gone
too far with you. You must take me to be a very ordinary woman.”
—Rodolphe made many signs of denial.—”Yes,” said the bookseller’s
wife, going on without noticing this pantomime, which, however,
she plainly saw. “I have detected that, and naturally I have reconsidered
my conduct. Well! I will put an end to everything by a few
words of deep truth. Understand this, Rodolphe: I feel in myself the
strength to stifle a feeling if it were not in harmony with my ideas or
anticipation of what true love is. I could love—as we can love in
Italy, but I know my duty. No intoxication can make me forget it.
Married without my consent to that poor old man, I might take
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advantage of the liberty he so generously gives me; but three years of
married life imply acceptance of its laws. Hence the most vehement
passion would never make me utter, even involuntarily, a wish to
find myself free.
“Emilio knows my character. He knows that without my heart,
which is my own, and which I might give away, I should never allow
anyone to take my hand. That is why I have just refused it to you. I
desire to be loved and waited for with fidelity, nobleness, ardor, while
all I can give is infinite tenderness of which the expression may not
overstep the boundary of the heart, the permitted neutral ground.
All this being thoroughly understood—Oh!” she went on with a
girlish gesture, “I will be as coquettish, as gay, as glad, as a child
which knows nothing of the dangers of familiarity.”
This plain and frank declaration was made in a tone, an accent, and
supported by a look which gave it the deepest stamp of truth.
“A Princess Colonna could not have spoken better,” said Rodolphe,
smiling.
“Is that,” she answered with some haughtiness, “a reflection on the
humbleness of my birth? Must your love flaunt a coat-of-arms? At
Milan the noblest names are written over shop-doors: Sforza, Canova,
Visconti, Trivulzio, Ursini; there are Archintos apothecaries; but, believe
me, though I keep a shop, I have the feelings of a duchess.”
“A reflection? Nay, madame, I meant it for praise.”
“By a comparison?” she said archly.
“Ah, once for all,” said he, “not to torture me if my words should
ill express my feelings, understand that my love is perfect; it carries
with it absolute obedience and respect.”
She bowed as a woman satisfied, and said, “Then monsieur accepts
the treaty?”
“Yes,” said he. “I can understand that in a rich and powerful feminine
nature the faculty of loving ought not to be wasted, and that
you, out of delicacy, wished to restrain it. Ah! Francesca, at my age
tenderness requited, and by so sublime, so royally beautiful a creature
as you are—why, it is the fulfilment of all my wishes. To love
you as you desire to be loved—is not that enough to make a young
man guard himself against every evil folly? Is it not to concentrate all
his powers in a noble passion, of which in the future he may be
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proud, and which can leave none but lovely memories? If you could
but know with what hues you have clothed the chain of Pilatus, the
Rigi, and this superb lake—”
“I want to know,” said she, with the Italian artlessness which has
always a touch of artfulness.
“Well, this hour will shine on all my life like a diamond on a
queen’s brow.”
Francesca’s only reply was to lay her hand on Rodolphe’s.
“Oh dearest! for ever dearest!—Tell me, have you never loved?”
“Never.”
“And you allow me to love you nobly, looking to heaven for the
utmost fulfilment?” he asked.
She gently bent her head. Two large tears rolled down Rodolphe’s
cheeks.
“Why! what is the matter?” she cried, abandoning her imperial
manner.
“I have now no mother whom I can tell of my happiness; she left
this earth without seeing what would have mitigated her agony—”
“What?” said she.
“Her tenderness replaced by an equal tenderness—”
“Povero mio!” exclaimed the Italian, much touched. “Believe me,”
she went on after a pause, “it is a very sweet thing, and to a woman,
a strong element of fidelity to know that she is all in all on earth to
the man she loves; to find him lonely, with no family, with nothing
in his heart but his love—in short, to have him wholly to herself.”
When two lovers thus understand each other, the heart feels delicious
peace, supreme tranquillity. Certainty is the basis for which
human feelings crave, for it is never lacking to religious sentiment;
man is always certain of being fully repaid by God. Love never believes
itself secure but by this resemblance to divine love. And the
raptures of that moment must have been fully felt to be understood;
it is unique in life; it can never return no more, alas! than the emotions
of youth. To believe in a woman, to make her your human
religion, the fount of life, the secret luminary of all your least
thoughts!—is not this a second birth? And a young man mingles
with this love a little of the feeling he had for his mother.
Rodolphe and Francesca for some time remained in perfect silence,
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answering each other by sympathetic glances full of thoughts. They
understood each other in the midst of one of the most beautiful
scenes of Nature, whose glories, interpreted by the glory in their
hearts, helped to stamp on their minds the most fugitive details of
that unique hour. There had not been the slightest shade of frivolity
in Francesca’s conduct. It was noble, large, and without any second
thought. This magnanimity struck Rodolphe greatly, for in it he
recognized the difference between the Italian and the Frenchwoman.
The waters, the land, the sky, the woman, all were grandiose and
suave, even their love in the midst of this picture, so vast in its expanse,
so rich in detail, where the sternness of the snowy peaks and
their hard folds standing clearly out against the blue sky, reminded
Rodolphe of the circumstances which limited his happiness; a lovely
country shut in by snows.
This delightful intoxication of soul was destined to be disturbed.
A boat was approaching from Lucerne; Gina, who had been watching
it attentively, gave a joyful start, though faithful to her part as a
mute. The bark came nearer; when at length Francesca could distinguish
the faces on board, she exclaimed, “Tito!” as she perceived a
young man. She stood up, and remained standing at the risk of being
drowned. “Tito! Tito!” cried she, waving her handkerchief.
Tito desired the boatmen to slacken, and the two boats pulled side
by side. The Italian and Tito talked with such extreme rapidity, and
in a dialect unfamiliar to a man who hardly knew even the Italian of
books, that Rodolphe could neither hear nor guess the drift of this
conversation. But Tito’s handsome face, Francesca’s familiarity, and
Gina’s expression of delight, all aggrieved him. And indeed no lover
can help being ill pleased at finding himself neglected for another,
whoever he may be. Tito tossed a little leather bag to Gina, full of
gold no doubt, and a packet of letters to Francesca, who began to
read them, with a farewell wave of the hand to Tito.
“Get quickly back to Gersau,” she said to the boatmen, “I will not
let my poor Emilio pine ten minutes longer than he need.”
“What has happened?” asked Rodolphe, as he saw Francesca finish
reading the last letter.
“La liberta!” she exclaimed, with an artist’s enthusiasm.
“E denaro!” added Gina, like an echo, for she had found her tongue.
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“Yes,” said Francesca, “no more poverty! For more than eleven
months have I been working, and I was beginning to be tired of it. I
am certainly not a literary woman.”
“Who is this Tito?” asked Rodolphe.
“The Secretary of State to the financial department of the humble
shop of the Colonnas, in other words, the son of our ragionato. Poor
boy! he could not come by the Saint-Gothard, nor by the Mont-
Cenis, nor by the Simplon; he came by sea, by Marseilles, and had to
cross France. Well, in three weeks we shall be at Geneva, and living at
our ease. Come, Rodolphe,” she added, seeing sadness overspread the
Parisian’s face, “is not the Lake of Geneva quite as good as the Lake
of Lucerne?”
“But allow me to bestow a regret on the Bergmanns’ delightful
house,” said Rodolphe, pointing to the little promontory.
“Come and dine with us to add to your associations, povero mio,”
said she. “This is a great day; we are out of danger. My mother writes
that within a year there will be an amnesty. Oh! la cara patria!”
These three words made Gina weep. “Another winter here,” said
she, “and I should have been dead!”
“Poor little Sicilian kid!” said Francesca, stroking Gina’s head with
an expression and an affection which made Rodolphe long to be so
caressed, even if it were without love.
The boat grounded; Rodolphe sprang on to the sand, offered his
hand to the Italian lady, escorted her to the door of the Bergmanns’
house, and went to dress and return as soon as possible.
When he joined the librarian and his wife, who were sitting on the
balcony, Rodolphe could scarcely repress an exclamation of surprise
at seeing the prodigious change which the good news had produced
in the old man. He now saw a man of about sixty, extremely well
preserved, a lean Italian, as straight as an I, with hair still black, though
thin and showing a white skull, with bright eyes, a full set of white
teeth, a face like Caesar, and on his diplomatic lips a sardonic smile,
the almost false smile under which a man of good breeding hides his
real feelings.
“Here is my husband under his natural form,” said Francesca gravely.
“He is quite a new acquaintance,” replied Rodolphe, bewildered.
“Quite,” said the librarian; “I have played many a part, and know
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well how to make up. Ah! I played one in Paris under the Empire,
with Bourrienne, Madame Murat, Madame d’Abrantis e tutte quanti.
Everything we take the trouble to learn in our youth, even the most
futile, is of use. If my wife had not received a man’s education—an
unheard-of thing in Italy—I should have been obliged to chop wood
to get my living here. Povera Francesca! who would have told me
that she would some day maintain me!”
As he listened to this worthy bookseller, so easy, so affable, so hale,
Rodolphe scented some mystification, and preserved the watchful
silence of a man who has been duped.
“Che avete, signor?” Francesca asked with simplicity. “Does our
happiness sadden you?”
“Your husband is a young man,” he whispered in her ear.
She broke into such a frank, infectious laugh that Rodolphe was
still more puzzled.
“He is but sixty-five, at your service,” said she; “but I can assure
you that even that is something—to be thankful for!”
“I do not like to hear you jest about an affection so sacred as this,
of which you yourself prescribed the conditions.”
“Zitto!” said she, stamping her foot, and looking whether her husband
were listening. “Never disturb the peace of mind of that dear
man, as simple as a child, and with whom I can do what I please. He
is under my protection,” she added. “If you could know with what
generosity he risked his life and fortune because I was a Liberal! for
he does not share my political opinions. Is not that love, Monsieur
Frenchman?—But they are like that in his family. Emilio’s younger
brother was deserted for a handsome youth by the woman he loved.
He thrust his sword through his own heart ten minutes after he had
said to his servant, ‘I could of course kill my rival, but that would
grieve the Diva too deeply.’ “
This mixture of dignity and banter, of haughtiness and playfulness,
made Francesca at this moment the most fascinating creature in the
world. The dinner and the evening were full of cheerfulness, justified,
indeed, by the relief of the two refugees, but depressing to Rodolphe.
“Can she be fickle?” he asked himself as he returned to the Stopfers’
house. “She sympathized in my sorrow, and I cannot take part in
her joy!”
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He blamed himself, justifying this girl-wife.
“She has no taint of hypocrisy, and is carried away by impulse,”
thought he, “and I want her to be like a Parisian woman.”
Next day and the following days, in fact, for twenty days after, Rodolphe
spent all his time at the Bergmanns’, watching Francesca without having
determined to watch her. In some souls admiration is not independent
of a certain penetration. The young Frenchman discerned in
Francesca the imprudence of girlhood, the true nature of a woman as
yet unbroken, sometimes struggling against her love, and at other
moments yielding and carried away by it. The old man certainly behaved
to her as a father to his daughter, and Francesca treated him with
a deeply felt gratitude which roused her instinctive nobleness. The situation
and the woman were to Rodolphe an impenetrable enigma, of
which the solution attracted him more and more.
These last days were full of secret joys, alternating with melancholy
moods, with tiffs and quarrels even more delightful than the
hours when Rodolphe and Francesca were of one mind. And he was
more and more fascinated by this tenderness apart from wit, always
and in all things the same, an affection that was jealous of mere nothings—already!
“You care very much for luxury?” said he one evening to Francesca,
who was expressing her wish to get away from Gersau, where she
missed many things.
“I!” cried she. “I love luxury as I love the arts, as I love a picture by
Raphael, a fine horse, a beautiful day, or the Bay of Naples. Emilio,” she
went on, “have I ever complained here during our days of privation.”
“You would not have been yourself if you had,” replied the old
man gravely.
“After all, is it not in the nature of plain folks to aspire to grandeur?”
she asked, with a mischievous glance at Rodolphe and at her
husband. “Were my feet made for fatigue?” she added, putting out
two pretty little feet. “My hands”—and she held one out to
Rodolphe— “were those hands made to work?—Leave us,” she said
to her husband; “I want to speak to him.”
The old man went into the drawing-room with sublime good faith;
he was sure of his wife.
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“I will not have you come with us to Geneva,” she said to Rodolphe.
“It is a gossiping town. Though I am far above the nonsense the
world talks, I do not choose to be calumniated, not for my own
sake, but for his. I make it my pride to be the glory of that old man,
who is, after all, my only protector. We are leaving; stay here a few
days. When you come on to Geneva, call first on my husband, and
let him introduce you to me. Let us hide our great and unchangeable
affection from the eyes of the world. I love you; you know it; but
this is how I will prove it to you— you shall never discern in my
conduct anything whatever that may arouse your jealousy.”
She drew him into a corner of the balcony, kissed him on the
forehead, and fled, leaving him in amazement.
Next day Rodolphe heard that the lodgers at the Bergmanns’ had
left at daybreak. It then seemed to him intolerable to remain at
Gersau, and he set out for Vevay by the longest route, starting sooner
than was necessary. Attracted to the waters of the lake where the
beautiful Italian awaited him, he reached Geneva by the end of October.
To avoid the discomforts of the town he took rooms in a
house at Eaux-Vives, outside the walls. As soon as he was settled, his
first care was to ask his landlord, a retired jeweler, whether some
Italian refugees from Milan had not lately come to reside at Geneva.
“Not so far as I know,” replied the man. “Prince and Princess
Colonna of Rome have taken Monsieur Jeanrenaud’s place for three
years; it is one of the finest on the lake. It is situated between the
Villa Diodati and that of Monsieur Lafin-de-Dieu, let to the
Vicomtesse de Beauseant. Prince Colonna has come to see his daughter
and his son-in-law Prince Gandolphini, a Neopolitan, or if you like,
a Sicilian, an old adherent of King Murat’s, and a victim of the last
revolution. These are the last arrivals at Geneva, and they are not
Milanese. Serious steps had to be taken, and the Pope’s interest in the
Colonna family was invoked, to obtain permission from the foreign
powers and the King of Naples for the Prince and Princess
Gandolphini to live here. Geneva is anxious to do nothing to displease
the Holy Alliance to which it owes its independence. Our part
is not to ruffle foreign courts; there are many foreigners here, Russians
and English.”
“Even some Gevenese?”
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“Yes, monsieur, our lake is so fine! Lord Byron lived here about
seven years at the Villa Diodati, which every one goes to see now, like
Coppet and Ferney.”
“You cannot tell me whether within a week or so a bookseller from
Milan has come with his wife—named Lamporani, one of the leaders
of the last revolution?”
“I could easily find out by going to the Foreigners’ Club,” said the
jeweler.
Rodolphe’s first walk was very naturally to the Villa Diodati, the
residence of Lord Byron, whose recent death added to its attractiveness:
for is not death the consecration of genius?
The road to Eaux-Vives follows the shore of the lake, and, like all
the roads in Switzerland, is very narrow; in some spots, in consequence
of the configuration of the hilly ground, there is scarcely space
for two carriages to pass each other.
At a few yards from the Jeanrenauds’ house, which he was approaching
without knowing it, Rodolphe heard the sound of a carriage behind
him, and, finding himself in a sunk road, he climbed to the top
of a rock to leave the road free. Of course he looked at the approaching
carriage—an elegant English phaeton, with a splendid pair of English
horses. He felt quite dizzy as he beheld in this carriage Francesca, beautifully
dressed, by the side of an old lady as hard as a cameo. A servant
blazing with gold lace stood behind. Francesca recognized Rodolphe,
and smiled at seeing him like a statue on a pedestal. The carriage, which
the lover followed with his eyes as he climbed the hill, turned in at the
gate of a country house, towards which he ran.
“Who lives here?” he asked the gardener.
“Prince and Princess Colonna, and Prince and Princess
Gandolphini.”
“Have they not just driven in?”
“Yes, sir.”
In that instant a veil fell from Rodolphe’s eyes; he saw clearly the
meaning of the past.
“If only this is her last piece of trickery!” thought the thunderstruck
lover to himself.
He trembled lest he should have been the plaything of a whim, for
he had heard what a capriccio might mean in an Italian. But what a
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crime had he committed in the eyes of a woman—in accepting a
born princess as a citizen’s wife! in believing that a daughter of one of
the most illustrious houses of the Middle Ages was the wife of a
bookseller! The consciousness of his blunders increased Rodolphe’s
desire to know whether he would be ignored and repelled. He asked
for Prince Gandolphini, sending in his card, and was immediately
received by the false Lamparini, who came forward to meet him,
welcomed him with the best possible grace, and took him to walk
on a terrace whence there was a view of Geneva, the Jura, the hills
covered with villas, and below them a wide expanse of the lake.
“My wife is faithful to the lakes, you see,” he remarked, after pointing
out the details to his visitor. “We have a sort of concert this evening,”
he added, as they returned to the splendid Villa Jeanrenaud. “I hope
you will do me and the Princess the pleasure of seeing you. Two months
of poverty endured in intimacy are equal to years of friendship.”
Though he was consumed by curiosity, Rodolphe dared not ask to
see the Princess; he slowly made his way back to Eaux-Vives, looking
forward to the evening. In a few hours his passion, great as it had
already been, was augmented by his anxiety and by suspense as to
future events. He now understood the necessity for making himself
famous, that he might some day find himself, socially speaking, on a
level with his idol. In his eyes Francesca was made really great by the
simplicity and ease of her conduct at Gersau. Princess Colonna’s
haughtiness, so evidently natural to her, alarmed Rodolphe, who
would find enemies in Francesca’s father and mother—at least so he
might expect; and the secrecy which Princess Gandolphini had so
strictly enjoined on him now struck him as a wonderful proof of
affection. By not choosing to compromise the future, had she not
confessed that she loved him?
At last nine o’clock struck; Rodolphe could get into a carriage and
say with an emotion that is very intelligible, “To the Villa
Jeanrenaud—to Prince Gandolphini’s.”
At last he saw Francesca, but without being seen by her. The Princess
was standing quite near the piano. Her beautiful hair, so thick
and long, was bound with a golden fillet. Her face, in the light of
wax candles, had the brilliant pallor peculiar to Italians, and which
looks its best only by artificial light. She was in full evening dress,
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Balzac
showing her fascinating shoulders, the figure of a girl and the arms of
an antique statue. Her sublime beauty was beyond all possible rivalry,
though there were some charming women of Geneva, and other
Italians, among them the dazzling and illustrious Princess Varese,
and the famous singer Tinti, who was at that moment singing.
Rodolphe, leaning against the door-post, looked at the Princess,
turning on her the fixed, tenacious, attracting gaze, charged with the
full, insistent will which is concentrated in the feeling called desire,
and thus assumes the nature of a vehement command. Did the flame
of that gaze reach Francesca? Was Francesca expecting each instant to
see Rodolphe? In a few minutes she stole a glance at the door, as
though magnetized by this current of love, and her eyes, without
reserve, looked deep into Rodolphe’s. A slight thrill quivered through
that superb face and beautiful body; the shock to her spirit reacted:
Francesca blushed! Rodolphe felt a whole life in this exchange of
looks, so swift that it can only be compared to a lightning flash. But
to what could his happiness compare? He was loved. The lofty Princess,
in the midst of her world, in this handsome villa, kept the pledge
given by the disguised exile, the capricious beauty of Bergmanns’
lodgings. The intoxication of such a moment enslaves a man for life!
A faint smile, refined and subtle, candid and triumphant, curled Princess
Gandolphini’s lips, and at a moment when she did not feel herself
observed she looked at Rodolphe with an expression which seemed
to ask his pardon for having deceived him as to her rank.
When the song was ended Rodolphe could make his way to the
Prince, who graciously led him to his wife. Rodolphe went through
the ceremonial of a formal introduction to Princess and Prince
Colonna, and to Francesca. When this was over, the Princess had to
take part in the famous quartette, Mi manca la voce, which was sung
by her with Tinti, with the famous tenor Genovese, and with a wellknown
Italian Prince then in exile, whose voice, if he had not been a
Prince, would have made him one of the Princes of Art.
“Take that seat,” said Francesca to Rodolphe, pointing to her own
chair. “Oime! I think there is some mistake in my name; I have for
the last minute been Princess Rodolphini.”
It was said with the artless grace which revived, in this avowal hidden
beneath a jest, the happy days at Gersau. Rodolphe reveled in the exquis-
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ite sensation of listening to the voice of the woman he adored, while
sitting so close to her that one cheek was almost touched by the stuff of
her dress and the gauze of her scarf. But when, at such a moment, Mi
manca la voce is being sung, and by the finest voices in Italy, it is easy to
understand what it was that brought the tears to Rodolphe’s eyes.
In love, as perhaps in all else, there are certain circumstances, trivial
in themselves, but the outcome of a thousand little previous incidents,
of which the importance is immense, as an epitome of the
past and as a link with the future. A hundred times already we have
felt the preciousness of the one we love; but a trifle—the perfect
touch of two souls united during a walk perhaps by a single word, by
some unlooked-for proof of affection, will carry the feeling to its
supremest pitch. In short, to express this truth by an image which
has been pre-eminently successful from the earliest ages of the world,
there are in a long chain points of attachment needed where the cohesion
is stronger than in the intermediate loops of rings. This recognition
between Rodolphe and Francesca, at this party, in the face of
the world, was one of those intense moments which join the future
to the past, and rivet a real attachment more deeply in the heart. It
was perhaps of these incidental rivets that Bossuet spoke when he
compared to them the rarity of happy moments in our lives—he
who had such a living and secret experience of love.
Next to the pleasure of admiring the woman we love, comes that of
seeing her admired by every one else. Rodolphe was enjoying both at
once. Love is a treasury of memories, and though Rodolphe’s was already
full, he added to it pearls of great price; smiles shed aside for him
alone, stolen glances, tones in her singing which Francesca addressed to
him alone, but which made Tinti pale with jealousy, they were so
much applauded. All his strength of desire, the special expression of his
soul, was thrown over the beautiful Roman, who became unchangeably
the beginning and the end of all his thoughts and actions. Rodolphe
loved as every woman may dream of being loved, with a force, a constancy,
a tenacity, which made Francesca the very substance of his heart;
he felt her mingling with his blood as purer blood, with his soul as a
more perfect soul; she would henceforth underlie the least efforts of
his life as the golden sand of the Mediterranean lies beneath the waves.
In short, Rodolphe’s lightest aspiration was now a living hope.
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At the end of a few days, Francesca understood this boundless love;
but it was so natural, and so perfectly shared by her, that it did not
surprise her. She was worthy of it.
“What is there that is strange?” said she to Rodolphe, as they walked
on the garden terrace, when he had been betrayed into one of those
outbursts of conceit which come so naturally to Frenchmen in the
expression of their feelings—”what is extraordinary in the fact of your
loving a young and beautiful woman, artist enough to be able to earn
her living like Tinti, and of giving you some of the pleasures of vanity?
What lout but would then become an Amadis? This is not in question
between you and me. What is needed is that we both love faithfully,
persistently; at a distance from each other for years, with no satisfaction
but that of knowing that we are loved.”
“Alas!” said Rodolphe, “will you not consider my fidelity as devoid
of all merit when you see me absorbed in the efforts of devouring
ambition? Do you imagine that I can wish to see you one day exchange
the fine name of Gandolphini for that of a man who is a
nobody? I want to become one of the most remarkable men of my
country, to be rich, great—that you may be as proud of my name as
of your own name of Colonna.”
“I should be grieved to see you without such sentiments in your
heart,” she replied, with a bewitching smile. “But do not wear yourself
out too soon in your ambitious labors. Remain young. They say
that politics soon make a man old.”
One of the rarest gifts in women is a certain gaiety which does not
detract from tenderness. This combination of deep feeling with the
lightness of youth added an enchanting grace at this moment to
Francesca’s charms. This is the key to her character; she laughs and
she is touched; she becomes enthusiastic, and returns to arch raillery
with a readiness, a facility, which makes her the charming and exquisite
creature she is, and for which her reputation is known outside
Italy. Under the graces of a woman she conceals vast learning, thanks
to the excessively monotonous and almost monastic life she led in
the castle of the old Colonnas.
This rich heiress was at first intended for the cloister, being the fourth
child of Prince and Princess Colonna; but the death of her two brothers,
and of her elder sister, suddenly brought her out of her retirement,
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Albert Savarus
and made her one of the most brilliant matches in the Papal States.
Her elder sister had been betrothed to Prince Gandolphini, one of the
richest landowners in Sicily; and Francesca was married to him instead,
so that nothing might be changed in the position of the family. The
Colonnas and Gandolphinis had always intermarried.
From the age of nine till she was sixteen, Francesca, under the direction
of a Cardinal of the family, had read all through the library of the
Colonnas, to make weight against her ardent imagination by studying
science, art, and letters. But in these studies she acquired the taste for
independence and liberal ideas, which threw her, with her husband,
into the ranks of the revolution. Rodolphe had not yet learned that,
besides five living languages, Francesca knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
The charming creature perfectly understood that, for a woman,
the first condition of being learned is to keep it deeply hidden.
Rodolphe spent the whole winter at Geneva. This winter passed
like a day. When spring returned, notwithstanding the infinite delights
of the society of a clever woman, wonderfully well informed,
young and lovely, the lover went through cruel sufferings, endured
indeed with courage, but which were sometimes legible in his countenance,
and betrayed themselves in his manners or speech, perhaps
because he believed that Francesca shared them. Now and again it
annoyed him to admire her calmness. Like an Englishwoman, she
seemed to pride herself on expressing nothing in her face; its serenity
defied love; he longed to see her agitated; he accused her of having no
feeling, for he believed in the tradition which ascribes to Italian
women a feverish excitability.
“I am a Roman!” Francesca gravely replied one day when she took
quite seriously some banter on this subject from Rodolphe.
There was a depth of tone in her reply which gave it the appearance
of scathing irony, and which set Rodolphe’s pulses throbbing. The
month of May spread before them the treasures of her fresh verdure;
the sun was sometimes as powerful as at midsummer. The two lovers
happened to be at a part of the terrace where the rock arises abruptly
from the lake, and were leaning over the stone parapet that crowns
the wall above a flight of steps leading down to a landing-stage. From
the neighboring villa, where there is a similar stairway, a boat presently
shot out like a swan, its flag flaming, its crimson awning spread
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over a lovely woman comfortably reclining on red cushions, her hair
wreathed with real flowers; the boatman was a young man dressed
like a sailor, and rowing with all the more grace because he was under
the lady’s eye.
“They are happy!” exclaimed Rodolphe, with bitter emphasis.
“Claire de Bourgogne, the last survivor of the only house which can
ever vie with the royal family of France—”
“Oh! of a bastard branch, and that a female line.”
“At any rate, she is Vicomtesse de Beauseant; and she did not—”
“Did not hesitate, you would say, to bury herself here with Monsieur
Gaston de Nueil, you would say,” replied the daughter of the
Colonnas. “She is only a Frenchwoman; I am an Italian, my dear sir!”
Francesca turned away from the parapet, leaving Rodolphe, and
went to the further end of the terrace, whence there is a wide prospect
of the lake. Watching her as she slowly walked away, Rodolphe
suspected that he had wounded her soul, at once so simple and so
wise, so proud and so humble. It turned him cold; he followed
Francesca, who signed to him to leave her to herself. But he did not
heed the warning, and detected her wiping away her tears. Tears! in so
strong a nature.
“Francesca,” said he, taking her hand, “is there a single regret in
your heart?”
She was silent, disengaged her hand which held her embroidered
handkerchief, and again dried her eyes.
“Forgive me!” he said. And with a rush, he kissed her eyes to wipe
away the tears.
Francesca did not seem aware of his passionate impulse, she was so
violently agitated. Rodolphe, thinking she consented, grew bolder; he
put his arm round her, clasped her to his heart, and snatched a kiss. But
she freed herself by a dignified movement of offended modesty, and,
standing a yard off, she looked at him without anger, but with firm
determination.
“Go this evening,” she said. “We meet no more till we meet at Naples.”
This order was stern, but it was obeyed, for it was Francesca’s will.
On his return to Paris Rodolphe found in his rooms a portrait of
Princess Gandolphini painted by Schinner, as Schinner can paint.
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The artist had passed through Geneva on his way to Italy. As he had
positively refused to paint the portraits of several women, Rodolphe
did not believe that the Prince, anxious as he was for a portrait of his
wife, would be able to conquer the great painter’s objections; but
Francesca, no doubt, had bewitched him, and obtained from him—
which was almost a miracle—an original portrait for Rodolphe, and
a duplicate for Emilio. She told him this in a charming and delightful
letter, in which the mind indemnified itself for the reserve required
by the worship of the proprieties. The lover replied. Thus
began, never to cease, a regular correspondence between Rodolphe
and Francesca, the only indulgence they allowed themselves.
Rodolphe, possessed by an ambition sanctified by his love, set to
work. First he longed to make his fortune, and risked his all in an
undertaking to which he devoted all his faculties as well as his capital;
but he, an inexperienced youth, had to contend against duplicity,
which won the day. Thus three years were lost in a vast enterprise,
three years of struggling and courage.
The Villele ministry fell just when Rodolphe was ruined. The valiant
lover thought he would seek in politics what commercial industry
had refused him; but before braving the storms of this career, he
went, all wounded and sick at heart, to have his bruises healed and
his courage revived at Naples, where the Prince and Princess had
been reinstated in their place and rights on the King’s accession. This,
in the midst of his warfare, was a respite full of delights; he spent
three months at the Villa Gandolphini, rocked in hope.
Rodolphe then began again to construct his fortune. His talents
were already known; he was about to attain the desires of his ambition;
a high position was promised him as the reward of his zeal, his
devotion, and his past services, when the storm of July 1830 broke,
and again his bark was swamped.
She, and God! These are the only witnesses of the brave efforts, the
daring attempts of a young man gifted with fine qualities, but to
whom, so far, the protection of luck—the god of fools—has been
denied. And this indefatigable wrestler, upheld by love, comes back
to fresh struggles, lighted on his way by an always friendly eye, an
ever faithful heart.
Lovers! Pray for him!
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As she finished this narrative, Mademoiselle de Watteville’s cheeks
were on fire; there was a fever in her blood. She was crying—but
with rage. This little novel, inspired by the literary style then in fashion,
was the first reading of the kind that Rosalie had ever had the
chance of devouring. Love was depicted in it, if not by a masterhand,
at any rate by a man who seemed to give his own impressions;
and truth, even if unskilled, could not fail to touch a virgin soul.
Here lay the secret of Rosalie’s terrible agitation, of her fever and her
tears; she was jealous of Francesca Colonna.
She never for an instant doubted the sincerity of this poetical flight;
Albert had taken pleasure in telling the story of his passion, while changing
the names of persons and perhaps of places. Rosalie was possessed
by infernal curiosity. What woman but would, like her, have wanted
to know her rival’s name—for she too loved! As she read these pages,
to her really contagious, she had said solemnly to herself, “I love him!”—
She loved Albert, and felt in her heart a gnawing desire to fight for
him, to snatch him from this unknown rival. She reflected that she
knew nothing of music, and that she was not beautiful.
“He will never love me!” thought she.
This conclusion aggravated her anxiety to know whether she might
not be mistaken, whether Albert really loved an Italian Princess, and
was loved by her. In the course of this fateful night, the power of
swift decision, which had characterized the famous Watteville, was
fully developed in his descendant. She devised those whimsical
schemes, round which hovers the imagination of most young girls
when, in the solitude to which some injudicious mothers confine
them, they are roused by some tremendous event which the system
of repression to which they are subjected could neither foresee nor
prevent. She dreamed of descending by a ladder from the kiosk into
the garden of the house occupied by Albert; of taking advantage of
the lawyer’s being asleep to look through the window into his private
room. She thought of writing to him, or of bursting the fetters
of Besancon society by introducing Albert to the drawing-room of
the Hotel de Rupt. This enterprise, which to the Abbe de Grancey
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even would have seemed the climax of the impossible, was a mere
passing thought.
“Ah!” said she to herself, “my father has a dispute pending as to his
land at les Rouxey. I will go there! If there is no lawsuit, I will manage
to make one, and he shall come into our drawing-room!” she cried, as
she sprang out of bed and to the window to look at the fascinating
gleam which shone through Albert’s nights. The clock struck one; he
was still asleep.
“I shall see him when he gets up; perhaps he will come to his window.”
At this instant Mademoiselle de Watteville was witness to an incident
which promised to place in her power the means of knowing
Albert’s secrets. By the light of the moon she saw a pair of arms
stretched out from the kiosk to help Jerome, Albert’s servant, to get
across the coping of the wall and step into the little building. In
Jerome’s accomplice Rosalie at once recognized Mariette the lady’smaid.
“Mariette and Jerome!” said she to herself. “Mariette, such an ugly
girl! Certainly they must be ashamed of themselves.”
Though Mariette was horribly ugly and six-and-thirty, she had inherited
several plots of land. She had been seventeen years with Madame
de Watteville, who valued her highly for her bigotry, her honesty,
and long service, and she had no doubt saved money and invested
her wages and perquisites. Hence, earning about ten louis a
year, she probably had by this time, including compound interest
and her little inheritance, not less than ten thousand francs.
In Jerome’s eyes ten thousand francs could alter the laws of optics;
he saw in Mariette a neat figure; he did not perceive the pits and
seams which virulent smallpox had left on her flat, parched face; to
him the crooked mouth was straight; and ever since Savaron, by
taking him into his service, had brought him so near to the Wattevilles’
house, he had laid siege systematically to the maid, who was as prim
and sanctimonious as her mistress, and who, like every ugly old maid,
was far more exacting than the handsomest.
If the night-scene in the kiosk is thus fully accounted for to all
perspicacious readers, it was not so to Rosalie, though she derived
from it the most dangerous lesson that can be given, that of a bad
example. A mother brings her daughter up strictly, keeps her under
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her wing for seventeen years, and then, in one hour, a servant girl
destroys the long and painful work, sometimes by a word, often
indeed by a gesture! Rosalie got into bed again, not without considering
how she might take advantage of her discovery.
Next morning, as she went to Mass accompanied by Mariette—
her mother was not well—Rosalie took the maid’s arm, which surprised
the country wench not a little.
“Mariette,” said she, “is Jerome in his master’s confidence?”
“I do not know, mademoiselle.”
“Do not play the innocent with me,” said Mademoiselle de
Watteville drily. “You let him kiss you last night under the kiosk; I
no longer wonder that you so warmly approved of my mother’s
ideas for the improvements she planned.”
Rosalie could feel how Mariette was trembling by the shaking of
her arm.
“I wish you no ill,” Rosalie went on. “Be quite easy; I shall not say a
word to my mother, and you can meet Jerome as often as you please.”
“But, mademoiselle,” said Mariette, “it is perfectly respectable;
Jerome honestly means to marry me—”
“But then,” said Rosalie, “why meet at night?”
Mariette was dumfounded, and could make no reply.
“Listen, Mariette; I am in love too! In secret and without any return.
I am, after all, my father’s and mother’s only child. You have
more to hope for from me than from any one else in the world—”
“Certainly, mademoiselle, and you may count on us for life or death,”
exclaimed Mariette, rejoiced at the unexpected turn of affairs.
“In the first place, silence for silence,” said Rosalie. “I will not marry
Monsieur de Soulas; but one thing I will have, and must have; my help
and favor are yours on one condition only.”
“What is that?”
“I must see the letters which Monsieur Savaron sends to the post
by Jerome.”
“But what for?” said Mariette in alarm.
“Oh! merely to read them, and you yourself shall post them afterwards.
It will cause a little delay; that is all.”
At this moment they went into church, and each of them, instead
of reading the order of Mass, fell into her own train of thought.
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“Dear, dear, how many sins are there in all that?” thought Mariette.
Rosalie, whose soul, brain, and heart were completely upset by
reading the story, by this time regarded it as history, written for her
rival. By dint of thinking of nothing else, like a child, she ended by
believing that the Eastern Review was no doubt forwarded to Albert’s
lady-love.
“Oh!” said she to herself, her head buried in her hands in the attitude
of a person lost in prayer; “oh! how can I get my father to look
through the list of people to whom the Review is sent?”
After breakfast she took a turn in the garden with her father, coaxing
and cajoling him, and brought him to the kiosk.
“Do you suppose, my dear little papa, that our Review is ever read
abroad?”
“It is but just started—”
“Well, I will wager that it is.”
“It is hardly possible.”
“Just go and find out, and note the names of any subscribers out of
France.”
Two hours later Monsieur de Watteville said to his daughter:
“I was right; there is not one foreign subscriber as yet. They hope
to get some at Neufchatel, at Berne, and at Geneva. One copy, is in
fact, sent to Italy, but it is not paid for—to a Milanese lady at her
country house at Belgirate, on Lago Maggiore.
“What is her name?”
“The Duchesse d’Argaiolo.”
“Do you know her, papa?”
“I have heard about her. She was by birth a Princess Soderini, a
Florentine, a very great lady, and quite as rich as her husband, who
has one of the largest fortunes in Lombardy. Their villa on the Lago
Maggiore is one of the sights of Italy.”
Two days after, Mariette placed the following letter in Mademoiselle
de Watteville’s hand:—
Albert Savaron to Leopold Hannequin.
“Yes, ’tis so, my dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I
was traveling. I would not tell you anything till success should begin,
and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive
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undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted
so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to
do as you have done—to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, as
the longest but the safest. I can see you jump with surprise in your
lawyer’s chair!
“But do not suppose that anything is changed in my personal life, of
which you alone in the world know the secret, and that under the
reservations she insists on. I did not tell you, my friend; but I was
horribly weary of Paris. The outcome of the first enterprise, on which I
had founded all my hopes, and which came to a bad end in consequence
of the utter rascality of my two partners, who combined to
cheat and fleece me—me, though everything was done by my energy—made
me give up the pursuit of a fortune after the loss of three
years of my life. One of these years was spent in the law courts, and
perhaps I should have come worse out of the scrape if I had not been
made to study law when I was twenty.
“I made up my mind to go into politics solely, to the end that I may
some day find my name on a list for promotion to the Senate under
the title of Comte Albert Savaron de Savarus, and so revive in France a
good name now extinct in Belgium—though indeed I am neither legitimate
nor legitimized.”
“Ah! I knew it! He is of noble birth!” exclaimed Rosalie, dropping
the letter.
“You know how conscientiously I studied, how faithful and useful I
was as an obscure journalist, and how excellent a secretary to the statesman
who, on his part, was true to me in 1829. Flung to the depths
once more by the revolution of July just when my name was becoming
known, at the very moment when, as Master of Appeals, I was about to
find my place as a necessary wheel in the political machine, I committed
the blunder of remaining faithful to the fallen, and fighting for
them, without them. Oh! why was I but three-and-thirty, and why
did I not apply to you to make me eligible? I concealed from you all
my devotedness and my dangers. What would you have? I was full of
faith. We should not have agreed.
“Ten months ago, when you saw me so gay and contented, writing
my political articles, I was in despair; I foresaw my fate, at the age of
thirty-seven, with two thousand francs for my whole fortune, without
the smallest fame, just having failed in a noble undertaking, the founding,
namely, of a daily paper answering only to a need of the future
instead of appealing to the passions of the moment. I did not know
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which way to turn, and I felt my own value! I wandered about, gloomy
and hurt, through the lonely places of Paris—Paris which had slipped
through my fingers—thinking of my crushed ambitions, but never
giving them up. Oh, what frantic letters I wrote at that time to her, my
second conscience, my other self! Sometimes I would say to myself,
‘Why did I sketch so vast a programme of life? Why demand everything?
Why not wait for happiness while devoting myself to some
mechanical employment.’
“I then looked about me for some modest appointment by which I
might live. I was about to get the editorship of a paper under a manager
who did not know much about it, a man of wealth and ambition,
when I took fright. ‘Would she ever accept as her husband a man who
had stooped so low?’ I wondered.
“This reflection made me two-and-twenty again. But, oh, my dear
Leopold, how the soul is worn by these perplexities! What must not the
caged eagles suffer, and imprisoned lions!—They suffer what Napoleon
suffered, not at Saint Helena, but on the Quay of the Tuileries, on the
10th of August, when he saw Louis XVI. defending himself so badly
while he could have quelled the insurrection; as he actually did, on the
same spot, a little later, in Vendemiaire. Well, my life has been a torment
of that kind, extending over four years. How many a speech to the Chamber
have I not delivered in the deserted alleys of the Bois de Boulogne!
These wasted harangues have at any rate sharpened my tongue and accustomed
my mind to formulate its ideas in words. And while I was
undergoing this secret torture, you were getting married, you had paid
for your business, you were made law-clerk to the Maire of your district,
after gaining a cross for a wound at Saint-Merri.
“Now, listen. When I was a small boy and tortured cock-chafers, the
poor insects had one form of struggle which used almost to put me in
a fever. It was when I saw them making repeated efforts to fly but
without getting away, though they could spread their wings. We used
to say, ‘They are marking time.’ Now was this sympathy? Was it a
vision of my own future?—Oh! to spread my wings and yet be unable
to fly! That has been my predicament since that fine undertaking by
which I was disgusted, but which has now made four families rich.
“At last, seven months ago, I determined to make myself a name at
the Paris Bar, seeing how many vacancies had been left by the promotion
of several lawyers to eminent positions. But when I remembered
the rivalry I had seen among men of the press, and how difficult it is to
achieve anything of any kind in Paris, the arena where so many cham-
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pions meet, I came to a determination painful to myself, but certain in
its results, and perhaps quicker than any other. In the course of our
conversations you had given me a picture of the society of Besancon, of
the impossibility for a stranger to get on there, to produce the smallest
effect, to get into society, or to succeed in any way whatever. It was
there that I determined to set up my flag, thinking, and rightly, that I
should meet with no opposition, but find myself alone to canvass for
the election. The people of the Comte will not meet the outsider? The
outsider will meet them! They refuse to admit him to their drawingrooms,
he will never go there! He never shows himself anywhere, not
even in the streets! But there is one class that elects the deputies—the
commercial class. I am going especially to study commercial questions,
with which I am already familiar; I will gain their lawsuits, I will
effect compromises, I will be the greatest pleader in Besancon. By and
by I will start a Review, in which I will defend the interests of the
country, will create them, or preserve them, or resuscitate them. When
I shall have won a sufficient number of votes, my name will come out
of the urn. For a long time the unknown barrister will be treated with
contempt, but some circumstance will arise to bring him to the front—
some unpaid defence, or a case which no other pleader will undertake.
“Well, my dear Leopold, I packed up my books in eleven cases, I
bought such law-books as might prove useful, and I sent everything
off, furniture and all, by carrier to Besancon. I collected my diplomas,
and I went to bid you good-bye. The mail coach dropped me at
Besancon, where, in three days’ time, I chose a little set of rooms looking
out over some gardens. I sumptuously arranged the mysterious
private room where I spend my nights and days, and where the portrait
of my divinity reigns—of her to whom my life is dedicate, who
fills it wholly, who is the mainspring of my efforts, the secret of my
courage, the cause of my talents. Then, as soon as the furniture and
books had come, I engaged an intelligent man-servant, and there I sat
for five months like a hibernating marmot.
“My name had, however, been entered on the list of lawyers in the
town. At last I was called one day to defend an unhappy wretch at the
Assizes, no doubt in order to hear me speak for once! One of the most
influential merchants of Besancon was on the jury; he had a difficult
task to fulfil; I did my utmost for the man, and my success was absolute
and complete. My client was innocent; I very dramatically secured
the arrest of the real criminals, who had come forward as witnesses.
In short, the Court and the public were united in their admira-
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tion. I managed to save the examining magistrate’s pride by pointing
out the impossibility of detecting a plot so skilfully planned.
“Then I had to fight a case for my merchant, and won his suit. The
Cathedral Chapter next chose me to defend a tremendous action against
the town, which had been going on for four years; I won that. Thus, after
three trials, I had become the most famous advocate of Franche-Comte.
“But I bury my life in the deepest mystery, and so hide my aims. I
have adopted habits which prevent my accepting any invitations. I am
only to be consulted between six and eight in the morning; I go to bed
after my dinner, and work at night. The Vicar-General, a man of parts,
and very influential, who placed the Chapter’s case in my hands after
they had lost it in the lower Court, of course professed their gratitude.
‘Monsieur,’ said I, ‘I will win your suit, but I want no fee; I want
more’ (start of alarm on the Abbe’s part). ‘You must know that I am a
great loser by putting myself forward in antagonism to the town. I
came here only to leave the place as deputy. I mean to engage only in
commercial cases, because commercial men return the members; they
will distrust me if I defend “the priests”—for to them you are simply
priests. If I undertake your defence, it is because I was, in 1828, private
secretary to such a Minister’ (again a start of surprise on the part
of my Abbe), ‘and Master of Appeals, under the name of Albert de
Savarus’ (another start). ‘I have remained faithful to monarchical opinions;
but, as you have not the majority of votes in Besancon, I must
gain votes among the citizens. So the fee I ask of you is the votes you
may be able secretly to secure for me at the opportune moment. Let us
each keep our own counsel, and I will defend, for nothing, every case
to which a priest of this diocese may be a party. Not a word about my
previous life, and we will be true to each other.’
“When he came to thank me afterwards, he gave me a note for five
hundred francs, and said in my ear, ‘The votes are a bargain all the
same.’—I have in the course of five interviews made a friend, I think,
of this Vicar-General.
“Now I am overwhelmed with business, and I undertake no cases
but those brought to me by merchants, saying that commercial questions
are my specialty. This line of conduct attaches business men to
me, and allows me to make friends with influential persons. So all goes
well. Within a few months I shall have found a house to purchase in
Besancon, so as to secure a qualification. I count on your lending me
the necessary capital for this investment. If I should die, if I should
fail, the loss would be too small to be any consideration between you
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Balzac
and me. You will get the interest out of the rental, and I shall take
good care to look out for something cheap, so that you may lose nothing
by this mortgage, which is indispensable.
“Oh! my dear Leopold, no gambler with the last remains of his fortune
in his pocket, bent on staking it at the Cercle des Etrangers for
the last time one night, when he must come away rich or ruined, ever
felt such a perpetual ringing in his ears, such a nervous moisture on his
palms, such a fevered tumult in his brain, such inward qualms in his
body as I go through every day now that I am playing my last card in
the game of ambition. Alas! my dear and only friend, for nearly ten
years now I have been struggling. This battle with men and things, in
which I have unceasingly poured out my strength and energy, and so
constantly worn the springs of desire, has, so to speak, undermined
my vitality. With all the appearance of a strong man of good health, I
feel myself a wreck. Every day carries with it a shred of my inmost life.
At every fresh effort I feel that I should never be able to begin again. I
have no power, no vigor left but for happiness; and if it should never
come to crown my head with roses, the me that is really me would
cease to exist, I should be a ruined thing. I should wish for nothing
more in the world. I should want to cease from living. You know that
power and fame, the vast moral empire that I crave, is but secondary; it
is to me only a means to happiness, the pedestal for my idol.
“To reach the goal and die, like the runner of antiquity! To see fortune
and death stand on the threshold hand in hand! To win the beloved
woman just when love is extinct! To lose the faculty of enjoyment
after earning the right to be happy!—Of how many men has this
been the fate!
“But there surely is a moment when Tantalus rebels, crosses his arms,
and defies hell, throwing up his part of the eternal dupe. That is what
I shall come to if anything should thwart my plan; if, after stooping to
the dust of provincial life, prowling like a starving tiger round these
tradesmen, these electors, to secure their votes; if, after wrangling in
these squalid cases, and giving them my time—the time I might have
spent on Lago Maggiore, seeing the waters she sees, basking in her
gaze, hearing her voice—if, after all, I failed to scale the tribune and
conquer the glory that should surround the name that is to succeed to
that of Argaiolo! Nay, more than this, Leopold; there are days when I
feel a heady languor; deep disgust surges up from the depths of my
soul, especially when, abandoned to long day-dreams, I have lost myself
in anticipation of the joys of blissful love! May it not be that our
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Albert Savarus
desire has only a certain modicum of power, and that it perishes, perhaps,
of a too lavish effusion of its essence? For, after all, at this present,
my life is fair, illuminated by faith, work, and love.
“Farewell, my friend; I send love to your children, and beg you to
remember me to your excellent wife.—Yours,
“Albert.”
Rosalie read this letter twice through, and its general purport was
stamped on her heart. She suddenly saw the whole of Albert’s previous
existence, for her quick intelligence threw light on all the details, and
enabled her to take it all in. By adding this information to the little
novel published in the Review, she now fully understood Albert. Of
course, she exaggerated the greatness, remarkable as it was, of this lofty
soul and potent will, and her love for Albert thenceforth became a
passion, its violence enhanced by all the strength of her youth, the
weariness of her solitude, and the unspent energy of her character. Love
is in a young girl the effect of a natural law; but when her craving for
affection is centered in an exceptional man, it is mingled with the enthusiasm
which overflows in a youthful heart. Thus Mademoiselle de
Watteville had in a few days reached a morbid and very dangerous stage
of enamored infatuation. The Baroness was much pleased with her
daughter, who, being under the spell of her absorbing thoughts, never
resisted her will, seemed to be devoted to feminine occupations, and
realized her mother’s ideal of a docile daughter.
The lawyer was now engaged in Court two or three times a week.
Though he was overwhelmed with business, he found time to attend
the trials, call on the litigious merchants, and conduct the Review;
keeping up his personal mystery, from the conviction that the
more covert and hidden was his influence, the more real it would be.
But he neglected no means of success, reading up the list of electors
of Besancon, and finding out their interests, their characters, their
various friendships and antipathies. Did ever a Cardinal hoping to be
made Pope give himself more trouble?
One evening Mariette, on coming to dress Rosalie for an evening
party, handed to her, not without many groans over this treachery, a
letter of which the address made Mademoiselle de Watteville shiver
and redden and turn pale again as she read the address:
174

To Madame la Duchesse d’Argaiolo
(nee Princesse Soderini)
At Belgirate,
Lago Maggiore, Italy.
Balzac
In her eyes this direction blazed as the words Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,
did in the eyes of Belshazzar. After concealing the letter, Rosalie went
downstairs to accompany her mother to Madame de Chavoncourt’s;
and as long as the endless evening lasted, she was tormented by remorse
and scruples. She had already felt shame at having violated the
secrecy of Albert’s letter to Leopold; she had several times asked herself
whether, if he knew of her crime, infamous inasmuch as it necessarily
goes unpunished, the high-minded Albert could esteem her.
Her conscience answered an uncompromising “No.”
She had expiated her sin by self-imposed penances; she fasted, she
mortified herself by remaining on her knees, her arms outstretched
for hours, and repeating prayers all the time. She had compelled
Mariette to similar sets of repentance; her passion was mingled with
genuine asceticism, and was all the more dangerous.
“Shall I read that letter, shall I not?” she asked herself, while listening
to the Chavoncourt girls. One was sixteen, the other seventeen and a
half. Rosalie looked upon her two friends as mere children because
they were not secretly in love.— “If I read it,” she finally decided, after
hesitating for an hour between Yes and No, “it shall, at any rate, be the
last. Since I have gone so far as to see what he wrote to his friend, why
should I not know what he says to her? If it is a horrible crime, is it not
a proof of love? Oh, Albert! am I not your wife?”
When Rosalie was in bed she opened the letter, dated from day
to day, so as to give the Duchess a faithful picture of Albert’s life
and feelings.
“25th.
“My dear Soul, all is well. To my other conquests I have just added
an invaluable one: I have done a service to one of the most influential
men who work the elections. Like the critics, who make other men’s
reputations but can never make their own, he makes deputies though
he never can become one. The worthy man wanted to show his gratitude
without loosening his purse-strings by saying to me, ‘Would you
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Albert Savarus
care to sit in the Chamber? I can get you returned as deputy.’
“ ‘If I ever make up my mind to enter on a political career,’ replied I
hypocritically, ‘it would be to devote myself to the Comte, which I
love, and where I am appreciated.’
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will persuade you, and through you we shall
have weight in the Chamber, for you will distinguish yourself there.’
“And so, my beloved angel, say what you will, my perseverance will
be rewarded. Ere long I shall, from the high place of the French Tribune,
come before my country, before Europe. My name will be flung
to you by the hundred voices of the French press.
“Yes, as you tell me, I was old when I came to Besancon, and Besancon
has aged me more; but, like Sixtus V., I shall be young again the day
after my election. I shall enter on my true life, my own sphere. Shall we
not then stand in the same line? Count Savaron de Savarus, Ambassador
I know not where, may surely marry a Princess Soderini, the widow of
the Duc d’Argaiolo! Triumph restores the youth of men who have been
preserved by incessant struggles. Oh, my Life! with what gladness did I
fly from my library to my private room, to tell your portrait of this
progress before writing to you! Yes, the votes I can command, those of
the Vicar-General, of the persons I can oblige, and of this client, make
my election already sure.
“26th.
“We have entered on the twelfth year since that blest evening when,
by a look, the beautiful Duchess sealed the promises made by the exile
Francesca. You, dear, are thirty-two, I am thirty-five; the dear Duke is
seventy-seven—that is to say, ten years more than yours and mine put
together, and he still keeps well! My patience is almost as great as my
love, and indeed I need a few years yet to rise to the level of your name.
As you see, I am in good spirits to-day, I can laugh; that is the effect of
hope. Sadness or gladness, it all comes to me through you. The hope of
success always carries me back to the day following that one on which I
saw you for the first time, when my life became one with yours as the
earth turns to the light. Qual pianto are these eleven years, for this is the
26th of December, the anniversary of my arrival at your villa on the Lake
of Geneva. For eleven years have I been crying to you, while you shine
like a star set too high for man to reach it.
“27th.
“No, dearest, do not go to Milan; stay at Belgirate. Milan terrifies
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Balzac
me. I do not like that odious Milanese fashion of chatting at the Scala
every evening with a dozen persons, among whom it is hard if no one
says something sweet. To me solitude is like the lump of amber in
whose heart an insect lives for ever in unchanging beauty. Thus the
heart and soul of a woman remains pure and unaltered in the form of
their first youth. Is it the Tedeschi that you regret?
“28th.
“Is your statue never to be finished? I should wish to have you in
marble, in painting, in miniature, in every possible form, to beguile
my impatience. I still am waiting for the view of Belgirate from the
south, and that of the balcony; these are all that I now lack. I am so
extremely busy that to-day I can only write you nothing—but that
nothing is everything. Was it not of nothing that God made the world?
That nothing is a word, God’s word: I love you!
“30th.
“Ah! I have received your journal. Thanks for your punctuality.—So
you found great pleasure in seeing all the details of our first acquaintance
thus set down? Alas! even while disguising them I was sorely
afraid of offending you. We had no stories, and a Review without stories
is a beauty without hair. Not being inventive by nature, and in
sheer despair, I took the only poetry in my soul, the only adventure in
my memory, and pitched it in the key in which it would bear telling;
nor did I ever cease to think of you while writing the only literary
production that will ever come from my heart, I cannot say from my
pen. Did not the transformation of your fierce Sormano into Gina
make you laugh?
“You ask after my health. Well, it is better than in Paris. Though I
work enormously, the peacefulness of the surroundings has its effect
on the mind. What really tries and ages me, dear angel, is the anguish
of mortified vanity, the perpetual friction of Paris life, the struggle of
rival ambitions. This peace is a balm.
“If you could imagine the pleasure your letter gives me!—the long,
kind letter in which you tell me the most trivial incidents of your life.
No! you women can never know to what a degree a true lover is interested
in these trifles. It was an immense pleasure to see the pattern of
your new dress. Can it be a matter of indifference to me to know what
you wear? If your lofty brow is knit? If our writers amuse you? If Canalis’
songs delight you? I read the books you read. Even to your boating
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Albert Savarus
on the lake every incident touched me. Your letter is as lovely, as sweet
as your soul! Oh! flower of heaven, perpetually adored, could I have
lived without those dear letters, which for eleven years have upheld me
in my difficult path like a light, like a perfume, like a steady chant, like
some divine nourishment, like everything which can soothe and comfort
life.
“Do not fail me! If you knew what anxiety I suffer the day before they
are due, or the pain a day’s delay can give me! Is she ill? Is he? I am
midway between hell and paradise.
“O mia cara diva, keep up your music, exercise your voice, practise.
I am enchanted with the coincidence of employments and hours by
which, though separated by the Alps, we live by precisely the same
rule. The thought charms me and gives me courage. The first time I
undertook to plead here—I forget to tell you this—I fancied that you
were listening to me, and I suddenly felt the flash of inspiration which
lifts the poet above mankind. If I am returned to the Chamber—oh!
you must come to Paris to be present at my first appearance there!
“30th, Evening.
“Good heavens, how I love you! Alas! I have intrusted too much to
my love and my hopes. An accident which should sink that overloaded
bark would end my life. For three years now I have not seen you, and
at the thought of going to Belgirate my heart beats so wildly that I am
forced to stop.—To see you, to hear that girlish caressing voice! To
embrace in my gaze that ivory skin, glistening under the candlelight,
and through which I can read your noble mind! To admire your fingers
playing on the keys, to drink in your whole soul in a look, in the tone
of an Oime or an Alberto! To walk by the blossoming orange-trees, to
live a few months in the bosom of that glorious scenery!—That is life.
What folly it is to run after power, a name, fortune! But at Belgirate
there is everything; there is poetry, there is glory! I ought to have made
myself your steward, or, as that dear tyrant whom we cannot hate
proposed to me, live there as cavaliere servente, only our passion was too
fierce to allow of it.
“Farewell, my angel, forgive me my next fit of sadness in consideration
of this cheerful mood; it has come as a beam of light from the
torch of Hope, which has hitherto seemed to me a Will-o’-the-wisp.”
“How he loves her!” cried Rosalie, dropping the letter, which seemed
heavy in her hand. “After eleven years to write like this!”
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Balzac
“Mariette,” said Mademoiselle de Watteville to her maid next
morning, “go and post this letter. Tell Jerome that I know all I wish
to know, and that he is to serve Monsieur Albert faithfully. We will
confess our sins, you and I, without saying to whom the letters belonged,
nor to whom they were going. I was in the wrong; I alone
am guilty.”
“Mademoiselle has been crying?” said Mariette.
“Yes, but I do not want that my mother should perceive it; give me
some very cold water.”
In the midst of the storms of her passion Rosalie often listened to
the voice of conscience. Touched by the beautiful fidelity of these
two hearts, she had just said her prayers, telling herself that there was
nothing left to her but to be resigned, and to respect the happiness of
two beings worthy of each other, submissive to fate, looking to God
for everything, without allowing themselves any criminal acts or
wishes. She felt a better woman, and had a certain sense of satisfaction
after coming to this resolution, inspired by the natural rectitude
of youth. And she was confirmed in it by a girl’s idea: She was sacrificing
herself for him.
“She does not know how to love,” thought she. “Ah! if it were I—
I would give up everything to a man who loved me so.—To be
loved!—When, by whom shall I be loved? That little Monsieur de
Soulas only loves my money; if I were poor, he would not even look
at me.”
“Rosalie, my child, what are you thinking about? You are working
beyond the outline,” said the Baroness to her daughter, who was
making worsted-work slippers for the Baron.
Rosalie spent the winter of 1834-35 torn by secret tumults; but in
the spring, in the month of April, when she reached the age of nineteen,
she sometimes thought that it would be a fine thing to triumph
over a Duchesse d’Argaiolo. In silence and solitude the prospect
of this struggle had fanned her passion and her evil thoughts.
She encouraged her romantic daring by making plan after plan. Although
such characters are an exception, there are, unfortunately, too
many Rosalies in the world, and this story contains a moral that
ought to serve them as a warning.
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In the course of this winter Albert de Savarus had quietly made
considerable progress in Besancon. Confident of success, he now
impatiently awaited the dissolution of the Chamber. Among the men
of the moderate party he had won the suffrages of one of the makers
of Besancon, a rich contractor, who had very wide influence.
Wherever they settled the Romans took immense pains, and spent
enormous sums to have an unlimited supply of good water in every
town of their empire. At Besancon they drank the water from Arcier,
a hill at some considerable distance from Besancon. The town stands
in a horseshoe circumscribed by the river Doubs. Thus, to restore an
aqueduct in order to drink the same water that the Romans drank, in
a town watered by the Doubs, is one of those absurdities which only
succeed in a country place where the most exemplary gravity prevails.
If this whim could be brought home to the hearts of the citizens, it
would lead to considerable outlay; and this expenditure would benefit
the influential contractor.
Albert Savaron de Savarus opined that the water of the river was
good for nothing but to flow under the suspension bridge, and that
the only drinkable water was that from Arcier. Articles were printed
in the Review which merely expressed the views of the commercial
interest of Besancon. The nobility and the citizens, the moderates
and the legitimists, the government party and the opposition, everybody,
in short, was agreed that they must drink the same water as the
Romans, and boast of a suspension bridge. The question of the Arcier
water was the order of the day at Besancon. At Besancon—as in the
matter of the two railways to Versailles—as for every standing abuse—
there were private interests unconfessed which gave vital force to this
idea. The reasonable folk in opposition to this scheme, who were
indeed but few, were regarded as old women. No one talked of anything
but of Savaron’s two projects. And thus, after eighteen months
of underground labor, the ambitious lawyer had succeeded in stirring
to its depths the most stagnant town in France, the most unyielding
to foreign influence, in finding the length of its foot, to use a vulgar
phrase, and exerting a preponderant influence without stirring from
his own room. He had solved the singular problem of how to be
powerful without being popular.
In the course of this winter he won seven lawsuits for various priests
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of Besancon. At moments he could breathe freely at the thought of
his coming triumph. This intense desire, which made him work so
many interests and devise so many springs, absorbed the last strength
of his terribly overstrung soul. His disinterestedness was lauded, and
he took his clients’ fees without comment. But this disinterestedness
was, in truth, moral usury; he counted on a reward far greater to him
than all the gold in the world.
In the month of October 1834 he had brought, ostensibly to serve
a merchant who was in difficulties, with money lent him by Leopold
Hannequin, a house which gave him a qualification for election. He
had not seemed to seek or desire this advantageous bargain.
“You are really a remarkable man,” said the Abbe de Grancey, who,
of course, had watched and understood the lawyer. The Vicar-General
had come to introduce to him a Canon who needed his professional
advice. “You are a priest who has taken the wrong turning.”
This observation struck Savarus.
Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong girl’s
head, to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room and acquainted
with the society of the Hotel de Rupt. So far she had limited
her desires to seeing and hearing Albert. She had compounded,
so to speak, and a composition is often no more than a truce.
Les Rouxey, the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was worth just
ten thousand francs a year; but in other hands it would have yielded
a great deal more. The Baron in his indifference—for his wife was to
have, and in fact had, forty thousand francs a year—left the management
of les Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the
Wattevilles named Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and
his wife wished to go out of the town, they went to les Rouxey,
which is very picturesquely situated. The chateau and the park were,
in fact, created by the famous Watteville, who in his active old age
was passionately attached to this magnificent spot.
Between two precipitous hills—little peaks with bare summits
known as the great and the little Rouxey—in the heart of a ravine
where the torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their
head, come tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs,
Watteville had a huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the
overflow. Above this dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two
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Albert Savarus
cascades; and these, uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a
lovely little river to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these
two hills he enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the
dam, which he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the
soil which had to be removed to make a channel for the river and the
irrigation canals.
When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake above his
dam he was owner of the two hills, but not of the upper valley thus
flooded, through which there had been at all times a right-of-way to
where it ends in a horseshoe under the Dent de Vilard. But this ferocious
old man was so widely dreaded, that so long as he lived no
claim was urged by the inhabitants of Riceys, the little village on the
further side of the Dent de Vilard. When the Baron died, he left the
slopes of the two Rouxey hills joined by a strong wall, to protect
from inundation the two lateral valleys opening into the valley of
Rouxey, to the right and left at the foot of the Dent de Vilard. Thus
he died the master of the Dent de Vilard.
His heirs asserted their protectorate of the village of Riceys, and so
maintained the usurpation. The old assassin, the old renegade, the
old Abbe Watteville, ended his career by planting trees and making a
fine road over the shoulder of one of the Rouxey hills to join the
highroad. The estate belonging to this park and house was extensive,
but badly cultivated; there were chalets on both hills and neglected
forests of timber. It was all wild and deserted, left to the care of
nature, abandoned to chance growths, but full of sublime and unexpected
beauty. You may now imagine les Rouxey.
It is unnecessary to complicate this story by relating all the prodigious
trouble and the inventiveness stamped with genius, by which
Rosalie achieved her end without allowing it to be suspected. It is
enough to say that it was in obedience to her mother that she left
Besancon in the month of May 1835, in an antique traveling carriage
drawn by a pair of sturdy hired horses, and accompanied her father
to les Rouxey.
To a young girl love lurks in everything. When she rose, the morning
after her arrival, Mademoiselle de Watteville saw from her bedroom
window the fine expanse of water, from which the light mists
rose like smoke, and were caught in the firs and larches, rolling up
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and along the hills till they reached the heights, and she gave a cry of
admiration.
“They loved by the lakes! She lives by a lake! A lake is certainly full
of love!” she thought.
A lake fed by snows has opalescent colors and a translucency that
makes it one huge diamond; but when it is shut in like that of les
Rouxey, between two granite masses covered with pines, when silence
broods over it like that of the Savannas or the Steppes, then every one
must exclaim as Rosalie did.
“We owe that,” said her father, “to the notorious Watteville.”
“On my word,” said the girl, “he did his best to earn forgiveness.
Let us go in a boat to the further end; it will give us an appetite for
breakfast.”
The Baron called two gardener lads who knew how to row, and
took with him his prime minister Modinier. The lake was about six
acres in breadth, in some places ten or twelve, and four hundred in
length. Rosalie soon found herself at the upper end shut in by the
Dent de Vilard, the Jungfrau of that little Switzerland.
“Here we are, Monsieur le Baron,” said Modinier, signing to the
gardeners to tie up the boat; “will you come and look?”
“Look at what?” asked Rosalie.
“Oh, nothing!” exclaimed the Baron. “But you are a sensible girl;
we have some little secrets between us, and I may tell you what ruffles
my mind. Some difficulties have arisen since 1830 between the village
authorities of Riceys and me, on account of this very Dent de
Vilard, and I want to settle the matter without your mother’s knowing
anything about it, for she is stubborn; she is capable of flinging
fire and flames broadcast, particularly if she should hear that the Mayor
of Riceys, a republican, got up this action as a sop to his people.”
Rosalie had presence of mind enough to disguise her delight, so as
to work more effectually on her father.
“What action?” said she.
“Mademoiselle, the people of Riceys,” said Modinier, “have long
enjoyed the right of grazing and cutting fodder on their side of the
Dent de Vilard. Now Monsieur Chantonnit, the Maire since 1830,
declares that the whole Dent belongs to his district, and maintains
that a hundred years ago, or more, there was a way through our
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Albert Savarus
grounds. You understand that in that case we should no longer have
them to ourselves. Then this barbarian would end by saying, what
the old men in the village say, that the ground occupied by the lake
was appropriated by the Abbe de Watteville. That would be the end
of les Rouxey; what next?”
“Indeed, my child, between ourselves, it is the truth,” said Monsieur
de Watteville simply. “The land is an usurpation, with no titledeed
but lapse of time. And, therefore, to avoid all worry, I should
wish to come to a friendly understanding as to my border line on
this side of the Dent de Vilard, and I will then raise a wall.”
“If you give way to the municipality, it will swallow you up. You
ought to have threatened Riceys.”
“That is just what I told the master last evening,” said Modinier.
“But in confirmation of that view I proposed that he should come to
see whether, on this side of the Dent or on the other, there may not
be, high or low, some traces of an enclosure.”
For a century the Dent de Vilard had been used by both parties
without coming to extremities; it stood as a sort of party wall between
the communes of Riceys and les Rouxey, yielding little profit.
Indeed, the object in dispute, being covered with snow for six months
in the year, was of a nature to cool their ardor. Thus it required all the
hot blast by which the revolution of 1830 inflamed the advocates of
the people, to stir up this matter, by which Monsieur Chantonnit,
the Maire of Riceys, hoped to give a dramatic turn to his career on
the peaceful frontier of Switzerland, and to immortalize his term of
office. Chantonnit, as his name shows, was a native of Neuchatel.
“My dear father,” said Rosalie, as they got into the boat again, “I
agree with Modinier. If you wish to secure the joint possession of
the Dent de Vilard, you must act with decision, and get a legal
opinion which will protect you against this enterprising Chantonnit.
Why should you be afraid? Get the famous lawyer Savaron—engage
him at once, lest Chantonnit should place the interests of the
village in his hands. The man who won the case for the Chapter
against the town can certainly win that of Watteville versus Riceys!
Besides,” she added, “les Rouxey will some day be mine—not for a
long time yet, I trust.—Well, then do not leave me with a lawsuit
on my hands. I like this place, I shall often live here, and add to it
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as much as possible. On those banks,” and she pointed to the feet
of the two hills, “I shall cut flowerbeds and make the loveliest English
gardens. Let us go to Besancon and bring back with us the
Abbe de Grancey, Monsieur Savaron, and my mother, if she cares
to come. You can then make up your mind; but in your place I
should have done so already. Your name is Watteville, and you are
afraid of a fight! If you should lose your case—well, I will never
reproach you by a word!”
“Oh, if that is the way you take it,” said the Baron, “I am quite
ready; I will see the lawyer.”
“Besides a lawsuit is really great fun. It brings some interest into
life, with coming and going and raging over it. You will have a great
deal to do before you can get hold of the judges.—We did not see
the Abbe de Grancey for three weeks, he was so busy!”
“But the very existence of the Chapter was involved,” said Monsieur
de Watteville; “and then the Archbishop’s pride, his conscience, everything
that makes up the life of the priesthood, was at stake. That Savaron
does not know what he did for the Chapter! He saved it!”
“Listen to me,” said his daughter in his ear, “if you secure Monsieur
de Savaron, you will gain your suit, won’t you? Well, then, let me
advise you. You cannot get at Monsieur Savaron excepting through
Monsieur de Grancey. Take my word for it, and let us together talk
to the dear Abbe without my mother’s presence at the interview, for
I know a way of persuading him to bring the lawyer to us.”
“It will be very difficult to avoid mentioning it to your mother!”
“The Abbe de Grancey will settle that afterwards. But just make
up your mind to promise your vote to Monsieur Savaron at the next
election, and you will see!”
“Go to the election! take the oath?” cried the Baron de Watteville.
“What then!” said she.
“And what will your mother say?”
“She may even desire you to do it,” replied Rosalie, knowing as she
did from Albert’s letter to Leopold how deeply the Vicar-General
had pledged himself.
Four days after, the Abbe de Grancey called very early one morning
on Albert de Savarus, having announced his visit the day before. The
old priest had come to win over the great lawyer to the house of the
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Albert Savarus
Wattevilles, a proceeding which shows how much tact and subtlety
Rosalie must have employed in an underhand way.
“What can I do for you, Monsieur le Vicaire-General?” asked Savarus.
The Abbe, who told his story with admirable frankness, was coldly
heard by Albert.
“Monsieur l’Abbe,” said he, “it is out of the question that I should
defend the interests of the Wattevilles, and you shall understand why.
My part in this town is to remain perfectly neutral. I will display no
colors; I must remain a mystery till the eve of my election. Now, to
plead for the Wattevilles would mean nothing in Paris, but here!—
Here, where everything is discussed, I should be supposed by every
one to be an ally of your Faubourg Saint-Germain.”
“What! do you suppose that you can remain unknown on the day
of the election, when the candidates must oppose each other? It must
then become known that your name is Savaron de Savarus, that you
have held the appointment of Master of Appeals, that you are a man
of the Restoration!”
“On the day of the election,” said Savarus, “I will be all I am expected
to be; and I intend to speak at the preliminary meetings.”
“If you have the support of Monsieur de Watteville and his party,
you will get a hundred votes in a mass, and far more to be trusted
than those on which you rely. It is always possible to produce division
of interests; convictions are inseparable.”
“The deuce is in it!” said Savarus. “I am attached to you, and I
could do a great deal for you, Father! Perhaps we may compound
with the Devil. Whatever Monsieur de Watteville’s business may be,
by engaging Girardet, and prompting him, it will be possible to drag
the proceedings out till the elections are over. I will not undertake to
plead till the day after I am returned.”
“Do this one thing,” said the Abbe. “Come to the Hotel de Rupt:
there is a young person of nineteen there who, one of these days, will
have a hundred thousand francs a year, and you can seem to be paying
your court to her—”
“Ah! the young lady I sometimes see in the kiosk?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle Rosalie,” replied the Abbe de Grancey. “You
are ambitious. If she takes a fancy to you, you may be everything an
ambitious man can wish—who knows? A Minister perhaps. A man
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can always be a Minister who adds a hundred thousand francs a year
to your amazing talents.”
“Monsieur l’Abbe, if Mademoiselle de Watteville had three times
her fortune, and adored me into the bargain, it would be impossible
that I should marry her—”
“You are married?” exclaimed the Abbe.
“Not in church nor before the Maire, but morally speaking,” said
Savarus.
“That is even worse when a man cares about it as you seem to
care,” replied the Abbe. “Everything that is not done, can be undone.
Do not stake your fortune and your prospects on a woman’s liking,
any more than a wise man counts on a dead man’s shoes before starting
on his way.”
“Let us say no more about Mademoiselle de Watteville,” said Albert
gravely, “and agree as to the facts. At your desire—for I have a regard
and respect for you—I will appear for Monsieur de Watteville, but
after the elections. Until then Girardet must conduct the case under
my instructions. That is the most I can do.”
“But there are questions involved which can only be settled after
inspection of the localities,” said the Vicar-General.
“Girardet can go,” said Savarus. “I cannot allow myself, in the face of a
town I know so well, to take any step which might compromise the
supreme interests that lie beyond my election.”
The Abbe left Savarus after giving him a keen look, in which he
seemed to be laughing at the young athlete’s uncompromising politics,
while admiring his firmness.
“Ah! I would have dragged my father into a lawsuit—I would have
done anything to get him here!” cried Rosalie to herself, standing in
the kiosk and looking at the lawyer in his room, the day after Albert’s
interview with the Abbe, who had reported the result to her father. “I
would have committed any mortal sin, and you will not enter the
Wattevilles’ drawing-room; I may not hear your fine voice! You make
conditions when your help is required by the Wattevilles and the
Rupts!—Well, God knows, I meant to be content with these small
joys; with seeing you, hearing you speak, going with you to les
Rouxey, that your presence might to me make the place sacred. That
was all I asked. But now—now I mean to be your wife.—Yes, yes;
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Albert Savarus
look at her portrait, at her drawing-room, her bedroom, at the four
sides of her villa, the points of view from her gardens. You expect her
statue? I will make her marble herself towards you!—After all, the
woman does not love. Art, science, books, singing, music, have absorbed
half her senses and her intelligence. She is old, too; she is past
thirty; my Albert will not be happy!”
“What is the matter that you stay here, Rosalie?” asked her mother,
interrupting her reflections. “Monsieur de Soulas is in the drawingroom,
and he observed your attitude, which certainly betrays more
thoughtfulness than is due at your age.”
“Then, is Monsieur de Soulas a foe to thought?” asked Rosalie.
“Then you were thinking?” said Madame de Watteville.
“Why, yes, mamma.”
“Why, no! you were not thinking. You were staring at that lawyer’s
window with an attention that is neither becoming, nor decent, and
which Monsieur de Soulas, of all men, ought never to have observed.”
“Why?” said Rosalie.
“It is time,” said the Baroness, “that you should know what our
intentions are. Amedee likes you, and you will not be unhappy as
Comtesse de Soulas.”
Rosalie, as white as a lily, made no reply, so completely was she stupefied
by contending feelings. And yet in the presence of the man she had
this instant begun to hate vehemently, she forced the kind of smile which
a ballet-dancer puts on for the public. Nay, she could even laugh; she had
the strength to conceal her rage, which presently subsided, for she was
determined to make use of this fat simpleton to further her designs.
“Monsieur Amedee,” said she, at the moment when her mother
was walking ahead of them in the garden, affecting to leave the young
people together, “were you not aware that Monsieur Albert Savaron
de Savarus is a Legitimist?”
“A Legitimist?”
“Until 1830 he was Master of Appeals to the Council of State,
attached to the supreme Ministerial Council, and in favor with the
Dauphin and Dauphiness. It would be very good of you to say nothing
against him, but it would be better still if you would attend the
election this year, carry the day, and hinder that poor Monsieur de
Chavoncourt from representing the town of Besancon.”
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“What sudden interest have you in this Savaron?”
“Monsieur Albert Savaron de Savarus, the natural son of the Comte
de Savarus—pray keep the secret of my indiscretion—if he is returned
deputy, will be our advocate in the suit about les Rouxey. Les
Rouxey, my father tells me, will be my property; I intend to live
there, it is a lovely place! I should be broken-hearted at seeing that
fine piece of the great de Watteville’s work destroyed.”
“The devil!” thought Amedee, as he left the house. “The heiress is
not such a fool as her mother thinks her.”
Monsieur de Chavoncourt is a Royalist, of the famous 221. Hence,
from the day after the revolution of July, he always preached the salutary
doctrine of taking the oaths and resisting the present order of things,
after the pattern of the Tories against the Whigs in England. This doctrine
was not acceptable to the Legitimists, who, in their defeat, had the
wit to divide in their opinions, and to trust to the force of inertia and to
Providence. Monsieur de Chavoncourt was not wholly trusted by his
own party, but seemed to the Moderates the best man to choose; they
preferred the triumph of his half-hearted opinions to the acclamation of
a Republican who should combine the votes of the enthusiasts and the
patriots. Monsieur de Chavoncourt, highly respected in Besancon, was
the representative of an old parliamentary family; his fortune, of about
fifteen thousand francs a year, was not an offence to anybody, especially
as he had a son and three daughters. With such a family, fifteen thousand
francs a year are a mere nothing. Now when, under these circumstances,
the father of the family is above bribery, it would be hard if the electors
did not esteem him. Electors wax enthusiastic over a beau ideal of parliamentary
virtue, just as the audience in the pit do at the representation of
the generous sentiments they so little practise.
Madame de Chavoncourt, at this time a woman of forty, was one of
the beauties of Besancon. While the Chamber was sitting, she lived
meagrely in one of their country places to recoup herself by economy
for Monsieur de Chavoncourt’s expenses in Paris. In the winter she
received very creditably once a week, on Tuesdays, understanding her
business as mistress of the house. Young Chavoncourt, a youth of twoand-twenty,
and another young gentleman, named Monsieur de
Vauchelles, no richer than Amedee and his school-friend, were his intimate
allies. They made excursions together to Granvelle, and some-
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Albert Savarus
times went out shooting; they were so well known to be inseparable
that they were invited to the country together.
Rosalie, who was intimate with the Chavoncourt girls, knew that
the three young men had no secrets from each other. She reflected that
if Monsieur de Soulas should repeat her words, it would be to his two
companions. Now, Monsieur de Vauchelles had his matrimonial plans,
as Amedee had his; he wished to marry Victoire, the eldest of the
Chavoncourts, on whom an old aunt was to settle an estate worth
seven thousand francs a year, and a hundred thousand francs in hard
cash, when the contract was to be signed. Victoire was this aunt’s goddaughter
and favorite niece. Consequently, young Chavoncourt and
his friend Vauchelles would be sure to warn Monsieur de Chavoncourt
of the danger he was in from Albert’s candidature.
But this did not satisfy Rosalie. She sent the Prefet of the department
a letter written with her left hand, signed “A friend to Louis
Philippe,” in which she informed him of the secret intentions of
Monsieur Albert de Savarus, pointing out the serious support a Royalist
orator might give to Berryer, and revealing to him the deeply
artful course pursued by the lawyer during his two years’ residence at
Besancon. The Prefet was a capable man, a personal enemy of the
Royalist party, devoted by conviction to the Government of July—
in short, one of those men of whom, in the Rue de Grenelle, the
Minister of the Interior could say, “We have a capital Prefet at
Besancon.”—The Prefet read the letter, and, in obedience to its instructions,
he burnt it.
Rosalie aimed at preventing Albert’s election, so as to keep him
five years longer at Besancon.
At that time an election was a fight between parties, and in order to
win, the Ministry chose its ground by choosing the moment when it
would give battle. The elections were therefore not to take place for
three months yet. When a man’s whole life depends on an election,
the period that elapses between the issuing of the writs for convening
the electoral bodies, and the day fixed for their meetings, is an interval
during which ordinary vitality is suspended. Rosalie fully understood
how much latitude Albert’s absorbed state would leave her
during these three months. By promising Mariette—as she afterwards
confessed—to take both her and Jerome into her service, she
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induced the maid to bring her all the letters Albert might sent to
Italy, and those addressed to him from that country. And all the time
she was pondering these machinations, the extraordinary girl was
working slippers for her father with the most innocent air in the
world. She even made a greater display than ever of candor and simplicity,
quite understanding how valuable that candor and innocence
would be to her ends.
“My daughter grows quite charming!” said Madame de Watteville.
Two months before the election a meeting was held at the house of
Monsieur Boucher senior, composed of the contractor who expected
to get the work for the aqueduct for the Arcier waters; of Monsieur
Boucher’s father-in-law; of Monsieur Granet, the influential man to
whom Savarus had done a service, and who was to nominate him as
a candidate; of Girardet the lawyer; of the printer of the Eastern
Review; and of the President of the Chamber of Commerce. In fact,
the assembly consisted of twenty-seven persons in all, men who in
the provinces are regarded as bigwigs. Each man represented on an
average six votes, but in estimating their values they said ten, for men
always begin by exaggerating their own influence. Among these
twenty-seven was one who was wholly devoted to the Prefet, one
false brother who secretly looked for some favor from the Ministry,
either for himself or for some one belonging to him.
At this preliminary meeting, it was agreed that Savaron the lawyer
should be named as candidate, a motion received with such enthusiasm
as no one looked for from Besancon. Albert, waiting at home
for Alfred Boucher to fetch him, was chatting with the Abbe de
Grancey, who was interested in this absorbing ambition. Albert had
appreciated the priest’s vast political capacities; and the priest, touched
by the young man’s entreaties, had been willing to become his guide
and adviser in this culminating struggle. The Chapter did not love
Monsieur de Chavoncourt, for it was his wife’s brother-in-law, as
President of the Tribunal, who had lost the famous suit for them in
the lower Court.
“You are betrayed, my dear fellow,” said the shrewd and worthy
Abbe, in that gentle, calm voice which old priests acquire.
“Betrayed!” cried the lover, struck to the heart.
“By whom I know not at all,” the priest replied. “But at the Prefec-
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ture your plans are known, and your hand read like a book. At this
moment I have no advice to give you. Such affairs need consideration.
As for this evening, take the bull by the horns, anticipate the
blow. Tell them all your previous life, and thus you will mitigate the
effect of the discovery on the good folks of Besancon.”
“Oh, I was prepared for it,” said Albert in a broken voice.
“You would not benefit by my advice; you had the opportunity of
making an impression at the Hotel de Rupt; you do not know the
advantage you would have gained—”
“What?”
“The unanimous support of the Royalists, an immediate readiness
to go to the election—in short, above a hundred votes. Adding to
these what, among ourselves, we call the ecclesiastical vote, though
you were not yet nominated, you were master of the votes by ballot.
Under such circumstances, a man may temporize, may make his
way—”
Alfred Boucher when he came in, full of enthusiasm, to announce
the decision of the preliminary meeting, found the Vicar-General
and the lawyer cold, calm, and grave.
“Good-night, Monsieur l’Abbe,” said Albert. “We will talk of your
business at greater length when the elections are over.”
And he took Alfred’s arm, after pressing Monsieur de Grancey’s
hand with meaning. The priest looked at the ambitious man, whose
face at that moment wore the lofty expression which a general may
have when he hears the first gun fired for a battle. He raised his eyes
to heaven, and left the room, saying to himself, “What a priest he
would make!”
Eloquence is not at the Bar. The pleader rarely puts forth the real
powers of his soul; if he did, he would die of it in a few years. Eloquence
is, nowadays, rarely in the pulpit; but it is found on certain
occasions in the Chamber of Deputies, when an ambitious man stakes
all to win all, or, stung by a myriad darts, at a given moment bursts
into speech. But it is still more certainly found in some privileged
beings, at the inevitable hour when their claims must either triumph
or be wrecked, and when they are forced to speak. Thus at this meeting,
Albert Savarus, feeling the necessity of winning himself some
supporters, displayed all the faculties of his soul and the resources of
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his intellect. He entered the room well, without awkwardness or
arrogance, without weakness, without cowardice, quite gravely, and
was not dismayed at finding himself among twenty or thirty men.
The news of the meeting and of its determination had already brought
a few docile sheep to follow the bell.
Before listening to Monsieur Boucher, who was about to deluge
him with a speech announcing the decision of the Boucher Committee,
Albert begged for silence, and, as he shook hands with Monsieur
Boucher, tried to warn him, by a sign, of an unexpected danger.
“My young friend, Alfred Boucher, has just announced to me the
honor you have done me. But before that decision is irrevocable,”
said the lawyer, “I think that I ought to explain to you who and what
your candidate is, so as to leave you free to take back your word if
my declaration should disturb your conscience!”
This exordium was followed by profound silence. Some of the
men thought it showed a noble impulse.
Albert gave a sketch of his previous career, telling them his real
name, his action under the Restoration, and revealing himself as a
new man since his arrival at Besancon, while pledging himself for the
future. This address held his hearers breathless, it was said. These
men, all with different interests, were spellbound by the brilliant
eloquence that flowed at boiling heat from the heart and soul of this
ambitious spirit. Admiration silenced reflection. Only one thing was
clear—the thing which Albert wished to get into their heads:
Was it not far better for the town to have one of those men who
are born to govern society at large than a mere voting-machine? A
statesman carries power with him. A commonplace deputy, however
incorruptible, is but a conscience. What a glory for Provence to have
found a Mirabeau, to return the only statesman since 1830 that the
revolution of July had produced!
Under the pressure of this eloquence, all the audience believed it
great enough to become a splendid political instrument in the hands
of their representative. They all saw in Albert Savaron, Savarus the
great Minister. And, reading the secret calculations of his constituents,
the clever candidate gave them to understand that they would
be the first to enjoy the right of profiting by his influence.
This confession of faith, this ambitious programme, this retro-
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spect of his life and character was, according to the only man present
who was capable of judging of Savarus (he has since become one of
the leading men of Besancon), a masterpiece of skill and of feeling,
of fervor, interest, and fascination. This whirlwind carried away the
electors. Never had any man had such a triumph. But, unfortunately,
speech, a weapon only for close warfare, has only an immediate effect.
Reflection kills the word when the word ceases to overpower
reflection. If the votes had then been taken, Albert’s name would
undoubtedly have come out of the ballot-box. At the moment, he
was conqueror. But he must conquer every day for two months.
Albert went home quivering. The townsfolk had applauded him,
and he had achieved the great point of silencing beforehand the malignant
talk to which his early career might give rise. The commercial
interest of Besancon had nominated the lawyer, Albert Savaron de
Savarus, as its candidate.
Alfred Boucher’s enthusiasm, at first infectious, presently became
blundering.
The Prefet, alarmed by this success, set to work to count the Ministerial
votes, and contrived to have a secret interview with Monsieur
de Chavoncourt, so as to effect a coalition in their common interests.
Every day, without Albert’s being able to discover how, the voters
in the Boucher committee diminished in number.
Nothing could resist the slow grinding of the Prefecture. Three of
four clever men would say to Albert’s clients, “Will the deputy defend
you and win your lawsuits? Will he give you advice, draw up
your contracts, arrange your compromises?—He will be your slave
for five years longer, if, instead of returning him to the Chamber,
you only hold out the hope of his going there five years hence.”
This calculation did Savarus all the more mischief, because the
wives of some of the merchants had already made it. The parties
interested in the matter of the bridge and that of the water from
Arcier could not hold out against a talking-to from a clever
Ministerialist, who proved to them that their safety lay at the Prefecture,
and not in the hands of an ambitious man. Each day was a
check for Savarus, though each day the battle was led by him and
fought by his lieutenants—a battle of words, speeches, and proceedings.
He dared not go to the Vicar-General, and the Vicar-General
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never showed himself. Albert rose and went to bed in a fever, his
brain on fire.
At last the day dawned of the first struggle, practically the show of
hands; the votes are counted, the candidates estimate their chances,
and clever men can prophesy their failure or success. It is a decent
hustings, without the mob, but formidable; agitation, though it is
not allowed any physical display, as it is in England, is not the less
profound. The English fight these battles with their fists, the French
with hard words. Our neighbors have a scrimmage, the French try
their fate by cold combinations calmly worked out. This particular
political business is carried out in opposition to the character of the
two nations.
The Radical party named their candidate; Monsieur de Chavoncourt
came forward; then Albert appeared, and was accused by the
Chavoncourt committee and the Radicals of being an uncompromising
man of the Right, a second Berryer. The Ministry had their candidate,
a stalking-horse, useful only to receive the purely Ministerial votes.
The votes, thus divided, gave no result. The Republican candidate had
twenty, the Ministry got fifty, Albert had seventy, Monsieur de
Chavoncourt obtained sixty-seven. But the Prefet’s party had perfidiously
made thirty of its most devoted adherents vote for Albert, so as
to deceive the enemy. The votes for Monsieur de Chavoncourt, added
to the eighty votes—the real number—at the disposal of the Prefecture,
would carry the election, if only the Prefet could succeed in gaining
over a few of the Radicals. A hundred and sixty votes were not
recorded: those of Monsieur de Grancey’s following and the Legitimists.
The show of hands at an election, like a dress rehearsal at a theatre,
is the most deceptive thing in the world. Albert Savarus came home,
putting a brave face on the matter, but half dead. He had had the wit,
the genius, or the good luck to gain, within the last fortnight, two
staunch supporters—Girardet’s father-in-law and a very shrewd old
merchant to whom Monsieur de Grancey had sent him. These two
worthy men, his self-appointed spies, affected to be Albert’s most
ardent opponents in the hostile camp. Towards the end of the show
of hands they informed Savarus, through the medium of Monsieur
Boucher, that thirty voters, unknown, were working against him in
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Albert Savarus
his party, playing the same trick that they were playing for his benefit
on the other side.
A criminal marching to execution could not suffer as Albert suffered
as he went home from the hall where his fate was at stake. The
despairing lover could endure no companionship. He walked through
the streets alone, between eleven o’clock and midnight. At one in the
morning, Albert, to whom sleep had been unknown for the past
three days, was sitting in his library in a deep armchair, his face as pale
as if he were dying, his hands hanging limp, in a forlorn attitude
worthy of the Magdalen. Tears hung on his long lashes, tears that
dim the eyes, but do not fall; fierce thought drinks them up, the fire
of the soul consumes them. Alone, he might weep. And then, under
the kiosk, he saw a white figure, which reminded him of Francesca.
“And for three months I have had no letter from her! What has
become of her? I have not written for two months, but I warned her.
Is she ill? Oh, my love! My life! Will you ever know what I have
gone through? What a wretched constitution is mine! Have I an aneurism?”
he asked himself, feeling his heart beat so violently that its
pulses seemed audible in the silence like little grains of sand dropping
on a big drum.
At this moment three distinct taps sounded on his door; Albert
hastened to open it, and almost fainted with joy at seeing the Vicar-
General’s cheerful and triumphant mien. Without a word, he threw
his arms round the Abbe de Grancey, held him fast, and clasped him
closely, letting his head fall on the old man’s shoulder. He was a child
again; he cried as he had cried on hearing that Francesca Soderini was
a married woman. He betrayed his weakness to no one but to this
priest, on whose face shone the light of hope. The priest had been
sublime, and as shrewd as he was sublime.
“Forgive me, dear Abbe, but you come at one of those moments when
the man vanishes, for you are not to think me vulgarly ambitious.”
“Oh! I know,” replied the Abbe. “You wrote ‘Ambition for love’s
sake!’—Ah! my son, it was love in despair that made me a priest in
1786, at the age of two-and-twenty. In 1788 I was in charge of a
parish. I know life.—I have refused three bishoprics already; I mean
to die at Besancon.”
“Come and see her!” cried Savarus, seizing a candle, and leading the
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Abbe into the handsome room where hung the portrait of the
Duchesse d’Argaiolo, which he lighted up.
“She is one of those women who are born to reign!” said the Vicar-
General, understanding how great an affection Albert showed him
by this mark of confidence. “But there is pride on that brow; it is
implacable; she would never forgive an insult! It is the Archangel
Michael, the angel of Execution, the inexorable angel—’All or nothing’
is the motto of this type of angel. There is something divinely
pitiless in that head.”
“You have guessed well,” cried Savarus. “But, my dear Abbe, for
more than twelve years now she had reigned over my life, and I have
not a thought for which to blame myself—”
“Ah! if you could only say the same of God!” said the priest with
simplicity. “Now, to talk of your affairs. For ten days I have been at
work for you. If you are a real politician, this time you will follow
my advice. You would not be where you are now if you would have
gone to the Wattevilles when I first told you. But you must go there
to-morrow; I will take you in the evening. The Rouxey estates are in
danger; the case must be defended within three days. The election
will not be over in three days. They will take good care not to appoint
examiners the first day. There will be several voting days, and
you will be elected by ballot—”
“How can that be?” asked Savarus.
“By winning the Rouxey lawsuit you will gain eighty Legitimist
votes; add them to the thirty I can command, and you have a hundred
and ten. Then, as twenty remain to you of the Boucher committee,
you will have a hundred and thirty in all.”
“Well,” said Albert, “we must get seventy-five more.”
“Yes,” said the priest, “since all the rest are Ministerial. But, my
son, you have two hundred votes, and the Prefecture no more than a
hundred and eighty.”
“I have two hundred votes?” said Albert, standing stupid with
amazement, after starting to his feet as if shot up by a spring.
“You have those of Monsieur de Chavoncourt,” said the Abbe.
“How?” said Albert.
“You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt.”
“Never!”
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“You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt,” the priest
repeated coldly.
“But you see—she is inexorable,” said Albert, pointing to Francesca.
“You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt,” said the
Abbe calmly for the third time.
This time Albert understood. The Vicar-General would not be implicated
in a scheme which at last smiled on the despairing politician. A
word more would have compromised the priest’s dignity and honor.
“To-morrow evening at the Hotel de Rupt you will meet Madame
de Chavoncourt and her second daughter. You can thank her beforehand
for what she is going to do for you, and tell her that your
gratitude is unbounded, that you are hers body and soul, that henceforth
your future is that of her family. You are quite disinterested, for
you have so much confidence in yourself that you regard the nomination
as deputy as a sufficient fortune.
“You will have a struggle with Madame de Chavoncourt; she will
want you to pledge your word. All your future life, my son, lies in
that evening. But, understand clearly, I have nothing to do with it. I
am answerable only for Legitimist voters; I have secured Madame de
Watteville, and that means all the aristocracy of Besancon. Amedee
de Soulas and Vauchelles, who will both vote for you, have won over
the young men; Madame de Watteville will get the old ones. As to
my electors, they are infallible.”
“And who on earth has gained over Madame de Chavoncourt?”
asked Savarus.
“Ask me no questions,” replied the Abbe. “Monsieur de
Chavoncourt, who has three daughters to marry, is not capable of
increasing his wealth. Though Vauchelles marries the eldest without
anything from her father, because her old aunt is to settle something
on her, what is to become of the two others? Sidonie is sixteen, and
your ambition is as good as a gold mine. Some one has told Madame
de Chavoncourt that she will do better by getting her daughter married
than by sending her husband to waste his money in Paris. That
some one manages Madame de Chavoncourt, and Madame de
Chavoncourt manages her husband.”
“That is enough, my dear Abbe. I understand. When once I am
returned as deputy, I have somebody’s fortune to make, and by mak-
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ing it large enough I shall be released from my promise. In me you
have a son, a man who will owe his happiness to you. Great heavens!
what have I done to deserve so true a friend?”
“You won a triumph for the Chapter,” said the Vicar-General, smiling.
“Now, as to all this, be as secret as the tomb. We are nothing, we
have done nothing. If we were known to have meddled in election
matters, we should be eaten up alive by the Puritans of the Left—
who do worse—and blamed by some of our own party, who want
everything. Madame de Chavoncourt has no suspicion of my share
in all this. I have confided in no one but Madame de Watteville,
whom we may trust as we trust ourselves.”
“I will bring the Duchess to you to be blessed!” cried Savarus.
After seeing out the old priest, Albert went to bed in the swaddling
clothes of power.
Next evening, as may well be supposed, by nine o’clock Madame la
Baronne de Watteville’s rooms were crowded by the aristocracy of
Besancon in convocation extraordinary. They were discussing the
exceptional step of going to the poll, to oblige the daughter of the
Rupts. It was known that the former Master of Appeals, the secretary
of one of the most faithful ministers under the Elder Branch,
was to be presented that evening. Madame de Chavoncourt was there
with her second daughter Sidonie, exquisitely dressed, while her elder
sister, secure of her lover, had not indulged in any of the arts of
the toilet. In country towns these little things are remarked. The
Abbe de Grancey’s fine and clever head was to be seen moving from
group to group, listening to everything, seeming to be apart from it
all, but uttering those incisive phrases which sum up a question and
direct the issue.
“If the Elder Branch were to return,” said he to an old statesman of
seventy, “what politicians would they find?”— “Berryer, alone on his
bench, does not know which way to turn; if he had sixty votes, he
would often scotch the wheels of the Government and upset Ministries!”
— “The Duc de Fitz-James is to be nominated at Toulouse.”—
‘You will enable Monsieur de Watteville to win his lawsuit.”— “If
you vote for Monsieur Savarus, the Republicans will vote with you
rather than with the Moderates!” etc., etc.
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At nine o’clock Albert had not arrived. Madame de Watteville was
disposed to regard such delay as an impertinence.
“My dear Baroness,” said Madame de Chavoncourt, “do not let
such serious issues turn on such a trifle. The varnish on his boots is
not dry—or a consultation, perhaps, detains Monsieur de Savarus.”
Rosalie shot a side glance at Madame de Chavoncourt.
“She is very lenient to Monsieur de Savarus,” she whispered to her
mother.
“You see,” said the Baroness with a smile, “there is a question of a
marriage between Sidonie and Monsieur de Savarus.”
Mademoiselle de Watteville hastily went to a window looking out
over the garden.
At ten o’clock Albert de Savarus had not yet appeared. The storm
that threatened now burst. Some of the gentlemen sat down to cards,
finding the thing intolerable. The Abbe de Grancey, who did not
know what to think, went to the window where Rosalie was hidden,
and exclaimed aloud in his amazement, “He must be dead!”
The Vicar-General stepped out into the garden, followed by Monsieur
de Watteville and his daughter, and they all three went up to the
kiosk. In Albert’s rooms all was dark; not a light was to be seen.
“Jerome!” cried Rosalie, seeing the servant in the yard below. The
Abbe looked at her with astonishment. “Where in the world is your
master?” she asked the man, who came to the foot of the wall.
“Gone—in a post-chaise, mademoiselle.”
“He is ruined!” exclaimed the Abbe de Grancey, “or he is happy!”
The joy of triumph was not so effectually concealed on Rosalie’s
face that the Vicar-General could not detect it. He affected to see
nothing.
“What can this girl have had to do with this business?” he asked himself.
They all three returned to the drawing-room, where Monsieur de
Watteville announced the strange, the extraordinary, the prodigious
news of the lawyer’s departure, without any reason assigned for his
evasion. By half-past eleven only fifteen persons remained, among
them Madame de Chavoncourt and the Abbe de Godenars, another
Vicar-General, a man of about forty, who hoped for a bishopric, the
two Chavoncourt girls, and Monsieur de Vauchelles, the Abbe de
Grancey, Rosalie, Amedee de Soulas, and a retired magistrate, one of
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the most influential members of the upper circle of Besancon, who
had been very eager for Albert’s election. The Abbe de Grancey sat
down by the Baroness in such a position as to watch Rosalie, whose
face, usually pale, wore a feverish flush.
“What can have happened to Monsieur de Savarus?” said Madame
de Chavoncourt.
At this moment a servant in livery brought in a letter for the Abbe
de Grancey on a silver tray.
“Pray read it,” said the Baroness.
The Vicar-General read the letter; he saw Rosalie suddenly turn as
white as her kerchief.
“She recognizes the writing,” said he to himself, after glancing at
the girl over his spectacles. He folded up the letter, and calmly put it
in his pocket without a word. In three minutes he had met three
looks from Rosalie which were enough to make him guess everything.
“She is in love with Albert Savarus!” thought the Vicar-General.
He rose and took leave. He was going towards the door when, in
the next room, he was overtaken by Rosalie, who said:
“Monsieur de Grancey, it was from Albert!”
“How do you know that it was his writing, to recognize it from
so far?”
The girl’s reply, caught as she was in the toils of her impatience and
rage, seemed to the Abbe sublime.
“I love him!—What is the matter?” she said after a pause.
“He gives up the election.”
Rosalie put her finger to her lip.
“I ask you to be as secret as if it were a confession,” said she before
returning to the drawing-room. “If there is an end of the election,
there is an end of the marriage with Sidonie.”
In the morning, on her way to Mass, Mademoiselle de Watteville
heard from Mariette some of the circumstances which had prompted
Albert’s disappearance at the most critical moment of his life.
“Mademoiselle, an old gentleman from Paris arrived yesterday
morning at the Hotel National; he came in his own carriage with
four horses, and a courier in front, and a servant. Indeed, Jerome,
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who saw the carriage returning, declares he could only be a prince or
a milord.”
“Was there a coronet on the carriage?” asked Rosalie.
“I do not know,” said Mariette. “Just as two was striking he came
to call on Monsieur Savarus, and sent in his card; and when he saw it,
Jerome says Monsieur turned as pale as a sheet, and said he was to be
shown in. As he himself locked the door, it is impossible to tell what
the old gentleman and the lawyer said to each other; but they were
together above an hour, and then the old gentleman, with the lawyer,
called up his servant. Jerome saw the servant go out again with an
immense package, four feet long, which looked like a great painting
on canvas. The old gentleman had in his hand a large parcel of papers.
Monsieur Savaron was paler than death, and he, so proud, so
dignified, was in a state to be pitied. But he treated the old gentleman
so respectfully that he could not have been politer to the King
himself. Jerome and Monsieur Albert Savaron escorted the gentleman
to his carriage, which was standing with the horses in. The courier
started on the stroke of three.
“Monsieur Savaron went straight to the Prefecture, and from that
to Monsieur Gentillet, who sold him the old traveling carriage that
used to belong to Madame de Saint-Vier before she died; then he
ordered post horses for six o’clock. He went home to pack; no doubt
he wrote a lot of letters; finally, he settled everything with Monsieur
Girardet, who went to him and stayed till seven. Jerome carried a
note to Monsieur Boucher, with whom his master was to have dined;
and then, at half-past seven, the lawyer set out, leaving Jerome with
three months’ wages, and telling him to find another place.
“He left his keys with Monsieur Girardet, whom he took home,
and at his house, Jerome says, he took a plate of soup, for at half-past
seven Monsieur Girardet had not yet dined. When Monsieur Savaron
got into the carriage he looked like death. Jerome, who, of course, saw
his master off, heard him tell the postilion ‘The Geneva Road!’ “
“Did Jerome ask the name of the stranger at the Hotel National?”
“As the old gentleman did not mean to stay, he was not asked for
it. The servant, by his orders no doubt, pretended not to speak French.”
“And the letter which came so late to Abbe de Grancey?” said Rosalie.
“It was Monsieur Girardet, no doubt, who ought to have delivered
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it; but Jerome says that poor Monsieur Girardet, who was much
attached to lawyer Savaron, was as much upset as he was. So he who
came so mysteriously, as Mademoiselle Galard says, is gone away just
as mysteriously.”
After hearing this narrative, Mademoiselle de Watteville fell into a
brooding and absent mood, which everybody could see. It is useless
to say anything of the commotion that arose in Besancon on the
disappearance of Monsieur Savaron. It was understood that the Prefect
had obliged him with the greatest readiness by giving him at
once a passport across the frontier, for he was thus quit of his only
opponent. Next day Monsieur de Chavoncourt was carried to the
top by a majority of a hundred and forty votes.
“Jack is gone by the way he came,” said an elector on hearing of
Albert Savaron’s flight.
This event lent weight to the prevailing prejudice at Besancon against
strangers; indeed, two years previously they had received confirmation
from the affair of the Republican newspaper. Ten days later Albert
de Savarus was never spoken of again. Only three persons—Girardet
the attorney, the Vicar-General, and Rosalie—were seriously affected
by his disappearance. Girardet knew that the white-haired stranger
was Prince Soderini, for he had seen his card, and he told the Vicar-
General; but Rosalie, better informed than either of them, had known
for three months past that the Duc d’Argaiolo was dead.
In the month of April 1836 no one had had any news from or of
Albert de Savarus. Jerome and Mariette were to be married, but the
Baroness confidentially desired her maid to wait till her daughter
was married, saying that the two weddings might take place at the
same time.
“It is time that Rosalie should be married,” said the Baroness one
day to Monsieur de Watteville. “She is nineteen, and she is fearfully
altered in these last months.”
“I do not know what ails her,” said the Baron.
“When fathers do not know what ails their daughters, mothers can
guess,” said the Baroness; “we must get her married.”
“I am quite willing,” said the Baron. “I shall give her les Rouxey
now that the Court has settled our quarrel with the authorities of
Riceys by fixing the boundary line at three hundred feet up the side
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of the Dent de Vilard. I am having a trench made to collect all the
water and carry it into the lake. The village did not appeal, so the
decision is final.”
“It has never occurred to you,” said Madame de Watteville, “that this
decision cost me thirty thousand francs handed over to Chantonnit.
That peasant would take nothing else; he sold us peace.—If you give
away les Rouxey, you will have nothing left,” said the Baroness.
“I do not need much,” said the Baron; “I am breaking up.”
“You eat like an ogre!”
“Just so. But however much I may eat, I feel my legs get weaker
and weaker—”
“It is from working the lathe,” said his wife.
“I do not know,” said he.
“We will marry Rosalie to Monsieur de Soulas; if you give her les
Rouxey, keep the life interest. I will give them fifteen thousand francs
a year in the funds. Our children can live here; I do not see that they
are much to be pitied.”
“No. I shall give them les Rouxey out and out. Rosalie is fond of
les Rouxey.”
“You are a queer man with your daughter! It does not occur to you
to ask me if I am fond of les Rouxey.”
Rosalie, at once sent for, was informed that she was to marry Monsieur
de Soulas one day early in the month of May.
“I am very much obliged to you, mother, and to you too, father,
for having thought of settling me; but I do not mean to marry; I am
very happy with you.”
“Mere speeches!” said the Baroness. “You are not in love with Monsieur
de Soulas, that is all.”
“If you insist on the plain truth, I will never marry Monsieur de
Soulas—”
“Oh! the never of a girl of nineteen!” retorted her mother, with a
bitter smile.
“The never of Mademoiselle de Watteville,” said Rosalie with firm
decision. “My father, I imagine, has no intention of making me marry
against my wishes?”
“No, indeed no!” said the poor Baron, looking affectionately at his
daughter.
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“Very well!” said the Baroness, sternly controlling the rage of a bigot
startled at finding herself unexpectedly defied, “you yourself, Monsieur
de Watteville, may take the responsibility of settling your daughter. Consider
well, mademoiselle, for if you do not marry to my mind you will
get nothing out of me!”
The quarrel thus begun between Madame de Watteville and her husband,
who took his daughter’s part, went so far that Rosalie and her
father were obliged to spend the summer at les Rouxey; life at the Hotel
de Rupt was unendurable. It thus became known in Besancon that Mademoiselle
de Watteville had positively refused the Comte de Soulas.
After their marriage Mariette and Jerome came to les Rouxey to
succeed to Modinier in due time. The Baron restored and repaired
the house to suit his daughter’s taste. When she heard that these improvements
had cost about sixty thousand francs, and that Rosalie
and her father were building a conservatory, the Baroness understood
that there was a leaven of spite in her daughter. The Baron purchased
various outlying plots, and a little estate worth thirty thousand francs.
Madame de Watteville was told that, away from her, Rosalie showed
masterly qualities, that she was taking steps to improve the value of
les Rouxey, that she had treated herself to a riding habit and rode
about; her father, whom she made very happy, who no longer complained
of his health, and who was growing fat, accompanied her in
her expeditions. As the Baroness’ name-day grew near—her name
was Louise—the Vicar-General came one day to les Rouxey, deputed,
no doubt, by Madame de Watteville and Monsieur de Soulas, to
negotiate a peace between mother and daughter.
“That little Rosalie has a head on her shoulders,” said the folk of
Besancon.
After handsomely paying up the ninety thousand francs spent on
les Rouxey, the Baroness allowed her husband a thousand francs a
month to live on; she would not put herself in the wrong. The father
and daughter were perfectly willing to return to Besancon for the
15th of August, and to remain there till the end of the month.
When, after dinner, the Vicar-General took Mademoiselle de
Watteville apart, to open the question of the marriage, by explaining
to her that it was vain to think any more of Albert, of whom they had
had no news for a year past, he was stopped at once by a sign from
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Rosalie. The strange girl took Monsieur de Grancey by the arm, and
led him to a seat under a clump of rhododendrons, whence there was
a view of the lake.
“Listen, dear Abbe,” said she. “You whom I love as much as my
father, for you had an affection for my Albert, I must at last confess
that I committed crimes to become his wife, and he must be my
husband.—Here; read this.”
She held out to him a number of the Gazette which she had in her
apron pocket, pointing out the following paragraph under the date
of Florence, May 25th:—
“The wedding of Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore, eldest son of the Duc
de Chaulieu, the former Ambassador, to Madame la Duchesse
d’Argaiolo, nee Princess Soderini, was solemnized with great splendor.
Numerous entertainments given in honor of the marriage are making
Florence gay. The Duchess’ fortune is one of the finest in Italy, for the
late Duke left her everything.
“The woman he loved is married,” said she. “I divided them.”
“You? How?” asked the Abbe.
Rosalie was about to reply, when she was interrupted by a loud cry
from two of the gardeners, following on the sound of a body falling
into the water; she started, and ran off screaming, “Oh! father!”—
The Baron had disappeared.
In trying to reach a piece of granite on which he fancied he saw the
impression of a shell, a circumstance which would have contradicted
some system of geology, Monsieur de Watteville had gone down the
slope, lost his balance, and slipped into the lake, which, of course,
was deepest close under the roadway. The men had the greatest difficulty
in enabling the Baron to catch hold of a pole pushed down at
the place where the water was bubbling, but at last they pulled him
out, covered with mud, in which he had sunk; he was getting deeper
and deeper in, by dint of struggling. Monsieur de Watteville had
dined heavily, digestion was in progress, and was thus checked.
When he had been undressed, washed, and put to bed, he was in
such evident danger that two servants at once set out on horseback:
one to ride to Besancon, and the other to fetch the nearest doctor
and surgeon. When Madame de Watteville arrived, eight hours later,
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with the first medical aid from Besancon, they found Monsieur de
Watteville past all hope, in spite of the intelligent treatment of the
Rouxey doctor. The fright had produced serious effusion on the brain,
and the shock to the digestion was helping to kill the poor man.
This death, which would never have happened, said Madame de
Watteville, if her husband had stayed at Besancon, was ascribed by
her to her daughter’s obstinacy. She took an aversion for Rosalie,
abandoning herself to grief and regrets that were evidently exaggerated.
She spoke of the Baron as “her dear lamb!”
The last of the Wattevilles was buried on an island in the lake at les
Rouxey, where the Baroness had a little Gothic monument erected
of white marble, like that called the tomb of Heloise at Pere-Lachaise.
A month after this catastrophe the mother and daughter had settled
in the Hotel de Rupt, where they lived in savage silence. Rosalie was
suffering from real sorrow, which had no visible outlet; she accused
herself of her father’s death, and she feared another disaster, much
greater in her eyes, and very certainly her own work; neither Girardet
the attorney nor the Abbe de Grancey could obtain any information
concerning Albert. This silence was appalling. In a paroxysm of repentance
she felt that she must confess to the Vicar-General the horrible
machinations by which she had separated Francesca and Albert.
They had been simple, but formidable. Mademoiselle de Watteville
had intercepted Albert’s letters to the Duchess as well as that in which
Francesca announced her husband’s illness, warning her lover that she
could write to him no more during the time while she was devoted,
as was her duty, to the care of the dying man. Thus, while Albert was
wholly occupied with election matters, the Duchess had written him
only two letters; one in which she told him that the Duc d’Argaiolo
was in danger, and one announcing her widowhood—two noble and
beautiful letters which Rosalie kept back.
After several nights’ labor she succeeded in imitating Albert’s writing
very perfectly. She had substituted three letters of her own writing for
three of Albert’s, and the rough copies which she showed to the old
priest made him shudder—the genius of evil was revealed in them to
such perfection. Rosalie, writing in Albert’s name, had prepared the
Duchess for a change in the Frenchman’s feelings, falsely representing
him as faithless, and she had answered the news of the Duc d’Argaiolo’s
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death by announcing the marriage ere long of Albert and Mademoiselle
de Watteville. The two letters, intended to cross on the road, had,
in fact, done so. The infernal cleverness with which the letters were
written so much astonished the Vicar-General that he read them a
second time. Francesca, stabbed to the heart by a girl who wanted to
kill love in her rival, had answered the last in these four words: “You are
free. Farewell.”
“Purely moral crimes, which give no hold to human justice, are the
most atrocious and detestable,” said the Abbe severely. “God often
punishes them on earth; herein lies the reason of the terrible catastrophes
which to us seem inexplicable. Of all secret crimes buried in the
mystery of private life, the most disgraceful is that of breaking the
seal of a letter, or of reading it surreptitiously. Every one, whoever it
may be, and urged by whatever reason, who is guilty of such an act
has stained his honor beyond retrieving.
“Do you not feel all that is touching, that is heavenly in the story
of the youthful page, falsely accused, and carrying the letter containing
the order for his execution, who sets out without a thought of ill,
and whom Providence protects and saves—miraculously, we say! But
do you know wherein the miracle lies? Virtue has a glory as potent as
that of innocent childhood.
“I say these things not meaning to admonish you,” said the old
priest, with deep grief. “I, alas! am not your spiritual director; you are
not kneeling at the feet of God; I am your friend, appalled by dread
of what your punishment may be. What has become of that unhappy
Albert? Has he, perhaps, killed himself? There was tremendous
passion under his assumption of calm. I understand now that
old Prince Soderini, the father of the Duchess d’Argaiolo, came here
to take back his daughter’s letters and portraits. This was the thunderbolt
that fell on Albert’s head, and he went off, no doubt, to try
to justify himself. But how is it that in fourteen months he has given
us no news of himself?”
“Oh! if I marry him, he will be so happy!”
“Happy?—He does not love you. Besides, you have no great fortune
to give him. Your mother detests you; you made her a fierce
reply which rankles, and which will be your ruin. When she told you
yesterday that obedience was the only way to repair your errors, and
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reminded you of the need for marrying, mentioning Amedee—’If
you are so fond of him, marry him yourself, mother!’—Did you, or
did you not, fling these words in her teeth?”
“Yes,” said Rosalie.
“Well, I know her,” Monsieur de Grancey went on. “In a few months
she will be Comtesse de Soulas! She will be sure to have children; she
will give Monsieur de Soulas forty thousand francs a year; she will
benefit him in other ways, and reduce your share of her fortune as
much as possible. You will be poor as long as she lives, and she is but
eight-and-thirty! Your whole estate will be the land of les Rouxey,
and the small share left to you after your father’s legal debts are settled,
if, indeed, your mother should consent to forego her claims on les
Rouxey. From the point of view of material advantages, you have
done badly for yourself; from the point of view of feeling, I imagine
you have wrecked your life. Instead of going to your mother—”
Rosalie shook her head fiercely.
“To your mother,” the priest went on, “and to religion, where you
would, at the first impulse of your heart, have found enlightenment,
counsel, and guidance, you chose to act in your own way, knowing
nothing of life, and listening only to passion!”
These words of wisdom terrified Mademoiselle de Watteville.
“And what ought I to do now?” she asked after a pause.
“To repair your wrong-doing, you must ascertain its extent,” said
the Abbe.
“Well, I will write to the only man who can know anything of
Albert’s fate, Monsieur Leopold Hannequin, a notary in Paris, his
friend since childhood.”
“Write no more, unless to do honor to truth,” said the Vicar-General.
“Place the real and the false letters in my hands, confess everything
in detail as though I were the keeper of your conscience, asking
me how you may expiate your sins, and doing as I bid you. I shall
see—for, above all things, restore this unfortunate man to his innocence
in the eyes of the woman he had made his divinity on earth.
Though he has lost his happiness, Albert must still hope for justification.”
Rosalie promised to obey the Abbe, hoping that the steps he might
take would perhaps end in bringing Albert back to her.
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Not long after Mademoiselle de Watteville’s confession a clerk came
to Besancon from Monsieur Leopold Hannequin, armed with a
power of attorney from Albert; he called first on Monsieur Girardet,
begging his assistance in selling the house belonging to Monsieur
Savaron. The attorney undertook to do this out of friendship for
Albert. The clerk from Paris sold the furniture, and with the proceeds
could repay some money owed by Savaron to Girardet, who
on the occasion of his inexplicable departure had lent him five thousand
francs while undertaking to collect his assets. When Girardet
asked what had become of the handsome and noble pleader, to whom
he had been so much attached, the clerk replied that no one knew
but his master, and that the notary had seemed greatly distressed by
the contents of the last letter he had received from Monsieur Albert
de Savarus.
On hearing this, the Vicar-General wrote to Leopold. This was the
worthy notary’s reply:—
“To Monsieur l’Abbe de Grancey,
Vicar-General of the Diocese of Besancon.
“Paris.
“Alas, monsieur, it is in nobody’s power to restore Albert to the life
of the world; he has renounced it. He is a novice in the monastery of
the Grand Chartreuse near Grenoble. You know, better than I who
have but just learned it, that on the threshold of that cloister everything
dies. Albert, foreseeing that I should go to him, placed the General
of the Order between my utmost efforts and himself. I know his
noble soul well enough to be sure that he is the victim of some odious
plot unknown to us; but everything is at an end. The Duchesse
d’Argaiolo, now Duchesse de Rhetore, seems to me to have carried
severity to an extreme. At Belgirate, which she had left when Albert
flew thither, she had left instructions leading him to believe that she
was living in London. From London Albert went in search of her to
Naples, and from Naples to Rome, where she was now engaged to the
Duc de Rhetore. When Albert succeeded in seeing Madame d’Argaiolo,
at Florence, it was at the ceremony of her marriage.
“Our poor friend swooned in the church, and even when he was in
danger of death he could never obtain any explanation from this woman,
who must have had I know not what in her heart. For seven months
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Albert had traveled in pursuit of a cruel creature who thought it sport
to escape him; he knew not where or how to catch her.
“I saw him on his way through Paris; and if you had seen him, as I did,
you would have felt that not a word might be spoken about the Duchess,
at the risk of bringing on an attack which might have wrecked his
reason. If he had known what his crime was, he might have found means
to justify himself; but being falsely accused of being married!—what
could he do? Albert is dead, quite dead to the world. He longed for rest;
let us hope that the deep silence and prayer into which he has thrown
himself may give him happiness in another guise. You, monsieur, who
have known him, must greatly pity him; and pity his friends also.
“Yours, etc.”
As soon as he received this letter the good Vicar-General wrote to
the General of the Carthusian order, and this was the letter he received
from Albert Savarus:—
“Brother Albert to Monsieur l’Abbe de Grancey,
Vicar-General of the Diocese of Besancon.
“La Grande Chartreuse.
“I recognized your tender soul, dear and well-beloved Vicar-General,
and your still youthful heart, in all that the reverend Father General
of our Order has just told me. You have understood the only wish
that lurks in the depths of my heart so far as the things of the world are
concerned—to get justice done to my feelings by her who has treated
me so badly! But before leaving me at liberty to avail myself of your
offer, the General wanted to know that my vocation was sincere; he
was so kind as to tell me his idea, on finding that I was determined to
preserve absolute silence on this point. If I had yielded to the temptation
to rehabilitate the man of the world, the friar would have been
rejected by this monastery. Grace has certainly done her work, but,
though short, the struggle was not the less keen or the less painful. Is
not this enough to show you that I could never return to the world?
“Hence my forgiveness, which you ask for the author of so much
woe, is entire and without a thought of vindictiveness. I will pray to
God to forgive that young lady as I forgive her, and as I shall beseech
Him to give Madame de Rhetore a life of happiness. Ah! whether it be
death, or the obstinate hand of a young girl madly bent on being
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loved, or one of the blows ascribed to chance, must we not all obey
God? Sorrow in some souls makes a vast void through which the Divine
Voice rings. I learned too late the bearings of this life on that
which awaits us; all in me is worn out; I could not serve in the ranks of
the Church Militant, and I lay the remains of an almost extinct life at
the foot of the altar.
“This is the last time I shall ever write. You alone, who loved me,
and whom I loved so well, could make me break the law of oblivion I
imposed on myself when I entered these headquarters of Saint Bruno,
but you are always especially named in the prayers of
“Brother Albert.
“November 1836.”
“Everything is for the best perhaps,” thought the Abbe de Grancey.
When he showed this letter to Rosalie, who, with a pious impulse,
kissed the lines which contained her forgiveness, he said to her:
“Well, now that he is lost to you, will you not be reconciled to
your mother and marry the Comte de Soulas?”
“Only if Albert should order it,” said she.
“But you see it is impossible to consult him. The General of the
Order would not allow it.”
“If I were to go to see him?”
“No Carthusian sees any visitor. Besides, no woman but the Queen
of France may enter a Carthusian monastery,” said the Abbe. “So you
have no longer any excuse for not marrying young Monsieur de
Soulas.”
“I do not wish to destroy my mother’s happiness,” retorted Rosalie.
“Satan!” exclaimed the Vicar-General.
Towards the end of that winter the worthy Abbe de Grancey died.
This good friend no longer stood between Madame de Watteville
and her daughter, to soften the impact of those two iron wills.
The event he had foretold took place. In the month of August
1837 Madame de Watteville was married to Monsieur de Soulas in
Paris, whither she went by Rosalie’s advice, the girl making a show of
kindness and sweetness to her mother. Madame de Watteville believed
in this affection on the part of her daughter, who simply desired
to go to Paris to give herself the luxury of a bitter revenge; she
thought of nothing but avenging Savarus by torturing her rival.
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Mademoiselle de Watteville had been declared legally of age; she was,
in fact, not far from one-and-twenty. Her mother, to settle with her
finally, had resigned her claims on les Rouxey, and the daughter had
signed a release for all the inheritance of the Baron de Watteville. Rosalie
encouraged her mother to marry the Comte de Soulas and settle all her
own fortune on him.
“Let us each be perfectly free,” she said.
Madame de Soulas, who had been uneasy as to her daughter’s intentions,
was touched by this liberality, and made her a present of six
thousand francs a year in the funds as conscience money. As the
Comtesse de Soulas had an income of forty-eight thousand francs
from her own lands, and was quite incapable of alienating them in
order to diminish Rosalie’s share, Mademoiselle de Watteville was
still a fortune to marry, of eighteen hundred thousand francs; les
Rouxey, with the Baron’s additions, and certain improvements, might
yield twenty thousand francs a year, besides the value of the house,
rents, and preserves. So Rosalie and her mother, who soon adopted
the Paris style and fashions, easily obtained introductions to the best
society. The golden key—eighteen hundred thousand francs— embroidered
on Mademoiselle de Watteville’s stomacher, did more for
the Comtesse de Soulas than her pretensions a la de Rupt, her inappropriate
pride, or even her rather distant great connections.
In the month of February 1838 Rosalie, who was eagerly courted
by many young men, achieved the purpose which had brought her
to Paris. This was to meet the Duchesse de Rhetore, to see this wonderful
woman, and to overwhelm her with perennial remorse. Rosalie
gave herself up to the most bewildering elegance and vanities in order
to face the Duchess on an equal footing.
They first met at a ball given annually after 1830 for the benefit of
the pensioners on the old Civil List. A young man, prompted by
Rosalie, pointed her out to the Duchess, saying:
“There is a very remarkable young person, a strong-minded young
lady too! She drove a clever man into a monastery—the Grand Chartreuse—a
man of immense capabilities, Albert de Savarus, whose
career she wrecked. She is Mademoiselle de Watteville, the famous
Besancon heiress—”
The Duchess turned pale. Rosalie’s eyes met hers with one of those
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flashes which, between woman and woman, are more fatal than the
pistol shots of a duel. Francesca Soderini, who had suspected that
Albert might be innocent, hastily quitted the ballroom, leaving the
speaker at his wits’ end to guess what terrible blow he had inflicted
on the beautiful Duchesse de Rhetore.
“If you want to hear more about Albert, come to the Opera ball on
Tuesday with a marigold in your hand.”
This anonymous note, sent by Rosalie to the Duchess, brought the
unhappy Italian to the ball, where Mademoiselle de Watteville placed
in her hand all Albert’s letters, with that written to Leopold Hannequin
by the Vicar-General, and the notary’s reply, and even that in which
she had written her confession to the Abbe de Grancey.
“I do not choose to be the only sufferer,” she said to her rival, “for
one has been as ruthless as the other.”
After enjoying the dismay stamped on the Duchess’ beautiful face,
Rosalie went away; she went out no more, and returned to Besancon
with her mother.
Mademoiselle de Watteville, who lived alone on her estate of les
Rouxey, riding, hunting, refusing two or three offers a year, going to
Besancon four or five times in the course of the winter, and busying
herself with improving her land, was regarded as a very eccentric personage.
She was one of the celebrities of the Eastern provinces.
Madame de Soulas has two children, a boy and a girl, and she has
grown younger; but Monsieur de Soulas has aged a good deal.
“My fortune has cost me dear,” said he to young Chavoncourt.
“Really to know a bigot it is unfortunately necessary to marry her!”
Mademoiselle de Watteville behaves in the most extraordinary
manner. “She has vagaries,” people say. Every year she goes to gaze at
the walls of the Grande Chartreuse. Perhaps she dreams of imitating
her grand-uncle by forcing the walls of the monastery to find a husband,
as Watteville broke through those of his monastery to recover
his liberty.
She left Besancon in 1841, intending, it was said, to get married;
but the real reason of this expedition is still unknown, for she returned
home in a state which forbids her ever appearing in society
again. By one of those chances of which the Abbe de Grancey had
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spoken, she happened to be on the Loire in a steamboat of which the
boiler burst. Mademoiselle de Watteville was so severely injured that
she lost her right arm and her left leg; her face is marked with fearful
scars, which have bereft her of her beauty; her health, cruelly upset,
leaves her few days free from suffering. In short, she now never leaves
the Chartreuse of les Rouxey, where she leads a life wholly devoted
to religious practices.
PARIS, May 1842.
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Beauseant, Vicomtesse de
Father Goriot
The Deserted Woman
Genovese
Massimilla Doni
Hannequin, Leopold
Beatrix
Cousin Betty
Cousin Pons
Jeanrenaud
The Commission in Lunacy
Nueil, Gaston de
The Deserted Woman
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Albert Savarus
Rhetore, Duc Alphonse de
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Letters of Two Brides
The Member for Arcis
Savaron de Savarus
The Quest of the Absolute
Savarus, Albert Savaron de
The Quest of the Absolute
Schinner, Hippolyte
The Purse
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Pierre Grassou
A Start in Life
The Government Clerks
Modeste Mignon
The Imaginary Mistress
The Unconscious Humorists
Tinti, Clarina
Massimilla Doni
216

Dedication
Another Study of
Woman
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
To Leon Gozlan as a Token of Literary Good-fellowship.
Balzac
AT PARIS there are almost always two separate parties going on at
every ball and rout. First, an official party, composed of the persons
invited, a fashionable and much-bored circle. Each one grimaces for
his neighbor’s eye; most of the younger women are there for one
person only; when each woman has assured herself that for that one
she is the handsomest woman in the room, and that the opinion is
perhaps shared by a few others, a few insignificant phrases are exchanged,
as: “Do you think of going away soon to La Crampade?”
“How well Madame de Portenduere sang!” “Who is that little woman
with such a load of diamonds?” Or, after firing off some smart epigrams,
which give transient pleasure, and leave wounds that rankle
long, the groups thin out, the mere lookers on go away, and the
waxlights burn down to the sconces.
The mistress of the house then waylays a few artists, amusing people
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Another Study of Woman
or intimate friends, saying, “Do not go yet; we will have a snug little
supper.” These collect in some small room. The second, the real party,
now begins; a party where, as of old, every one can hear what is said,
conversation is general, each one is bound to be witty and to contribute
to the amusement of all. Everything is made to tell, honest laughter
takes the place of the gloom which in company saddens the prettiest
faces. In short, where the rout ends pleasure begins.
The Rout, a cold display of luxury, a review of self-conceits in full
dress, is one of those English inventions which tend to mechanize
other nations. England seems bent on seeing the whole world as dull
as itself, and dull in the same way. So this second party is, in some
French houses, a happy protest on the part of the old spirit of our
light-hearted people. Only, unfortunately, so few houses protest; and
the reason is a simple one. If we no longer have many suppers nowadays,
it is because never, under any rule, have there been fewer men
placed, established, and successful than under the reign of Louis
Philippe, when the Revolution began again, lawfully. Everybody is
on the march some whither, or trotting at the heels of Fortune. Time
has become the costliest commodity, so no one can afford the lavish
extravagance of going home to-morrow morning and getting up late.
Hence, there is no second soiree now but at the houses of women
rich enough to entertain, and since July 1830 such women may be
counted in Paris.
In spite of the covert opposition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
two or three women, among them Madame d’Espard and Mademoiselle
des Touches, have not chosen to give up the share of influence
they exercised in Paris, and have not closed their houses.
The salon of Mademoiselle des Touches is noted in Paris as being
the last refuge where the old French wit has found a home, with its
reserved depths, its myriad subtle byways, and its exquisite politeness.
You will there still find grace of manner notwithstanding the
conventionalities of courtesy, perfect freedom of talk notwithstanding
the reserve which is natural to persons of breeding, and, above all,
a liberal flow of ideas. No one there thinks of keeping his thought for
a play; and no one regards a story as material for a book. In short, the
hideous skeleton of literature at bay never stalks there, on the prowl for
a clever sally or an interesting subject.
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The memory of one of these evenings especially dwells with me,
less by reason of a confidence in which the illustrious de Marsay
opened up one of the deepest recesses of woman’s heart, than on
account of the reflections to which his narrative gave rise, as to the
changes that have taken place in the French woman since the fateful
revolution of July.
On that evening chance had brought together several persons, whose
indisputable merits have won them European reputations. This is
not a piece of flattery addressed to France, for there were a good
many foreigners present. And, indeed, the men who most shone were
not the most famous. Ingenious repartee, acute remarks, admirable
banter, pictures sketched with brilliant precision, all sparkled and
flowed without elaboration, were poured out without disdain, but
without effort, and were exquisitely expressed and delicately appreciated.
The men of the world especially were conspicuous for their
really artistic grace and spirit.
Elsewhere in Europe you will find elegant manners, cordiality, genial
fellowship, and knowledge; but only in Paris, in this drawingroom,
and those to which I have alluded, does the particular wit
abound which gives an agreeable and changeful unity to all these
social qualities, an indescribable river-like flow which makes this profusion
of ideas, of definitions, of anecdotes, of historical incidents,
meander with ease. Paris, the capital of taste, alone possesses the science
which makes conversation a tourney in which each type of wit
is condensed into a shaft, each speaker utters his phrase and casts his
experience in a word, in which every one finds amusement, relaxation,
and exercise. Here, then, alone, will you exchange ideas; here
you need not, like the dolphin in the fable, carry a monkey on your
shoulders; here you will be understood, and will not risk staking
your gold pieces against base metal.
Here, again, secrets neatly betrayed, and talk, light or deep, play
and eddy, changing their aspect and hue at every phrase. Eager criticism
and crisp anecdotes lead on from one to the next. All eyes are
listening, a gesture asks a question, and an expressive look gives the
answer. In short, and in a word, everything is wit and mind.
The phenomenon of speech, which, when duly studied and well
handled, is the power of the actor and the story-teller, had never so
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Another Study of Woman
completely bewitched me. Nor was I alone under the influence of its
spell; we all spent a delightful evening. The conversation had drifted
into anecdote, and brought out in its rushing course some curious
confessions, several portraits, and a thousand follies, which make
this enchanting improvisation impossible to record; still, by setting
these things down in all their natural freshness and abruptness, their
elusive divarications, you may perhaps feel the charm of a real French
evening, taken at the moment when the most engaging familiarity
makes each one forget his own interests, his personal conceit, or, if
you like, his pretensions.
At about two in the morning, as supper ended, no one was left
sitting round the table but intimate friends, proved by intercourse of
fifteen years, and some persons of great taste and good breeding,
who knew the world. By tacit agreement, perfectly carried out, at
supper every one renounced his pretensions to importance. Perfect
equality set the tone. But indeed there was no one present who was
not very proud of being himself.
Mademoiselle des Touches always insists on her guests remaining
at table till they leave, having frequently remarked the change which
a move produces in the spirit of a party. Between the dining-room
and the drawing-room the charm is destroyed. According to Sterne,
the ideas of an author after shaving are different from those he had
before. If Sterne is right, may it not be boldly asserted that the frame
of mind of a party at table is not the same as that of the same persons
returned to the drawing-room? The atmosphere is not heady, the eye
no longer contemplates the brilliant disorder of the dessert, lost are
the happy effects of that laxness of mood, that benevolence which
comes over us while we remain in the humor peculiar to the wellfilled
man, settled comfortably on one of the springy chairs which
are made in these days. Perhaps we are not more ready to talk face to
face with the dessert and in the society of good wine, during the
delightful interval when every one may sit with an elbow on the
table and his head resting on his hand. Not only does every one like
to talk then, but also to listen. Digestion, which is almost always
attent, is loquacious or silent, as characters differ. Then every one
finds his opportunity.
Was not this preamble necessary to make you know the charm of
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the narrative, by which a celebrated man, now dead, depicted the
innocent jesuistry of women, painting it with the subtlety peculiar
to persons who have seen much of the world, and which makes statesmen
such delightful storytellers when, like Prince Talleyrand and Prince
Metternich, they vouchsafe to tell a story?
De Marsay, prime minister for some six months, had already given
proofs of superior capabilities. Those who had known him long were
not indeed surprised to see him display all the talents and various
aptitudes of a statesman; still it might yet be a question whether he
would prove to be a solid politician, or had merely been moulded in
the fire of circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man
whom he had made a prefet, a man of wit and observation, who had
for a long time been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without
infusing into his admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which,
in Paris, one superior man excuses himself from admiring another.
“Was there ever,” said he, “in your former life, any event, any
thought or wish which told you what your vocation was?” asked
Emile Blondet; “for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls
and leads us to the spot where our faculties develop—”
“Yes,” said de Marsay; “I will tell you about it.”
Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, de Marsay’s intimate
friends,—all settled themselves comfortably, each in his favorite
attitude, to look at the Minister. Need it be said that the servants
had left, that the doors were shut, and the curtains drawn over them?
The silence was so complete that the murmurs of the coachmen’s
voices could be heard from the courtyard, and the pawing and champing
made by horses when asking to be taken back to their stable.
“The statesman, my friends, exists by one single quality,” said the
Minister, playing with his gold and mother-of-pearl dessert knife.
“To wit: the power of always being master of himself; of profiting
more or less, under all circumstances, by every event, however fortuitous;
in short, of having within himself a cold and disinterested
other self, who looks on as a spectator at all the changes of life, noting
our passions and our sentiments, and whispering to us in every
case the judgment of a sort of moral ready-reckoner.”
“That explains why a statesman is so rare a thing in France,” said
old Lord Dudley.
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“From a sentimental point of view, this is horrible,” the Minister
went on. “Hence, when such a phenomenon is seen in a young man—
Richelieu, who, when warned overnight by a letter of Concini’s peril,
slept till midday, when his benefactor was killed at ten o’clock—or
say Pitt, or Napoleon, he was a monster. I became such a monster at
a very early age, thanks to a woman.”
“I fancied,” said Madame de Montcornet with a smile, “that more
politicians were undone by us than we could make.”
“The monster of which I speak is a monster just because he withstands
you,” replied de Marsay, with a little ironical bow.
“If this is a love-story,” the Baronne de Nucingen interposed, “I
request that it may not be interrupted by any reflections.”
“Reflection is so antipathetic to it!” cried Joseph Bridau.
“I was seventeen,” de Marsay went on; “the Restoration was being
consolidated; my old friends know how impetuous and fervid I was
then. I was in love for the first time, and I was—I may say so now—
one of the handsomest young fellows in Paris. I had youth and good
looks, two advantages due to good fortune, but of which we are all
as proud as of a conquest. I must be silent as to the rest.—Like all
youths, I was in love with a woman six years older than myself. No
one of you here,” said he, looking carefully round the table, “can
suspect her name or recognize her. Ronquerolles alone, at the time,
ever guessed my secret. He had kept it well, but I should have feared
his smile. However, he is gone,” said the Minister, looking round.
“He would not stay to supper,” said Madame de Nucingen.
“For six months, possessed by my passion,” de Marsay went on,
“but incapable of suspecting that it had overmastered me, I had abandoned
myself to that rapturous idolatry which is at once the triumph
and the frail joy of the young. I treasured her old gloves; I drank an
infusion of the flowers she had worn; I got out of bed at night to go
and gaze at her window. All my blood rushed to my heart when I
inhaled the perfume she used. I was miles away from knowing that
woman is a stove with a marble casing.”
“Oh! spare us your terrible verdicts,” cried Madame de Montcornet
with a smile.
“I believe I should have crushed with my scorn the philosopher
who first uttered this terrible but profoundly true thought,” said de
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Marsay. “You are all far too keen-sighted for me to say any more on
that point. These few words will remind you of your own follies.
“A great lady if ever there was one, a widow without children—oh!
all was perfect—my idol would shut herself up to mark my linen
with her hair; in short, she responded to my madness by her own.
And how can we fail to believe in passion when it has the guarantee
of madness?
“We each devoted all our minds to concealing a love so perfect
and so beautiful from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded.
And what charm we found in our escapades! Of her I will say nothing.
She was perfection then, and to this day is considered one of
the most beautiful women in Paris; but at that time a man would
have endured death to win one of her glances. She had been left
with an amount of fortune sufficient for a woman who had loved
and was adored; but the Restoration, to which she owed renewed
lustre, made it seem inadequate in comparison with her name. In
my position I was so fatuous as never to dream of a suspicion.
Though my jealousy would have been of a hundred and twenty
Othello-power, that terrible passion slumbered in me as gold in
the nugget. I would have ordered my servant to thrash me if I had
been so base as ever to doubt the purity of that angel—so fragile
and so strong, so fair, so artless, pure, spotless, and whose blue eyes
allowed my gaze to sound it to the very depths of her heart with
adorable submissiveness. Never was there the slightest hesitancy in
her attitude, her look, or word; always white and fresh, and ready
for the Beloved like the Oriental Lily of the ‘Song of Songs!’ Ah!
my friends!” sadly exclaimed the Minister, grown young again, “a
man must hit his head very hard on the marble to dispel that poem!”
This cry of nature, finding an echo in the listeners, spurred the
curiosity he had excited in them with so much skill.
“Every morning, riding Sultan—the fine horse you sent me from
England,” de Marsay went on, addressing Lord Dudley, “I rode past
her open carriage, the horses’ pace being intentionally reduced to a
walk, and read the order of the day signaled to me by the flowers of
her bouquet in case we were unable to exchange a few words. Though
we saw each other almost every evening in society, and she wrote to
me every day, to deceive the curious and mislead the observant we
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had adopted a scheme of conduct: never to look at each other; to
avoid meeting; to speak ill of each other. Self-admiration, swagger,
or playing the disdained swain,—all these old manoeuvres are not to
compare on either part with a false passion professed for an indifferent
person and an air of indifference towards the true idol. If two
lovers will only play that game, the world will always be deceived;
but then they must be very secure of each other.
“Her stalking-horse was a man in high favor, a courtier, cold and
sanctimonious, whom she never received at her own house. This little
comedy was performed for the benefit of simpletons and drawingroom
circles, who laughed at it. Marriage was never spoken of between
us; six years’ difference of age might give her pause; she knew nothing
of my fortune, of which, on principle, I have always kept the secret. I,
on my part, fascinated by her wit and manners, by the extent of her
knowledge and her experience of the world, would have married her
without a thought. At the same time, her reserve charmed me. If she
had been the first to speak of marriage in a certain tone, I might perhaps
have noted it as vulgar in that accomplished soul.
“Six months, full and perfect—a diamond of the purest water!
That has been my portion of love in this base world.
“One morning, attacked by the feverish stiffness which marks the
beginning of a cold, I wrote her a line to put off one of those secret
festivals which are buried under the roofs of Paris like pearls in the
sea. No sooner was the letter sent than remorse seized me: she will
not believe that I am ill! thought I. She was wont to affect jealousy
and suspiciousness.—When jealousy is genuine,” said de Marsay, interrupting
himself, “it is the visible sign of an unique passion.”
“Why?” asked the Princesse de Cadignan eagerly.
“Unique and true love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of corporeal
apathy attuned to the contemplation into which one falls. Then
the mind complicates everything; it works on itself, pictures its fancies,
turns them into reality and torment; and such jealousy is as
delightful as it is distressing.”
A foreign minister smiled as, by the light of memory, he felt the
truth of this remark.
“Besides,” de Marsay went on, “I said to myself, why miss a happy
hour? Was it not better to go, even though feverish? And, then, if she
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learns that I am ill, I believe her capable of hurrying here and compromising
herself. I made an effort; I wrote a second letter, and carried
it myself, for my confidential servant was now gone. The river
lay between us. I had to cross Paris; but at last, within a suitable
distance of her house, I caught sight of a messenger; I charged him to
have the note sent up to her at once, and I had the happy idea of
driving past her door in a hackney cab to see whether she might not
by chance receive the two letters together. At the moment when I
arrived it was two o’clock; the great gate opened to admit a carriage.
Whose? —That of the stalking-horse!
“It is fifteen years since—well, even while I tell the tale, I, the exhausted
orator, the Minister dried up by the friction of public business,
I still feel a surging in my heart and the hot blood about my
diaphragm. At the end of an hour I passed once more; the carriage
was still in the courtyard! My note no doubt was in the porter’s
hands. At last, at half-past three, the carriage drove out. I could observe
my rival’s expression; he was grave, and did not smile; but he
was in love, and no doubt there was business in hand.
“I went to keep my appointment; the queen of my heart met me;
I saw her calm, pure, serene. And here I must confess that I have
always thought that Othello was not only stupid, but showed very
bad taste. Only a man who is half a Negro could behave so: indeed
Shakespeare felt this when he called his play ‘The Moor of Venice.’
The sight of the woman we love is such a balm to the heart that it
must dispel anguish, doubt, and sorrow. All my rage vanished. I could
smile again. Hence this cheerfulness, which at my age now would be
the most atrocious dissimulation, was the result of my youth and
my love. My jealousy once buried, I had the power of observation.
My ailing condition was evident; the horrible doubts that had fermented
in me increased it. At last I found an opening for putting in
these words: ‘You have had no one with you this morning?’ making
a pretext of the uneasiness I had felt in the fear lest she should have
disposed of her time after receiving my first note.—’Ah!’ she exclaimed,
‘only a man could have such ideas! As if I could think of
anything but your suffering. Till the moment when I received your
second note I could think only of how I could contrive to see you.’—
’And you were alone?’—’Alone,’ said she, looking at me with a face
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Another Study of Woman
of innocence so perfect that it must have been his distrust of such a
look as that which made the Moor kill Desdemona. As she lived
alone in the house, the word was a fearful lie. One single lie destroys
the absolute confidence which to some souls is the very foundation
of happiness.
“To explain to you what passed in me at that moment it must be
assumed that we have an internal self of which the exterior I is but
the husk; that this self, as brilliant as light, is as fragile as a shade —
well, that beautiful self was in me thenceforth for ever shrouded in
crape. Yes; I felt a cold and fleshless hand cast over me the windingsheet
of experience, dooming me to the eternal mourning into which
the first betrayal plunges the soul. As I cast my eyes down that she
might not observe my dizziness, this proud thought somewhat restored
my strength: ‘If she is deceiving you, she is unworthy of you!’
“I ascribed my sudden reddening and the tears which started to my
eyes to an attack of pain, and the sweet creature insisted on driving
me home with the blinds of the cab drawn. On the way she was full
of a solicitude and tenderness that might have deceived the Moor of
Venice whom I have taken as a standard of comparison. Indeed, if
that great child were to hesitate two seconds longer, every intelligent
spectator feels that he would ask Desdemona’s forgiveness. Thus,
killing the woman is the act of a boy.—She wept as we parted, so
much was she distressed at being unable to nurse me herself. She
wished she were my valet, in whose happiness she found a cause of
envy, and all this was as elegantly expressed, oh! as Clarissa might
have written in her happiness. There is always a precious ape in the
prettiest and most angelic woman!”
At these words all the women looked down, as if hurt by this
brutal truth so brutally stated.
“I will say nothing of the night, nor of the week I spent,” de Marsay
went on. “I discovered that I was a statesman.”
It was so well said that we all uttered an admiring exclamation.
“As I thought over the really cruel vengeance to be taken on a
woman,” said de Marsay, continuing his story, “with infernal ingenuity—for,
as we had loved each other, some terrible and irreparable
revenges were possible—I despised myself, I felt how common I
was, I insensibly formulated a horrible code—that of Indulgence. In
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taking vengeance on a woman, do we not in fact admit that there is
but one for us, that we cannot do without her? And, then, is revenge
the way to win her back? If she is not indispensable, if there are other
women in the world, why not grant her the right to change which
we assume?
“This, of course, applies only to passion; in any other sense it would
be socially wrong. Nothing more clearly proves the necessity for indissoluble
marriage than the instability of passion. The two sexes
must be chained up, like wild beasts as they are, by inevitable law,
deaf and mute. Eliminate revenge, and infidelity in love is nothing.
Those who believe that for them there is but one woman in the
world must be in favor of vengeance, and then there is but one form
of it—that of Othello.
“Mine was different.”
The words produced in each of us the imperceptible movement
which newspaper writers represent in Parliamentary reports by the
words: great sensation.
“Cured of my cold, and of my pure, absolute, divine love, I flung
myself into an adventure, of which the heroine was charming, and of
a style of beauty utterly opposed to that of my deceiving angel. I
took care not to quarrel with this clever woman, who was so good an
actress, for I doubt whether true love can give such gracious delights
as those lavished by such a dexterous fraud. Such refined hypocrisy is
as good as virtue.—I am not speaking to you Englishwomen, my
lady,” said the Minister, suavely, addressing Lady Barimore, Lord
Dudley’s daughter. “I tried to be the same lover.
“I wished to have some of my hair worked up for my new angel,
and I went to a skilled artist who at that time dwelt in the Rue
Boucher. The man had a monopoly of capillary keepsakes, and I
mention his address for the benefit of those who have not much
hair; he has plenty of every kind and every color. After I had explained
my order, he showed me his work. I then saw achievements
of patience surpassing those which the story books ascribe to fairies,
or which are executed by prisoners. He brought me up to date as to
the caprices and fashions governing the use of hair. ‘For the last year,’
said he, ‘there has been a rage for marking linen with hair; happily I
had a fine collection of hair and skilled needlewomen,’—on hearing
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Another Study of Woman
this a suspicion flashed upon me; I took out my handkerchief and
said, ‘So this was done in your shop, with false hair?’—He looked at
the handkerchief, and said, ‘Ay! that lady was very particular, she
insisted on verifying the tint of the hair. My wife herself marked
those handkerchiefs. You have there, sir, one of the finest pieces of
work we have ever executed.’ Before this last ray of light I might
have believed something—might have taken a woman’s word. I left
the shop still having faith in pleasure, but where love was concerned
I was as atheistical as a mathematician.
“Two months later I was sitting by the side of the ethereal being in
her boudoir, on her sofa; I was holding one of her hands—they were
very beautiful—and we scaled the Alps of sentiment, culling their
sweetest flowers, and pulling off the daisy-petals; there is always a
moment when one pulls daisies to pieces, even if it is in a drawingroom
and there are no daisies. At the intensest moment of tenderness,
and when we are most in love, love is so well aware of its own
short duration that we are irresistibly urged to ask, ‘Do you love me?
Will you love me always?’ I seized the elegiac moment, so warm, so
flowery, so full-blown, to lead her to tell her most delightful lies, in
the enchanting language of love. Charlotte displayed her choicest
allurements: She could not live without me; I was to her the only
man in the world; she feared to weary me, because my presence bereft
her of all her wits; with me, all her faculties were lost in love; she
was indeed too tender to escape alarms; for the last six months she
had been seeking some way to bind me to her eternally, and God
alone knew that secret; in short, I was her god!”
The women who heard de Marsay seemed offended by seeing themselves
so well acted, for he seconded the words by airs, and sidelong
attitudes, and mincing grimaces which were quite illusory.
“At the very moment when I might have believed these adorable
falsehoods, as I still held her right hand in mine, I said to her, ‘When
are you to marry the Duke?’
“The thrust was so direct, my gaze met hers so boldly, and her
hand lay so tightly in mine, that her start, slight as it was, could not
be disguised; her eyes fell before mine, and a faint blush colored her
cheeks.—’The Duke! What do you mean?’ she said, affecting great
astonishment.—’I know everything,’ replied I; ‘and in my opinion,
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you should delay no longer; he is rich; he is a duke; but he is more
than devout, he is religious! I am sure, therefore, that you have been
faithful to me, thanks to his scruples. You cannot imagine how urgently
necessary it is that you should compromise him with himself
and with God; short of that you will never bring him to the point.’—
’Is this a dream?’ said she, pushing her hair from her forehead, fifteen
years before Malibran, with the gesture which Malibran has made so
famous.—’Come, do not be childish, my angel,’ said I, trying to
take her hands; but she folded them before her with a little prudish
and indignant mein.— ‘Marry him, you have my permission,’ said I,
replying to this gesture by using the formal vous instead of tu. ‘Nay,
better, I beg you to do so.’— ‘But,’ cried she, falling at my knees,
‘there is some horrible mistake; I love no one in the world but you;
you may demand any proofs you please.’— ‘Rise, my dear,’ said I,
‘and do me the honor of being truthful.’— ‘As before God.’— ‘Do
you doubt my love?’—’No.’— ‘Nor my fidelity?’— ‘No.’—’Well,
I have committed the greatest crime,’ I went on. ‘I have doubted
your love and your fidelity. Between two intoxications I looked calmly
about me.’— ‘Calmly!’ sighed she. ‘That is enough, Henri; you no
longer love me.’
“She had at once found, you perceive, a loophole for escape. In
scenes like these an adverb is dangerous. But, happily, curiosity made
her add: ‘And what did you see? Have I ever spoken of the Duke
excepting in public? Have you detected in my eyes—?’— ‘No,’ said
I, ‘but in his. And you have eight times made me go to Saint-Thomas
d’Aquin to see you listening to the same mass as he.’— ‘Ah!’ she
exclaimed, ‘then I have made you jealous!’—Oh! I only wish I could
be!’ said I, admiring the pliancy of her quick intelligence, and these
acrobatic feats which can only be successful in the eyes of the blind.
‘But by dint of going to church I have become very incredulous. On
the day of my first cold, and your first treachery, when you thought
I was in bed, you received the Duke, and you told me you had seen
no one.’— ‘Do you know that your conduct is infamous?’— ‘In
what respect? I consider your marriage to the Duke an excellent arrangement;
he gives you a great name, the only rank that suits you, a
brilliant and distinguished position. You will be one of the queens of
Paris. I should be doing you a wrong if I placed any obstacle in the
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Another Study of Woman
way of this prospect, this distinguished life, this splendid alliance.
Ah! Charlotte, some day you will do me justice by discovering how
unlike my character is to that of other young men. You would have
been compelled to deceive me; yes, you would have found it very
difficult to break with me, for he watches you. It is time that we
should part, for the Duke is rigidly virtuous. You must turn prude; I
advise you to do so. The Duke is vain; he will be proud of his wife.’—
’Oh!’ cried she, bursting into tears, ‘Henri, if only you had spoken!
Yes, if you had chosen’—it was I who was to blame, you understand—’we
would have gone to live all our days in a corner, married,
happy, and defied the world.’— ‘Well, it is too late now,’ said I,
kissing her hands, and putting on a victimized air.— ‘Good God!
But I can undo it all!’ said she.— ‘No, you have gone too far with
the Duke. I ought indeed to go a journey to part us more effectually.
We should both have reason to fear our own affection—’— ‘Henri,
do you think the Duke has any suspicions?’ I was still ‘Henri,’ but
the tu was lost for ever.—’I do not think so,’ I replied, assuming the
manner of a friend; ‘but be as devout as possible, reconcile yourself
to God, for the Duke waits for proofs; he hesitates, you must bring
him to the point.’
“She rose, and walked twice round the boudoir in real or affected
agitation; then she no doubt found an attitude and a look beseeming
the new state of affairs, for she stopped in front of me, held out her
hand, and said in a voice broken by emotion, ‘Well, Henri, you are
loyal, noble, and a charming man; I shall never forget you.’
“These were admirable tactics. She was bewitching in this transition
of feeling, indispensable to the situation in which she wished to place
herself in regard to me. I fell into the attitude, the manners, and the
look of a man so deeply distressed, that I saw her too newly assumed
dignity giving way; she looked at me, took my hand, drew me along
almost, threw me on the sofa, but quite gently, and said after a moment’s
silence, ‘I am dreadfully unhappy, my dear fellow. Do you love me?’—
‘Oh! yes.’— ‘Well, then, what will become of you?’”
At this point the women all looked at each other.
“Though I can still suffer when I recall her perfidy, I still laugh at
her expression of entire conviction and sweet satisfaction that I must
die, or at any rate sink into perpetual melancholy,” de Marsay went
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on. “Oh! do not laugh yet!” he said to his listeners; “there is better to
come. I looked at her very tenderly after a pause, and said to her, ‘Yes,
that is what I have been wondering.’— ‘Well, what will you do?’ —
‘I asked myself that the day after my cold.’— ‘And—?’ she asked
with eager anxiety.—’And I have made advances to the little lady to
whom I was supposed to be attached.’
“Charlotte started up from the sofa like a frightened doe, trembling
like a leaf, gave me one of those looks in which women forgo
all their dignity, all their modesty, their refinement, and even their
grace, the sparkling glitter of a hunted viper’s eye when driven into a
corner, and said, ‘And I have loved this man! I have struggled! I have—
’ On this last thought, which I leave you to guess, she made the most
impressive pause I ever heard.— ‘Good God!’ she cried, ‘how unhappy
are we women! we never can be loved. To you there is nothing
serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us
you still are our dupes!’—’I see that plainly,’ said I, with a stricken
air; ‘you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer
from it.’—This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some
tears of vexation. ‘You disgust me with the world and with life.’ she
said; ‘you snatch away all my illusions; you deprave my heart.’
“She said to me all that I had a right to say to her, and with a simple
effrontery, an artless audacity, which would certainly have nailed any
man but me on the spot.— ‘What is to become of us poor women
in a state of society such as Louis XVIII.’s charter made it?’—(Imagine
how her words had run away with her.)— ‘Yes, indeed, we are
born to suffer. In matters of passion we are always superior to you,
and you are beneath all loyalty. There is no honesty in your hearts. To
you love is a game in which you always cheat.’— ‘My dear,’ said I,
‘to take anything serious in society nowadays would be like making
romantic love to an actress.’—’What a shameless betrayal! It was
deliberately planned!’— ‘No, only a rational issue.’— ‘Good-bye,
Monsieur de Marsay,’ said she; ‘you have deceived me horribly.’—
‘Surely,’ I replied, taking up a submissive attitude, ‘Madame la
Duchesse will not remember Charlotte’s grievances?’— ‘Certainly,’
she answered bitterly.— ‘Then, in fact, you hate me?’—She bowed,
and I said to myself, ‘There is something still left!’
“The feeling she had when I parted from her allowed her to believe
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that she still had something to avenge. Well, my friends, I have carefully
studied the lives of men who have had great success with women,
but I do not believe that the Marechal de Richelieu, or Lauzun, or
Louis de Valois ever effected a more judicious retreat at the first attempt.
As to my mind and heart, they were cast in a mould then and
there, once for all, and the power of control I thus acquired over the
thoughtless impulses which make us commit so many follies gained
me the admirable presence of mind you all know.”
“How deeply I pity the second!” exclaimed the Baronne de
Nucingen.
A scarcely perceptible smile on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine
de Nucingen color.
“How we do forget!” said the Baron de Nucingen.
The great banker’s simplicity was so extremely droll, that his wife,
who was de Marsay’s “second,” could not help laughing like every
one else.
“You are all ready to condemn the woman,” said Lady Dudley.
“Well, I quite understand that she did not regard her marriage as an
act of inconstancy. Men will never distinguish between constancy
and fidelity.—I know the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay
has told us, and she is one of the last of your truly great ladies.”
“Alas! my lady, you are right,” replied de Marsay. “For very nearly
fifty years we have been looking on at the progressive ruin of all
social distinctions. We ought to have saved our women from this
great wreck, but the Civil Code has swept its leveling influence over
their heads. However terrible the words, they must be spoken: Duchesses
are vanishing, and marquises too! As to the baronesses—I must
apologize to Madame de Nucingen, who will become a countess
when her husband is made a peer of France—baronesses have never
succeeded in getting people to take them seriously.”
“Aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” said Blondet with a smile.
“Countesses will survive,” said de Marsay. “An elegant woman will
be more or less of a countess—a countess of the Empire or of yesterday,
a countess of the old block, or, as they say in Italy, a countess by
courtesy. But as to the great lady, she died out with the dignified
splendor of the last century, with powder, patches, high-heeled slippers,
and stiff bodices with a delta stomacher of bows. Duchesses in
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these days can pass through a door without any need to widen it for
their hoops. The Empire saw the last of gowns with trains! I am still
puzzled to understand how a sovereign who wished to see his drawing-room
swept by ducal satin and velvet did not make indestructible
laws. Napoleon never guessed the results of the Code he was so
proud of. That man, by creating duchesses, founded the race of our
‘ladies’ of to-day—the indirect offspring of his legislation.”
“It was logic, handled as a hammer by boys just out of school and
by obscure journalists, which demolished the splendors of the social
state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “In these days every rogue who
can hold his head straight in his collar, cover his manly bosom with
half an ell of satin by way of a cuirass, display a brow where apocryphal
genius gleams under curling locks, and strut in a pair of patentleather
pumps graced by silk socks which cost six francs, screws his
eye-glass into one of his eye-sockets by puckering up his cheek, and
whether he be an attorney’s clerk, a contractor’s son, or a banker’s
bastard, he stares impertinently at the prettiest duchess, appraises her
as she walks downstairs, and says to his friend—dressed by Buisson,
as we all are, and mounted in patent-leather like any duke himself—
’There, my boy, that is a perfect lady.’ “
“You have not known how to form a party,” said Lord Dudley; “it
will be a long time yet before you have a policy. You talk a great deal
in France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized
property. So this is what happens: Any duke—and even in the time
of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. there were some left who had two
hundred thousand francs a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous
train of servants—well, such a duke could live like a great lord.
The last of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de
Talleyrand.—This duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting
that he has great luck in marrying them all well, each of these
descendants will have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now;
each is the father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to
live with the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first
floor of a large house. Who knows if they may not even be hunting
a fortune? Henceforth the eldest son’s wife, a duchess in name only,
has no carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time to herself. She has
not her own rooms in the family mansion, nor her fortune, nor her
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pretty toys; she is buried in trade; she buys socks for her dear little
children, nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on her girls, whom
she no longer sends to school at a convent. Thus your noblest dames
have been turned into worthy brood-hens.”
“Alas! it is true,” said Joseph Bridau. “In our day we cannot show
those beautiful flowers of womanhood which graced the golden ages
of the French Monarchy. The great lady’s fan is broken. A woman
has nothing now to blush for; she need not slander or whisper, hide
her face or reveal it. A fan is of no use now but for fanning herself.
When once a thing is no more than what it is, it is too useful to be a
form of luxury.”
“Everything in France has aided and abetted the ‘perfect lady,’ “
said Daniel d’Arthez. “The aristocracy has acknowledged her by retreating
to the recesses of its landed estates, where it has hidden itself
to die—emigrating inland before the march of ideas, as of old to
foreign lands before that of the masses. The women who could have
founded European salons, could have guided opinion and turned it
inside out like a glove, could have ruled the world by ruling the men
of art or of intellect who ought to have ruled it, have committed the
blunder of abandoning their ground; they were ashamed of having
to fight against the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out
on to the stage of the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the
barbarians who are at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist
on seeing princesses, these are really only ladylike young women. In
these days princes can find no great ladies whom they may compromise;
they cannot even confer honor on a woman taken up at random.
The Duc de Bourbon was the last prince to avail himself of
this privilege.”
“And God alone knows how dearly he paid for it,” said Lord Dudley.
“Nowadays princes have lady-like wives, obliged to share their opera-box
with other ladies; royal favor could not raise them higher by
a hair’s breadth; they glide unremarkable between the waters of the
citizen class and those of the nobility—not altogether noble nor altogether
bourgeoises,” said the Marquise de Rochegude acridly.
“The press has fallen heir to the Woman,” exclaimed Rastignac.
“She no longer has the quality of a spoken feuilleton—delightful
calumnies graced by elegant language. We read feuilletons written in a
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dialect which changes every three years, society papers about as mirthful
as an undertaker’s mute, and as light as the lead of their type. French
conversation is carried on from one end of the country to the other
in a revolutionary jargon, through long columns of type printed in
old mansions where a press groans in the place where formerly elegant
company used to meet.”
“The knell of the highest society is tolling,” said a Russian Prince.
“Do you hear it? And the first stroke is your modern word lady.”
“You are right, Prince,” said de Marsay. “The ‘perfect lady,’ issuing
from the ranks of the nobility, or sprouting from the citizen class, and
the product of every soil, even of the provinces is the expression of
these times, a last remaining embodiment of good taste, grace, wit,
and distinction, all combined, but dwarfed. We shall see no more great
ladies in France, but there will be ‘ladies’ for a long time, elected by
public opinion to form an upper chamber of women, and who will be
among the fair sex what a ‘gentleman’ is in England.”
“And that they call progress!” exclaimed Mademoiselle des Touches.
“I should like to know where the progress lies?”
“Why, in this,” said Madame de Nucingen. “Formerly a woman
might have the voice of a fish-seller, the walk of a grenadier, the face
of an impudent courtesan, her hair too high on her forehead, a large
foot, a thick hand—she was a great lady in spite of it all; but in these
days, even if she were a Montmorency—if a Montmorency would
ever be such a creature—she would not be a lady.”
“But what do you mean by a ‘perfect lady’?” asked Count Adam
Laginski.
“She is a modern product, a deplorable triumph of the elective
system as applied to the fair sex,” said the Minister. “Every revolution
has a word of its own which epitomizes and depicts it.”
“You are right,” said the Russian, who had come to make a literary
reputation in Paris. “The explanation of certain words added from
time to time to your beautiful language would make a magnificent
history. Organize, for instance, is the word of the Empire, and sums
up Napoleon completely.”
“But all that does not explain what is meant by a lady!” the young
Pole exclaimed, with some impatience.
“Well, I will tell you,” said Emile Blondet to Count Adam. “One
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fine morning you go for a saunter in Paris. It is past two, but five has
not yet struck. You see a woman coming towards you; your first
glance at her is like the preface to a good book, it leads you to expect
a world of elegance and refinement. Like a botanist over hill and dale
in his pursuit of plants, among the vulgarities of Paris life you have at
last found a rare flower. This woman is attended by two very distinguished-looking
men, of whom one, at any rate, wears an order; or
else a servant out of livery follows her at a distance of ten yards. She
displays no gaudy colors, no open-worked stockings, no over-elaborate
waist-buckle, no embroidered frills to her drawers fussing round
her ankles. You will see that she is shod with prunella shoes, with
sandals crossed over extremely fine cotton stockings, or plain gray
silk stockings; or perhaps she wears boots of the most exquisite simplicity.
You notice that her gown is made of a neat and inexpensive
material, but made in a way that surprises more than one woman of
the middle class; it is almost always a long pelisse, with bows to fasten
it, and neatly bound with fine cord or an imperceptible braid. The
Unknown has a way of her own in wrapping herself in her shawl or
mantilla; she knows how to draw it round her from her hips to her
neck, outlining a carapace, as it were, which would make an ordinary
woman look like a turtle, but which in her sets off the most beautiful
forms while concealing them. How does she do it? This secret she
keeps, though unguarded by any patent.
“As she walks she gives herself a little concentric and harmonious
twist, which makes her supple or dangerous slenderness writhe under
the stuff, as a snake does under the green gauze of trembling grass. Is
it to an angel or a devil that she owes the graceful undulation which
plays under her long black silk cape, stirs its lace frill, sheds an airy
balm, and what I should like to call the breeze of a Parisienne? You
may recognize over her arms, round her waist, about her throat, a
science of drapery recalling the antique Mnemosyne.
“Oh! how thoroughly she understands the cut of her gait—forgive
the expression. Study the way she puts her foot forward moulding
her skirt with such a decent preciseness that the passer-by is filled
with admiration, mingled with desire, but subdued by deep respect.
When an Englishwoman attempts this step, she looks like a grenadier
marching forward to attack a redoubt. The women of Paris have
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a genius for walking. The municipality really owed them asphalt
footwalks.
“Our Unknown jostles no one. If she wants to pass, she waits with
proud humility till some one makes way. The distinction peculiar to
a well-bred woman betrays itself, especially in the way she holds her
shawl or cloak crossed over her bosom. Even as she walks she has a
little air of serene dignity, like Raphael’s Madonnas in their frames.
Her aspect, at once quiet and disdainful, makes the most insolent
dandy step aside for her.
“Her bonnet, remarkable for its simplicity, is trimmed with crisp
ribbons; there may be flowers in it, but the cleverest of such women
wear only bows. Feathers demand a carriage; flowers are too showy.
Beneath it you see the fresh unworn face of a woman who, without
conceit, is sure of herself; who looks at nothing, and sees everything;
whose vanity, satiated by being constantly gratified, stamps her face
with an indifference which piques your curiosity. She knows that she
is looked at, she knows that everybody, even women, turn round to
see her again. And she threads her way through Paris like a gossamer,
spotless and pure.
“This delightful species affects the hottest latitudes, the cleanest
longitudes of Paris; you will meet her between the 10th and 110th
Arcade of the Rue de Rivoli; along the line of the Boulevards from
the equator of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of
India flourish, where the warmest creations of industry are displayed,
to the Cape of the Madeleine; in the least muddy districts of the
citizen quarters, between No. 30 and No. 130 of the Rue du
Faubourg Saint-Honore. During the winter, she haunts the terrace of
the Feuillants, but not the asphalt pavement that lies parallel. According
to the weather, she may be seen flying in the Avenue of the
Champs-Elysees, which is bounded on the east by the Place Louis
XV., on the west by the Avenue de Marigny, to the south by the
road, to the north by the gardens of the Faubourg Saint-Honore.
Never is this pretty variety of woman to be seen in the hyperborean
regions of the Rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamtschatka of miry,
narrow, commercial streets, never anywhere in bad weather. These
flowers of Paris, blooming only in Oriental weather, perfume the
highways; and after five o’clock fold up like morning-glory flowers.
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The women you will see later, looking a little like them, are wouldbe
ladies; while the fair Unknown, your Beatrice of a day, is a ‘perfect
lady.’
“It is not very easy for a foreigner, my dear Count, to recognize the
differences by which the observer emeritus distinguishes them—
women are such consummate actresses; but they are glaring in the
eyes of Parisians: hooks ill fastened, strings showing loops of rustywhite
tape through a gaping slit in the back, rubbed shoe-leather,
ironed bonnet-strings, an over-full skirt, an over-tight waist. You will
see a certain effort in the intentional droop of the eyelid. There is
something conventional in the attitude.
“As to the bourgeoise, the citizen womankind, she cannot possibly
be mistaken for the spell cast over you by the Unknown. She is bustling,
and goes out in all weathers, trots about, comes, goes, gazes,
does not know whether she will or will not go into a shop. Where
the lady knows just what she wants and what she is doing, the townswoman
is undecided, tucks up her skirts to cross a gutter, dragging a
child by the hand, which compels her to look out for the vehicles;
she is a mother in public, and talks to her daughter; she carries money
in her bag, and has open-work stockings on her feet; in winter, she
wears a boa over her fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is
accomplished in the redundancies of dress.
“You will meet the fair Unknown again at the Italiens, at the Opera,
at a ball. She will then appear under such a different aspect that
you would think them two beings devoid of any analogy. The woman
has emerged from those mysterious garments like a butterfly from
its silky cocoon. She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished
eyes, the forms which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At
the theatre she never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at
the Italiens. You can there watch at your leisure the studied deliberateness
of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all the
little political artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude all idea of
art or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand, the most
perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely necessary that
she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet or curl she plays
with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will be persuaded that
she is giving irony or grace to what she says to her neighbor, sitting in
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such a position as to produce the magical effect of the ‘lost profile,’
so dear to great painters, by which the cheek catches the high light,
the nose is shown in clear outline, the nostrils are transparently rosy,
the forehead squarely modeled, the eye has its spangle of fire, but
fixed on space, and the white roundness of the chin is accentuated by
a line of light. If she has a pretty foot, she will throw herself on a sofa
with the coquettish grace of a cat in the sunshine, her feet outstretched
without your feeling that her attitude is anything but the most charming
model ever given to a sculptor by lassitude.
“Only the perfect lady is quite at her ease in full dress; nothing
inconveniences her. You will never see her, like the woman of the
citizen class, pulling up a refractory shoulder-strap, or pushing down
a rebellious whalebone, or looking whether her tucker is doing its
office of faithful guardian to two treasures of dazzling whiteness, or
glancing in the mirrors to see if her head-dress is keeping its place.
Her toilet is always in harmony with her character; she had had time
to study herself, to learn what becomes her, for she has long known
what does not suit her. You will not find her as you go out; she
vanishes before the end of the play. If by chance she is to be seen,
calm and stately, on the stairs, she is experiencing some violent emotion;
she has to bestow a glance, to receive a promise. Perhaps she
goes down so slowly on purpose to gratify the vanity of a slave whom
she sometimes obeys. If your meeting takes place at a ball or an evening
party, you will gather the honey, natural or affected of her insinuating
voice; her empty words will enchant you, and she will know how
to give them the value of thought by her inimitable bearing.”
“To be such a woman, is it not necessary to be very clever?” asked
the Polish Count.
“It is necessary to have great taste,” replied the Princesse de Cadignan.
“And in France taste is more than cleverness,” said the Russian.
“This woman’s cleverness is the triumph of a purely plastic art,”
Blondet went on. “You will not know what she said, but you will be
fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white shoulders;
she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout and
smile; or throw a Voltairean epigram into an ‘Indeed!’ an ‘Ah!’ a
‘What then!’ A jerk of her head will be her most pertinent form of
questioning; she will give meaning to the movement by which she
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twirls a vinaigrette hanging to her finger by a ring. She gets an artificial
grandeur out of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand
impressively, letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops
hang on the cup of a flower, and all is said—she has pronounced
judgment beyond appeal, to the apprehension of the most obtuse.
She knows how to listen to you; she gives you the opportunity of
shining, and—I ask your modesty—those moments are rare?”
The candid simplicity of the young Pole, to whom Blondet spoke,
made all the party shout with laughter.
“Now, you will not talk for half-an-hour with a bourgeoise without
her alluding to her husband in one way or another,” Blondet went on
with unperturbed gravity; “whereas, even if you know that your lady is
married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so effectually
that it will need the enterprise of Christopher Columbus to discover
him. Often you will fail in the attempt single-handed. If you
have had no opportunity of inquiring, towards the end of the evening
you detect her gazing fixedly at a middle-aged man wearing a decoration,
who bows and goes out. She has ordered her carriage, and goes.
“You are not the rose, but you have been with the rose, and you go
to bed under the golden canopy of a delicious dream, which will last
perhaps after Sleep, with his heavy finger, has opened the ivory gates
of the temple of dreams.
“The lady, when she is at home, sees no one before four; she is
shrewd enough always to keep you waiting. In her house you will
find everything in good taste; her luxury is for hourly use, and duly
renewed; you will see nothing under glass shades, no rags of wrappings
hanging about, and looking like a pantry. You will find the
staircase warmed. Flowers on all sides will charm your sight—flowers,
the only gift she accepts, and those only from certain people, for
nosegays live but a day; they give pleasure, and must be replaced; to
her they are, as in the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly toys
of fashion lie about, but not so as to suggest a museum or a curiosity
shop. You will find her sitting by the fire in a low chair, from which
she will not rise to greet you. Her talk will not now be what it was at
the ball; there she was our creditor; in her own home she owes you
the pleasure of her wit. These are the shades of which the lady is a
marvelous mistress. What she likes in you is a man to swell her circle,
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an object for the cares and attentions which such women are now
happy to bestow. Therefore, to attract you to her drawing-room, she
will be bewitchingly charming. This especially is where you feel how
isolated women are nowadays, and why they want a little world of
their own, to which they may seem a constellation. Conversation is
impossible without generalities.”
“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have truly hit the fault of our age. The
epigram—a volume in a word—no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events, and
it dies in a day.”
“Hence,” said Blondet, “the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great difference
between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous; the lady
does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will be; she
hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank and falls full
length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last graces left to her
by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church, but she will talk to
you of religion; and if you have the good taste to affect Free-thought,
she will try to convert you, for you will have opened the way for the
stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and gestures understood by all
these women: ‘For shame! I thought you had too much sense to attack
religion. Society is tottering, and you deprive it of its support. Why,
religion at this moment means you and me; it is property, and the
future of our children! Ah! let us not be selfish! Individualism is the
disease of the age, and religion is the only remedy; it unites families
which your laws put asunder,’ and so forth. Then she plunges into
some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with political notions which is
neither Catholic nor Protestant—but moral? Oh! deuced moral!—in
which you may recognize a fag end of every material woven by modern
doctrines, at loggerheads together.”
The women could not help laughing at the airs by which Blondet
illustrated his satire.
“This explanation, dear Count Adam,” said Blondet, turning to
the Pole, “will have proved to you that the ‘perfect lady’ represents
the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is surrounded
by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry
which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by
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something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She certainly
has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because she
will have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked
you your secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there are
some things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You
alone will be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart.
The great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers
and advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion neatly
ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and minims,
its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak women,
she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or the
future of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer
flags so respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board.
The whole aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the
lady. She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of
lofty antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who
would be crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical mezzo termine, she is a
creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of anonymous
passions steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as much
afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a
trial in the divorce-court. This woman—so free at a ball, so attractive
out walking—is a slave at home; she is never independent but in
perfect privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in her position
as a lady. This is her task.
“For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a
meagre allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of
the divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a
townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will
not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover
still have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect
lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander.”
“It is all so horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.
“And so,” said Blondet, “our ‘perfect lady’ lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century—a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows
up is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures shrink
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into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am fully
convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born
close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the
encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the
important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring,
the angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the
silence, the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness,
the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.”
“And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn,” said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “would you class the
female author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman comme il faut?”
“When she has no genius, she is a woman comme il n’en faut pas,”
Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen glance, which
might make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille Maupin.
“This epigram is not mine, but Napoleon’s,” he added.
“You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score,” said Canalis,
with an emphatic tone and gesture. “It was one of his weaknesses to
be jealous of literary genius—for he had his mean points. Who will
ever explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented
with his arms folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest
force ever known, the most concentrated, the most mordant, the
most acid of all forces; a singular genius who carried armed civilization
in every direction without fixing it anywhere; a man who could
do everything because he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon
of will, conquering an illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die
of disease in bed after living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man
with a code and a sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted
spirit that foresaw everything but his own fall; a capricious politician
who risked men by handfuls out of economy, and who spared three
heads—those of Talleyrand, of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich,
diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire, and
who seemed to him of greater weight than thousands of soldiers; a
man to whom nature, as a rare privilege, had given a heart in a frame
of bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight amid women, and next
morning manipulating Europe as a young girl might amuse herself
by splashing water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous; loving
tawdriness and simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the arts;
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and in spite of these antitheses, really great in everything by instinct
or by temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty;
and then, like my grocer buried in Pere Lachaise, a good husband and
a good father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings,
codes, verses, a romance—and all with more range than precision.
Did he not aim at making all Europe France? And after making us
weigh on the earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation,
he left us poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us;
while he, who had taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the
frontier of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man all thought
and all action, who comprehended Desaix and Fouche.”
“All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!”
said de Marsay.
“Ah! vat a pleashre it is to dichest vile you talk,” said Baron de
Nucingen.
“But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common
one?” asked Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the charms of
conversation as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune
would be inadequate! There is no second performance of the
same flash of wit.”
“And are we really so much deteriorated as these gentlemen think?”
said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the women with a smile at
once sceptical and ironical. “Because, in these days, under a regime
which makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms,
small pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that
prove that women too have grown smaller? Why should the human
heart change because you change your coat? In all ages the passions
remain the same. I know cases of beautiful devotion, of sublime sufferings,
which lack the publicity—the glory, if you choose—which
formerly gave lustre to the errors of some women. But though one
may not have saved a King of France, one is not the less an Agnes Sorel.
Do you believe that our dear Marquise d’Espard is not the peer of
Madame Doublet, or Madame du Deffant, in whose rooms so much
evil was spoken and done? Is not Taglioni a match for Camargo? or
Malibran the equal of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets superior to
those of the eighteenth century? If at this moment, through the fault
of the Grocers who govern us, we have not a style of our own, had not
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the Empire its distinguishing stamp as the age of Louis XV. had, and
was not its splendor fabulous? Have the sciences lost anything?”
“I am quite of your opinion, madame; the women of this age are
truly great,” replied the Comte de Vandenesse. “When posterity shall
have followed us, will not Madame Recamier appear in proportions
as fine as those of the most beautiful women of the past? We have
made so much history that historians will be lacking. The age of
Louis XIV. had but one Madame de Sevigne; we have a thousand
now in Paris who certainly write better than she did, and who do not
publish their letters. Whether the Frenchwoman be called ‘perfect
lady,’ or great lady, she will always be the woman among women.
“Emile Blondet has given us a picture of the fascinations of a woman
of the day; but, at need, this creature who bridles or shows off, who
chirps out the ideas of Mr. This and Mr. That, would be heroic. And
it must be said, your faults, mesdames, are all the more poetical,
because they must always and under all circumstances be surrounded
by greater perils. I have seen much of the world, I have studied it
perhaps too late; but in cases where the illegality of your feelings
might be excused, I have always observed the effects of I know not
what chance—which you may call Providence—inevitably overwhelming
such as we consider light women.”
“I hope,” said Madame de Vandenesse, “that we can be great in
other ways—”
“Oh, let the Comte de Vandenesse preach to us!” exclaimed Madame
de Serizy.
“With all the more reason because he has preached a great deal by
example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.
“On my honor!” said General de Montriveau, “in all the dramas—a
word you are very fond of,” he said, looking at Blondet— “in which
the finger of God has been visible, the most frightful I ever knew was
very near being by my act—”
“Well, tell us all about it!” cried Lady Barimore; “I love to shudder!”
“It is the taste of a virtuous woman,” replied de Marsay, looking at
Lord Dudley’s lovely daughter.
“During the campaign of 1812,” General de Montriveau began, “I
was the involuntary cause of a terrible disaster which may be of use
to you, Doctor Bianchon,” turning to me, “since, while devoting
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yourself to the human body, you concern yourself a good deal with
the mind; it may tend to solve some of the problems of the will.
“I was going through my second campaign; I enjoyed danger, and
laughed at everything, like the young and foolish lieutenant of artillery
that I was. When we reached the Beresina, the army had, as you
know, lost all discipline, and had forgotten military obedience. It
was a medley of men of all nations, instinctively making their way
from north to south. The soldiers would drive a general in rags and
bare-foot away from their fire if he brought neither wood nor victuals.
After the passage of this famous river disorder did not diminish.
I had come quietly and alone, without food, out of the marshes of
Zembin, and was wandering in search of a house where I might be
taken in. Finding none or driven away from those I came across,
happily towards evening I perceived a wretched little Polish farm, of
which nothing can give you any idea unless you have seen the wooden
houses of Lower Normandy, or the poorest farm-buildings of la
Beauce. These dwellings consist of a single room, with one end divided
off by a wooden partition, the smaller division serving as a
store-room for forage.
“In the darkness of twilight I could just see a faint smoke rising
above this house. Hoping to find there some comrades more compassionate
than those I had hitherto addressed, I boldly walked as far as
the farm. On going in, I found the table laid. Several officers, and with
them a woman—a common sight enough—were eating potatoes, some
horseflesh broiled over the charcoal, and some frozen beetroots. I recognized
among the company two or three artillery captains of the regiment
in which I had first served. I was welcomed with a shout of
acclamation, which would have amazed me greatly on the other side of
the Beresina; but at this moment the cold was less intense; my fellowofficers
were resting, they were warm, they had food, and the room,
strewn with trusses of straw, gave the promise of a delightful night. We
did not ask for so much in those days. My comrades could be philanthropists
gratis—one of the commonest ways of being philanthropic. I
sat down to eat on one of the bundles of straw.
“At the end of the table, by the side of the door opening into the
smaller room full of straw and hay, sat my old colonel, one of the
most extraordinary men I ever saw among all the mixed collection of
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Balzac
men it has been my lot to meet. He was an Italian. Now, whenever
human nature is truly fine in the lands of the South, it is really sublime.
I do not know whether you have ever observed the extreme
fairness of Italians when they are fair. It is exquisite, especially under
an artificial light. When I read the fantastical portrait of Colonel
Oudet sketched by Charles Nodier, I found my own sensations in
every one of his elegant phrases. Italian, then, as were most of the
officers of his regiment, which had, in fact, been borrowed by the
Emperor from Eugene’s army, my colonel was a tall man, at least
eight or nine inches above the standard, and was admirably proportioned—a
little stout perhaps, but prodigiously powerful, active, and
clean-limbed as a greyhound. His black hair in abundant curls showed
up his complexion, as white as a woman’s; he had small hands, a
shapely foot, a pleasant mouth, and an aquiline nose delicately formed,
of which the tip used to become naturally pinched and white whenever
he was angry, as happened often. His irascibility was so far beyond
belief that I will tell you nothing about it; you will have the
opportunity of judging of it. No one could be calm in his presence.
I alone, perhaps, was not afraid of him; he had indeed taken such a
singular fancy to me that he thought everything I did right. When he
was in a rage his brow was knit and the muscles of the middle of his
forehead set in a delta, or, to be more explicit, in Redgauntlet’s horseshoe.
This mark was, perhaps, even more terrifying than the magnetic
flashes of his blue eyes. His whole frame quivered, and his
strength, great as it was in his normal state, became almost unbounded.
“He spoke with a strong guttural roll. His voice, at least as powerful
as that of Charles Nordier’s Oudet, threw an incredible fulness of
tone into the syllable or the consonant in which this burr was sounded.
Though this faulty pronunciation was at times a grace, when commanding
his men, or when he was excited, you cannot imagine, unless
you had heard it, what force was expressed by this accent, which
at Paris is so common. When the Colonel was quiescent, his blue
eyes were angelically sweet, and his smooth brow had a most charming
expression. On parade, or with the army of Italy, not a man
could compare with him. Indeed, d’Orsay himself, the handsome
d’Orsay, was eclipsed by our colonel on the occasion of the last review
held by Napoleon before the invasion of Russia.
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Another Study of Woman
“Everything was in contrasts in this exceptional man. Passion lives
on contrast. Hence you need not ask whether he exerted over women
the irresistible influences to which our nature yields”—and the general
looked at the Princesse de Cadignan—”as vitreous matter is
moulded under the pipe of the glass-blower; still, by a singular fatality—an
observer might perhaps explain the phenomenon—the Colonel
was not a lady-killer, or was indifferent to such successes.
“To give you an idea of his violence, I will tell you in a few words
what I once saw him do in a paroxysm of fury. We were dragging our
guns up a very narrow road, bordered by a somewhat high slope on
one side, and by thickets on the other. When we were half-way up
we met another regiment of artillery, its colonel marching at the
head. This colonel wanted to make the captain who was at the head
of our foremost battery back down again. The captain, of course,
refused; but the colonel of the other regiment signed to his foremost
battery to advance, and in spite of the care the driver took to keep
among the scrub, the wheel of the first gun struck our captain’s right
leg and broke it, throwing him over on the near side of his horse. All
this was the work of a moment. Our Colonel, who was but a little
way off, guessed that there was a quarrel; he galloped up, riding among
the guns at the risk of falling with his horse’s four feet in the air, and
reached the spot, face to face with the other colonel, at the very moment
when the captain fell, calling out ‘Help!’ No, our Italian colonel
was no longer human! Foam like the froth of champagne rose to
his lips; he roared inarticulately like a lion. Incapable of uttering a
word, or even a cry, he made a terrific signal to his antagonist, pointing
to the wood and drawing his sword. The two colonels went
aside. In two seconds we saw our Colonel’s opponent stretched on
the ground, his skull split in two. The soldiers of his regiment
backed—yes, by heaven, and pretty quickly too.
“The captain, who had been so nearly crushed, and who lay yelping
in the puddle where the gun carriage had thrown him, had an Italian
wife, a beautiful Sicilian of Messina, who was not indifferent to our
Colonel. This circumstance had aggravated his rage. He was pledged to
protect the husband, bound to defend him as he would have defended
the woman herself.
“Now, in the hovel beyond Zembin, where I was so well received,
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Balzac
this captain was sitting opposite to me, and his wife was at the other
end of the table, facing the Colonel. This Sicilian was a little woman
named Rosina, very dark, but with all the fire of the Southern sun in
her black almond-shaped eyes. At this moment she was deplorably
thin; her face was covered with dust, like fruit exposed to the drought
of a highroad. Scarcely clothed in rags, exhausted by marches, her hair
in disorder, and clinging together under a piece of a shawl tied close
over her head, still she had the graces of a woman; her movements
were engaging, her small rose mouth and white teeth, the outline of
her features and figure, charms which misery, cold, and neglect had not
altogether defaced, still suggested love to any man who could think of
a woman. Rosina had one of those frames which are fragile in appearance,
but wiry and full of spring. Her husband, a gentleman of Piedmont,
had a face expressive of ironical simplicity, if it is allowable to
ally the two words. Brave and well informed, he seemed to know
nothing of the connections which had subsisted between his wife and
the Colonel for three years past. I ascribed this unconcern to Italian
manners, or to some domestic secret; yet there was in the man’s countenance
one feature which always filled me with involuntary distrust.
His under lip, which was thin and very restless, turned down at the
corners instead of turning up, and this, as I thought, betrayed a streak
of cruelty in a character which seemed so phlegmatic and indolent.
“As you may suppose the conversation was not very sparkling when
I went in. My weary comrades ate in silence; of course, they asked
me some questions, and we related our misadventures, mingled with
reflections on the campaign, the generals, their mistakes, the Russians,
and the cold. A minute after my arrival the colonel, having
finished his meagre meal, wiped his moustache, bid us good-night,
shot a black look at the Italian woman, saying, ‘Rosina?’ and then,
without waiting for a reply, went into the little barn full of hay, to
bed. The meaning of the Colonel’s utterance was self-evident. The
young wife replied by an indescribable gesture, expressing all the annoyance
she could not feel at seeing her thralldom thus flaunted without
human decency, and the offence to her dignity as a woman, and
to her husband. But there was, too, in the rigid setting of her features
and the tight knitting of her brows a sort of presentiment; perhaps
she foresaw her fate. Rosina remained quietly in her place.
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Another Study of Woman
“A minute later, and apparently when the Colonel was snug in his
couch of straw or hay, he repeated, ‘Rosina?’
“The tone of this second call was even more brutally questioning
than the first. The Colonel’s strong burr, and the length which the
Italian language allows to be given to vowels and the final syllable,
concentrated all the man’s despotism, impatience, and strength of
will. Rosina turned pale, but she rose, passed behind us, and went to
the Colonel.
“All the party sat in utter silence; I, unluckily, after looking at them
all, began to laugh, and then they all laughed too.— ‘Tu ridi? —you
laugh?’ said the husband.
“ ‘On my honor, old comrade,’ said I, becoming serious again, ‘I
confess that I was wrong; I ask your pardon a thousand times, and
if you are not satisfied by my apologies I am ready to give you
satisfaction.’
“ ‘Oh! it is not you who are wrong, it is I!’ he replied coldly.
“Thereupon we all lay down in the room, and before long all were
sound asleep.
“Next morning each one, without rousing his neighbor or seeking
companionship, set out again on his way, with that selfishness which
made our rout one of the most horrible dramas of self-seeking, melancholy,
and horror which ever was enacted under heaven. Nevertheless,
at about seven or eight hundred paces from our shelter we, most
of us, met again and walked on together, like geese led in flocks by a
child’s wilful tyranny. The same necessity urged us all.
“Having reached a knoll where we could still see the farmhouse
where we had spent the night, we heard sounds resembling the roar
of lions in the desert, the bellowing of bulls—no, it was a noise
which can be compared to no known cry. And yet, mingling with
this horrible and ominous roar, we could hear a woman’s feeble
scream. We all looked round, seized by I know not what impulse of
terror; we no longer saw the house, but a huge bonfire. The farmhouse
had been barricaded, and was in flames. Swirls of smoke borne
on the wind brought us hoarse cries and an indescribable pungent
smell. A few yards behind, the captain was quietly approaching to
join our caravan; we gazed at him in silence, for no one dared question
him; but he, understanding our curiosity, pointed to his breast
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Balzac
with the forefinger of his right hand, and, waving the left in the
direction of the fire, he said, ‘Son’io.’
“We all walked on without saying a word to him.”
“There is nothing more terrible than the revolt of a sheep,” said de
Marsay.
“It would be frightful to let us leave with this horrible picture in
our memory,” said Madame de Montcornet. “I shall dream of it—”
“And what was the punishment of Monsieur de Marsay’s ‘First’?”
said Lord Dudley, smiling.
“When the English are in jest, their foils have the buttons on,” said
Blondet.
“Monsieur Bianchon can tell us, for he saw her dying,” replied de
Marsay, turning to me.
“Yes,” said I; “and her end was one of the most beautiful I ever saw.
The Duke and I had spent the night by the dying woman’s pillow;
pulmonary consumption, in the last stage, left no hope; she had taken
the sacrament the day before. The Duke had fallen asleep. The Duchess,
waking at about four in the morning, signed to me in the most
touching way, with a friendly smile, to bid me leave him to rest, and
she meanwhile was about to die. She had become incredibly thin,
but her face had preserved its really sublime outline and features. Her
pallor made her skin look like porcelain with a light within. Her
bright eyes and color contrasted with this languidly elegant complexion,
and her countenance was full of expressive calm. She seemed to
pity the Duke, and the feeling had its origin in a lofty tenderness
which, as death approached, seemed to know no bounds. The silence
was absolute. The room, softly lighted by a lamp, looked like every
sickroom at the hour of death.
“At this moment the clock struck. The Duke awoke, and was in
despair at having fallen asleep. I did not see the gesture of impatience
by which he manifested the regret he felt at having lost sight of his
wife for a few of the last minutes vouchsafed to him; but it is quite
certain that any one but the dying woman might have misunderstood
it. A busy statesman, always thinking of the interests of France,
the Duke had a thousand odd ways on the surface, such as often lead
to a man of genius being mistaken for a madman, and of which the
explanation lies in the exquisiteness and exacting needs of their intel-
251

Another Study of Woman
lect. He came to seat himself in an armchair by his wife’s side, and
looked fixedly at her. The dying woman put her hand out a little
way, took her husband’s and clasped it feebly; and in a low but agitated
voice she said, ‘My poor dear, who is left to understand you
now?’ Then she died, looking at him.”
“The stories the doctor tells us,” said the Comte de Vandenesse,
“always leave a deep impression.”
“But a sweet one,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, rising.
252
Addendum
Paris, June 1839-42.
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
The Atheist’s Mass
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin

A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
La Grande Breteche
Blondet, Emile
Jealousies of a Country Town
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
The Firm of Nucingen
The Peasantry
Blondet, Virginie (Madame Montcornet)
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Secrets of a Princess
The Peasantry
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Member for Arcis
A Daughter of Eve
Bridau, Joseph
The Purse
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Start in Life
Modeste Mignon
Pierre Grassou
Letters of Two Brides
Balzac
253

Another Study of Woman
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
Letters of Two Brides
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Modeste Mignon
The Magic Skin
A Start in Life
Beatrix
The Unconscious Humorists
The Member for Arcis
Dudley, Lord
The Lily of the Valley
The Thirteen
A Man of Business
A Daughter of Eve
Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise
d’
The Commission in Lunacy
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Letters of Two Brides
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
Beatrix
Laginski, Comte Adam Mitgislas
The Imaginary Mistress
Cousin Betty
Marsay, Henri de
The Thirteen
The Unconscious Humorists
254

The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de
The Secrets of a Princess
Modeste Mignon
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Muse of the Department
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Letters of Two Brides
The Gondreville Mystery
The Member for Arcis
Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de
The Thirteen
Father Goriot
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Pierrette
The Member for Arcis
Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
The Firm of Nucingen
Father Goriot
Pierrette
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
Balzac
255

Another Study of Woman
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Secrets of a Princess
A Man of Business
Cousin Betty
The Muse of the Department
The Unconscious Humorists
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
Father Goriot
The Thirteen
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Melmoth Reconciled
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Portenduere, Vicomtesse Savinien de
Ursule Mirouet
Beatrix
Rastignac, Eugene de
Father Goriot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Commission in Lunacy
A Study of Woman
The Magic Skin
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
256

The Gondreville Mystery
The Firm of Nucingen
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
The Unconscious Humorists
Ronquerolles, Marquis de
The Imaginary Mistress
The Peasantry
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
The Thirteen
The Member for Arcis
Serizy, Comtesse de
A Start in Life
The Thirteen
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Imaginary Mistress
Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des
Beatrix
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Daughter of Eve
Honorine
Beatrix
The Muse of the Department
Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
The Lily of the Valley
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Balzac
257

Another Study of Woman
Cesar Birotteau
Letters of Two Brides
A Start in Life
The Marriage Settlement
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
258

The Atheist’s Mass
by
Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
This is dedicated to Auguste Borget
by his friend De Balzac
Balzac
BIANCHON, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical
physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity
in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which
European doctors do homage, practised surgery for a long time before
he took up medicine. His earliest studies were guided by one of
the greatest of French surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed
across science like a meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he
took with him to the tomb an incommunicable method. Like all
men of genius, he had no heirs; he carried everything in him, and
carried it away with him. The glory of a surgeon is like that of an
actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves
no trace when they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers
too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power
of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of
such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day almost
forgotten, will survive in his special department without crossing its
limits. For must there not be some extraordinary circumstances to
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The Atheist’s Mass
exalt the name of a professor from the history of Science to the general
history of the human race? Had Desplein that universal command
of knowledge which makes a man the living word, the great
figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer
and his malady by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled
him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine
the very time, the hour, the minute when an operation should be
performed, making due allowance for atmospheric conditions and
peculiarities of individual temperament. To proceed thus, hand in
hand with nature, had he then studied the constant assimilation by
living beings, of the elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded
by the earth to man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular
expression of life? Did he work it all out by the power of
deduction and analogy, to which we owe the genius of Cuvier? Be
this as it may, this man was in all the secrets of the human frame; he
knew it in the past and in the future, emphasizing the present.
But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates
did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards
new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent
observer of human chemistry possessed that antique science of the
Mages, that is to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes
of life, life antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or
ever it IS, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him
was purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism
is now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming
statue to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at
its own cost.
But perhaps Desplein’s genius was answerable for his beliefs, and
for that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative
envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not
being able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he
would not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither
in the antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein
had no doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism
was like that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but
invincible atheists—atheists such as religious people declare to be
impossible. This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who
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Balzac
was accustomed from his youth to dissect the creature above all others—before,
during, and after life; to hunt through all his organs
without ever finding the individual soul, which is indispensable to
religious theory. When he detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre,
and a centre for aerating the blood—the first two so perfectly
complementary that in the latter years of his life he came to a conviction
that the sense of hearing is not absolutely necessary for hearing,
nor the sense of sight for seeing, and that the solar plexus could supply
their place without any possibility of doubt—Desplein, thus finding
two souls in man, confirmed his atheism by this fact, though it is
no evidence against God. This man died, it is said, in final impenitence,
as do, unfortunately, many noble geniuses, whom God may
forgive.
The life of this man, great as he was, was marred by many
meannesses, to use the expression employed by his enemies, who
were anxious to diminish his glory, but which it would be more
proper to call apparent contradictions. Envious people and fools,
having no knowledge of the determinations by which superior spirits
are moved, seize at once on superficial inconsistencies, to formulate
an accusation and so to pass sentence on them. If, subsequently,
the proceedings thus attacked are crowned with success, showing the
correlations of the preliminaries and the results, a few of the vanguard
of calumnies always survive. In our day, for instance, Napoleon
was condemned by our contemporaries when he spread his eagle’s
wings to alight in England: only 1822 could explain 1804 and the
flatboats at Boulogne.
As, in Desplein, his glory and science were invulnerable, his enemies
attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact, he
was simply characterized by what the English call eccentricity. Sometimes
very handsomely dressed, like Crebillon the tragical, he would
suddenly affect extreme indifference as to what he wore; he was sometimes
seen in a carriage, and sometimes on foot. By turns rough and
kind, harsh and covetous on the surface, but capable of offering his
whole fortune to his exiled masters—who did him the honor of
accepting it for a few days—no man ever gave rise to such contradictory
judgements. Although to obtain a black ribbon, which physicians
ought not to intrigue for, he was capable of dropping a prayer-
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The Atheist’s Mass
book out of his pocket at Court, in his heart he mocked at everything;
he had a deep contempt for men, after studying them from
above and below, after detecting their genuine expression when performing
the most solemn and the meanest acts of their lives.
The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these
colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still superior
to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that “he is witty.”
Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may be applied
to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must be able to
see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has saved ask,
“How is the Emperor?” could say, “The courtier is alive; the man will
follow!”—that man is not merely a surgeon or a physician, he is prodigiously
witty also. Hence a patient and diligent student of human
nature will admit Desplein’s exorbitant pretensions, and believe—as he
himself believed—that he might have been no less great as a minister
than he was as a surgeon.
Among the riddles which Desplein’s life presents to many of his
contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting, because
the answer is to be found at the end of the narrative, and will avenge
him for some foolish charges.
Of all the students in Desplein’s hospital, Horace Bianchon was
one of those to whom he most warmly attached himself. Before
being a house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been
a medical student lodging in a squalid boarding house in the Quartier
Latin, known as the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man had felt
there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible
from which great talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as
diamonds, which may be subjected to any shock without being
crushed. In the fierce fire of their unbridled passions they acquire the
most impeccable honesty, and get into the habit of fighting the battles
which await genius with the constant work by which they coerce
their cheated appetites.
Horace was an upright young fellow, incapable of tergiversation
on a matter of honor, going to the point without waste of words,
and as ready to pledge his cloak for a friend as to give him his time
and his night hours. Horace, in short, was one of those friends who
are never anxious as to what they may get in return for what they
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Balzac
give, feeling sure that they will in their turn get more than they give.
Most of his friends felt for him that deeply-seated respect which is
inspired by unostentatious virtue, and many of them dreaded his
censure. But Horace made no pedantic display of his qualities. He
was neither a puritan nor a preacher; he could swear with a grace as he
gave his advice, and was always ready for a jollification when occasion
offered. A jolly companion, not more prudish than a trooper, as
frank and outspoken—not as a sailor, for nowadays sailors are wily
diplomates—but as an honest man who has nothing in his life to
hide, he walked with his head erect, and a mind content. In short, to
put the facts into a word, Horace was the Pylades of more than one
Orestes—creditors being regarded as the nearest modern equivalent
to the Furies of the ancients.
He carried his poverty with the cheerfulness which is perhaps one
of the chief elements of courage, and, like all people who have nothing,
he made very few debts. As sober as a camel and active as a stag,
he was steadfast in his ideas and his conduct.
The happy phase of Bianchon’s life began on the day when the
famous surgeon had proof of the qualities and the defects which,
these no less than those, make Doctor Horace Bianchon doubly dear
to his friends. When a leading clinical practitioner takes a young man
to his bosom, that young man has, as they say, his foot in the stirrup.
Desplein did not fail to take Bianchon as his assistant to wealthy
houses, where some complimentary fee almost always found its way
into the student’s pocket, and where the mysteries of Paris life were
insensibly revealed to the young provincial; he kept him at his side
when a consultation was to be held, and gave him occupation; sometimes
he would send him to a watering-place with a rich patient; in
fact, he was making a practice for him. The consequence was that in
the course of time the Tyrant of surgery had a devoted ally. These
two men—one at the summit of honor and of his science, enjoying
an immense fortune and an immense reputation; the other a humble
Omega, having neither fortune nor fame—became intimate friends.
The great Desplein told his house surgeon everything; the disciple
knew whether such or such a woman had sat on a chair near the
master, or on the famous couch in Desplein’s surgery, on which he
slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament, a com-
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pound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and enlarged
beyond measure the great man’s torso, and caused his death by degeneration
of the heart. He studied the eccentricities of that busy life,
the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes of the politician who
lurked behind the man of science; he was able to foresee the mortifications
that awaited the only sentiment that lay hid in a heart that
was steeled, but not of steel.
One day Bianchon spoke to Desplein of a poor water-carrier of the
Saint-Jacques district, who had a horrible disease caused by fatigue
and want; this wretched Auvergnat had had nothing but potatoes to
eat during the dreadful winter of 1821. Desplein left all his visits,
and at the risk of killing his horse, he rushed off, followed by
Bianchon, to the poor man’s dwelling, and saw, himself, to his being
removed to a sick house, founded by the famous Dubois in the
Faubourg Saint-Denis. Then he went to attend the man, and when
he had cured him he gave him the necessary sum to buy a horse and
a water-barrel. This Auvergnat distinguished himself by an amusing
action. One of his friends fell ill, and he took him at once to Desplein,
saying to his benefactor, “I could not have borne to let him go to any
one else!”
Rough customer as he was, Desplein grasped the water-carrier’s
hand, and said, “Bring them all to me.”
He got the native of Cantal into the Hotel-Dieu, where he took
the greatest care of him. Bianchon had already observed in his chief a
predilection for Auvergnats, and especially for water carriers; but as
Desplein took a sort of pride in his cures at the Hotel-Dieu, the
pupil saw nothing very strange in that.
One day, as he crossed the Place Saint-Sulpice, Bianchon caught
sight of his master going into the church at about nine in the morning.
Desplein, who at that time never went a step without his cab,
was on foot, and slipped in by the door in the Rue du Petit-Lion,
as if he were stealing into some house of ill fame. The house surgeon,
naturally possessed by curiosity, knowing his master’s opinions,
and being himself a rabid follower of Cabanis (Cabaniste en
dyable, with the y, which in Rabelais seems to convey an intensity
of devilry)—Bianchon stole into the church, and was not a little
astonished to see the great Desplein, the atheist, who had no mercy
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on the angels—who give no work to the lancet, and cannot suffer
from fistula or gastritis—in short, this audacious scoffer kneeling
humbly, and where? In the Lady Chapel, where he remained through
the mass, giving alms for the expenses of the service, alms for the
poor, and looking as serious as though he were superintending an
operation.
“He has certainly not come here to clear up the question of the
Virgin’s delivery,” said Bianchon to himself, astonished beyond measure.
“If I had caught him holding one of the ropes of the canopy on
Corpus Christi day, it would be a thing to laugh at; but at this hour,
alone, with no one to see—it is surely a thing to marvel at!”
Bianchon did not wish to seem as though he were spying the head
surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu; he went away. As it happened, Desplein
asked him to dine with him that day, not at his own house, but at a
restaurant. At dessert Bianchon skilfully contrived to talk of the mass,
speaking of it as mummery and a farce.
“A farce,” said Desplein, “which has cost Christendom more blood
than all Napoleon’s battles and all Broussais’ leeches. The mass is a
papal invention, not older than the sixth century, and based on the
Hoc est corpus. What floods of blood were shed to establish the
Fete-Dieu, the Festival of Corpus Christi—the institution by which
Rome established her triumph in the question of the Real Presence, a
schism which rent the Church during three centuries! The wars of
the Count of Toulouse against the Albigenses were the tail end of
that dispute. The Vaudois and the Albigenses refused to recognize
this innovation.”
In short, Desplein was delighted to disport himself in his most
atheistical vein; a flow of Voltairean satire, or, to be accurate, a vile
imitation of the Citateur.
“Hallo! where is my worshiper of this morning?” said Bianchon to
himself.
He said nothing; he began to doubt whether he had really seen his
chief at Saint-Sulpice. Desplein would not have troubled himself to
tell Bianchon a lie, they knew each other too well; they had already
exchanged thoughts on quite equally serious subjects, and discussed
systems de natura rerum, probing or dissecting them with the knife
and scalpel of incredulity.
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Three months went by. Bianchon did not attempt to follow the
matter up, though it remained stamped on his memory. One day
that year, one of the physicians of the Hotel-Dieu took Desplein by
the arm, as if to question him, in Bianchon’s presence.
“What were you doing at Saint-Sulpice, my dear master?” said he.
“I went to see a priest who has a diseased knee-bone, and to whom
the Duchesse d’Angouleme did me the honor to recommend me,”
said Desplein.
The questioner took this defeat for an answer; not so Bianchon.
“Oh, he goes to see damaged knees in church!—He went to mass,”
said the young man to himself.
Bianchon resolved to watch Desplein. He remembered the day
and hour when he had detected him going into Saint-Sulpice, and
resolved to be there again next year on the same day and at the same
hour, to see if he should find him there again. In that case the periodicity
of his devotion would justify a scientific investigation; for in
such a man there ought to be no direct antagonism of thought and
action.
Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already
ceased to be Desplein’s house surgeon, saw the great man’s cab standing
at the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du Petit-Lion,
whence his friend jesuitically crept along by the wall of Saint-Sulpice,
and once more attended mass in front of the Virgin’s altar. It was
Desplein, sure enough! The master-surgeon, the atheist at heart, the
worshiper by chance. The mystery was greater than ever; the regularity
of the phenomenon complicated it. When Desplein had left,
Bianchon went to the sacristan, who took charge of the chapel, and
asked him whether the gentleman were a constant worshiper.
“For twenty years that I have been here,” replied the man, “M.
Desplein has come four times a year to attend this mass. He founded
it.”
“A mass founded by him!” said Bianchon, as he went away. “This
is as great a mystery as the Immaculate Conception—an article which
alone is enough to make a physician an unbeliever.”
Some time elapsed before Doctor Bianchon, though so much his
friend, found an opportunity of speaking to Desplein of this incident
of his life. Though they met in consultation, or in society, it
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was difficult to find an hour of confidential solitude when, sitting
with their feet on the fire-dogs and their head resting on the back of
an armchair, two men tell each other their secrets. At last, seven years
later, after the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the
Archbishop’s residence, when Republican agitators spurred them on
to destroy the gilt crosses which flashed like streaks of lightning in
the immensity of the ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted
itself in the streets, side by side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more
detected Desplein going into Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him,
and knelt down by him without the slightest notice or demonstration
of surprise from his friend. They both attended this mass of his
founding.
“Will you tell me, my dear fellow,” said Bianchon, as they left the
church, “the reason for your fit of monkishness? I have caught you
three times going to mass—— You! You must account to me for this
mystery, explain such a flagrant disagreement between your opinions
and your conduct. You do not believe in God, and yet you attend
mass? My dear master, you are bound to give me an answer.”
“I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are
deeply religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be.”
And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,
of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new
edition of Moliere’s Tartufe.
“All that has nothing to do with my question,” retorted Bianchon.
“I want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and
why you founded this mass.”
“Faith! my dear boy,” said Desplein, “I am on the verge of the
tomb; I may safely tell you about the beginning of my life.”
At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to
the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which
the narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the
end, with windows appropriately termed “borrowed lights”—or, in
French, jours de souffrance. It was a greenish structure; the ground
floor occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter
a different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his
arm with a vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:
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“I lived up there for two years.”
“I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day during
my first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of great men!
What then?”
“The mass I have just attended is connected with some events which
took place at the time when I lived in the garret where you say Arthez
lived; the one with the window where the clothes line is hanging
with linen over a pot of flowers. My early life was so hard, my dear
Bianchon, that I may dispute the palm of Paris suffering with any
man living. I have endured everything: hunger and thirst, want of
money, want of clothes, of shoes, of linen, every cruelty that penury
can inflict. I have blown on my frozen fingers in that pickle-jar of
great men, which I should like to see again, now, with you. I worked
through a whole winter, seeing my head steam, and perceiving the
atmosphere of my own moisture as we see that of horses on a frosty
day. I do not know where a man finds the fulcrum that enables him
to hold out against such a life.
“I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or
to pay the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my
irascible, touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood
that this irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the
bottom of the social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I
had, as I may say to you, before whom I need wear no draperies, I
had that ground-bed of good feeling and keen sensitiveness which
must always be the birthright of any man who is strong enough to
climb to any height whatever, after having long trampled in the bogs
of poverty. I could obtain nothing from my family, nor from my
home, beyond my inadequate allowance. In short, at that time, I
breakfasted off a roll which the baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold
me cheap because it was left from yesterday or the day before, and I
crumbled it into milk; thus my morning meal cost me but two sous.
I dined only every other day in a boarding-house where the meal cost
me sixteen sous. You know as well as I what care I must have taken of
my clothes and shoes. I hardly know whether in later life we feel grief
so deep when a colleague plays us false as we have known, you and I,
on detecting the mocking smile of a gaping seam in a shoe, or hearing
the armhole of a coat split, I drank nothing but water; I regarded
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a cafe with distant respect. Zoppi’s seemed to me a promised land
where none but the Lucullus of the pays Latin had a right of entry.
‘Shall I ever take a cup of coffee there with milk in it?’ said I to
myself, ‘or play a game of dominoes?’
“I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to
master positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value,
and merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from
nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned
during these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long
duel, obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy
anywhere. To have friends, must we not form connections with young
men, have a few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and
meet them where students congregate? And I had nothing! And no
one in Paris can understand that nothing means nothing. When I
even thought of revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction
of the throat which makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from
the oesophagus into the larynx.
“In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having
wanted for anything, had never even heard this problem in the rule
of three: A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is to X.—
These gilded idiots say to me, ‘Why did you get into debt? Why did
you involve yourself in such onerous obligations?’ They remind me
of the princess who, on hearing that the people lacked bread, said,
‘Why do not they buy cakes?’ I should like to see one of these rich
men, who complain that I charge too much for an operation,—yes,
I should like to see him alone in Paris without a sou, without a
friend, without credit, and forced to work with his five fingers to
live at all! What would he do? Where would he go to satisfy his
hunger?
“Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was
because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility, the
selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in the highest
circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred,
envy, jealousy, and calumny raised up between me and success. In
Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup,
some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap
that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse’s
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The Atheist’s Mass
shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all
is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point
blank.
“You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make acquaintance
before long with the odious and incessant warfare waged by
mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop five-andtwenty
louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on the next,
and your best friends will report that you have lost twenty-five thousand.
If you have a headache, you will be considered mad. If you are
a little hasty, no one can live with you. If, to make a stand against this
armament of pigmies, you collect your best powers, your best friends
will cry out that you want to have everything, that you aim at domineering,
at tyranny. In short, your good points will become your
faults, your faults will be vices, and your virtues crime.
“If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears
on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present
at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die. Stumble, and
you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will
be crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.
“So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe
still less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein,
altogether different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?—
However, we will not stir that mud-heap.
“Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my
first examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come
to one of those moments of extremity when a man says, ‘I will enlist.’
I had one hope. I expected from my home a box full of linen, a
present from one of those old aunts who, knowing nothing of Paris,
think of your shirts, while they imagine that their nephew with thirty
francs a month is eating ortolans. The box arrived while I was at the
schools; it had cost forty francs for carriage. The porter, a German
shoemaker living in a loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I
walked up and down the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and
the Rue de l’Ecole de Medecine without hitting on any scheme which
would release my trunk without the payment of the forty francs,
which of course I could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen.
My stupidity proved to me that surgery was my only vocation. My
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Balzac
good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty atmosphere,
have none of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile in resource and
device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent, things come
to them.
“At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger
also came in—a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-
Flour. We knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off
the same landing, and who hear each other sleeping, coughing, dressing,
and so at last become used to one another. My neighbor informed
me that the landlord, to whom I owed three quarters’ rent,
had turned me out; I must clear out next morning. He himself was
also turned out on account of his occupation. I spent the most miserable
night of my life. Where was I to get a messenger who could
carry my few chattels and my books? How could I pay him and the
porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these unanswerable questions
again and again, in tears, as madmen repeat their tunes. I fell asleep;
poverty has for its friends heavenly slumbers full of beautiful dreams.
“Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread
soaked in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile Auvergne
accent:
“‘Mouchieur l’Etudiant, I am a poor man, a foundling from the
hospital at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not rich
enough to marry. You are not fertile in relations either, nor well supplied
with the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart downstairs which I
have hired for two sous an hour; it will hold all our goods; if you
like, we will try to find lodgings together, since we are both turned
out of this. It is not the earthly paradise, when all is said and done.’
“‘I know that, my good Bourgeat,’ said I. ‘But I am in a great fix.
I have a trunk downstairs with a hundred francs’ worth of linen in it,
out of which I could pay the landlord and all I owe to the porter, and
I have not a hundred sous.’
“‘Pooh! I have a few dibs,’ replied Bourgeat joyfully, and he pulled
out a greasy old leather purse. ‘Keep your linen.’
“Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the
porter. Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his cart,
and pulled it along the street, stopping in front of every house where
there was a notice board. I went up to see whether the rooms to let
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The Atheist’s Mass
would suit us. At midday we were still wandering about the neighborhood
without having found anything. The price was the great
difficulty. Bourgeat proposed that we should eat at a wine shop,
leaving the cart at the door. Towards evening I discovered, in the
Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the very top of a house
next the roof, two rooms with a staircase between them. Each of us
was to pay sixty francs a year. So there we were housed, my humble
friend and I. We dined together. Bourgeat, who earned about fifty
sous a day, had saved a hundred crowns or so; he would soon be able
to gratify his ambition by buying a barrel and a horse. On learning of
my situation—for he extracted my secrets with a quiet craftiness and
good nature, of which the remembrance touches my heart to this
day, he gave up for a time the ambition of his whole life; for twentytwo
years he had been carrying water in the street, and he now devoted
his hundred crowns to my future prospects.”
Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon’s arm tightly. “He gave
me the money for my examination fees! That man, my friend, understood
that I had a mission, that the needs of my intellect were
greater than his. He looked after me, he called me his boy, he lent me
money to buy books, he would come in softly sometimes to watch
me at work, and took a mother’s care in seeing that I had wholesome
and abundant food, instead of the bad and insufficient nourishment
I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a man of about forty, had a
homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent forehead, a head that a
painter might have chosen as a model for that of Lycurgus. The poor
man’s heart was big with affections seeking an object; he had never
been loved but by a poodle that had died some time since, of which
he would talk to me, asking whether I thought the Church would
allow masses to be said for the repose of its soul. His dog, said he,
had been a good Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied
him to church, never barking, listening to the organ without opening
his mouth, and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem
as though he were praying too.
“This man centered all his affections in me; he looked upon me as
a forlorn and suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most
thoughtful mother, the most considerate benefactor, the ideal of the
virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the street,
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Balzac
he would throw me a glance of intelligence full of unutterable dignity;
he would affect to walk as though he carried no weight, and
seemed happy in seeing me in good health and well dressed. It was,
in fact, the devoted affection of the lower classes, the love of a girl of
the people transferred to a loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands,
woke me at night at any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our
landing; as good as a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an
English girl. He did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed
our wood, and gave to all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving
his dignity, for he seemed to understand that the end ennobles
every act.
“When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-
Dieu, I felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could no
longer live with me; but he comforted himself with the prospect of
saving up money enough for me to take my degree, and he made me
promise to go to see him whenever I had a day out: Bourgeat was
proud of me. He loved me for my own sake, and for his own. If you
look up my thesis, you will see that I dedicated it to him.
“During the last year of my residence as house surgeon I earned
enough to repay all I owed to this worthy Auvergnat by buying him
a barrel and a horse. He was furious with rage at learning that I had
been depriving myself of spending my money, and yet he was delighted
to see his wishes fulfilled; he laughed and scolded, he looked
at his barrel, at his horse, and wiped away a tear, as he said, ‘It is too
bad. What a splendid barrel! You really ought not. Why, that horse is
as strong as an Auvergnat!’
“I never saw a more touching scene. Bourgeat insisted on buying
for me the case of instruments mounted in silver which you have
seen in my room, and which is to me the most precious thing there.
Though enchanted with my first success, never did the least sign, the
least word, escape him which might imply, ‘This man owes all to
me!’ And yet, but for him, I should have died of want; he had eaten
bread rubbed with garlic that I might have coffee to enable me to sit
up at night.
“He fell ill. As you may suppose, I passed my nights by his bedside,
and the first time I pulled him through; but two years after he
had a relapse; in spite of the utmost care, in spite of the greatest
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The Atheist’s Mass
exertions of science, he succumbed. No king was ever nursed as he
was. Yes, Bianchon, to snatch that man from death I tried unheardof
things. I wanted him to live long enough to show him his work
accomplished, to realize all his hopes, to give expression to the only
need for gratitude that ever filled my heart, to quench a fire that
burns in me to this day.
“Bourgeat, my second father, died in my arms,” Desplein went on,
after a pause, visibly moved. “He left me everything he possessed by
a will he had had made by a public scrivener, dating from the year
when we had gone to live in the Cour de Rohan.
“This man’s faith was perfect; he loved the Holy Virgin as he might
have loved his wife. He was an ardent Catholic, but never said a
word to me about my want of religion. When he was dying he entreated
me to spare no expense that he might have every possible
benefit of clergy. I had a mass said for him every day. Often, in the
night, he would tell me of his fears as to his future fate; he feared his
life had not been saintly enough. Poor man! he was at work from
morning till night. For whom, then, is Paradise—if there be a Paradise?
He received the last sacrament like the saint that he was, and his
death was worthy of his life.
“I alone followed him to the grave. When I had laid my only benefactor
to rest, I looked about to see how I could pay my debt to him;
I found he had neither family nor friends, neither wife nor child. But
he believed. He had a religious conviction; had I any right to dispute
it? He had spoken to me timidly of masses said for the repose of the
dead; he would not impress it on me as a duty, thinking that it would
be a form of repayment for his services. As soon as I had money
enough I paid to Saint-Sulpice the requisite sum for four masses
every year. As the only thing I can do for Bourgeat is thus to satisfy
his pious wishes, on the days when that mass is said, at the beginning
of each season of the year, I go for his sake and say the required
prayers; and I say with the good faith of a sceptic—’Great God, if
there is a sphere which Thou hast appointed after death for those
who have been perfect, remember good Bourgeat; and if he should
have anything to suffer, let me suffer it for him, that he may enter all
the sooner into what is called Paradise.’
“That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opin-
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ions can allow himself. But God must be a good fellow; He cannot
owe me any grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune
if faith such as Bourgeat’s could enter my brain.”
BIANCHON, who was with Desplein all through his last illness, dares
not affirm to this day that the great surgeon died an atheist. Will not
those who believe like to fancy that the humble Auvergnat came to
open the gate of Heaven to his friend, as he did that of the earthly
temple on whose pediment we read the words—”A grateful country
to its great men.”
Paris, January 1836.
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
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The Atheist’s Mass
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
Desplein
Cousin Pons
Lost Illusions
The Thirteen
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
276

The Ball at Sceaux
by
Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
To Henri de Balzac, his brother Honore.
Balzac
THE COMTE DE FONTAINE, head of one of the oldest families in Poitou,
had served the Bourbon cause with intelligence and bravery during
the war in La Vendee against the Republic. After having escaped all
the dangers which threatened the royalist leaders during this stormy
period of modern history, he was wont to say in jest, “I am one of
the men who gave themselves to be killed on the steps of the throne.”
And the pleasantry had some truth in it, as spoken by a man left for
dead at the bloody battle of Les Quatre Chemins. Though ruined by
confiscation, the staunch Vendeen steadily refused the lucrative posts
offered to him by the Emperor Napoleon. Immovable in his aristocratic
faith, he had blindly obeyed its precepts when he thought it
fitting to choose a companion for life. In spite of the blandishments
of a rich but revolutionary parvenu, who valued the alliance at a high
figure, he married Mademoiselle de Kergarouet, without a fortune,
but belonging to one of the oldest families in Brittany.
When the second revolution burst on Monsieur de Fontaine he was
encumbered with a large family. Though it was no part of the noble
gentlemen’s views to solicit favors, he yielded to his wife’s wish, left his
country estate, of which the income barely sufficed to maintain his
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children, and came to Paris. Saddened by seeing the greediness of his
former comrades in the rush for places and dignities under the new
Constitution, he was about to return to his property when he received
a ministerial despatch, in which a well-known magnate announced to
him his nomination as marechal de camp, or brigadier-general, under a
rule which allowed the officers of the Catholic armies to count the
twenty submerged years of Louis XVIII.’s reign as years of service. Some
days later he further received, without any solicitation, ex officio, the
crosses of the Legion of Honor and of Saint-Louis.
Shaken in his determination by these successive favors, due, as he
supposed, to the monarch’s remembrance, he was no longer satisfied
with taking his family, as he had piously done every Sunday, to cry
“Vive le Roi” in the hall of the Tuileries when the royal family passed
through on their way to chapel; he craved the favor of a private audience.
The audience, at once granted, was in no sense private. The royal
drawing-room was full of old adherents, whose powdered heads, seen
from above, suggested a carpet of snow. There the Count met some
old friends, who received him somewhat coldly; but the princes he
thought adorable, an enthusiastic expression which escaped him when
the most gracious of his masters, to whom the Count had supposed
himself to be known only by name, came to shake hands with him,
and spoke of him as the most thorough Vendeen of them all. Notwithstanding
this ovation, none of these august persons thought of
inquiring as to the sum of his losses, or of the money he had poured so
generously into the chests of the Catholic regiments. He discovered, a
little late, that he had made war at his own cost. Towards the end of the
evening he thought he might venture on a witty allusion to the state of
his affairs, similar, as it was, to that of many other gentlemen. His
Majesty laughed heartily enough; any speech that bore the hall-mark
of wit was certain to please him; but he nevertheless replied with one
of those royal pleasantries whose sweetness is more formidable than
the anger of a rebuke. One of the King’s most intimate advisers took
an opportunity of going up to the fortune-seeking Vendeen, and made
him understand by a keen and polite hint that the time had not yet
come for settling accounts with the sovereign; that there were bills of
much longer standing than his on the books, and there, no doubt, they
would remain, as part of the history of the Revolution. The Count
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prudently withdrew from the venerable group, which formed a respectful
semi-circle before the august family; then, having extricated
his sword, not without some difficulty, from among the lean legs which
had got mixed up with it, he crossed the courtyard of the Tuileries and
got into the hackney cab he had left on the quay. With the restive
spirit, which is peculiar to the nobility of the old school, in whom still
survives the memory of the League and the day of the Barricades (in
1588), he bewailed himself in his cab, loudly enough to compromise
him, over the change that had come over the Court. “Formerly,” he
said to himself, “every one could speak freely to the King of his own
little affairs; the nobles could ask him a favor, or for money, when it
suited them, and nowadays one cannot recover the money advanced
for his service without raising a scandal! By Heaven! the cross of Saint-
Louis and the rank of brigadier-general will not make good the three
hundred thousand livres I have spent, out and out, on the royal cause.
I must speak to the King, face to face, in his own room.”
This scene cooled Monsieur de Fontaine’s ardor all the more effectually
because his requests for an interview were never answered. And,
indeed, he saw the upstarts of the Empire obtaining some of the
offices reserved, under the old monarchy, for the highest families.
“All is lost!” he exclaimed one morning. “The King has certainly
never been other than a revolutionary. But for Monsieur, who never
derogates, and is some comfort to his faithful adherents, I do not
know what hands the crown of France might not fall into if things
are to go on like this. Their cursed constitutional system is the worst
possible government, and can never suit France. Louis XVIII. and
Monsieur Beugnot spoiled everything at Saint Ouen.”
The Count, in despair, was preparing to retire to his estate, abandoning,
with dignity, all claims to repayment. At this moment the
events of the 20th March (1815) gave warning of a fresh storm,
threatening to overwhelm the legitimate monarch and his defenders.
Monsieur de Fontaine, like one of those generous souls who do not
dismiss a servant in a torrent of rain; borrowed on his lands to follow
the routed monarchy, without knowing whether this complicity in
emigration would prove more propitious to him than his past devotion.
But when he perceived that the companions of the King’s exile
were in higher favor than the brave men who had protested, sword in
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hand, against the establishment of the republic, he may perhaps have
hoped to derive greater profit from this journey into a foreign land
than from active and dangerous service in the heart of his own country.
Nor was his courtier-like calculation one of these rash speculations
which promise splendid results on paper, and are ruinous in
effect. He was—to quote the wittiest and most successful of our
diplomates—one of the faithful five hundred who shared the exile
of the Court at Ghent, and one of the fifty thousand who returned
with it. During the short banishment of royalty, Monsieur de Fontaine
was so happy as to be employed by Louis XVIII., and found more
than one opportunity of giving him proofs of great political honesty
and sincere attachment. One evening, when the King had nothing
better to do, he recalled Monsieur de Fontaine’s witticism at the
Tuileries. The old Vendeen did not let such a happy chance slip; he
told his history with so much vivacity that a king, who never forgot
anything, might remember it at a convenient season. The royal amateur
of literature also observed the elegant style given to some notes
which the discreet gentleman had been invited to recast. This little
success stamped Monsieur de Fontaine on the King’s memory as one
of the loyal servants of the Crown.
At the second restoration the Count was one of those special envoys
who were sent throughout the departments charged with absolute
jurisdiction over the leaders of revolt; but he used his terrible
powers with moderation. As soon as the temporary commission was
ended, the High Provost found a seat in the Privy Council, became a
deputy, spoke little, listened much, and changed his opinions very
considerably. Certain circumstances, unknown to historians, brought
him into such intimate relations with the Sovereign, that one day, as
he came in, the shrewd monarch addressed him thus: “My friend
Fontaine, I shall take care never to appoint you to be director-general,
or minister. Neither you nor I, as employes, could keep our place on
account of our opinions. Representative government has this advantage;
it saves Us the trouble We used to have, of dismissing Our Secretaries
of State. Our Council is a perfect inn-parlor, whither public opinion
sometimes sends strange travelers; however, We can always find a place
for Our faithful adherents.”
This ironical speech was introductory to a rescript giving Monsieur
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de Fontaine an appointment as administrator in the office of Crown
lands. As a consequence of the intelligent attention with which he
listened to his royal Friend’s sarcasms, his name always rose to His
Majesty’s lips when a commission was to be appointed of which the
members were to receive a handsome salary. He had the good sense to
hold his tongue about the favor with which he was honored, and knew
how to entertain the monarch in those familiar chats in which Louis
XVIII. delighted as much as in a well-written note, by his brilliant manner
of repeating political anecdotes, and the political or parliamentary
tittle-tattle —if the expression may pass—which at that time was rife. It
is well known that he was immensely amused by every detail of his
Gouvernementabilite—a word adopted by his facetious Majesty.
Thanks to the Comte de Fontaine’s good sense, wit, and tact, every
member of his numerous family, however young, ended, as he
jestingly told his Sovereign, in attaching himself like a silkworm to
the leaves of the Pay-List. Thus, by the King’s intervention, his eldest
son found a high and fixed position as a lawyer. The second, before
the restoration a mere captain, was appointed to the command of a
legion on the return from Ghent; then, thanks to the confusion of
1815, when the regulations were evaded, he passed into the bodyguard,
returned to a line regiment, and found himself after the affair
of the Trocadero a lieutenant-general with a commission in the
Guards. The youngest, appointed sous-prefet, ere long became a legal
official and director of a municipal board of the city of Paris,
where he was safe from changes in Legislature. These bounties, bestowed
without parade, and as secret as the favor enjoyed by the
Count, fell unperceived. Though the father and his three sons each
had sinecures enough to enjoy an income in salaries almost equal to
that of a chief of department, their political good fortune excited no
envy. In those early days of the constitutional system, few persons
had very precise ideas of the peaceful domain of the civil service,
where astute favorites managed to find an equivalent for the demolished
abbeys. Monsieur le Comte de Fontaine, who till lately boasted
that he had not read the Charter, and displayed such indignation at the
greed of courtiers, had, before long, proved to his august master that
he understood, as well as the King himself, the spirit and resources of
the representative system. At the same time, notwithstanding the es-
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tablished careers open to his three sons, and the pecuniary advantages
derived from four official appointments, Monsieur de Fontaine was
the head of too large a family to be able to re-establish his fortune
easily and rapidly.
His three sons were rich in prospects, in favor, and in talent; but he
had three daughters, and was afraid of wearying the monarch’s benevolence.
It occurred to him to mention only one by one, these virgins
eager to light their torches. The King had too much good taste to leave
his work incomplete. The marriage of the eldest with a Receiver-General,
Planat de Baudry, was arranged by one of those royal speeches
which cost nothing and are worth millions. One evening, when the
Sovereign was out of spirits, he smiled on hearing of the existence of
another Demoiselle de Fontaine, for whom he found a husband in the
person of a young magistrate, of inferior birth, no doubt, but wealthy,
and whom he created Baron. When, the year after, the Vendeen spoke
of Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine, the King replied in his thin sharp
tones, “Amicus Plato sed magis amica Natio.” Then, a few days later,
he treated his “friend Fontaine” to a quatrain, harmless enough, which
he styled an epigram, in which he made fun of these three daughters so
skilfully introduced, under the form of a trinity. Nay, if report is to be
believed, the monarch had found the point of the jest in the Unity of
the three Divine Persons.
“If your Majesty would only condescend to turn the epigram into
an epithalamium?” said the Count, trying to turn the sally to good
account.
“Though I see the rhyme of it, I fail to see the reason,” retorted the
King, who did not relish any pleasantry, however mild, on the subject
of his poetry.
From that day his intercourse with Monsieur de Fontaine showed
less amenity. Kings enjoy contradicting more than people think. Like
most youngest children, Emilie de Fontaine was a Benjamin spoilt
by almost everybody. The King’s coolness, therefore, caused the Count
all the more regret, because no marriage was ever so difficult to arrange
as that of this darling daughter. To understand all the obstacles
we must make our way into the fine residence where the official was
housed at the expense of the nation. Emilie had spent her childhood
on the family estate, enjoying the abundance which suffices for the
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joys of early youth; her lightest wishes had been law to her sisters, her
brothers, her mother, and even her father. All her relations doted on
her. Having come to years of discretion just when her family was
loaded with the favors of fortune, the enchantment of life continued.
The luxury of Paris seemed to her just as natural as a wealth of
flowers or fruit, or as the rural plenty which had been the joy of her
first years. Just as in her childhood she had never been thwarted in
the satisfaction of her playful desires, so now, at fourteen, she was
still obeyed when she rushed into the whirl of fashion.
Thus, accustomed by degrees to the enjoyment of money, elegance
of dress, of gilded drawing-rooms and fine carriages, became as necessary
to her as the compliments of flattery, sincere or false, and the
festivities and vanities of court life. Like most spoiled children, she
tyrannized over those who loved her, and kept her blandishments for
those who were indifferent. Her faults grew with her growth, and
her parents were to gather the bitter fruits of this disastrous education.
At the age of nineteen Emilie de Fontaine had not yet been
pleased to make a choice from among the many young men whom
her father’s politics brought to his entertainments. Though so young,
she asserted in society all the freedom of mind that a married woman
can enjoy. Her beauty was so remarkable that, for her, to appear in a
room was to be its queen; but, like sovereigns, she had no friends,
though she was everywhere the object of attentions to which a finer
nature than hers might perhaps have succumbed. Not a man, not
even an old man, had it in him to contradict the opinions of a young
girl whose lightest look could rekindle love in the coldest heart.
She had been educated with a care which her sisters had not enjoyed;
painted pretty well, spoke Italian and English, and played the
piano brilliantly; her voice, trained by the best masters, had a ring in
it which made her singing irresistibly charming. Clever, and intimate
with every branch of literature, she might have made folks believe
that, as Mascarille says, people of quality come into the world knowing
everything. She could argue fluently on Italian or Flemish painting,
on the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; pronounced at haphazard
on books new or old, and could expose the defects of a work
with a cruelly graceful wit. The simplest thing she said was accepted
by an admiring crowd as a fetfah of the Sultan by the Turks. She thus
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dazzled shallow persons; as to deeper minds, her natural tact enabled
her to discern them, and for them she put forth so much fascination
that, under cover of her charms, she escaped their scrutiny. This enchanting
veneer covered a careless heart; the opinion—common to
many young girls—that no one else dwelt in a sphere so lofty as to be
able to understand the merits of her soul; and a pride based no less on
her birth than on her beauty. In the absence of the overwhelming
sentiment which, sooner or later, works havoc in a woman’s heart,
she spent her young ardor in an immoderate love of distinctions, and
expressed the deepest contempt for persons of inferior birth. Supremely
impertinent to all newly-created nobility, she made every
effort to get her parents recognized as equals by the most illustrious
families of the Saint-Germain quarter.
These sentiments had not escaped the observing eye of Monsieur
de Fontaine, who more than once, when his two elder girls were
married, had smarted under Emilie’s sarcasm. Logical readers will be
surprised to see the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a
Receiver-General, possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates,
but whose name was not preceded by the little word to which the
throne owed so many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too
lately Baronified to obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood.
This noteworthy change in the ideas of a noble on the verge
of his sixtieth year—an age when men rarely renounce their convictions—was
due not merely to his unfortunate residence in the modern
Babylon, where, sooner or later, country folks all get their corners
rubbed down; the Comte de Fontaine’s new political conscience
was also a result of the King’s advice and friendship. The philosophical
prince had taken pleasure in converting the Vendeen to the ideas
required by the advance of the nineteenth century, and the new aspect
of the Monarchy. Louis XVIII. aimed at fusing parties as Napoleon
had fused things and men. The legitimate King, who was not
less clever perhaps than his rival, acted in a contrary direction. The
last head of the House of Bourbon was just as eager to satisfy the
third estate and the creations of the Empire, by curbing the clergy, as
the first of the Napoleons had been to attract the grand old nobility,
or to endow the Church. The Privy Councillor, being in the secret of
these royal projects, had insensibly become one of the most prudent
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and influential leaders of that moderate party which most desired a
fusion of opinion in the interests of the nation. He preached the
expensive doctrines of constitutional government, and lent all his
weight to encourage the political see-saw which enabled his master
to rule France in the midst of storms. Perhaps Monsieur de Fontaine
hoped that one of the sudden gusts of legislation, whose unexpected
efforts then startled the oldest politicians, might carry him up to the
rank of peer. One of his most rigid principles was to recognize no
nobility in France but that of the peerage—the only families that
might enjoy any privileges.
“A nobility bereft of privileges,” he would say, “is a tool without a
handle.”
As far from Lafayette’s party as he was from La Bourdonnaye’s, he
ardently engaged in the task of general reconciliation, which was to
result in a new era and splendid fortunes for France. He strove to
convince the families who frequented his drawing-room, or those
whom he visited, how few favorable openings would henceforth be
offered by a civil or military career. He urged mothers to give their
boys a start in independent and industrial professions, explaining that
military posts and high Government appointments must at last pertain,
in a quite constitutional order, to the younger sons of members
of the peerage. According to him, the people had conquered a sufficiently
large share in practical government by its elective assembly, its
appointments to law-offices, and those of the exchequer, which, said
he, would always, as heretofore, be the natural right of the distinguished
men of the third estate.
These new notions of the head of the Fontaines, and the prudent
matches for his eldest girls to which they had led, met with strong
resistance in the bosom of his family. The Comtesse de Fontaine
remained faithful to the ancient beliefs which no woman could disown,
who, through her mother, belonged to the Rohans. Although
she had for a while opposed the happiness and fortune awaiting her
two eldest girls, she yielded to those private considerations which
husband and wife confide to each other when their heads are resting
on the same pillow. Monsieur de Fontaine calmly pointed out to his
wife, by exact arithmetic that their residence in Paris, the necessity
for entertaining, the magnificence of the house which made up to
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them now for the privations so bravely shared in La Vendee, and the
expenses of their sons, swallowed up the chief part of their income
from salaries. They must therefore seize, as a boon from heaven, the
opportunities which offered for settling their girls with such wealth.
Would they not some day enjoy sixty—eighty—a hundred thousand
francs a year? Such advantageous matches were not to be met
with every day for girls without a portion. Again, it was time that
they should begin to think of economizing, to add to the estate of
Fontaine, and re-establish the old territorial fortune of the family.
The Countess yielded to such cogent arguments, as every mother
would have done in her place, though perhaps with a better grace;
but she declared that Emilie, at any rate, should marry in such a way
as to satisfy the pride she had unfortunately contributed to foster in
the girl’s young soul.
Thus events, which ought to have brought joy into the family, had
introduced a small leaven of discord. The Receiver-General and the
young lawyer were the objects of a ceremonious formality which the
Countess and Emilie contrived to create. This etiquette soon found
even ampler opportunity for the display of domestic tyranny; for
Lieutenant-General de Fontaine married Mademoiselle Mongenod,
the daughter of a rich banker; the President very sensibly found a
wife in a young lady whose father, twice or thrice a millionaire, had
traded in salt; and the third brother, faithful to his plebeian doctrines,
married Mademoiselle Grossetete, the only daughter of the
Receiver-General at Bourges. The three sisters-in-law and the two
brothers-in-law found the high sphere of political bigwigs, and the
drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so full of charm
and of personal advantages, that they united in forming a little court
round the overbearing Emilie. This treaty between interest and pride
was not, however, so firmly cemented but that the young despot
was, not unfrequently, the cause of revolts in her little realm. Scenes,
which the highest circles would not have disowned, kept up a sarcastic
temper among all the members of this powerful family; and this,
without seriously diminishing the regard they professed in public,
degenerated sometimes in private into sentiments far from charitable.
Thus the Lieutenant-General’s wife, having become a Baronne,
thought herself quite as noble as a Kergarouet, and imagined that her
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good hundred thousand francs a year gave her the right to be as impertinent
as her sister-in-law Emilie, whom she would sometimes
wish to see happily married, as she announced that the daughter of
some peer of France had married Monsieur So-and-So with no title
to his name. The Vicomtesse de Fontaine amused herself by eclipsing
Emilie in the taste and magnificence that were conspicuous in her
dress, her furniture, and her carriages. The satirical spirit in which her
brothers and sisters sometimes received the claims avowed by Mademoiselle
de Fontaine roused her to wrath that a perfect hailstorm of
sharp sayings could hardly mitigate. So when the head of the family
felt a slight chill in the King’s tacit and precarious friendship, he
trembled all the more because, as a result of her sisters’ defiant mockery,
his favorite daughter had never looked so high.
In the midst of these circumstances, and at a moment when this
petty domestic warfare had become serious, the monarch, whose favor
Monsieur de Fontaine still hoped to regain, was attacked by the
malady of which he was to die. The great political chief, who knew
so well how to steer his bark in the midst of tempests, soon succumbed.
Certain then of favors to come, the Comte de Fontaine
made every effort to collect the elite of marrying men about his youngest
daughter. Those who may have tried to solve the difficult problem
of settling a haughty and capricious girl, will understand the
trouble taken by the unlucky father. Such an affair, carried out to the
liking of his beloved child, would worthily crown the career the Count
had followed for these ten years at Paris. From the way in which his
family claimed salaries under every department, it might be compared
with the House of Austria, which, by intermarriage, threatens
to pervade Europe. The old Vendeen was not to be discouraged in
bringing forward suitors, so much had he his daughter’s happiness at
heart, but nothing could be more absurd than the way in which the
impertinent young thing pronounced her verdicts and judged the
merits of her adorers. It might have been supposed that, like a princess
in the Arabian Nights, Emilie was rich enough and beautiful
enough to choose from among all the princes in the world. Her
objections were each more preposterous than the last: one had too
thick knees and was bow-legged, another was short-sighted, this one’s
name was Durand, that one limped, and almost all were too fat.
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Livelier, more attractive, and gayer than ever after dismissing two or
three suitors, she rushed into the festivities of the winter season, and
to balls, where her keen eyes criticised the celebrities of the day, delighted
in encouraging proposals which she invariably rejected.
Nature had bestowed on her all the advantages needed for playing
the part of Celimene. Tall and slight, Emilie de Fontaine could assume
a dignified or a frolicsome mien at her will. Her neck was
rather long, allowing her to affect beautiful attitudes of scorn and
impertinence. She had cultivated a large variety of those turns of the
head and feminine gestures, which emphasize so cruelly or so happily
a hint of a smile. Fine black hair, thick and strongly-arched eyebrows,
lent her countenance an expression of pride, to which her coquettish
instincts and her mirror had taught her to add terror by a stare, or
gentleness by the softness of her gaze, by the set of the gracious curve
of her lips, by the coldness or the sweetness of her smile. When Emilie
meant to conquer a heart, her pure voice did not lack melody; but
she could also give it a sort of curt clearness when she was minded to
paralyze a partner’s indiscreet tongue. Her colorless face and alabaster
brow were like the limpid surface of a lake, which by turns is rippled
by the impulse of a breeze and recovers its glad serenity when the air
is still. More than one young man, a victim to her scorn, accused her
of acting a part; but she justified herself by inspiring her detractors
with the desire to please her, and then subjecting them to all her
most contemptuous caprice. Among the young girls of fashion, not
one knew better than she how to assume an air of reserve when a
man of talent was introduced to her, or how to display the insulting
politeness which treats an equal as an inferior, and to pour out her
impertinence on all who tried to hold their heads on a level with
hers. Wherever she went she seemed to be accepting homage rather
than compliments, and even in a princess her airs and manner would
have transformed the chair on which she sat into an imperial throne.
Monsieur de Fontaine discovered too late how utterly the education
of the daughter he loved had been ruined by the tender devotion
of the whole family. The admiration which the world is at first ready
to bestow on a young girl, but for which, sooner or later, it takes its
revenge, had added to Emilie’s pride, and increased her self-confidence.
Universal subservience had developed in her the selfishness
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natural to spoilt children, who, like kings, make a plaything of everything
that comes to hand. As yet the graces of youth and the
charms of talent hid these faults from every eye; faults all the more
odious in a woman, since she can only please by self-sacrifice and
unselfishness; but nothing escapes the eye of a good father, and Monsieur
de Fontaine often tried to explain to his daughter the more
important pages of the mysterious book of life. Vain effort! He had
to lament his daughter’s capricious indocility and ironical shrewdness
too often to persevere in a task so difficult as that of correcting
an ill-disposed nature. He contented himself with giving her from
time to time some gentle and kind advice; but he had the sorrow of
seeing his tenderest words slide from his daughter’s heart as if it were
of marble. A father’s eyes are slow to be unsealed, and it needed more
than one experience before the old Royalist perceived that his daughter’s
rare caresses were bestowed on him with an air of condescension. She
was like young children, who seem to say to their mother, “Make
haste to kiss me, that I may go to play.” In short, Emilie vouchsafed
to be fond of her parents. But often, by those sudden whims, which
seem inexplicable in young girls, she kept aloof and scarcely ever
appeared; she complained of having to share her father’s and mother’s
heart with too many people; she was jealous of every one, even of her
brothers and sisters. Then, after creating a desert about her, the strange
girl accused all nature of her unreal solitude and her wilful griefs.
Strong in the experience of her twenty years, she blamed fate, because,
not knowing that the mainspring of happiness is in ourselves,
she demanded it of the circumstances of life. She would have fled to
the ends of the earth to escape a marriage such as those of her two
sisters, and nevertheless her heart was full of horrible jealousy at seeing
them married, rich, and happy. In short, she sometimes led her
mother—who was as much a victim to her vagaries as Monsieur de
Fontaine—to suspect that she had a touch of madness.
But such aberrations are quite inexplicable; nothing is commoner
than this unconfessed pride developed in the heart of young girls
belonging to families high in the social scale, and gifted by nature
with great beauty. They are almost all convinced that their mothers,
now forty or fifty years of age, can neither sympathize with their
young souls, nor conceive of their imaginings. They fancy that most
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mothers, jealous of their girls, want to dress them in their own way
with the premeditated purpose of eclipsing them or robbing them of
admiration. Hence, often, secret tears and dumb revolt against supposed
tyranny. In the midst of these woes, which become very real
though built on an imaginary basis, they have also a mania for composing
a scheme of life, while casting for themselves a brilliant horoscope;
their magic consists in taking their dreams for reality; secretly,
in their long meditations, they resolve to give their heart and hand to
none but the man possessing this or the other qualification; and they
paint in fancy a model to which, whether or no, the future lover
must correspond. After some little experience of life, and the serious
reflections that come with years, by dint of seeing the world and its
prosaic round, by dint of observing unhappy examples, the brilliant
hues of their ideal are extinguished. Then, one fine day, in the course
of events, they are quite astonished to find themselves happy without
the nuptial poetry of their day-dreams. It was on the strength of
that poetry that Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine, in her slender
wisdom, had drawn up a programme to which a suitor must conform
to be excepted. Hence her disdain and sarcasm.
“Though young and of an ancient family, he must be a peer of
France,” said she to herself. “I could not bear not to see my coat-ofarms
on the panels of my carriage among the folds of azure mantling,
not to drive like the princes down the broad walk of the Champs-
Elysees on the days of Longchamps in Holy Week. Besides, my father
says that it will someday be the highest dignity in France. He must be
a soldier—but I reserve the right of making him retire; and he must
bear an Order, that the sentries may present arms to us.”
And these rare qualifications would count for nothing if this creature
of fancy had not the most amiable temper, a fine figure, intelligence,
and, above all, if he were not slender. To be lean, a personal
grace which is but fugitive, especially under a representative government,
was an indispensable condition. Mademoiselle de Fontaine
had an ideal standard which was to be the model. A young man who
at the first glance did not fulfil the requisite conditions did not even
get a second look.
“Good Heavens! see how fat he is!” was with her the utmost expression
of contempt.
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To hear her, people of respectable corpulence were incapable of
sentiment, bad husbands, and unfit for civilized society. Though it is
esteemed a beauty in the East, to be fat seemed to her a misfortune
for a woman; but in a man it was a crime. These paradoxical views
were amusing, thanks to a certain liveliness of rhetoric. The Count
felt nevertheless that by-and-by his daughter’s affections, of which
the absurdity would be evident to some women who were not less
clear-sighted than merciless, would inevitably become a subject of
constant ridicule. He feared lest her eccentric notions should deviate
into bad style. He trembled to think that the pitiless world might
already be laughing at a young woman who remained so long on the
stage without arriving at any conclusion of the drama she was playing.
More than one actor in it, disgusted by a refusal, seemed to be
waiting for the slightest turn of ill-luck to take his revenge. The indifferent,
the lookers-on were beginning to weary of it; admiration is
always exhausting to human beings. The old Vendeen knew better
than any one that if there is an art in choosing the right moment for
coming forward on the boards of the world, on those of the Court,
in a drawing-room or on the stage, it is still more difficult to quit
them in the nick of time. So during the first winter after the accession
of Charles X., he redoubled his efforts, seconded by his three
sons and his sons-in-law, to assemble in the rooms of his official
residence the best matches which Paris and the various deputations
from departments could offer. The splendor of his entertainments,
the luxury of his dining-room, and his dinners, fragrant with truffles,
rivaled the famous banquets by which the ministers of that time
secured the vote of their parliamentary recruits.
The Honorable Deputy was consequently pointed at as a most
influential corrupter of the legislative honesty of the illustrious
Chamber that was dying as it would seem of indigestion. A whimsical
result! his efforts to get his daughter married secured him a
splendid popularity. He perhaps found some covert advantage in
selling his truffles twice over. This accusation, started by certain
mocking Liberals, who made up by their flow of words for their
small following in the Chamber, was not a success. The Poitevin
gentleman had always been so noble and so honorable, that he was
not once the object of those epigrams which the malicious journal-
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ism of the day hurled at the three hundred votes of the centre, at
the Ministers, the cooks, the Directors-General, the princely
Amphitryons, and the official supporters of the Villele Ministry.
At the close of this campaign, during which Monsieur de Fontaine
had on several occasions brought out all his forces, he believed that
this time the procession of suitors would not be a mere dissolving
view in his daughter’s eyes; that it was time she should make up her
mind. He felt a certain inward satisfaction at having well fulfilled his
duty as a father. And having left no stone unturned, he hoped that,
among so many hearts laid at Emilie’s feet, there might be one to
which her caprice might give a preference. Incapable of repeating
such an effort, and tired, too, of his daughter’s conduct, one morning,
towards the end of Lent, when the business at the Chamber did
not demand his vote, he determined to ask what her views were.
While his valet was artistically decorating his bald yellow head with
the delta of powder which, with the hanging “ailes de pigeon,” completed
his venerable style of hairdressing, Emilie’s father, not without
some secret misgivings, told his old servant to go and desire the
haughty damsel to appear in the presence of the head of the family.
“Joseph,” he added, when his hair was dressed, “take away that
towel, draw back the curtains, put those chairs square, shake the rug,
and lay it quite straight. Dust everything.—Now, air the room a
little by opening the window.”
The Count multiplied his orders, putting Joseph out of breath,
and the old servant, understanding his master’s intentions, aired and
tidied the room, of course the least cared for of any in the house, and
succeeded in giving a look of harmony to the files of bills, the letterboxes,
the books and furniture of this sanctum, where the interests
of the royal demesnes were debated over. When Joseph had reduced
this chaos to some sort of order, and brought to the front such things
as might be most pleasing to the eye, as if it were a shop front, or
such as by their color might give the effect of a kind of official poetry,
he stood for a minute in the midst of the labyrinth of papers
piled in some places even on the floor, admired his handiwork, jerked
his head, and went.
The anxious sinecure-holder did not share his retainer’s favorable
opinion. Before seating himself in his deep chair, whose rounded
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back screened him from draughts, he looked round him doubtfully,
examined his dressing-gown with a hostile expression, shook off a
few grains of snuff, carefully wiped his nose, arranged the tongs and
shovel, made the fire, pulled up the heels of his slippers, pulled out
his little queue of hair which had lodged horizontally between the
collar of his waistcoat and that of his dressing-gown restoring it to its
perpendicular position; then he swept up the ashes of the hearth,
which bore witness to a persistent catarrh. Finally, the old man did
not settle himself till he had once more looked all over the room,
hoping that nothing could give occasion to the saucy and impertinent
remarks with which his daughter was apt to answer his good
advice. On this occasion he was anxious not to compromise his dignity
as a father. He daintily took a pinch of snuff, cleared his throat
two or three times, as if he were about to demand a count out of the
House; then he heard his daughter’s light step, and she came in humming
an air from Il Barbiere.
“Good-morning, papa. What do you want with me so early?”
Having sung these words, as though they were the refrain of the
melody, she kissed the Count, not with the familiar tenderness which
makes a daughter’s love so sweet a thing, but with the light carelessness
of a mistress confident of pleasing, whatever she may do.
“My dear child,” said Monsieur de Fontaine, gravely, “I sent for
you to talk to you very seriously about your future prospects. You are
at this moment under the necessity of making such a choice of a
husband as may secure your durable happiness—”
“My good father,” replied Emilie, assuming her most coaxing tone
of voice to interrupt him, “it strikes me that the armistice on which
we agreed as to my suitors is not yet expired.”
“Emilie, we must to-day forbear from jesting on so important a
matter. For some time past the efforts of those who most truly
love you, my dear child, have been concentrated on the endeavor to
settle you suitably; and you would be guilty of ingratitude in meeting
with levity those proofs of kindness which I am not alone in
lavishing on you.”
As she heard these words, after flashing a mischievously inquisitive
look at the furniture of her father’s study, the young girl brought
forward the armchair which looked as if it had been least used by
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petitioners, set it at the side of the fireplace so as to sit facing her
father, and settled herself in so solemn an attitude that it was impossible
not to read in it a mocking intention, crossing her arms over the
dainty trimmings of a pelerine a la neige, and ruthlessly crushing its
endless frills of white tulle. After a laughing side glance at her old
father’s troubled face, she broke silence.
“I never heard you say, my dear father, that the Government issued
its instructions in its dressing-gown. However,” and she smiled, “that
does not matter; the mob are probably not particular. Now, what are
your proposals for legislation, and your official introductions?”
“I shall not always be able to make them, headstrong girl!—Listen,
Emilie. It is my intention no longer to compromise my reputation,
which is part of my children’s fortune, by recruiting the regiment of
dancers which, spring after spring, you put to rout. You have already
been the cause of many dangerous misunderstandings with certain
families. I hope to make you perceive more truly the difficulties of
your position and of ours. You are two-and-twenty, my dear child,
and you ought to have been married nearly three years since. Your
brothers and your two sisters are richly and happily provided for.
But, my dear, the expenses occasioned by these marriages, and the
style of housekeeping you require of your mother, have made such
inroads on our income that I can hardly promise you a hundred
thousand francs as a marriage portion. From this day forth I shall
think only of providing for your mother, who must not be sacrificed
to her children. Emilie, if I were to be taken from my family Madame
de Fontaine could not be left at anybody’s mercy, and ought to
enjoy the affluence which I have given her too late as the reward of
her devotion in my misfortunes. You see, my child, that the amount
of your fortune bears no relation to your notions of grandeur. Even
that would be such a sacrifice as I have not hitherto made for either
of my children; but they have generously agreed not to expect in the
future any compensation for the advantage thus given to a too favored
child.”
“In their position!” said Emilie, with an ironical toss of her head.
“My dear, do not so depreciate those who love you. Only the poor
are generous as a rule; the rich have always excellent reasons for not
handing over twenty thousand francs to a relation. Come, my child,
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do not pout, let us talk rationally.—Among the young marrying
men have you noticed Monsieur de Manerville?”
“Oh, he minces his words—he says Zules instead of Jules; he is
always looking at his feet, because he thinks them small, and he gazes
at himself in the glass! Besides, he is fair. I don’t like fair men.”
“Well, then, Monsieur de Beaudenord?”
“He is not noble! he is ill made and stout. He is dark, it is true.—If
the two gentlemen could agree to combine their fortunes, and the first
would give his name and his figure to the second, who should keep his
dark hair, then—perhaps—”
“What can you say against Monsieur de Rastignac?”
“Madame de Nucingen has made a banker of him,” she said with
meaning.
“And our cousin, the Vicomte de Portenduere?”
“A mere boy, who dances badly; besides, he has no fortune. And,
after all, papa, none of these people have titles. I want, at least, to be
a countess like my mother.”
“Have you seen no one, then, this winter—”
“No, papa.”
“What then do you want?”
“The son of a peer of France.
“My dear girl, you are mad!” said Monsieur de Fontaine, rising.
But he suddenly lifted his eyes to heaven, and seemed to find a
fresh fount of resignation in some religious thought; then, with a
look of fatherly pity at his daughter, who herself was moved, he took
her hand, pressed it, and said with deep feeling: “God is my witness,
poor mistaken child, I have conscientiously discharged my duty to
you as a father—conscientiously, do I say? Most lovingly, my Emilie.
Yes, God knows! This winter I have brought before you more than
one good man, whose character, whose habits, and whose temper
were known to me, and all seemed worthy of you. My child, my
task is done. From this day forth you are the arbiter of your fate, and
I consider myself both happy and unhappy at finding myself relieved
of the heaviest of paternal functions. I know not whether you will
for any long time, now, hear a voice which, to you, has never been
stern; but remember that conjugal happiness does not rest so much
on brilliant qualities and ample fortune as on reciprocal esteem. This
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happiness is, in its nature, modest, and devoid of show. So now, my
dear, my consent is given beforehand, whoever the son-in-law may
be whom you introduce to me; but if you should be unhappy, remember
you will have no right to accuse your father. I shall not
refuse to take proper steps and help you, only your choice must be
serious and final. I will never twice compromise the respect due to
my white hairs.”
The affection thus expressed by her father, the solemn tones of his
urgent address, deeply touched Mademoiselle de Fontaine; but she
concealed her emotion, seated herself on her father’s knees—for he
had dropped all tremulous into his chair again—caressed him fondly,
and coaxed him so engagingly that the old man’s brow cleared. As
soon as Emilie thought that her father had got over his painful agitation,
she said in a gentle voice: “I have to thank you for your graceful
attention, my dear father. You have had your room set in order to
receive your beloved daughter. You did not perhaps know that you
would find her so foolish and so headstrong. But, papa, is it so difficult
to get married to a peer of France? You declared that they were
manufactured by dozens. At least, you will not refuse to advise me.”
“No, my poor child, no;—and more than once I may have occasion
to cry, ‘Beware!’ Remember that the making of peers is so recent
a force in our government machinery that they have no great fortunes.
Those who are rich look to becoming richer. The wealthiest
member of our peerage has not half the income of the least rich lord
in the English Upper Chamber. Thus all the French peers are on the
lookout for great heiresses for their sons, wherever they may meet
with them. The necessity in which they find themselves of marrying
for money will certainly exist for at least two centuries.
“Pending such a fortunate accident as you long for—and this fastidiousness
may cost you the best years of your life—your attractions
might work a miracle, for men often marry for love in these days.
When experience lurks behind so sweet a face as yours it may achieve
wonders. In the first place, have you not the gift of recognizing virtue
in the greater or smaller dimensions of a man’s body? This is no
small matter! To so wise a young person as you are, I need not enlarge
on all the difficulties of the enterprise. I am sure that you would
never attribute good sense to a stranger because he had a handsome
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face, or all the virtues because he had a fine figure. And I am quite of
your mind in thinking that the sons of peers ought to have an air
peculiar to themselves, and perfectly distinctive manners. Though
nowadays no external sign stamps a man of rank, those young men
will have, perhaps, to you the indefinable something that will reveal
it. Then, again, you have your heart well in hand, like a good horseman
who is sure his steed cannot bolt. Luck be with you, my dear!”
“You are making game of me, papa. Well, I assure you that I would
rather die in Mademoiselle de Conde’s convent than not be the wife
of a peer of France.”
She slipped out of her father’s arms, and proud of being her own
mistress, went off singing the air of Cara non dubitare, in the “Matrimonio
Segreto.”
As it happened, the family were that day keeping the anniversary of
a family fete. At dessert Madame Planat, the Receiver-General’s wife,
spoke with some enthusiasm of a young American owning an immense
fortune, who had fallen passionately in love with her sister,
and made through her the most splendid proposals.
“A banker, I rather think,” observed Emilie carelessly. “I do not like
money dealers.”
“But, Emilie,” replied the Baron de Villaine, the husband of the
Count’s second daughter, “you do not like lawyers either; so that if
you refuse men of wealth who have not titles, I do not quite see in
what class you are to choose a husband.”
“Especially, Emilie, with your standard of slimness,” added the Lieutenant-General.
“I know what I want,” replied the young lady.
“My sister wants a fine name, a fine young man, fine prospects,
and a hundred thousand francs a year,” said the Baronne de Fontaine.
“Monsieur de Marsay, for instance.”
“I know, my dear,” retorted Emilie, “that I do not mean to make
such a foolish marriage as some I have seen. Moreover, to put an end
to these matrimonial discussions, I hereby declare that I shall look on
anyone who talks to me of marriage as a foe to my peace of mind.”
An uncle of Emilie’s, a vice-admiral, whose fortune had just been
increased by twenty thousand francs a year in consequence of the Act
of Indemnity, and a man of seventy, feeling himself privileged to say
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hard things to his grand-niece, on whom he doted, in order to mollify
the bitter tone of the discussion now exclaimed:
“Do not tease my poor little Emilie; don’t you see she is waiting till
the Duc de Bordeaux comes of age!”
The old man’s pleasantry was received with general laughter.
“Take care I don’t marry you, old fool!” replied the young girl,
whose last words were happily drowned in the noise.
“My dear children,” said Madame de Fontaine, to soften this saucy
retort, “Emilie, like you, will take no advice but her mother’s.”
“Bless me! I shall take no advice but my own in a matter which
concerns no one but myself,” said Mademoiselle de Fontaine very
distinctly.
At this all eyes were turned to the head of the family. Every one
seemed anxious as to what he would do to assert his dignity. The
venerable gentleman enjoyed much consideration, not only in the
world; happier than many fathers, he was also appreciated by his
family, all its members having a just esteem for the solid qualities by
which he had been able to make their fortunes. Hence he was treated
with the deep respect which is shown by English families, and some
aristocratic houses on the continent, to the living representatives of
an ancient pedigree. Deep silence had fallen; and the guests looked
alternately from the spoilt girl’s proud and sulky pout to the severe
faces of Monsieur and Madame de Fontaine.
“I have made my daughter Emilie mistress of her own fate,” was
the reply spoken by the Count in a deep voice.
Relations and guests gazed at Mademoiselle de Fontaine with
mingled curiosity and pity. The words seemed to declare that fatherly
affection was weary of the contest with a character that the
whole family knew to be incorrigible. The sons-in-law muttered,
and the brothers glanced at their wives with mocking smiles. From
that moment every one ceased to take any interest in the haughty
girl’s prospects of marriage. Her old uncle was the only person who,
as an old sailor, ventured to stand on her tack, and take her broadsides,
without ever troubling himself to return her fire.
When the fine weather was settled, and after the budget was voted,
the whole family—a perfect example of the parliamentary families
on the northern side of the Channel who have a footing in every
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government department, and ten votes in the House of Commons—
flew away like a brood of young birds to the charming neighborhoods
of Aulnay, Antony, and Chatenay. The wealthy Receiver-General
had lately purchased in this part of the world a country-house for
his wife, who remained in Paris only during the session. Though the
fair Emilie despised the commonalty, her feeling was not carried so
far as to scorn the advantages of a fortune acquired in a profession; so
she accompanied her sister to the sumptuous villa, less out of affection
for the members of her family who were visiting there, than
because fashion has ordained that every woman who has any selfrespect
must leave Paris in the summer. The green seclusion of Sceaux
answered to perfection the requirements of good style and of the
duties of an official position.
As it is extremely doubtful that the fame of the “Bal de Sceaux”
should ever have extended beyond the borders of the Department of
the Seine, it will be necessary to give some account of this weekly
festivity, which at that time was important enough to threaten to
become an institution. The environs of the little town of Sceaux
enjoy a reputation due to the scenery, which is considered enchanting.
Perhaps it is quite ordinary, and owes its fame only to the stupidity
of the Paris townsfolk, who, emerging from the stony abyss in
which they are buried, would find something to admire in the flats
of La Beauce. However, as the poetic shades of Aulnay, the hillsides
of Antony, and the valley of the Bieve are peopled with artists who
have traveled far, by foreigners who are very hard to please, and by a
great many pretty women not devoid of taste, it is to be supposed
that the Parisians are right. But Sceaux possesses another attraction
not less powerful to the Parisian. In the midst of a garden whence
there are delightful views, stands a large rotunda open on all sides,
with a light, spreading roof supported on elegant pillars. This rural
baldachino shelters a dancing-floor. The most stuck-up landowners
of the neighborhood rarely fail to make an excursion thither once or
twice during the season, arriving at this rustic palace of Terpsichore
either in dashing parties on horseback, or in the light and elegant
carriages which powder the philosophical pedestrian with dust. The
hope of meeting some women of fashion, and of being seen by
them—and the hope, less often disappointed, of seeing young peas-
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ant girls, as wily as judges—crowds the ballroom at Sceaux with
numerous swarms of lawyers’ clerks, of the disciples of Aesculapius,
and other youths whose complexions are kept pale and moist by the
damp atmosphere of Paris back-shops. And a good many bourgeois
marriages have had their beginning to the sound of the band occupying
the centre of this circular ballroom. If that roof could speak,
what love-stories could it not tell!
This interesting medley gave the Sceaux balls at that time a spice of
more amusement than those of two or three places of the same kind
near Paris; and it had incontestable advantages in its rotunda, and the
beauty of its situation and its gardens. Emilie was the first to express a
wish to play at being common folk at this gleeful suburban entertainment,
and promised herself immense pleasure in mingling with the
crowd. Everybody wondered at her desire to wander through such a
mob; but is there not a keen pleasure to grand people in an incognito?
Mademoiselle de Fontaine amused herself with imagining all these
town-bred figures; she fancied herself leaving the memory of a bewitching
glance and smile stamped on more than one shopkeeper’s
heart, laughed beforehand at the damsels’ airs, and sharpened her pencils
for the scenes she proposed to sketch in her satirical album. Sunday
could not come soon enough to satisfy her impatience.
The party from the Villa Planat set out on foot, so as not to betray
the rank of the personages who were about to honor the ball with
their presence. They dined early. And the month of May humored
this aristocratic escapade by one of its finest evenings. Mademoiselle
de Fontaine was quite surprised to find in the rotunda some quadrilles
made up of persons who seemed to belong to the upper classes.
Here and there, indeed, were some young men who look as though
they must have saved for a month to shine for a day; and she perceived
several couples whose too hearty glee suggested nothing conjugal;
still, she could only glean instead of gathering a harvest. She
was amused to see that pleasure in a cotton dress was so very like
pleasure robed in satin, and that the girls of the middle class danced
quite as well as ladies—nay, sometimes better. Most of the women
were simply and suitably dressed. Those who in this assembly represented
the ruling power, that is to say, the country-folk, kept apart
with wonderful politeness. In fact, Mademoiselle Emilie had to study
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the various elements that composed the mixture before she could
find any subject for pleasantry. But she had not time to give herself
up to malicious criticism, or opportunity for hearing many of the
startling speeches which caricaturists so gladly pick up. The haughty
young lady suddenly found a flower in this wide field—the metaphor
is reasonable—whose splendor and coloring worked on her
imagination with all the fascination of novelty. It often happens that
we look at a dress, a hanging, a blank sheet of paper, with so little
heed that we do not at first detect a stain or a bright spot which
afterwards strikes the eye as though it had come there at the very
instant when we see it; and by a sort of moral phenomenon somewhat
resembling this, Mademoiselle de Fontaine discovered in a
young man the external perfection of which she had so long dreamed.
Seated on one of the clumsy chairs which marked the boundary
line of the circular floor, she had placed herself at the end of the row
formed by the family party, so as to be able to stand up or push
forward as her fancy moved her, treating the living pictures and groups
in the hall as if she were in a picture gallery; impertinently turning
her eye-glass on persons not two yards away, and making her remarks
as though she were criticising or praising a study of a head, a painting
of genre. Her eyes, after wandering over the vast moving picture,
were suddenly caught by this figure, which seemed to have been placed
on purpose in one corner of the canvas, and in the best light, like a
person out of all proportion with the rest.
The stranger, alone and absorbed in thought, leaned lightly against
one of the columns that supported the roof; his arms were folded,
and he leaned slightly on one side as though he had placed himself
there to have his portrait taken by a painter. His attitude, though full
of elegance and dignity, was devoid of affectation. Nothing suggested
that he had half turned his head, and bent it a little to the right like
Alexander, or Lord Byron, and some other great men, for the sole
purpose of attracting attention. His fixed gaze followed a girl who
was dancing, and betrayed some strong feeling. His slender, easy frame
recalled the noble proportions of the Apollo. Fine black hair curled
naturally over a high forehead. At a glance Mademoiselle de Fontaine
observed that his linen was fine, his gloves fresh, and evidently bought
of a good maker, and his feet were small and well shod in boots of
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Irish kid. He had none of the vulgar trinkets displayed by the dandies
of the National Guard or the Lovelaces of the counting-house. A
black ribbon, to which an eye-glass was attached, hung over a waistcoat
of the most fashionable cut. Never had the fastidious Emilie
seen a man’s eyes shaded by such long, curled lashes. Melancholy and
passion were expressed in this face, and the complexion was of a
manly olive hue. His mouth seemed ready to smile, unbending the
corners of eloquent lips; but this, far from hinting at gaiety, revealed
on the contrary a sort of pathetic grace. There was too much promise
in that head, too much distinction in his whole person, to allow of
one’s saying, “What a handsome man!” or “What a fine man!” One
wanted to know him. The most clear-sighted observer, on seeing this
stranger, could not have helped taking him for a clever man attracted
to this rural festivity by some powerful motive.
All these observations cost Emilie only a minute’s attention, during
which the privileged gentleman under her severe scrutiny became
the object of her secret admiration. She did not say to herself, “He
must be a peer of France!” but “Oh, if only he is noble, and he surely
must be——” Without finishing her thought, she suddenly rose,
and followed by her brother the General, she made her way towards
the column, affecting to watch the merry quadrille; but by a stratagem
of the eye, familiar to women, she lost not a gesture of the
young man as she went towards him. The stranger politely moved to
make way for the newcomers, and went to lean against another pillar.
Emilie, as much nettled by his politeness as she might have been
by an impertinence, began talking to her brother in a louder voice
than good taste enjoined; she turned and tossed her head, gesticulated
eagerly, and laughed for no particular reason, less to amuse her
brother than to attract the attention of the imperturbable stranger.
None of her little arts succeeded. Mademoiselle de Fontaine then
followed the direction in which his eyes were fixed, and discovered
the cause of his indifference.
In the midst of the quadrille, close in front of them, a pale girl was
dancing; her face was like one of the divinities which Girodet has
introduced into his immense composition of French Warriors received
by Ossian. Emilie fancied that she recognized her as a distinguished
milady who for some months had been living on a neigh-
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boring estate. Her partner was a lad of about fifteen, with red hands,
and dressed in nankeen trousers, a blue coat, and white shoes, which
showed that the damsel’s love of dancing made her easy to please in
the matter of partners. Her movements did not betray her apparent
delicacy, but a faint flush already tinged her white cheeks, and her
complexion was gaining color. Mademoiselle de Fontaine went nearer,
to be able to examine the young lady at the moment when she returned
to her place, while the side couples in their turn danced the
figure. But the stranger went up to the pretty dancer, and leaning
over, said in a gentle but commanding tone:
“Clara, my child, do not dance any more.”
Clara made a little pouting face, bent her head, and finally smiled.
When the dance was over, the young man wrapped her in a cashmere
shawl with a lover’s care, and seated her in a place sheltered from the
wind. Very soon Mademoiselle de Fontaine, seeing them rise and
walk round the place as if preparing to leave, found means to follow
them under pretence of admiring the views from the garden. Her
brother lent himself with malicious good-humor to the divagations
of her rather eccentric wanderings. Emilie then saw the attractive
couple get into an elegant tilbury, by which stood a mounted groom
in livery. At the moment when, from his high seat, the young man
was drawing the reins even, she caught a glance from his eye such as a
man casts aimlessly at the crowd; and then she enjoyed the feeble
satisfaction of seeing him turn his head to look at her. The young
lady did the same. Was it from jealousy?
“I imagine you have now seen enough of the garden,” said her
brother. “We may go back to the dancing.”
“I am ready,” said she. “Do you think the girl can be a relation of
Lady Dudley’s?”
“Lady Dudley may have some male relation staying with her,” said
the Baron de Fontaine; “but a young girl!—No!”
Next day Mademoiselle de Fontaine expressed a wish to take a
ride. Then she gradually accustomed her old uncle and her brothers
to escorting her in very early rides, excellent, she declared for her
health. She had a particular fancy for the environs of the hamlet
where Lady Dudley was living. Notwithstanding her cavalry
manoeuvres, she did not meet the stranger so soon as the eager
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search she pursued might have allowed her to hope. She went several
times to the “Bal de Sceaux” without seeing the young Englishman
who had dropped from the skies to pervade and beautify her
dreams. Though nothing spurs on a young girl’s infant passion so
effectually as an obstacle, there was a time when Mademoiselle de
Fontaine was on the point of giving up her strange and secret search,
almost despairing of the success of an enterprise whose singularity
may give some idea of the boldness of her temper. In point of fact,
she might have wandered long about the village of Chatenay without
meeting her Unknown. The fair Clara—since that was the name
Emilie had overheard—was not English, and the stranger who escorted
her did not dwell among the flowery and fragrant bowers of
Chatenay.
One evening Emilie, out riding with her uncle, who, during the
fine weather, had gained a fairly long truce from the gout, met Lady
Dudley. The distinguished foreigner had with her in her open carriage
Monsieur Vandenesse. Emilie recognized the handsome couple,
and her suppositions were at once dissipated like a dream. Annoyed,
as any woman must be whose expectations are frustrated, she touched
up her horse so suddenly that her uncle had the greatest difficulty in
following her, she had set off at such a pace.
“I am too old, it would seem, to understand these youthful spirits,”
said the old sailor to himself as he put his horse to a canter; “or
perhaps young people are not what they used to be. But what ails my
niece? Now she is walking at a foot-pace like a gendarme on patrol in
the Paris streets. One might fancy she wanted to outflank that worthy
man, who looks to me like an author dreaming over his poetry,
for he has, I think, a notebook in his hand. My word, I am a great
simpleton! Is not that the very young man we are in search of!”
At this idea the old admiral moderated his horse’s pace so as to
follow his niece without making any noise. He had played too many
pranks in the years 1771 and soon after, a time of our history when
gallantry was held in honor, not to guess at once that by the merest
chance Emilie had met the Unknown of the Sceaux gardens. In spite
of the film which age had drawn over his gray eyes, the Comte de
Kergarouet could recognize the signs of extreme agitation in his niece,
under the unmoved expression she tried to give to her features. The
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girl’s piercing eyes were fixed in a sort of dull amazement on the
stranger, who quietly walked on in front of her.
“Ay, that’s it,” thought the sailor. “She is following him as a pirate
follows a merchantman. Then, when she has lost sight of him, she
will be in despair at not knowing who it is she is in love with, and
whether he is a marquis or a shopkeeper. Really these young heads
need an old fogy like me always by their side …”
He unexpectedly spurred his horse in such a way as to make his
niece’s bolt, and rode so hastily between her and the young man on
foot that he obliged him to fall back on to the grassy bank which rose
from the roadside. Then, abruptly drawing up, the Count exclaimed:
“Couldn’t you get out of the way?”
“I beg your pardon, monsieur. But I did not know that it lay with
me to apologize to you because you almost rode me down.”
“There, enough of that, my good fellow!” replied the sailor harshly,
in a sneering tone that was nothing less than insulting. At the same
time the Count raised his hunting-crop as if to strike his horse, and
touched the young fellow’s shoulder, saying, “A liberal citizen is a
reasoner; every reasoner should be prudent.”
The young man went up the bankside as he heard the sarcasm;
then he crossed his arms, and said in an excited tone of voice, “I
cannot suppose, monsieur, as I look at your white hairs, that you still
amuse yourself by provoking duels——”
“White hairs!” cried the sailor, interrupting him. “You lie in your
throat. They are only gray.”
A quarrel thus begun had in a few seconds become so fierce that
the younger man forgot the moderation he had tried to preserve. Just
as the Comte de Kergarouet saw his niece coming back to them with
every sign of the greatest uneasiness, he told his antagonist his name,
bidding him keep silence before the young lady entrusted to his care.
The stranger could not help smiling as he gave a visiting card to the
old man, desiring him to observe that he was living at a countryhouse
at Chevreuse; and, after pointing this out to him, he hurried
away.
“You very nearly damaged that poor young counter-jumper, my
dear,” said the Count, advancing hastily to meet Emilie. “Do you
not know how to hold your horse in?—And there you leave me to
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compromise my dignity in order to screen your folly; whereas if you
had but stopped, one of your looks, or one of your pretty speeches—
one of those you can make so prettily when you are not pert—would
have set everything right, even if you had broken his arm.”
“But, my dear uncle, it was your horse, not mine, that caused the
accident. I really think you can no longer ride; you are not so good a
horseman as you were last year.—But instead of talking nonsense—”
“Nonsense, by Gad! Is it nothing to be so impertinent to your
uncle?”
“Ought we not to go on and inquire if the young man is hurt? He
is limping, uncle, only look!”
“No, he is running; I rated him soundly.”
“Oh, yes, uncle; I know you there!”
“Stop,” said the Count, pulling Emilie’s horse by the bridle, “I do
not see the necessity of making advances to some shopkeeper who is
only too lucky to have been thrown down by a charming young
lady, or the commander of La Belle-Poule.”
“Why do you think he is anything so common, my dear uncle? He
seems to me to have very fine manners.”
“Every one has manners nowadays, my dear.”
“No, uncle, not every one has the air and style which come of the
habit of frequenting drawing-rooms, and I am ready to lay a bet with
you that the young man is of noble birth.”
“You had not long to study him.”
“No, but it is not the first time I have seen him.”
“Nor is it the first time you have looked for him,” replied the
admiral with a laugh.
Emilie colored. Her uncle amused himself for some time with her
embarrassment; then he said: “Emilie, you know that I love you as
my own child, precisely because you are the only member of the
family who has the legitimate pride of high birth. Devil take it, child,
who could have believed that sound principles would become so
rare? Well, I will be your confidant. My dear child, I see that his
young gentleman is not indifferent to you. Hush! All the family
would laugh at us if we sailed under the wrong flag. You know what
that means. We two will keep our secret, and I promise to bring him
straight into the drawing-room.”
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“When, uncle?”
“To-morrow.”
“But, my dear uncle, I am not committed to anything?”
“Nothing whatever, and you may bombard him, set fire to him,
and leave him to founder like an old hulk if you choose. He won’t be
the first, I fancy?”
“You are kind, uncle!”
As soon as the Count got home he put on his glasses, quietly took
the card out of his pocket, and read, “Maximilien Longueville, Rue
de Sentier.”
“Make yourself happy, my dear niece,” he said to Emilie, “you may
hook him with any easy conscience; he belongs to one of our historical
families, and if he is not a peer of France, he infallibly will be.”
“How do you know so much?”
“That is my secret.”
“Then do you know his name?”
The old man bowed his gray head, which was not unlike a gnarled
oak-stump, with a few leaves fluttering about it, withered by autumnal
frosts; and his niece immediately began to try the ever-new power
of her coquettish arts. Long familiar with the secret of cajoling the
old man, she lavished on him the most childlike caresses, the tenderest
names; she even went so far as to kiss him to induce him to divulge
so important a secret. The old man, who spent his life in playing off
these scenes on his niece, often paying for them with a present of
jewelry, or by giving her his box at the opera, this time amused himself
with her entreaties, and, above all, her caresses. But as he spun
out this pleasure too long, Emilie grew angry, passed from coaxing
to sarcasm and sulks; then, urged by curiosity, she recovered herself.
The diplomatic admiral extracted a solemn promise from his niece
that she would for the future be gentler, less noisy, and less wilful,
that she would spend less, and, above all, tell him everything. The
treaty being concluded, and signed by a kiss impressed on Emilie’s
white brow, he led her into a corner of the room, drew her on to his
knee, held the card under the thumbs so as to hide it, and then uncovered
the letters one by one, spelling the name of Longueville; but
he firmly refused to show her anything more.
This incident added to the intensity of Mademoiselle de Fontaine’s
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secret sentiment, and during chief part of the night she evolved the
most brilliant pictures from the dreams with which she had fed her
hopes. At last, thanks to chance, to which she had so often appealed,
Emilie could now see something very unlike a chimera at the fountain-head
of the imaginary wealth with which she gilded her married
life. Ignorant, as all young girls are, of the perils of love and marriage,
she was passionately captivated by the externals of marriage and love.
Is not this as much as to say that her feeling had birth like all the
feelings of extreme youth—sweet but cruel mistakes, which exert a
fatal influence on the lives of young girls so inexperienced as to trust
their own judgment to take care of their future happiness?
Next morning, before Emilie was awake, her uncle had hastened to
Chevreuse. On recognizing, in the courtyard of an elegant little villa,
the young man he had so determinedly insulted the day before, he
went up to him with the pressing politeness of men of the old court.
“Why, my dear sir, who could have guessed that I should have a
brush, at the age of seventy-three, with the son, or the grandson, of
one of my best friends. I am a vice-admiral, monsieur; is not that as
much as to say that I think no more of fighting a duel than of smoking
a cigar? Why, in my time, no two young men could be intimate
till they had seen the color of their blood! But ‘sdeath, sir, last evening,
sailor-like, I had taken a drop too much grog on board, and I ran you
down. Shake hands; I would rather take a hundred rebuffs from a
Longueville than cause his family the smallest regret.”
However coldly the young man tried to behave to the Comte de
Kergarouet, he could not resist the frank cordiality of his manner,
and presently gave him his hand.
“You were going out riding,” said the Count. “Do not let me
detain you. But, unless you have other plans, I beg you will come
to dinner to-day at the Villa Planat. My nephew, the Comte de
Fontaine, is a man it is essential that you should know. Ah, ha! And
I propose to make up to you for my clumsiness by introducing you
to five of the prettiest women in Paris. So, so, young man, your
brow is clearing! I am fond of young people, and I like to see them
happy. Their happiness reminds me of the good times of my youth,
when adventures were not lacking, any more than duels. We were
gay dogs then! Nowadays you think and worry over everything, as
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though there had never been a fifteenth and a sixteenth century.”
“But, monsieur, are we not in the right? The sixteenth century only
gave religious liberty to Europe, and the nineteenth will give it political
lib—”
“Oh, we will not talk politics. I am a perfect old woman—ultra
you see. But I do not hinder young men from being revolutionary,
so long as they leave the King at liberty to disperse their assemblies.”
When they had gone a little way, and the Count and his companion
were in the heart of the woods, the old sailor pointed out a
slender young birch sapling, pulled up his horse, took out one of his
pistols, and the bullet was lodged in the heart of the tree, fifteen
paces away.
“You see, my dear fellow, that I am not afraid of a duel,” he said
with comical gravity, as he looked at Monsieur Longueville.
“Nor am I,” replied the young man, promptly cocking his pistol;
he aimed at the hole made by the Comte’s bullet, and sent his own
close to it.
“That is what I call a well-educated man,” cried the admiral with
enthusiasm.
During this ride with the youth, whom he already regarded as his
nephew, he found endless opportunities of catechizing him on all the
trifles of which a perfect knowledge constituted, according to his private
code, an accomplished gentleman.
“Have you any debts?” he at last asked of his companion, after
many other inquiries.
“No, monsieur.”
“What, you pay for all you have?”
“Punctually; otherwise we should lose our credit, and every sort of
respect.”
“But at least you have more than one mistress? Ah, you blush,
comrade! Well, manners have changed. All these notions of lawful
order, Kantism, and liberty have spoilt the young men. You have no
Guimard now, no Duthe, no creditors—and you know nothing of
heraldry; why, my dear young friend, you are not fully fledged. The
man who does not sow his wild oats in the spring sows them in the
winter. If I have but eighty thousand francs a year at the age of seventy,
it is because I ran through the capital at thirty. Oh! with my
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wife—in decency and honor. However, your imperfections will not
interfere with my introducing you at the Pavillon Planat. Remember,
you have promised to come, and I shall expect you.”
“What an odd little old man!” said Longueville to himself. “He is
so jolly and hale; but though he wishes to seem a good fellow, I will
not trust him too far.”
Next day, at about four o’clock, when the house party were dispersed
in the drawing-rooms and billiard-room, a servant announced to the
inhabitants of the Villa Planat, “Monsieur de Longueville.” On hearing
the name of the old admiral’s protege, every one, down to the player
who was about to miss his stroke, rushed in, as much to study Mademoiselle
de Fontaine’s countenance as to judge of this phoenix of men,
who had earned honorable mention to the detriment of so many rivals.
A simple but elegant style of dress, an air of perfect ease, polite manners,
a pleasant voice with a ring in it which found a response in the hearer’s
heart-strings, won the good-will of the family for Monsieur Longueville.
He did not seem unaccustomed to the luxury of the Receiver-General’s
ostentatious mansion. Though his conversation was that of a man of the
world, it was easy to discern that he had had a brilliant education, and
that his knowledge was as thorough as it was extensive. He knew so well
the right thing to say in a discussion on naval architecture, trivial, it is
true, started by the old admiral, that one of the ladies remarked that he
must have passed through the Ecole Polytechnique.
“And I think, madame,” he replied, “that I may regard it as an
honor to have got in.”
In spite of urgent pressing, he refused politely but firmly to be
kept to dinner, and put an end to the persistency of the ladies by
saying that he was the Hippocrates of his young sister, whose delicate
health required great care.
“Monsieur is perhaps a medical man?” asked one of Emilie’s sisters-in-law
with ironical meaning.
“Monsieur has left the Ecole Polytechnique,” Mademoiselle de
Fontaine kindly put in; her face had flushed with richer color, as
she learned that the young lady of the ball was Monsieur
Longueville’s sister.
“But, my dear, he may be a doctor and yet have been to the Ecole
Polytechnique—is it not so, monsieur?”
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“There is nothing to prevent it, madame,” replied the young man.
Every eye was on Emilie, who was gazing with uneasy curiosity at
the fascinating stranger. She breathed more freely when he added,
not without a smile, “I have not the honor of belonging to the medical
profession; and I even gave up going into the Engineers in order
to preserve my independence.”
“And you did well,” said the Count. “But how can you regard it as
an honor to be a doctor?” added the Breton nobleman. “Ah, my
young friend, such a man as you—”
“Monsieur le Comte, I respect every profession that has a useful
purpose.”
“Well, in that we agree. You respect those professions, I imagine, as
a young man respects a dowager.”
Monsieur Longueville made his visit neither too long nor too short.
He left at the moment when he saw that he had pleased everybody,
and that each one’s curiosity about him had been roused.
“He is a cunning rascal!” said the Count, coming into the drawingroom
after seeing him to the door.
Mademoiselle de Fontaine, who had been in the secret of this call,
had dressed with some care to attract the young man’s eye; but she
had the little disappointment of finding that he did not bestow on
her so much attention as she thought she deserved. The family were
a good deal surprised at the silence into which she had retired. Emilie
generally displayed all her arts for the benefit of newcomers, her witty
prattle, and the inexhaustible eloquence of her eyes and attitudes.
Whether it was that the young man’s pleasing voice and attractive
manners had charmed her, that she was seriously in love, and that
this feeling had worked a change in her, her demeanor had lost all its
affectations. Being simple and natural, she must, no doubt, have
seemed more beautiful. Some of her sisters, and an old lady, a friend
of the family, saw in this behavior a refinement of art. They supposed
that Emilie, judging the man worthy of her, intended to delay
revealing her merits, so as to dazzle him suddenly when she found
that she pleased him. Every member of the family was curious to
know what this capricious creature thought of the stranger; but when,
during dinner, every one chose to endow Monsieur Longueville with
some fresh quality which no one else had discovered, Mademoiselle
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The Ball at Sceaux
de Fontaine sat for some time in silence. A sarcastic remark of her
uncle’s suddenly roused her from her apathy; she said, somewhat
epigrammatically, that such heavenly perfection must cover some
great defect, and that she would take good care how she judged so
gifted a man at first sight.
“Those who please everybody, please nobody,” she added; “and the
worst of all faults is to have none.”
Like all girls who are in love, Emilie cherished the hope of being
able to hide her feelings at the bottom of her heart by putting the
Argus-eyes that watched on the wrong tack; but by the end of a
fortnight there was not a member of the large family party who was
not in this little domestic secret. When Monsieur Longueville called
for the third time, Emilie believed it was chiefly for her sake. This
discovery gave her such intoxicating pleasure that she was startled as
she reflected on it. There was something in it very painful to her
pride. Accustomed as she was to be the centre of her world, she was
obliged to recognize a force that attracted her outside herself; she
tried to resist, but she could not chase from her heart the fascinating
image of the young man.
Then came some anxiety. Two of Monsieur Longueville’s qualities,
very adverse to general curiosity, and especially to Mademoiselle de
Fontaine’s, were unexpected modesty and discretion. He never spoke
of himself, of his pursuits, or of his family. The hints Emilie threw out
in conversation, and the traps she laid to extract from the young fellow
some facts concerning himself, he could evade with the adroitness of a
diplomatist concealing a secret. If she talked of painting, he responded
as a connoisseur; if she sat down to play, he showed without conceit
that he was a very good pianist; one evening he delighted all the party
by joining his delightful voice to Emilie’s in one of Cimarosa’s charming
duets. But when they tried to find out whether he were a professional
singer, he baffled them so pleasantly that he did not afford these
women, practised as they were in the art of reading feelings, the least
chance of discovering to what social sphere he belonged. However
boldly the old uncle cast the boarding-hooks over the vessel, Longueville
slipped away cleverly, so as to preserve the charm of mystery; and it was
easy to him to remain the “handsome Stranger” at the Villa, because
curiosity never overstepped the bounds of good breeding.
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Emilie, distracted by this reserve, hoped to get more out of the
sister than the brother, in the form of confidences. Aided by her
uncle, who was as skilful in such manoeuvres as in handling a ship,
she endeavored to bring upon the scene the hitherto unseen figure of
Mademoiselle Clara Longueville. The family party at the Villa Planat
soon expressed the greatest desire to make the acquaintance of so
amiable a young lady, and to give her some amusement. An informal
dance was proposed and accepted. The ladies did not despair of making
a young girl of sixteen talk.
Notwithstanding the little clouds piled up by suspicion and created
by curiosity, a light of joy shone in Emilie’s soul, for she found
life delicious when thus intimately connected with another than herself.
She began to understand the relations of life. Whether it is that
happiness makes us better, or that she was too fully occupied to torment
other people, she became less caustic, more gentle, and indulgent.
This change in her temper enchanted and amazed her family.
Perhaps, at last, her selfishness was being transformed to love. It was
a deep delight to her to look for the arrival of her bashful and unconfessed
adorer. Though they had not uttered a word of passion, she
knew that she was loved, and with what art did she not lead the
stranger to unlock the stores of his information, which proved to be
varied! She perceived that she, too, was being studied, and that made
her endeavor to remedy the defects her education had encouraged.
Was not this her first homage to love, and a bitter reproach to herself?
She desired to please, and she was enchanting; she loved, and she
was idolized. Her family, knowing that her pride would sufficiently
protect her, gave her enough freedom to enjoy the little childish delights
which give to first love its charm and its violence. More than
once the young man and Mademoiselle de Fontaine walked, tete-atete,
in the avenues of the garden, where nature was dressed like a
woman going to a ball. More than once they had those conversations,
aimless and meaningless, in which the emptiest phrases are
those which cover the deepest feelings. They often admired together
the setting sun and its gorgeous coloring. They gathered daisies to
pull the petals off, and sang the most impassioned duets, using the
notes set down by Pergolesi or Rossini as faithful interpreters to express
their secrets.
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The Ball at Sceaux
The day of the dance came. Clara Longueville and her brother, whom
the servants persisted in honoring with the noble DE, were the principle
guests. For the first time in her life Mademoiselle de Fontaine felt pleasure
in a young girl’s triumph. She lavished on Clara in all sincerity the
gracious petting and little attentions which women generally give each
other only to excite the jealousy of men. Emilie, had, indeed, an object
in view; she wanted to discover some secrets. But, being a girl, Mademoiselle
Longueville showed even more mother-wit than her brother,
for she did not even look as if she were hiding a secret, and kept the
conversation to subjects unconnected with personal interests, while, at
the same time, she gave it so much charm that Mademoiselle de Fontaine
was almost envious, and called her “the Siren.” Though Emilie had intended
to make Clara talk, it was Clara, in fact, who questioned Emilie;
she had meant to judge her, and she was judged by her; she was constantly
provoked to find that she had betrayed her own character in some
reply which Clara had extracted from her, while her modest and candid
manner prohibited any suspicion of perfidy. There was a moment when
Mademoiselle de Fontaine seemed sorry for an ill-judged sally against
the commonalty to which Clara had led her.
“Mademoiselle,” said the sweet child, “I have heard so much of you
from Maximilien that I had the keenest desire to know you, out of
affection for him; but is not a wish to know you a wish to love you?”
“My dear Clara, I feared I might have displeased you by speaking
thus of people who are not of noble birth.”
“Oh, be quite easy. That sort of discussion is pointless in these
days. As for me, it does not affect me. I am beside the question.”
Ambitious as the answer might seem, it filled Mademoiselle de
Fontaine with the deepest joy; for, like all infatuated people, she
explained it, as oracles are explained, in the sense that harmonized
with her wishes; she began dancing again in higher spirits than ever,
as she watched Longueville, whose figure and grace almost surpassed
those of her imaginary ideal. She felt added satisfaction in believing
him to be well born, her black eyes sparkled, and she danced with all
the pleasure that comes of dancing in the presence of the being we
love. The couple had never understood each other as well as at this
moment; more than once they felt their finger tips thrill and tremble
as they were married in the figures of the dance.
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The early autumn had come to the handsome pair, in the midst of
country festivities and pleasures; they had abandoned themselves softly
to the tide of the sweetest sentiment in life, strengthening it by a
thousand little incidents which any one can imagine; for love is in
some respects always the same. They studied each other through it
all, as much as lovers can.
“Well, well; a flirtation never turned so quickly into a love match,”
said the old uncle, who kept an eye on the two young people as a
naturalist watches an insect in the microscope.
The speech alarmed Monsieur and Madame Fontaine. The old
Vendeen had ceased to be so indifferent to his daughter’s prospects as
he had promised to be. He went to Paris to seek information, and
found none. Uneasy at this mystery, and not yet knowing what might
be the outcome of the inquiry which he had begged a Paris friend to
institute with reference to the family of Longueville, he thought it
his duty to warn his daughter to behave prudently. The fatherly admonition
was received with mock submission spiced with irony.
“At least, my dear Emilie, if you love him, do not own it to him.”
“My dear father, I certainly do love him; but I will await your
permission before I tell him so.”
“But remember, Emilie, you know nothing of his family or his
pursuits.”
“I may be ignorant, but I am content to be. But, father, you wished
to see me married; you left me at liberty to make my choice; my
choice is irrevocably made—what more is needful?”
“It is needful to ascertain, my dear, whether the man of your choice
is the son of a peer of France,” the venerable gentleman retorted sarcastically.
Emilie was silent for a moment. She presently raised her head,
looked at her father, and said somewhat anxiously, “Are not the
Longuevilles—?”
“They became extinct in the person of the old Duc de Rostein-
Limbourg, who perished on the scaffold in 1793. He was the last
representative of the last and younger branch.”
“But, papa, there are some very good families descended from bastards.
The history of France swarms with princes bearing the bar
sinister on their shields.”
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“Your ideas are much changed,” said the old man, with a smile.
The following day was the last that the Fontaine family were to
spend at the Pavillon Planat. Emilie, greatly disturbed by her father’s
warning, awaited with extreme impatience the hour at which young
Longueville was in the habit of coming, to wring some explanation
from him. She went out after dinner, and walked alone across the
shrubbery towards an arbor fit for lovers, where she knew that the
eager youth would seek her; and as she hastened thither she considered
of the best way to discover so important a matter without compromising
herself—a rather difficult thing! Hitherto no direct avowal
had sanctioned the feelings which bound her to this stranger. Like
Maximilien, she had secretly enjoyed the sweetness of first love; but
both were equally proud, and each feared to confess that love.
Maximilien Longueville, to whom Clara had communicated her
not unfounded suspicions as to Emilie’s character, was by turns carried
away by the violence of a young man’s passion, and held back by
a wish to know and test the woman to whom he would be entrusting
his happiness. His love had not hindered him from perceiving in
Emilie the prejudices which marred her young nature; but before
attempting to counteract them, he wished to be sure that she loved
him, for he would no sooner risk the fate of his love than of his life.
He had, therefore, persistently kept a silence to which his looks, his
behavior, and his smallest actions gave the lie.
On her side, the self-respect natural to a young girl, augmented in
Mademoiselle de Fontaine by the monstrous vanity founded on her
birth and beauty, kept her from meeting the declaration half-way,
which her growing passion sometimes urged her to invite. Thus the
lovers had instinctively understood the situation without explaining
to each other their secret motives. There are times in life when such
vagueness pleases youthful minds. Just because each had postponed
speaking too long, they seemed to be playing a cruel game of suspense.
He was trying to discover whether he was beloved, by the
effort any confession would cost his haughty mistress; she every
minute hoped that he would break a too respectful silence.
Emilie, seated on a rustic bench, was reflecting on all that had happened
in these three months full of enchantment. Her father’s suspicions
were the last that could appeal to her; she even disposed of
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them at once by two or three of those reflections natural to an inexperienced
girl, which, to her, seemed conclusive. Above all, she was
convinced that it was impossible that she should deceive herself. All
the summer through she had not been able to detect in Maximilien a
single gesture, or a single word, which could indicate a vulgar origin
or vulgar occupations; nay more, his manner of discussing things
revealed a man devoted to the highest interests of the nation. “Besides,”
she reflected, “an office clerk, a banker, or a merchant, would
not be at leisure to spend a whole season in paying his addresses to
me in the midst of woods and fields; wasting his time as freely as a
nobleman who has life before him free of all care.”
She had given herself up to meditations far more interesting to her
than these preliminary thoughts, when a slight rustling in the leaves
announced to her than Maximilien had been watching her for a
minute, not probably without admiration.
“Do you know that it is very wrong to take a young girl thus
unawares?” she asked him, smiling.
“Especially when they are busy with their secrets,” replied
Maximilien archly.
“Why should I not have my secrets? You certainly have yours.”
“Then you really were thinking of your secrets?” he went on,
laughing.
“No, I was thinking of yours. My own, I know.”
“But perhaps my secrets are yours, and yours mine,” cried the young
man, softly seizing Mademoiselle de Fontaine’s hand and drawing it
through his arm.
After walking a few steps they found themselves under a clump of
trees which the hues of the sinking sun wrapped in a haze of red and
brown. This touch of natural magic lent a certain solemnity to the
moment. The young man’s free and eager action, and, above all, the
throbbing of his surging heart, whose hurried beating spoke to
Emilie’s arm, stirred her to an emotion that was all the more disturbing
because it was produced by the simplest and most innocent circumstances.
The restraint under which the young girls of the upper
class live gives incredible force to any explosion of feeling, and to
meet an impassioned lover is one of the greatest dangers they can
encounter. Never had Emilie and Maximilien allowed their eyes to
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say so much that they dared never speak. Carried a way by this intoxication,
they easily forgot the petty stipulations of pride, and the
cold hesitancies of suspicion. At first, indeed, they could only express
themselves by a pressure of hands which interpreted their happy
thoughts.
After slowing pacing a few steps in long silence, Mademoiselle de
Fontaine spoke. “Monsieur, I have a question to ask you,” she said
trembling, and in an agitated voice. “But, remember, I beg, that it is
in a manner compulsory on me, from the rather singular position I
am in with regard to my family.”
A pause, terrible to Emilie, followed these sentences, which she
had almost stammered out. During the minute while it lasted, the
girl, haughty as she was, dared not meet the flashing eye of the man
she loved, for she was secretly conscious of the meanness of the next
words she added: “Are you of noble birth?”
As soon as the words were spoken she wished herself at the bottom
of a lake.
“Mademoiselle,” Longueville gravely replied, and his face assumed
a sort of stern dignity, “I promise to answer you truly as soon as you
shall have answered in all sincerity a question I will put to you!”—
He released her arm, and the girl suddenly felt alone in the world, as
he said: “What is your object in questioning me as to my birth?”
She stood motionless, cold, and speechless.
“Mademoiselle,” Maximilien went on, “let us go no further if we
do not understand each other. I love you,” he said, in a voice of deep
emotion. “Well, then,” he added, as he heard the joyful exclamation
she could not suppress, “why ask me if I am of noble birth?”
“Could he speak so if he were not?” cried a voice within her, which
Emilie believed came from the depths of her heart. She gracefully
raised her head, seemed to find new life in the young man’s gaze, and
held out her hand as if to renew the alliance.
“You thought I cared very much for dignities?” said she with keen
archness.
“I have no titles to offer my wife,” he replied, in a half-sportive, halfserious
tone. “But if I choose one of high rank, and among women
whom a wealthy home has accustomed to the luxury and pleasures of
a fine fortune, I know what such a choice requires of me. Love gives
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everything,” he added lightly, “but only to lovers. Once married, they
need something more than the vault of heaven and the carpet of a
meadow.”
“He is rich,” she reflected. “As to titles, perhaps he only wants to
try me. He has been told that I am mad about titles, and bent on
marrying none but a peer’s son. My priggish sisters have played me
that trick.”—”I assure you, monsieur,” she said aloud, “that I have
had very extravagant ideas about life and the world; but now,” she
added pointedly, looking at him in a perfectly distracting way, “I
know where true riches are to be found for a wife.”
“I must believe that you are speaking from the depths of your
heart,” he said, with gentle gravity. “But this winter, my dear Emilie,
in less than two months perhaps, I may be proud of what I shall have
to offer you if you care for the pleasures of wealth. This is the only
secret I shall keep locked here,” and he laid his hand on his heart, “for
on its success my happiness depends. I dare not say ours.”
“Yes, yes, ours!”
Exchanging such sweet nothings, they slowly made their way back
to rejoin the company. Mademoiselle de Fontaine had never found
her lover more amiable or wittier: his light figure, his engaging manners,
seemed to her more charming than ever, since the conversation
which had made her to some extent the possessor of a heart worthy
to be the envy of every woman. They sang an Italian duet with so
much expression that the audience applauded enthusiastically. Their
adieux were in a conventional tone, which concealed their happiness.
In short, this day had been to Emilie like a chain binding her more
closely than ever to the Stranger’s fate. The strength and dignity he
had displayed in the scene when they had confessed their feelings had
perhaps impressed Mademoiselle de Fontaine with the respect without
which there is no true love.
When she was left alone in the drawing-room with her father, the
old man went up to her affectionately, held her hands, and asked her
whether she had gained any light at to Monsieur Longueville’s family
and fortune.
“Yes, my dear father,” she replied, “and I am happier than I could
have hoped. In short, Monsieur de Longueville is the only man I
could ever marry.”
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“Very well, Emilie,” said the Count, “then I know what remains
for me to do.”
“Do you know of any impediment?” she asked, in sincere alarm.
“My dear child, the young man is totally unknown to me; but
unless he is not a man of honor, so long as you love him, he is as dear
to me as a son.”
“Not a man of honor!” exclaimed Emilie. “As to that, I am quite
easy. My uncle, who introduced him to us, will answer for him. Say,
my dear uncle, has he been a filibuster, an outlaw, a pirate?”
“I knew I should find myself in this fix!” cried the old sailor, waking
up. He looked round the room, but his niece had vanished “like Saint-
Elmo’s fires,” to use his favorite expression.
“Well, uncle,” Monsieur de Fontaine went on, “how could you
hide from us all you knew about this young man? You must have
seen how anxious we have been. Is Monsieur de Longueville a man
of family?”
“I don’t know him from Adam or Eve,” said the Comte de
Kergarouet. “Trusting to that crazy child’s tact, I got him here by a
method of my own. I know that the boy shoots with a pistol to admiration,
hunts well, plays wonderfully at billiards, at chess, and at backgammon;
he handles the foils, and rides a horse like the late Chevalier
de Saint-Georges. He has a thorough knowledge of all our vintages.
He is as good an arithmetician as Bareme, draws, dances, and sings
well. The devil’s in it! what more do you want? If that is not a perfect
gentleman, find me a bourgeois who knows all this, or any man who
lives more nobly than he does. Does he do anything, I ask you? Does
he compromise his dignity by hanging about an office, bowing down
before the upstarts you call Directors-General? He walks upright. He
is a man.—However, I have just found in my waistcoat pocket the
card he gave me when he fancied I wanted to cut his throat, poor
innocent. Young men are very simple-minded nowadays! Here it is.”
“Rue du Sentier, No. 5,” said Monsieur de Fontaine, trying to
recall among all the information he had received, something which
might concern the stranger. “What the devil can it mean? Messrs.
Palma, Werbrust & Co., wholesale dealers in muslins, calicoes, and
printed cotton goods, live there.—Stay, I have it: Longueville the
deputy has an interest in their house. Well, but so far as I know,
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Longueville has but one son of two-and-thirty, who is not at all like
our man, and to whom he gave fifty thousand francs a year that he
might marry a minister’s daughter; he wants to be made a peer like
the rest of ‘em. —I never heard him mention this Maximilien. Has
he a daughter? What is this girl Clara? Besides, it is open to any
adventurer to call himself Longueville. But is not the house of Palma,
Werbrust & Co. half ruined by some speculation in Mexico or the
Indies? I will clear all this up.”
“You speak a soliloquy as if you were on the stage, and seem to
account me a cipher,” said the old admiral suddenly. “Don’t you know
that if he is a gentleman, I have more than one bag in my hold that
will stop any leak in his fortune?”
“As to that, if he is a son of Longueville’s, he will want nothing;
but,” said Monsieur de Fontaine, shaking his head from side to side,
“his father has not even washed off the stains of his origin. Before the
Revolution he was an attorney, and the DE he has since assumed no
more belongs to him than half of his fortune.”
“Pooh! pooh! happy those whose fathers were hanged!” cried the
admiral gaily.
THREE OR FOUR DAYS AFTER this memorable day, on one of those fine
mornings in the month of November, which show the boulevards
cleaned by the sharp cold of an early frost, Mademoiselle de Fontaine,
wrapped in a new style of fur cape, of which she wished to set the
fashion, went out with two of her sisters-in-law, on whom she had
been wont to discharge her most cutting remarks. The three women
were tempted to the drive, less by their desire to try a very elegant
carriage, and wear gowns which were to set the fashion for the winter,
than by their wish to see a cape which a friend had observed in a handsome
lace and linen shop at the corner of the Rue de la Paix. As soon as
they were in the shop the Baronne de Fontaine pulled Emilie by the
sleeve, and pointed out to her Maximilien Longueville seated behind
the desk, and engaged in paying out the change for a gold piece to one
of the workwomen with whom he seemed to be in consultation. The
“handsome stranger” held in his hand a parcel of patterns, which left
no doubt as to his honorable profession.
Emilie felt an icy shudder, though no one perceived it. Thanks to
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the good breeding of the best society, she completely concealed the
rage in her heart, and answered her sister-in-law with the words, “I
knew it,” with a fulness of intonation and inimitable decision which
the most famous actress of the time might have envied her. She went
straight up to the desk. Longueville looked up, put the patterns in
his pocket with distracting coolness, bowed to Mademoiselle de
Fontaine, and came forward, looking at her keenly.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to the shopgirl, who followed him, looking
very much disturbed, “I will send to settle that account; my house
deals in that way. But here,” he whispered into her ear, as he gave her
a thousand-franc note, “take this—it is between ourselves.—You will
forgive me, I trust, mademoiselle,” he added, turning to Emilie. “You
will kindly excuse the tyranny of business matters.”
“Indeed, monsieur, it seems to me that it is no concern of mine,”
replied Mademoiselle de Fontaine, looking at him with a bold expression
of sarcastic indifference which might have made any one
believe that she now saw him for the first time.
“Do you really mean it?” asked Maximilien in a broken voice.
Emilie turned her back upon him with amazing insolence. These
words, spoken in an undertone, had escaped the ears of her two sisters-in-law.
When, after buying the cape, the three ladies got into the
carriage again, Emilie, seated with her back to the horses, could not
resist one last comprehensive glance into the depths of the odious
shop, where she saw Maximilien standing with his arms folded, in
the attitude of a man superior to the disaster that has so suddenly
fallen on him. Their eyes met and flashed implacable looks. Each
hoped to inflict a cruel wound on the heart of a lover. In one instant
they were as far apart as if one had been in China and the other in
Greenland.
Does not the breath of vanity wither everything? Mademoiselle de
Fontaine, a prey to the most violent struggle that can torture the
heart of a young girl, reaped the richest harvest of anguish that prejudice
and narrow-mindedness ever sowed in a human soul. Her face,
but just now fresh and velvety, was streaked with yellow lines and
red patches; the paleness of her cheeks seemed every now and then to
turn green. Hoping to hide her despair from her sisters, she would
laugh as she pointed out some ridiculous dress or passer-by; but her
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laughter was spasmodic. She was more deeply hurt by their unspoken
compassion than by any satirical comments for which she might
have revenged herself. She exhausted her wit in trying to engage them
in a conversation, in which she tried to expend her fury in senseless
paradoxes, heaping on all men engaged in trade the bitterest insults
and witticisms in the worst taste.
On getting home, she had an attack of fever, which at first assumed
a somewhat serious character. By the end of a month the care
of her parents and of the physician restored her to her family.
Every one hoped that this lesson would be severe enough to subdue
Emilie’s nature; but she insensibly fell into her old habits and
threw herself again into the world of fashion. She declared that there
was no disgrace in making a mistake. If she, like her father, had a vote
in the Chamber, she would move for an edict, she said, by which all
merchants, and especially dealers in calico, should be branded on the
forehead, like Berri sheep, down to the third generation. She wished
that none but nobles should have the right to wear the antique French
costume, which was so becoming to the courtiers of Louis XV. To
hear her, it was a misfortune for France, perhaps, that there was no
outward and visible difference between a merchant and a peer of
France. And a hundred more such pleasantries, easy to imagine, were
rapidly poured out when any accident brought up the subject.
But those who loved Emilie could see through all her banter a
tinge of melancholy. It was clear that Maximilien Longueville still
reigned over that inexorable heart. Sometimes she would be as gentle
as she had been during the brief summer that had seen the birth of
her love; sometimes, again, she was unendurable. Every one made
excuses for her inequality of temper, which had its source in sufferings
at once secret and known to all. The Comte de Kergarouet had
some influence over her, thanks to his increased prodigality, a kind of
consolation which rarely fails of its effect on a Parisian girl.
The first ball at which Mademoiselle de Fontaine appeared was at
the Neapolitan ambassador’s. As she took her place in the first quadrille
she saw, a few yards away from her, Maximilien Longueville,
who nodded slightly to her partner.
“Is that young man a friend of yours?” she asked, with a scornful air.
“Only my brother,” he replied.
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Emilie could not help starting. “Ah!” he continued, “and he is the
noblest soul living—”
“Do you know my name?” asked Emilie, eagerly interrupting him.
“No, mademoiselle. It is a crime, I confess, not to remember a
name which is on every lip—I ought to say in every heart. But I have
a valid excuse. I have but just arrived from Germany. My ambassador,
who is in Paris on leave, sent me here this evening to take care of
his amiable wife, whom you may see yonder in that corner.”
“A perfect tragic mask!” said Emilie, after looking at the ambassadress.
“And yet that is her ballroom face!” said the young man, laughing.
“I shall have to dance with her! So I thought I might have some
compensation.” Mademoiselle de Fontaine courtesied. “I was very
much surprised,” the voluble young secretary went on, “to find my
brother here. On arriving from Vienna I heard that the poor boy was
ill in bed; and I counted on seeing him before coming to this ball;
but good policy will always allow us to indulge family affection. The
Padrona della case would not give me time to call on my poor
Maximilien.”
“Then, monsieur, your brother is not, like you, in diplomatic employment.”
“No,” said the attache, with a sigh, “the poor fellow sacrificed himself
for me. He and my sister Clara have renounced their share of my
father’s fortune to make an eldest son of me. My father dreams of a
peerage, like all who vote for the ministry. Indeed, it is promised
him,” he added in an undertone. “After saving up a little capital my
brother joined a banking firm, and I hear he has just effected a speculation
in Brazil which may make him a millionaire. You see me in the
highest spirits at having been able, by my diplomatic connections, to
contribute to his success. I am impatiently expecting a dispatch from
the Brazilian Legation, which will help to lift the cloud from his
brow. What do you think of him?”
“Well, your brother’s face does not look to me like that of a man
busied with money matters.”
The young attache shot a scrutinizing glance at the apparently calm
face of his partner.
“What!” he exclaimed, with a smile, “can young ladies read the
thoughts of love behind the silent brow?”
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“Your brother is in love, then?” she asked, betrayed into a movement
of curiosity.
“Yes; my sister Clara, to whom he is as devoted as a mother, wrote
to me that he had fallen in love this summer with a very pretty girl;
but I have had no further news of the affair. Would you believe that
the poor boy used to get up at five in the morning, and went off to
settle his business that he might be back by four o’clock in the country
where the lady was? In fact, he ruined a very nice thoroughbred
that I had just given him. Forgive my chatter, mademoiselle; I have
but just come home from Germany. For a year I have heard no decent
French, I have been weaned from French faces, and satiated with
Germans, to such a degree that, I believe, in my patriotic mania, I
could talk to the chimeras on a French candlestick. And if I talk with
a lack of reserve unbecoming in a diplomatist, the fault is yours,
mademoiselle. Was it not you who pointed out my brother? When
he is the theme I become inexhaustible. I should like to proclaim to
all the world how good and generous he is. He gave up no less than
a hundred thousand francs a year, the income from the Longueville
property.”
If Mademoiselle de Fontaine had the benefit of these important
revelations, it was partly due to the skill with which she continued to
question her confiding partner from the moment when she found
that he was the brother of her scorned lover.
“And could you, without being grieved, see your brother selling
muslin and calico?” asked Emilie, at the end of the third figure of the
quadrille.
“How do you know that?” asked the attache. “Thank God, though I
pour out a flood of words, I have already acquired the art of not telling
more than I intend, like all the other diplomatic apprentices I know.”
“You told me, I assure you.”
Monsieur de Longueville looked at Mademoiselle de Fontaine with
a surprise that was full of perspicacity. A suspicion flashed upon him.
He glanced inquiringly from his brother to his partner, guessed everything,
clasped his hands, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and began to
laugh, saying, “I am an idiot! You are the handsomest person here;
my brother keeps stealing glances at you; he is dancing in spite of his
illness, and you pretend not to see him. Make him happy,” he added,
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as he led her back to her old uncle. “I shall not be jealous, but I shall
always shiver a little at calling you my sister—”
The lovers, however, were to prove as inexorable to each other as
they were to themselves. At about two in the morning, refreshments
were served in an immense corridor, where, to leave persons of the
same coterie free to meet each other, the tables were arranged as in a
restaurant. By one of those accidents which always happen to lovers,
Mademoiselle de Fontaine found herself at a table next to that at
which the more important guests were seated. Maximilien was of
the group. Emilie, who lent an attentive ear to her neighbors’ conversation,
overheard one of those dialogues into which a young woman
so easily falls with a young man who has the grace and style of
Maximilien Longueville. The lady talking to the young banker was a
Neapolitan duchess, whose eyes shot lightning flashes, and whose
skin had the sheen of satin. The intimate terms on which Longueville
affected to be with her stung Mademoiselle de Fontaine all the more
because she had just given her lover back twenty times as much tenderness
as she had ever felt for him before.
“Yes, monsieur, in my country true love can make every kind of
sacrifice,” the Duchess was saying, in a simper.
“You have more passion than Frenchwomen,” said Maximilien,
whose burning gaze fell on Emilie. “They are all vanity.”
“Monsieur,” Emilie eagerly interposed, “is it not very wrong to
calumniate your own country? Devotion is to be found in every nation.”
“Do you imagine, mademoiselle,” retorted the Italian, with a sardonic
smile, “that a Parisian would be capable of following her lover
all over the world?”
“Oh, madame, let us understand each other. She would follow
him to a desert and live in a tent but not to sit in a shop.”
A disdainful gesture completed her meaning. Thus, under the influence
of her disastrous education, Emile for the second time killed
her budding happiness, and destroyed its prospects of life. Maximilien’s
apparent indifference, and a woman’s smile, had wrung from her one
of those sarcasms whose treacherous zest always let her astray.
“Mademoiselle,” said Longueville, in a low voice, under cover of
the noise made by the ladies as they rose from the table, “no one will
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ever more ardently desire your happiness than I; permit me to assure
you of this, as I am taking leave of you. I am starting for Italy in a
few days.”
“With a Duchess, no doubt?”
“No, but perhaps with a mortal blow.”
“Is not that pure fancy?” asked Emilie, with an anxious glance.
“No,” he replied. “There are wounds which never heal.”
“You are not to go,” said the girl, imperiously, and she smiled.
“I shall go,” replied Maximilien, gravely.
“You will find me married on your return, I warn you,” she said
coquettishly.
“I hope so.”
“Impertinent wretch!” she exclaimed. “How cruel a revenge!”
A fortnight later Maximilien set out with his sister Clara for the
warm and poetic scenes of beautiful Italy, leaving Mademoiselle de
Fontaine a prey to the most vehement regret. The young Secretary to
the Embassy took up his brother’s quarrel, and contrived to take
signal vengeance on Emilie’s disdain by making known the occasion
of the lovers’ separation. He repaid his fair partner with interest all
the sarcasm with which she had formerly attacked Maximilien, and
often made more than one Excellency smile by describing the fair foe
of the counting-house, the amazon who preached a crusade against
bankers, the young girl whose love had evaporated before a bale of
muslin. The Comte de Fontaine was obliged to use his influence to
procure an appointment to Russia for Auguste Longueville in order
to protect his daughter from the ridicule heaped upon her by this
dangerous young persecutor.
Not long after, the Ministry being compelled to raise a levy of
peers to support the aristocratic party, trembling in the Upper Chamber
under the lash of an illustrious writer, gave Monsieur Guiraudin de
Longueville a peerage, with the title of Vicomte. Monsieur de
Fontaine also obtained a peerage, the reward due as much to his fidelity
in evil days as to his name, which claimed a place in the hereditary
Chamber.
About this time Emilie, now of age, made, no doubt, some serious
reflections on life, for her tone and manners changed perceptibly.
Instead of amusing herself by saying spiteful things to her uncle, she
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lavished on him the most affectionate attentions; she brought him
his stick with a persevering devotion that made the cynical smile, she
gave him her arm, rode in his carriage, and accompanied him in all
his drives; she even persuaded him that she liked the smell of tobacco,
and read him his favorite paper La Quotidienne in the midst
of clouds of smoke, which the malicious old sailor intentionally blew
over her; she learned piquet to be a match for the old count; and this
fantastic damsel even listened without impatience to his periodical
narratives of the battles of the Belle-Poule, the manoeuvres of the
Ville de Paris, M. de Suffren’s first expedition, or the battle of Aboukir.
Though the old sailor had often said that he knew his longitude
and latitude too well to allow himself to be captured by a young
corvette, one fine morning Paris drawing-rooms heard the news of
the marriage of Mademoiselle de Fontaine to the Comte de
Kergarouet. The young Countess gave splendid entertainments to
drown thought; but she, no doubt, found a void at the bottom of
the whirlpool; luxury was ineffectual to disguise the emptiness and
grief of her sorrowing soul; for the most part, in spite of the flashes
of assumed gaiety, her beautiful face expressed unspoken melancholy.
Emilie appeared, however, full of attentions and consideration for
her old husband, who, on retiring to his rooms at night, to the sounds
of a lively band, would often say, “I do not know myself. Was I to
wait till the age of seventy-two to embark as pilot on board the Belle
Emilie after twenty years of matrimonial galleys?”
The conduct of the young Countess was marked by such strictness
that the most clear-sighted criticism had no fault to find with her.
Lookers on chose to think that the vice-admiral had reserved the
right of disposing of his fortune to keep his wife more tightly in
hand; but this was a notion as insulting to the uncle as to the niece.
Their conduct was indeed so delicately judicious that the men who
were most interested in guessing the secrets of the couple could never
decide whether the old Count regarded her as a wife or as a daughter.
He was often heard to say that he had rescued his niece as a castaway
after shipwreck; and that, for his part, he had never taken a mean
advantage of hospitality when he had saved an enemy from the fury
of the storm. Though the Countess aspired to reign in Paris and tried
to keep pace with Mesdames the Duchesses de Maufrigneuse and du
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Chaulieu, the Marquises d’Espard and d’Aiglemont, the Comtesses
Feraud, de Montcornet, and de Restaud, Madame de Camps, and
Mademoiselle des Touches, she did not yield to the addresses of the
young Vicomte de Portenduere, who made her his idol.
Two years after her marriage, in one of the old drawing-rooms in
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where she was admired for her character,
worthy of the old school, Emilie heard the Vicomte de Longueville
announced. In the corner of the room where she was sitting, playing
piquet with the Bishop of Persepolis, her agitation was not observed;
she turned her head and saw her former lover come in, in all the
freshness of youth. His father’s death, and then that of his brother,
killed by the severe climate of Saint-Petersburg, had placed on
Maximilien’s head the hereditary plumes of the French peer’s hat.
His fortune matched his learning and his merits; only the day before
his youthful and fervid eloquence had dazzled the Assembly. At this
moment he stood before the Countess, free, and graced with all the
advantages she had formerly required of her ideal. Every mother with
a daughter to marry made amiable advances to a man gifted with the
virtues which they attributed to him, as they admired his attractive
person; but Emilie knew, better than any one, that the Vicomte de
Longueville had the steadfast nature in which a wise woman sees a
guarantee of happiness. She looked at the admiral who, to use his
favorite expression, seemed likely to hold his course for a long time
yet, and cursed the follies of her youth.
At this moment Monsieur de Persepolis said with Episcopal grace:
“Fair lady, you have thrown away the king of hearts—I have won.
But do not regret your money. I keep it for my little seminaries.”
Paris, December 1829.
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330
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Beaudenord, Godefroid de
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Firm of Nucingen
Dudley, Lady Arabella
The Lily of the Valley
The Magic Skin
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
Letters of Two Brides
Fontaine, Comte de
The Chouans
Modeste Mignon
Cesar Birotteau
The Government Clerks
Kergarouet, Comte de
The Purse
Ursule Mirouet
Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier
The Chouans
The Seamy Side of History
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Lily of the Valley
Colonel Chabert
The Government Clerks

Manerville, Paul Francois-Joseph, Comte de
The Thirteen
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Marriage Settlement
Marsay, Henri de
The Thirteen
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
Modest Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Palma (banker)
The Firm of Nucingen
Cesar Birotteau
Gobseck
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Portenduere, Vicomte Savinien de
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Ursule Mirouet
Beatrix
Rastignac, Eugene de
Father Goriot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Balzac
331

The Ball at Sceaux
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Interdiction
A Study of Woman
Another Study of Woman
The Magic Skin
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
The Gondreville Mystery
The Firm of Nucingen
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
The Unconscious Humorists
Vandenesse, Marquise Charles de (Emilie de Fontaine)
Cesar Birotteau
Ursule Mirouet
A Daughter of Eve
332

The Secrets of the
Dedication
Princesse de
Cadignan
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
To Theophile Gautier
Balzac
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
334
CHAPTER I
THE LAST WORD OF TWO
GREAT COQUETTES
AFTER THE DISASTERS of the revolution of July, which destroyed so
many aristocratic fortunes dependent on the court, Madame la
Princesse de Cadignan was clever enough to attribute to political
events the total ruin she had caused by her own extravagance. The
prince left France with the royal family, and never returned to it,
leaving the princess in Paris, protected by the fact of his absence; for
their debts, which the sale of all their salable property had not been
able to extinguish, could only be recovered through him. The revenues
of the entailed estates had been seized. In short, the affairs of
this great family were in as bad a state as those of the elder branch of
the Bourbons.
This woman, so celebrated under her first name of Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse, very wisely decided to live in retirement, and to make
herself, if possible, forgotten. Paris was then so carried away by the
whirling current of events that the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, buried
in the Princesse de Cadignan, a change of name unknown to
most of the new actors brought upon the stage of society by the
revolution of July, did really become a stranger in her own city.
In Paris the title of duke ranks all others, even that of prince; though,
in heraldic theory, free of all sophism, titles signify nothing; there is
absolute equality among gentlemen. This fine equality was formerly
maintained by the House of France itself; and in our day it is so still,
at least, nominally; witness the care with which the kings of France

Balzac
give to their sons the simple title of count. It was in virtue of this
system that Francois I. crushed the splendid titles assumed by the
pompous Charles the Fifth, by signing his answer: “Francois, seigneur
de Vanves.” Louis XI. did better still by marrying his daughter to an
untitled gentleman, Pierre de Beaujeu. The feudal system was so thoroughly
broken up by Louis XIV. that the title of duke became, during
his reign, the supreme honor of the aristocracy, and the most
coveted.
Nevertheless there are two or three families in France in which the
principality, richly endowed in former times, takes precedence of the
duchy. The house of Cadignan, which possesses the title of Duc de
Maufrigneuse for its eldest sons, is one of these exceptional families.
Like the princes of the house of Rohan in earlier days, the princes of
Cadignan had the right to a throne in their own domain; they could
have pages and gentlemen in their service. This explanation is necessary,
as much to escape foolish critics who know nothing, as to record
the customs of a world which, we are told, is about to disappear, and
which, evidently, so many persons are assisting to push away without
knowing what it is.
The Cadignans bear: or, five lozenges sable appointed, placed fesswise,
with the word “Memini” for motto, a crown with a cap of
maintenance, no supporters or mantle. In these days the great crowd
of strangers flocking to Paris, and the almost universal ignorance of
the science of heraldry, are beginning to bring the title of prince into
fashion. There are no real princes but those possessed of principalities,
to whom belongs the title of highness. The disdain shown by
the French nobility for the title of prince, and the reasons which
caused Louis XIV. to give supremacy to the title of duke, have prevented
Frenchmen from claiming the appellation of “highness” for
the few princes who exist in France, those of Napoleon excepted.
This is why the princes of Cadignan hold an inferior position, nominally,
to the princes of the continent.
The members of the society called the faubourg Saint-Germain
protected the princess by a respectful silence due to her name, which
is one of those that all men honor, to her misfortunes, which they
ceased to discuss, and to her beauty, the only thing she saved of her
departed opulence. Society, of which she had once been the orna-
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
ment, was thankful to her for having, as it were, taken the veil, and
cloistered herself in her own home. This act of good taste was for
her, more than for any other woman, an immense sacrifice. Great
deeds are always so keenly felt in France that the princess gained, by
her retreat, as much as she had lost in public opinion in the days of
her splendor.
She now saw only one of her old friends, the Marquise d’Espard,
and even to her she never went on festive occasions or to parties. The
princess and the marquise visited each other in the forenoons, with a
certain amount of secrecy. When the princess went to dine with her
friend, the marquise closed her doors. Madame d’Espard treated the
princess charmingly; she changed her box at the opera, leaving the
first tier for a baignoire on the ground-floor, so that Madame de
Cadignan could come to the theatre unseen, and depart incognito.
Few women would have been capable of a delicacy which deprived
them of the pleasure of bearing in their train a fallen rival, and of
publicly being her benefactress. Thus relieved of the necessity for
costly toilets, the princess could enjoy the theatre, whither she went
in Madame d’Espard’s carriage, which she would never have accepted
openly in the daytime. No one has ever known Madame d’Espard’s
reasons for behaving thus to the Princesse de Cadignan; but her conduct
was admirable, and for a long time included a number of little
acts which, viewed single, seem mere trifles, but taken in the mass
become gigantic.
In 1832, three years had thrown a mantle of snow over the follies
and adventures of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and had whitened
them so thoroughly that it now required a serious effort of memory
to recall them. Of the queen once adored by so many courtiers, and
whose follies might have given a theme to a variety of novels, there
remained a woman still adorably beautiful, thirty-six years of age,
but quite justified in calling herself thirty, although she was the mother
of Duc Georges de Maufrigneuse, a young man of eighteen, handsome
as Antinous, poor as Job, who was expected to obtain great
successes, and for whom his mother desired, above all things, to find
a rich wife. Perhaps this hope was the secret of the intimacy she still
kept up with the marquise, in whose salon, which was one of the
first in Paris, she might eventually be able to choose among many
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Balzac
heiresses for Georges’ wife. The princess saw five years between the
present moment and her son’s marriage,—five solitary and desolate
years; for, in order to obtain such a marriage for her son, she knew
that her own conduct must be marked in the corner with discretion.
The princess lived in the rue de Miromesnil, in a small house, of
which she occupied the ground-floor at a moderate rent. There she
made the most of the relics of her past magnificence. The elegance of
the great lady was still redolent about her. She was still surrounded
by beautiful things which recalled her former existence. On her chimney-piece
was a fine miniature portrait of Charles X., by Madame
Mirbel, beneath which were engraved the words, “Given by the King”;
and, as a pendant, the portrait of “Madame”, who was always her
kind friend. On a table lay an album of costliest price, such as none
of the bourgeoises who now lord it in our industrial and fault-finding
society would have dared to exhibit. This album contained portraits,
about thirty in number, of her intimate friends, whom the
world, first and last, had given her as lovers. The number was a calumny;
but had rumor said ten, it might have been, as her friend
Madame d’Espard remarked, good, sound gossip. The portraits of
Maxime de Trailles, de Marsay, Rastignac, the Marquis d’Esgrignon,
General Montriveau, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and d’Ajuda-
Pinto, Prince Galathionne, the young Ducs de Grandlieu and de
Rhetore, the Vicomte de Serizy, and the handsome Lucien de
Rubempre, had all been treated with the utmost coquetry of brush
and pencil by celebrated artists. As the princess now received only
two or three of these personages, she called the book, jokingly, the
collection of her errors.
Misfortune had made this woman a good mother. During the fifteen
years of the Restoration she had amused herself far too much to
think of her son; but on taking refuge in obscurity, this illustrious
egoist bethought her that the maternal sentiment, developed to its
extreme, might be an absolution for her past follies in the eyes of
sensible persons, who pardon everything to a good mother. She loved
her son all the more because she had nothing else to love. Georges de
Maufrigneuse was, moreover, one of those children who flatter the
vanities of a mother; and the princess had, accordingly, made all sorts
of sacrifices for him. She hired a stable and coach-house, above which
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
he lived in a little entresol with three rooms looking on the street,
and charmingly furnished; she had even borne several privations to
keep a saddle-horse, a cab-horse, and a little groom for his use. For
herself, she had only her own maid, and as cook, a former kitchenmaid.
The duke’s groom had, therefore, rather a hard place. Toby,
formerly tiger to the “late” Beaudenord (such was the jesting term
applied by the gay world to that ruined gentleman),—Toby, who at
twenty-five years of age was still considered only fourteen, was expected
to groom the horses, clean the cabriolet, or the tilbury, and
the harnesses, accompany his master, take care of the apartments, and
be in the princess’s antechamber to announce a visitor, if, by chance,
she happened to receive one.
When one thinks of what the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
had been under the Restoration,—one of the queens of Paris, a dazzling
queen, whose luxurious existence equalled that of the richest
women of fashion in London,—there was something touching in
the sight of her in that humble little abode in the rue de Miromesnil,
a few steps away from her splendid mansion, which no amount of
fortune had enabled her to keep, and which the hammer of speculators
has since demolished. The woman who thought she was scarcely
well served by thirty servants, who possessed the most beautiful reception-rooms
in all Paris, and the loveliest little private apartments,
and who made them the scene of such delightful fetes, now lived in
a small apartment of five rooms,—an antechamber, dining-room,
salon, one bed-chamber, and a dressing-room, with two womenservants
only.
“Ah! she is devoted to her son,” said that clever creature, Madame
d’Espard, “and devoted without ostentation; she is happy. Who would
ever have believed so frivolous a woman was capable of such persistent
resolution! Our good archbishop has, consequently, greatly encouraged
her; he is most kind to her, and has just induced the old
Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne to pay her a visit.”
Let us admit a truth! One must be a queen to know how to abdicate,
and to descend with dignity from a lofty position which is
never wholly lost. Those only who have an inner consciousness of
being nothing in themselves, show regrets in falling, or struggle,
murmuring, to return to a past which can never return,—a fact of
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Balzac
which they themselves are well aware. Compelled to do without the
choice exotics in the midst of which she had lived, and which set off
so charmingly her whole being (for it is impossible not to compare
her to a flower), the princess had wisely chosen a ground-floor apartment;
there she enjoyed a pretty little garden which belonged to it,—
a garden full of shrubs, and an always verdant turf, which brightened
her peaceful retreat. She had about twelve thousand francs a year; but
that modest income was partly made up of an annual stipend sent
her by the old Duchesse de Navarreins, paternal aunt of the young
duke, and another stipend given by her mother, the Duchesse
d’Uxelles, who was living on her estate in the country, where she
economized as old duchesses alone know how to economize; for
Harpagon is a mere novice compared to them. The princess still retained
some of her past relations with the exiled royal family; and it
was in her house that the marshal to whom we owe the conquest of
Africa had conferences, at the time of “Madame’s” attempt in La
Vendee, with the principal leaders of legitimist opinion,—so great
was the obscurity in which the princess lived, and so little distrust
did the government feel for her in her present distress.
Beholding the approach of that terrible fortieth year, the bankruptcy
of love, beyond which there is so little for a woman as woman,
the princess had flung herself into the kingdom of philosophy. She
took to reading, she who for sixteen years had felt a cordial horror
for serious things. Literature and politics are to-day what piety and
devotion once were to her sex,—the last refuge of their feminine
pretensions. In her late social circle it was said that Diane was writing
a book. Since her transformation from a queen and beauty to a
woman of intellect, the princess had contrived to make a reception
in her little house a great honor which distinguished the favored person.
Sheltered by her supposed occupation, she was able to deceive
one of her former adorers, de Marsay, the most influential personage
of the political bourgeoisie brought to the fore in July 1830. She
received him sometimes in the evenings, and, occupied his attention
while the marshal and a few legitimists were talking, in a low voice,
in her bedroom, about the recovery of power, which could be attained
only by a general co-operation of ideas,—the one element of
success which all conspirators overlook. It was the clever vengeance
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
of the pretty woman, who thus inveigled the prime minister, and
made him act as screen for a conspiracy against his own government.
This adventure, worthy of the finest days of the Fronde, was the text
of a very witty letter, in which the princess rendered to “Madame” an
account of the negotiations. The Duc de Maufrigneuse went to La
Vendee, and was able to return secretly without being compromised,
but not without taking part in “Madame’s” perils; the latter, however,
sent him home the moment she saw that her cause was lost. Perhaps,
had he remained, the eager vigilance of the young man might have
foiled that treachery. However great the faults of the Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse may have seemed in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the
behavior of her son on this occasion certainly effaced them in the eyes
of the aristocracy. There was great nobility and grandeur in thus risking
her only son, and the heir of an historic name. Some persons are said to
intentionally cover the faults of their private life by public services, and
vice versa; but the Princesse de Cadignan made no such calculation.
Possibly those who apparently so conduct themselves make none. Events
count for much in such cases.
On one of the first fine days in the month of May, 1833, the Marquise
d’Espard and the princess were turning about—one could hardly
call it walking—in the single path which wound round the grass-plat in
the garden, about half-past two in the afternoon, just as the sun was
leaving it. The rays reflected on the walls gave a warm atmosphere to the
little space, which was fragrant with flowers, the gift of the marquise.
“We shall soon lose de Marsay,” said the marquise; “and with him
will disappear your last hope of fortune for your son. Ever since you
played him that clever trick, he has returned to his affection for you.”
“My son will never capitulate to the younger branch,” returned the
princess, “if he has to die of hunger, or I have to work with my hands
to feed him. Besides, Berthe de Cinq-Cygne has no aversion to him.”
“Children don’t bind themselves to their parents’ principles,” said
Madame d’Espard.
“Don’t let us talk about it,” said the princess. “If I can’t coax over
the Marquise de Cinq-Cygne, I shall marry Georges to the daughter
of some iron-founderer, as that little d’Esgrignon did.”
“Did you love Victurnien?” asked the marquise.
“No,” replied the princess, gravely, “d’Esgrignon’s simplicity was
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Balzac
really only a sort of provincial silliness, which I perceived rather too
late—or, if you choose, too soon.”
“And de Marsay?”
“De Marsay played with me as if I were a doll. I was so young at
the time! We never love men who pretend to teach us; they rub up all
our little vanities.”
“And that wretched boy who hanged himself?”
“Lucien? An Antinous and a great poet. I worshiped him in all
conscience, and I might have been happy. But he was in love with a
girl of the town; and I gave him up to Madame. de Serizy …. If he
had cared to love me, should I have given him up?”
“What an odd thing, that you should come into collision with an
Esther!”
“She was handsomer than I,” said the Princess.—”Very soon it shall
be three years that I have lived in solitude,” she resumed, after a pause,
“and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it. To you
alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited with
adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but
conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart. I have found
all the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of
them ever caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur,
no delicacy. I wish I could have met with one man able to inspire me
with respect.”
“Then are you like me, my dear?” asked the marquise; “have you
never felt the emotion of love while trying to love?”
“Never,” replied the princess, laying her hand on the arm of her
friend.
They turned and seated themselves on a rustic bench beneath a
jasmine then coming into flower. Each had uttered one of those sayings
that are solemn to women who have reached their age.
“Like you,” resumed the princess, “I have received more love than
most women; but through all my many adventures, I have never
found happiness. I committed great follies, but they had an object,
and that object retreated as fast as I approached it. I feel to-day in my
heart, old as it is, an innocence which has never been touched. Yes,
under all my experience, lies a first love intact,—just as I myself, in
spite of all my losses and fatigues, feel young and beautiful. We may
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
love and not be happy; we may be happy and never love; but to love
and be happy, to unite those two immense human experiences, is a
miracle. That miracle has not taken place for me.”
“Nor for me,” said Madame d’Espard.
“I own I am pursued in this retreat by dreadful regret: I have amused
myself all through life, but I have never loved.”
“What an incredible secret!” cried the marquise.
“Ah! my dear,” replied the princess, “such secrets we can tell to
ourselves, you and I, but nobody in Paris would believe us.”
“And,” said the marquise, “if we were not both over thirty-six years
of age, perhaps we would not tell them to each other.”
“Yes; when women are young they have so many stupid conceits,”
replied the princess. “We are like those poor young men who play
with a toothpick to pretend they have dined.”
“Well, at any rate, here we are!” said Madame d’Espard, with coquettish
grace, and a charming gesture of well-informed innocence;
“and, it seems to me, sufficiently alive to think of taking our revenge.”
“When you told me, the other day, that Beatrix had gone off with
Conti, I thought of it all night long,” said the princess, after a pause.
“I suppose there was happiness in sacrificing her position, her future,
and renouncing society forever.”
“She was a little fool,” said Madame d’Espard, gravely. “Mademoiselle
des Touches was delighted to get rid of Conti. Beatrix never
perceived how that surrender, made by a superior woman who never
for a moment defended her claims, proved Conti’s nothingness.”
“Then you think she will be unhappy?”
“She is so now,” replied Madame d’Espard. “Why did she leave her
husband? What an acknowledgment of weakness!”
“Then you think that Madame de Rochefide was not influenced
by the desire to enjoy a true love in peace?” asked the princess.
“No; she was simply imitating Madame de Beausant and Madame de
Langeais, who, be it said, between you and me, would have been, in a
less vulgar period than ours, the La Villiere, the Diane de Poitiers, the
Gabrielle d’Estrees of history.”
“Less the king, my dear. Ah! I wish I could evoke the shades of
those women, and ask them—”
“But,” said the marquise, interrupting the princess, “why ask the
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dead? We know living women who have been happy. I have talked
on this very subject a score of times with Madame de Montcornet
since she married that little Emile Blondet, who makes her the happiest
woman in the world; not an infidelity, not a thought that turns
aside from her; they are as happy as they were the first day. These
long attachments, like that of Rastignac and Madame de Nucingen,
and your cousin, Madame de Camps, for her Octave, have a secret,
and that secret you and I don’t know, my dear. The world has paid us
the extreme compliment of thinking we are two rakes worthy of the
court of the regent; whereas we are, in truth, as innocent as a couple
of school-girls.”
“I should like that sort of innocence,” cried the princess, laughing;
“but ours is worse, and it is very humiliating. Well, it is a mortification
we offer up in expiation of our fruitless search; yes, my dear,
fruitless, for it isn’t probable we shall find in our autumn season the
fine flower we missed in the spring and summer.”
“That’s not the question,” resumed the marquise, after a meditative
pause. “We are both still beautiful enough to inspire love, but we
could never convince any one of our innocence and virtue.”
“If it were a lie, how easy to dress it up with commentaries, and
serve it as some delicious fruit to be eagerly swallowed! But how is it
possible to get a truth believed? Ah! the greatest of men have been
mistaken there!” added the princess, with one of those meaning smiles
which the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci alone has rendered.
“Fools love well, sometimes,” returned the marquise.
“But in this case,” said the princess, “fools wouldn’t have enough
credulity in their nature.”
“You are right,” said the marquise. “But what we ought to look for
is neither a fool nor even a man of talent. To solve our problem we
need a man of genius. Genius alone has the faith of childhood, the
religion of love, and willingly allows us to band its eyes. Look at
Canalis and the Duchesse de Chaulieu! Though we have both encountered
men of genius, they were either too far removed from us
or too busy, and we too absorbed, too frivolous.”
“Ah! how I wish I might not leave this world without knowing the
happiness of true love,” exclaimed the princess.
“It is nothing to inspire it,” said Madame d’Espard; “the thing is to
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
feel it. I see many women who are only the pretext for a passion
without being both its cause and its effect.”
“The last love I inspired was a beautiful and sacred thing,” said the
princess. “It had a future in it. Chance had brought me, for once in a
way, the man of genius who is due to us, and yet so difficult to
obtain; there are more pretty women than men of genius. But the
devil interfered with the affair.”
“Tell me about it, my dear; this is all news to me.”
“I first noticed this beautiful passion about the middle of the winter
of 1829. Every Friday, at the opera, I observed a young man,
about thirty years of age, in the orchestra stalls, who evidently came
there for me. He was always in the same stall, gazing at me with eyes
of fire, but, seemingly, saddened by the distance between us, perhaps
by the hopelessness of reaching me.”
“Poor fellow! When a man loves he becomes eminently stupid,”
said the marquise.
“Between every act he would slip into the corridor,” continued the
princess, smiling at her friend’s epigrammatic remark. “Once or twice,
either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass
sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was
certain to see him in the corridor close to my door, casting a furtive
glance upon me. He had apparently learned to know the persons
belonging to my circle; and he followed them when he saw them
turning in the direction of my box, in order to obtain the benefit of
the opening door. I also found my mysterious adorer at the Italian
opera-house; there he had a stall directly opposite to my box, where
he could gaze at me in naive ecstasy—oh! it was pretty! On leaving
either house I always found him planted in the lobby, motionless; he
was elbowed and jostled, but he never moved. His eyes grew less
brilliant if he saw me on the arm of some favorite. But not a word,
not a letter, no demonstration. You must acknowledge that was in
good taste. Sometimes, on getting home late at night, I found him
sitting upon one of the stone posts of the porte-cochere. This lover
of mine had very handsome eyes, a long, thick, fan-shaped beard,
with a moustache and side-whiskers; nothing could be seen of his
skin but his white cheek-bones, and a noble forehead; it was truly an
antique head. The prince, as you know, defended the Tuileries on the
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riverside, during the July days. He returned to Saint-Cloud that night,
when all was lost, and said to me: ‘I came near being killed at four
o’clock. I was aimed at by one of the insurgents, when a young man,
with a long beard, whom I have often seen at the opera, and who was
leading the attack, threw up the man’s gun, and saved me.’ So my
adorer was evidently a republican! In 1831, after I came to lodge in
this house, I found him, one day, leaning with his back against the
wall of it; he seemed pleased with my disasters; possibly he may have
thought they drew us nearer together. But after the affair of Saint-
Merri I saw him no more; he was killed there. The evening before
the funeral of General Lamarque, I had gone out on foot with my
son, and my republican accompanied us, sometimes behind, sometimes
in front, from the Madeleine to the Passage des Panoramas,
where I was going.”
“Is that all?” asked the marquise.
“Yes, all,” replied the princess. “Except that on the morning Saint-
Merri was taken, a gamin came here and insisted on seeing me. He
gave me a letter, written on common paper, signed by my republican.”
“Show it to me,” said the marquise.
“No, my dear. Love was too great and too sacred in the heart of
that man to let me violate its secrets. The letter, short and terrible,
still stirs my soul when I think of it. That dead man gives me more
emotions than all the living men I ever coquetted with; he constantly
recurs to my mind.”
“What was his name?” asked the marquise.
“Oh! a very common one: Michel Chrestien.”
“You have done well to tell me,” said Madame d’Espard, eagerly. “I
have often heard of him. This Michel Chrestien was the intimate
friend of a remarkable man you have already expressed a wish to
see,—Daniel d’Arthez, who comes to my house some two or three
times a year. Chrestien, who was really killed at Saint-Merri, had no
lack of friends. I have heard it said that he was one of those born
statesmen to whom, like de Marsay, nothing is wanting but opportunity
to become all they might be.”
“Then he had better be dead,” said the princess, with a melancholy
air, under which she concealed her thoughts.
“Will you come to my house some evening and meet d’Arthez?”
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
said the marquise. “You can talk of your ghost.”
“Yes, I will,” replied the princess.
346

CHAPTER II
DANIEL D’ARTHEZ
Balzac
A FEW DAYS after this conversation Blondet and Rastignac, who knew
d’Arthez, promised Madame d’Espard that they would bring him to
dine with her. This promise might have proved rash had it not been
for the name of the princess, a meeting with whom was not a matter
of indifference to the great writer.
Daniel d’Arthez, one of the rare men who, in our day, unite a
noble character with great talent, had already obtained, not all the
popularity his works deserve, but a respectful esteem to which souls
of his own calibre could add nothing. His reputation will certainly
increase; but in the eyes of connoisseurs it had already attained its full
development. He is one of those authors who, sooner or later, are
put in their right place, and never lose it. A poor nobleman, he had
understood his epoch well enough to seek personal distinction only.
He had struggled long in the Parisian arena, against the wishes of a
rich uncle who, by a contradiction which vanity must explain, after
leaving his nephew a prey to the utmost penury, bequeathed to the
man who had reached celebrity the fortune so pitilessly refused to
the unknown writer. This sudden change in his position made no
change in Daniel d’Arthez’s habits; he continued to work with a simplicity
worthy of the antique past, and even assumed new toils by
accepting a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, where he took his seat
on the Right.
Since his accession to fame he had sometimes gone into society.
One of his old friends, the now-famous physician, Horace Bianchon,
persuaded him to make the acquaintance of the Baron de Rastignac,
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under-secretary of State, and a friend of de Marsay, the prime minister.
These two political officials acquiesced, rather nobly, in the strong
wish of d’Arthez, Bianchon, and other friends of Michel Chrestien
for the removal of the body of that republican to the church of Saint-
Merri for the purpose of giving it funeral honors. Gratitude for a
service which contrasted with the administrative rigor displayed at a
time when political passions were so violent, had bound, so to speak,
d’Arthez to Rastignac. The latter and de Marsay were much too clever
not to profit by that circumstance; and thus they won over other
friends of Michel Chrestien, who did not share his political opinions,
and who now attached themselves to the new government.
One of them, Leon Giraud, appointed in the first instance master of
petitions, became eventually a Councillor of State.
The whole existence of Daniel d’Arthez is consecrated to work; he
sees society only by snatches; it is to him a sort of dream. His house
is a convent, where he leads the life of a Benedictine; the same sobriety
of regimen, the same regularity of occupation. His friends knew
that up to the present time woman had been to him no more than an
always dreaded circumstance; he had observed her too much not to
fear her; but by dint of studying her he had ceased to understand
her,—like, in this, to those deep strategists who are always beaten on
unexpected ground, where their scientific axioms are either modified
or contradicted. In character he still remains a simple-hearted child,
all the while proving himself an observer of the first rank. This contrast,
apparently impossible, is explainable to those who know how
to measure the depths which separate faculties from feelings; the
former proceed from the head, the latter from the heart. A man can
be a great man and a wicked one, just as he can be a fool and a
devoted lover. D’Arthez is one of those privileged beings in whom
shrewdness of mind and a broad expanse of the qualities of the brain
do not exclude either the strength or the grandeur of sentiments. He
is, by rare privilege, equally a man of action and a man of thought.
His private life is noble and generous. If he carefully avoided love, it
was because he knew himself, and felt a premonition of the empire
such a passion would exercise upon him.
For several years the crushing toil by which he prepared the solid
ground of his subsequent works, and the chill of poverty, were mar-
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vellous preservatives. But when ease with his inherited fortune came
to him, he formed a vulgar and most incomprehensible connection
with a rather handsome woman, belonging to the lower classes, without
education or manners, whom he carefully concealed from every
eye. Michel Chrestien attributed to men of genius the power of transforming
the most massive creatures into sylphs, fools into clever
women, peasants into countesses; the more accomplished a woman
was, the more she lost her value in their eyes, for, according to Michel,
their imagination had the less to do. In his opinion love, a mere
matter of the senses to inferior beings, was to great souls the most
immense of all moral creations and the most binding. To justify
d’Arthez, he instanced the example of Raffaele and the Fornarina. He
might have offered himself as an instance for this theory, he who had
seen an angel in the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. This strange fancy of
d’Arthez might, however, be explained in other ways; perhaps he had
despaired of meeting here below with a woman who answered to
that delightful vision which all men of intellect dream of and cherish;
perhaps his heart was too sensitive, too delicate, to yield itself to
a woman of society; perhaps he thought best to let nature have her
way, and keep his illusions by cultivating his ideal; perhaps he had
laid aside love as being incompatible with his work and the regularity
of a monastic life which love would have wholly upset.
For several months past d’Arthez had been subjected to the jests
and satire of Blondet and Rastignac, who reproached him with knowing
neither the world nor women. According to them, his authorship
was sufficiently advanced, and his works numerous enough, to
allow him a few distractions; he had a fine fortune, and here he was
living like a student; he enjoyed nothing,—neither his money nor
his fame; he was ignorant of the exquisite enjoyments of the noble
and delicate love which well-born and well-bred women could inspire
and feel; he knew nothing of the charming refinements of language,
nothing of the proofs of affection incessantly given by refined
women to the commonest things. He might, perhaps, know woman;
but he knew nothing of the divinity. Why not take his rightful place
in the world, and taste the delights of Parisian society?
“Why doesn’t a man who bears party per bend gules and or, a bezant
and crab counterchanged,” cried Rastignac, “display that ancient es-
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cutcheon of Picardy on the panels of a carriage? You have thirty thousand
francs a year, and the proceeds of your pen; you have justified
your motto: Ars thesaurusque virtus, that punning device our ancestors
were always seeking, and yet you never appear in the Bois de
Boulogne! We live in times when virtue ought to show itself.”
“If you read your works to that species of stout Laforet, whom
you seem to fancy, I would forgive you,” said Blondet. “But, my
dear fellow, you are living on dry bread, materially speaking; in the
matter of intellect you haven’t even bread.”
This friendly little warfare had been going on for several months between
Daniel and his friends, when Madame d’Espard asked Rastignac
and Blondet to induce d’Arthez to come and dine with her, telling them
that the Princesse de Cadignan had a great desire to see that celebrated
man. Such curiosities are to certain women what magic lanterns are to
children,—a pleasure to the eyes, but rather shallow and full of disappointments.
The more sentiments a man of talent excites at a distance,
the less he responds to them on nearer view; the more brilliant fancy has
pictured him, the duller he will seem in reality. Consequently, disenchanted
curiosity is often unjust.
Neither Blondet nor Rastignac could deceive d’Arthez; but they
told him, laughing, that they now offered him a most seductive opportunity
to polish up his heart and know the supreme fascinations
which love conferred on a Parisian great lady. The princess was evidently
in love with him; he had nothing to fear but everything to
gain by accepting the interview; it was quite impossible he could
descend from the pedestal on which madame de Cadignan had placed
him. Neither Blondet nor Rastignac saw any impropriety in attributing
this love to the princess; she whose past had given rise to so
many anecdotes could very well stand that lesser calumny. Together
they began to relate to d’Arthez the adventures of the Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse: her first affair with de Marsay; her second with d’Ajuda,
whom she had, they said, distracted from his wife, thus avenging
Madame de Beausant; also her later connection with young
d’Esgrignon, who had travelled with her in Italy, and had horribly
compromised himself on her account; after that they told him how
unhappy she had been with a certain celebrated ambassador, how
happy with a Russian general, besides becoming the Egeria of two
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ministers of Foreign affairs, and various other anecdotes. D’Arthez
replied that he knew a great deal more than they could tell him about
her through their poor friend, Michel Chrestien, who adored her
secretly for four years, and had well-nigh gone mad about her.
“I have often accompanied him,” said Daniel, “to the opera. He
would make me run through the streets as far as her horses that he
might see the princess through the window of her coupe.”
“Well, there you have a topic all ready for you,” said Blondet, smiling.
“This is the very woman you need; she’ll initiate you most gracefully
into the mysteries of elegance; but take care! she has wasted
many fortunes. The beautiful Diane is one of those spendthrifts who
don’t cost a penny, but for whom a man spends millions. Give yourself
up to her, body and soul, if you choose; but keep your money in
your hand, like the old fellow in Girodet’s ‘Deluge.’”
From the tenor of these remarks it was to be inferred that the
princess had the depth of a precipice, the grace of a queen, the corruption
of diplomatists, the mystery of a first initiation, and the
dangerous qualities of a siren. The two clever men of the world,
incapable of foreseeing the denouement of their joke, succeeded in
presenting Diane d’Uxelles as a consummate specimen of the Parisian
woman, the cleverest of coquettes, the most enchanting mistress
in the world. Right or wrong, the woman whom they thus treated so
lightly was sacred to d’Arthez; his desire to meet her needed no spur;
he consented to do so at the first word, which was all the two friends
wanted of him.
Madame d’Espard went to see the princess as soon as she had received
this answer.
“My dear, do you feel yourself in full beauty and coquetry?” she
said. “If so, come and dine with me a few days hence, and I’ll serve
up d’Arthez. Our man of genius is by nature, it seems, a savage; he
fears women, and has never loved! Make your plans on that. He is all
intellect, and so simple that he’ll mislead you into feeling no distrust.
But his penetration, which is wholly retrospective, acts later,
and frustrates calculation. You may hoodwink him to-day, but tomorrow
nothing can dupe him.”
“Ah!” cried the princess, “if I were only thirty years old what amusement
I might have with him! The one enjoyment I have lacked up to
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the present is a man of intellect to fool. I have had only partners,
never adversaries. Love was a mere game instead of being a battle.”
“Dear princess, admit that I am very generous; for, after all, you
know!—charity begins at home.”
The two women looked at each other, laughing, and clasped hands
in a friendly way. Assuredly they both knew each other’s secrets, and
this was not the first man nor the first service that one had given to
the other; for sincere and lasting friendships between women of the
world need to be cemented by a few little crimes. When two friends
are liable to kill each other reciprocally, and see a poisoned dagger in
each other’s hand, they present a touching spectacle of harmony, which
is never troubled, unless, by chance, one of them is careless enough
to drop her weapon.
So, eight days later, a little dinner such as are given to intimates by
verbal invitation only, during which the doors are closed to all other
visitors, took place at Madame d’Espard’s house. Five persons were
invited,—Emile Blondet and Madame de Montcornet, Daniel
d’Arthez, Rastignac, and the Princesse de Cadignan. Counting the
mistress of the house, there were as many men as women.
Chance never exerted itself to make wiser preparations than those
which opened the way to a meeting between d’Arthez and Madame
de Cadignan. The princess is still considered one of the chief authorities
on dress, which, to women, is the first of arts. On this occasion
she wore a gown of blue velvet with flowing white sleeves, and a
tulle guimpe, slightly frilled and edged with blue, covering the shoulders,
and rising nearly to the throat, as we see in several of Raffaele’s
portraits. Her maid had dressed her hair with white heather, adroitly
placed among its blond cascades, which were one of the great beauties
to which she owed her celebrity.
Certainly Diane did not look to be more than twenty-five years
old. Four years of solitude and repose had restored the freshness of
her complexion. Besides, there are moments when the desire to please
gives an increase of beauty to women. The will is not without influence
on the variations of the face. If violent emotions have the power
to yellow the white tones of persons of bilious and melancholy temperament,
and to green lymphatic faces, shall we not grant to desire,
hope, and joy, the faculty of clearing the skin, giving brilliancy to the
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eye, and brightening the glow of beauty with a light as jocund as that
of a lovely morning? The celebrated faintness of the princess had
taken on a ripeness which now made her seem more august. At this
moment of her life, impressed by her many vicissitudes and by serious
reflections, her noble, dreamy brow harmonized delightfully with
the slow, majestic glance of her blue eyes. It was impossible for the
ablest physiognomist to imagine calculation or self-will beneath that
unspeakable delicacy of feature. There were faces of women which
deceive knowledge, and mislead observation by their calmness and
delicacy; it is necessary to examine such faces when passions speak,
and that is difficult, or after they have spoken, which is no longer of
any use, for then the woman is old and has ceased to dissimulate.
The princess is one of those impenetrable women; she can make
herself what she pleases to be: playful, childlike, distractingly innocent;
or reflective, serious, and profound enough to excite anxiety.
She came to Madame d’Espard’s dinner with the intention of being
a gentle, simple woman, to whom life was known only through its
deceptions: a woman full of soul, and calumniated, but resigned,—
in short, a wounded angel.
She arrived early, so as to pose on a sofa near the fire beside Madame
d’Espard, as she wished to be first seen: that is, in one of those
attitudes in which science is concealed beneath an exquisite naturalness;
a studied attitude, putting in relief the beautiful serpentine outline
which, starting from the foot, rises gracefully to the hip, and
continues with adorable curves to the shoulder, presenting, in fact, a
profile of the whole body. With a subtlety which few women would
have dreamed of, Diane, to the great amazement of the marquise,
had brought her son with her. After a moment’s reflection, Madame
d’Espard pressed the princess’s hand, with a look of intelligence that
seemed to say:—
“I understand you! By making d’Arthez accept all the difficulties at
once you will not have to conquer them later.”
Rastignac brought d’Arthez. The princess made none of those compliments
to the celebrated author with which vulgar persons overwhelmed
him; but she treated him with a kindness full of graceful
respect, which, with her, was the utmost extent of her concessions.
Her manner was doubtless the same with the King of France and the
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royal princes. She seemed happy to see this great man, and glad that
she had sought him. Persons of taste, like the princess, are especially
distinguished for their manner of listening, for an affability without
superciliousness, which is to politeness what practice is to virtue.
When the celebrated man spoke, she took an attentive attitude, a
thousand times more flattering than the best-seasoned compliments.
The mutual presentation was made quietly, without emphasis, and
in perfectly good taste, by the marquise.
At dinner d’Arthez was placed beside the princess, who, far from
imitating the eccentricities of diet which many affected women display,
ate her dinner with a very good appetite, making it a point of
honor to seem a natural woman, without strange ways or fancies.
Between two courses she took advantage of the conversation becoming
general to say to d’Arthez, in a sort of aside:—
“The secret of the pleasure I take in finding myself beside you, is
the desire I feel to learn something of an unfortunate friend of yours,
monsieur. He died for another cause greater than ours; but I was
under the greatest obligations to him, although unable to acknowledge
or thank him for them. I know that you were one of his best
friends. Your mutual friendship, pure and unalterable, is a claim upon
me. You will not, I am sure, think it extraordinary, that I have wished
to know all you could tell me of a man so dear to you. Though I am
attached to the exiled family, and bound, of course, to hold monarchical
opinions, I am not among those who think it is impossible to
be both republican and noble in heart. Monarchy and the republic
are two forms of government which do not stifle noble sentiments.”
“Michel Chrestien was an angel, madame,” replied Daniel, in a
voice of emotion. “I don’t know among the heroes of antiquity a
greater than he. Be careful not to think him one of those narrowminded
republicans who would like to restore the Convention and
the amenities of the Committee of Public Safety. No, Michel dreamed
of the Swiss federation applied to all Europe. Let us own, between
ourselves, that after the glorious government of one man only, which,
as I think, is particularly suited to our nation, Michel’s system would
lead to the suppression of war in this old world, and its reconstruction
on bases other than those of conquest, which formerly feudalized
it. From this point of view the republicans came nearest to his
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idea. That is why he lent them his arm in July, and was killed at
Saint-Merri. Though completely apart in opinion, he and I were
closely bound together as friends.”
“That is noble praise for both natures,” said Madame de Cadignan,
timidly.
“During the last four years of his life,” continued Daniel, “he made
to me alone a confidence of his love for you, and this confidence
knitted closer than ever the already strong ties of brotherly affection.
He alone, madame, can have loved you as you ought to be loved.
Many a time I have been pelted with rain as we accompanied your
carriage at the pace of the horses, to keep at a parallel distance, and see
you—admire you.”
“Ah! monsieur,” said the princess, “how can I repay such feelings!”
“Why is Michel not here!” exclaimed Daniel, in melancholy accents.
“Perhaps he would not have loved me long,” said the princess, shaking
her head sadly. “Republicans are more absolute in their ideas than
we absolutists, whose fault is indulgence. No doubt he imagined me
perfect, and society would have cruelly undeceived him. We are pursued,
we women, by as many calumnies as you authors are compelled
to endure in your literary life; but we, alas! cannot defend
ourselves either by our works or by our fame. The world will not
believe us to be what we are, but what it thinks us to be. It would
soon have hidden from his eyes the real but unknown woman that is
in me, behind the false portrait of the imaginary woman which the
world considers true. He would have come to think me unworthy of
the noble feelings he had for me, and incapable of comprehending
him.”
Here the princess shook her head, swaying the beautiful blond curls,
full of heather, with a touching gesture. This plaintive expression of
grievous doubts and hidden sorrows is indescribable. Daniel understood
them all; and he looked at the princess with keen emotion.
“And yet, the night on which I last saw him, after the revolution of
July, I was on the point of giving way to the desire I felt to take his
hand and press it before all the world, under the peristyle of the
opera-house. But the thought came to me that such a proof of gratitude
might be misinterpreted; like so many other little things done
from noble motives which are called to-day the follies of Madame
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de Maufrigneuse—things which I can never explain, for none but
my son and God have understood me.”
These words, breathed into the ear of the listener, in tones inaudible
to the other guests, and with accents worthy of the cleverest
actress, were calculated to reach the heart; and they did reach that
of d’Arthez. There was no question of himself in the matter; this
woman was seeking to rehabilitate herself in favor of the dead. She
had been calumniated; and she evidently wanted to know if anything
had tarnished her in the eyes of him who had loved her; had
he died with all his illusions?
“Michel,” replied d’Arthez, “was one of those men who love absolutely,
and who, if they choose ill, can suffer without renouncing the
woman they have once elected.”
“Was I loved thus?” she said, with an air of exalted beatitude.
“Yes, madame.”
“I made his happiness?”
“For four years.”
“A woman never hears of such a thing without a sentiment of proud
satisfaction,” she said, turning her sweet and noble face to d’Arthez
with a movement full of modest confusion.
One of the most skilful manoeuvres of these actresses is to veil their
manner when words are too expressive, and speak with their eyes when
language is restrained. These clever discords, slipped into the music of
their love, be it false or true, produce irresistible attractions.
“Is it not,” she said, lowering her voice and her eyes, after feeling
well assured they had produced her effect,—”is it not fulfilling one’s
destiny to have rendered a great man happy?”
“Did he not write that to you?”
“Yes; but I wanted to be sure, quite sure; for, believe me, monsieur,
in putting me so high he was not mistaken.”
Women know how to give a peculiar sacredness to their words;
they communicate something vibrant to them, which extends the
meaning of their ideas, and gives them depth; though later their fascinated
listener may not remember precisely what they said, their
end has been completely attained,—which is the object of all eloquence.
The princess might at that moment have been wearing the
diadem of France, and her brow could not have seemed more impos-
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ing than it was beneath that crown of golden hair, braided like a
coronet, and adorned with heather. She was simple and calm; nothing
betrayed a sense of any necessity to appear so, nor any desire to
seem grand or loving. D’Arthez, the solitary toiler, to whom the
ways of the world were unknown, whom study had wrapped in its
protecting veils, was the dupe of her tones and words. He was under
the spell of those exquisite manners; he admired that perfect beauty,
ripened by misfortune, placid in retirement; he adored the union of
so rare a mind and so noble a soul; and he longed to become, himself,
the heir of Michel Chrestien.
The beginning of this passion was, as in the case of almost all deep
thinkers, an idea. Looking at the princess, studying the shape of her
head, the arrangement of those sweet features, her figure, her hand,
so finely modelled, closer than when he accompanied his friend in
their wild rush through the streets, he was struck by the surprising
phenomenon of the moral second-sight which a man exalted by love
invariably finds within him. With what lucidity had Michel Chrestien
read into that soul, that heart, illumined by the fires of love! Thus
the princess acquired, in d’Arthez’s eyes, another charm; a halo of
poesy surrounded her.
As the dinner proceeded, Daniel called to mind the various confidences
of his friend, his despair, his hopes, the noble poems of a true
sentiment sung to his ear alone, in honor of this woman. It is rare
that a man passes without remorse from the position of confidant to
that of rival, and d’Arthez was free to do so without dishonor. He
had suddenly, in a moment, perceived the enormous differences existing
between a well-bred woman, that flower of the great world,
and common women, though of the latter he did not know beyond
one specimen. He was thus captured on the most accessible and sensitive
sides of his soul and of his genius. Impelled by his simplicity,
and by the impetuosity of his ideas, to lay immediate claim to this
woman, he found himself restrained by society, also by the barrier
which the manners and, let us say the word, the majesty of the princess
placed between them. The conversation, which remained upon
the topic of Michel Chrestien until the dessert, was an excellent pretext
for both to speak in a low voice: love, sympathy, comprehension!
she could pose as a maligned and misunderstood woman; he
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could slip his feet into the shoes of the dead republican. Perhaps his
candid mind detected itself in regretting his dead friend less. The
princess, at the moment when the dessert appeared upon the table,
and the guests were separated by a brilliant hedge of fruits and sweetmeats,
thought best to put an end to this flow of confidences by a
charming little speech, in which she delicately expressed the idea that
Daniel and Michel were twin souls.
After this d’Arthez threw himself into the general conversation with
the gayety of a child, and a self-conceited air that was worthy of a schoolboy.
When they left the dining-room, the princess took d’Arthez’s arm,
in the simplest manner, to return to Madame d’Espard’s little salon. As
they crossed the grand salon she walked slowly, and when sufficiently
separated from the marquise, who was on Blondet’s arm, she stopped.
“I do not wish to be inaccessible to the friend of that poor man,”
she said to d’Arthez; “and though I have made it a rule to receive no
visitors, you will always be welcome in my house. Do not think this
a favor. A favor is only for strangers, and to my mind you and I seem
old friends; I see in you the brother of Michel.”
D’Arthez could only press her arm, unable to make other reply.
After coffee was served, Diane de Cadignan wrapped herself, with
coquettish motions, in a large shawl, and rose. Blondet and Rastignac
were too much men of the world, and too polite to make the least
remonstrance, or try to detain her; but Madame d’Espard compelled
her friend to sit down again, whispering in her ear:—
“Wait till the servants have had their dinner; the carriage is not
ready yet.”
So saying, the marquise made a sign to the footman, who was
taking away the coffee-tray. Madame de Montcornet perceived that
the princess and Madame d’Espard had a word to say to each other,
and she drew around her d’Arthez, Rastignac, and Blondet, amusing
them with one of those clever paradoxical attacks which Parisian
women understand so thoroughly.
“Well,” said the marquise to Diane, “what do you think of him?”
“He is an adorable child, just out of swaddling-clothes! This time,
like all other times, it will only be a triumph without a struggle.”
“Well, it is disappointing,” said Madame d’Espard. “But we might
evade it.”
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“How?”
“Let me be your rival.”
“Just as you please,” replied the princess. “I’ve decided on my course.
Genius is a condition of the brain; I don’t know what the heart gets
out of it; we’ll talk about that later.”
Hearing the last few words, which were wholly incomprehensible
to her, Madame d’Espard returned to the general conversation, showing
neither offence at that indifferent “As you please,” nor curiosity
as to the outcome of the interview. The princess stayed an hour longer,
seated on the sofa near the fire, in the careless, nonchalant attitude of
Guerin’s Dido, listening with the attention of an absorbed mind,
and looking at Daniel now and then, without disguising her admiration,
which never went, however, beyond due limits. She slipped
away when the carriage was announced, with a pressure of the hand
to the marquise, and an inclination of the head to Madame de
Montcornet.
The evening concluded without any allusion to the princess. The
other guests profited by the sort of exaltation which d’Arthez had
reached, for he put forth the treasures of his mind. In Blondet and
Rastignac he certainly had two acolytes of the first quality to bring
forth the delicacy of his wit and the breadth of his intellect. As for
the two women, they had long been counted among the cleverest in
society. This evening was like a halt in the oasis of a desert,—a rare
enjoyment, and well appreciated by these four persons, habitually
victimized to the endless caution entailed by the world of salons and
politics. There are beings who have the privilege of passing among
men like beneficent stars, whose light illumines the mind, while its
rays send a glow to the heart. D’Arthez was one of those beings. A
writer who rises to his level, accustoms himself to free thought, and
forgets that in society all things cannot be said; it is impossible for
such a man to observe the restraint of persons who live in the world
perpetually; but as his eccentricities of thought bore the mark of
originality, no one felt inclined to complain. This zest, this piquancy,
rare in mere talent, this youthfulness and simplicity of soul which
made d’Arthez so nobly original, gave a delightful charm to this
evening. He left the house with Rastignac, who, as they drove home,
asked him how he liked the princess.
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“Michel did well to love her,” replied d’Arthez; “she is, indeed, an
extraordinary woman.”
“Very extraordinary,” replied Rastignac, dryly. “By the tone of your
voice I should judge you were in love with her already. You will be in
her house within three days; and I am too old a denizen of Paris not
to know what will be the upshot of that. Well, my dear Daniel, I do
entreat you not to allow yourself to be drawn into any confusion of
interests, so to speak. Love the princess if you feel any love for her in
your heart, but keep an eye on your fortune. She has never taken or
asked a penny from any man on earth, she is far too much of a
d’Uxelles and a Cadignan for that; but, to my knowledge, she has
not only spent her own fortune, which was very considerable, but
she has made others waste millions. How? why? by what means? No
one knows; she doesn’t know herself. I myself saw her swallow up,
some thirteen years ago, the entire fortune of a charming young fellow,
and that of an old notary, in twenty months.”
“Thirteen years ago!” exclaimed d’Arthez,—”why, how old is she
now?”
“Didn’t you see, at dinner,” replied Rastignac, laughing, “her son,
the Duc de Maufrigneuse. That young man is nineteen years old;
nineteen and seventeen make—”
“Thirty-six!” cried the amazed author. “I gave her twenty.”
“She’ll accept them,” said Rastignac; “but don’t be uneasy, she will
always be twenty to you. You are about to enter the most fantastic of
worlds. Good-night, here you are at home,” said the baron, as they
entered the rue de Bellefond, where d’Arthez lived in a pretty little
house of his own. “We shall meet at Mademoiselle des Touches’s in
the course of the week.”
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CHAPTER III
THE PRINCESS GOES TO
WORK
Balzac
D’ARTHEZ ALLOWED LOVE to enter his heart after the manner of my
Uncle Toby, without making the slightest resistance; he proceeded
by adoration without criticism, and by exclusive admiration. The
princess, that noble creature, one of the most remarkable creations of
our monstrous Paris, where all things are possible, good as well as
evil, became—whatever vulgarity the course of time may have given
to the expression—the angel of his dreams. To fully understand the
sudden transformation of this illustrious author, it is necessary to
realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the
heart; all that love—reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant,
beside an ignoble woman—excites of regret and longings for diviner
sentiments in the higher regions of the soul. D’Arthez was, indeed,
the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized. An
illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful
Diane. At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire
and seek, if only to make a plaything of him,—that power which
they consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last
she had found the grandeurs of the intellect united with the simplicity
of a heart all new to love; and she saw, with untold happiness,
that these merits were contained in a form that pleased her. She
thought d’Arthez handsome, and perhaps he was. Though he had
reached the age of gravity (for he was now thirty-eight), he still preserved
a flower of youth, due to the sober and ascetic life which he
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had led. Like all men of sedentary habits, and statesmen, he had
acquired a certainly reasonable embonpoint. When very young, he
bore some resemblance to Bonaparte; and the likeness still continued,
as much as a man with black eyes and thick, dark hair could
resemble a sovereign with blue eyes and scanty, chestnut hair. But
whatever there once was of ardent and noble ambition in the great
author’s eyes had been somewhat quenched by successes. The thoughts
with which that brow once teemed had flowered; the lines of the
hollow face were filling out. Ease now spread its golden tints where,
in youth, poverty had laid the yellow tones of the class of temperament
whose forces band together to support a crushing and longcontinued
struggle. If you observe carefully the noble faces of ancient
philosophers, you will always find those deviations from the type of
a perfect human face which show the characteristic to which each
countenance owes its originality, chastened by the habit of meditation,
and by the calmness necessary for intellectual labor. The most
irregular features, like those of Socrates, for instance, become, after a
time, expressive of an almost divine serenity.
To the noble simplicity which characterized his head, d’Arthez added
a naive expression, the naturalness of a child, and a touching kindliness.
He did not have that politeness tinged with insincerity with
which, in society, the best-bred persons and the most amiable assume
qualities in which they are often lacking, leaving those they
have thus duped wounded and distressed. He might, indeed, fail to
observe certain rules of social life, owing to his isolated mode of
living; but he never shocked the sensibilities, and therefore this perfume
of savagery made the peculiar affability of a man of great talent
the more agreeable; such men know how to leave their superiority in
their studies, and come down to the social level, lending their backs,
like Henry IV., to the children’s leap-frog, and their minds to fools.
If d’Arthez did not brace himself against the spell which the princess
had cast about him, neither did she herself argue the matter in her own
mind, on returning home. It was settled for her. She loved with all her
knowledge and all her ignorance. If she questioned herself at all, it was
to ask whether she deserved so great a happiness, and what she had
done that Heaven should send her such an angel. She wanted to be
worthy of that love, to perpetuate it, to make it her own forever, and
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to gently end her career of frivolity in the paradise she now foresaw. As
for coquetting, quibbling, resisting, she never once thought of it. She
was thinking of something very different!—of the grandeur of men of
genius, and the certainty which her heart divined that they would never
subject the woman they chose to ordinary laws.
Here begins one of those unseen comedies, played in the secret
regions of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will
be the dupe of the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness;
one of those dark and comic dramas to which that of Tartuffe is
mere child’s play, —dramas that do not enter the scenic domain,
although they are natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity;
dramas which may be characterized as not vice, only the other
side of it.
The princess began by sending for d’Arthez’s books, of which she
had never, as yet, read a single word, although she had managed to
maintain a twenty minutes’ eulogism and discussion of them without
a blunder. She now read them all. Then she wanted to compare
these books with the best that contemporary literature had produced.
By the time d’Arthez came to see her she was having an indigestion
of mind. Expecting this visit, she had daily made a toilet of what
may be called the superior order; that is, a toilet which expresses an
idea, and makes it accepted by the eye without the owner of the eye
knowing why or wherefore. She presented an harmonious combination
of shades of gray, a sort of semi-mourning, full of graceful renunciation,—the
garments of a woman who holds to life only through
a few natural ties, —her child, for instance,—but who is weary of
life. Those garments bore witness to an elegant disgust, not reaching,
however, as far as suicide; no, she would live out her days in these
earthly galleys.
She received d’Arthez as a woman who expected him, and as if he
had already been to see her a hundred times; she did him the honor
to treat him like an old acquaintance, and she put him at his ease by
pointing to a seat on a sofa, while she finished a note she was then
writing. The conversation began in a commonplace manner: the
weather, the ministry, de Marsay’s illness, the hopes of the legitimists.
D’Arthez was an absolutist; the princess could not be ignorant
of the opinions of a man who sat in the Chamber among the fifteen
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or twenty persons who represented the legitimist party; she found
means to tell him how she had fooled de Marsay to the top of his
bent, then, by an easy transition to the royal family and to “Madame,”
and the devotion of the Prince de Cadignan to their service,
she drew d’Arthez’s attention to the prince:—
“There is this to be said for him: he loved his masters, and was
faithful to them. His public character consoles me for the sufferings
his private life has inflicted upon me— Have you never remarked,”
she went on, cleverly leaving the prince aside, “you who observe so
much, that men have two natures: one of their homes, their wives,
their private lives,—this is their true self; here no mask, no dissimulation;
they do not give themselves the trouble to disguise a feeling;
they are what they are, and it is often horrible! The other man is for
others, for the world, for salons; the court, the sovereign, the public
often see them grand, and noble, and generous, embroidered with
virtues, adorned with fine language, full of admirable qualities. What
a horrible jest it is!—and the world is surprised, sometimes, at the
caustic smile of certain women, at their air of superiority to their
husbands, and their indifference—”
She let her hand fall along the arm of her chair, without ending her
sentence, but the gesture admirably completed the speech. She saw
d’Arthez watching her flexible figure, gracefully bending in the depths
of her easy-chair, noting the folds of her gown, and the pretty little
ruffle which sported on her breast,—one of those audacities of the
toilet that are suited only to slender waists,—and she resumed the
thread of her thoughts as if she were speaking to herself:—
“But I will say no more. You writers have ended by making ridiculous
all women who think they are misunderstood, or ill-mated, and
who try to make themselves dramatically interesting,—attempts
which seem to me, I must say, intolerably vulgar. There are but two
things for women in that plight to do,—yield, and all is over; resist,
and amuse themselves; in either case they should keep silence. It is
true that I neither yielded wholly, nor resisted wholly; but, perhaps,
that was only the more reason why I should be silent. What folly for
women to complain! If they have not proved the stronger, they have
failed in sense, in tact, in capacity, and they deserve their fate. Are
they not queens in France? They can play with you as they like, when
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they like, and as much as they like.” Here she danced her vinaigrette
with an airy movement of feminine impertinence and mocking gayety.
“I have often heard miserable little specimens of my sex regretting
that they were women, wishing they were men; I have always
regarded them with pity. If I had to choose, I should still elect to be
a woman. A fine pleasure, indeed, to owe one’s triumph to force,
and to all those powers which you give yourselves by the laws you
make! But to see you at our feet, saying and doing foolish things,—
ah! it is an intoxicating pleasure to feel within our souls that weakness
triumphs! But when we triumph, we ought to keep silence,
under pain of losing our empire. Beaten, a woman’s pride should gag
her. The slave’s silence alarms the master.”
This chatter was uttered in a voice so softly sarcastic, so dainty, and
with such coquettish motions of the head, that d’Arthez, to whom
this style of woman was totally unknown, sat before her exactly like
a partridge charmed by a setter.
“I entreat you, madame,” he said, at last, “to tell me how it was
possible that a man could make you suffer? Be assured that where, as
you say, other women are common and vulgar, you can only seem
distinguished; your manner of saying things would make a cookbook
interesting.”
“You go fast in friendship,” she said, in a grave voice which made
d’Arthez extremely uneasy.
The conversation changed; the hour was late, and the poor man of
genius went away contrite for having seemed curious, and for wounding
the sensitive heart of that rare woman who had so strangely suffered.
As for her, she had passed her life in amusing herself with men,
and was another Don Juan in female attire, with this difference: she
would certainly not have invited the Commander to supper, and
would have got the better of any statue.
It is impossible to continue this tale without saying a word about
the Prince de Cadignan, better known under the name of the Duc de
Maufrigneuse, otherwise the spice of the princess’s confidences would
be lost, and strangers would not understand the Parisian comedy she
was about to play for her man of genius.
The Duc de Maufrigneuse, like a true son of the old Prince de
Cadignan, is a tall, lean man, of elegant shape, very graceful, a sayer
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
of witty things, colonel by the grace of God, and a good soldier by
accident; brave as a Pole, which means without sense or discernment,
and hiding the emptiness of his mind under the jargon of good society.
After the age of thirty-six he was forced to be as absolutely indifferent
to the fair sex as his master Charles X., punished, like that
master, for having pleased it too well. For eighteen years the idol of
the faubourg Saint-Germain, he had, like other heirs of great families
led a dissipated life, spent solely on pleasure. His father, ruined
by the revolution, had somewhat recovered his position on the return
of the Bourbons, as governor of a royal domain, with salary and
perquisites; but this uncertain fortune the old prince spent, as it came,
in keeping up the traditions of a great seigneur before the revolution;
so that when the law of indemnity was passed, the sums he received
were all swallowed up in the luxury he displayed in his vast hotel.
The old prince died some little time before the revolution of July
aged eighty-seven. He had ruined his wife, and had long been on bad
terms with the Duc de Navarreins, who had married his daughter for
a first wife, and to whom he very reluctantly rendered his accounts.
The Duc de Maufrigneuse, early in life, had had relations with the
Duchesse d’Uxelles. About the year 1814, when Monsieur de
Maufrigneuse was forty-six years of age, the duchess, pitying his poverty,
and seeing that he stood very well at court, gave him her daughter
Diane, then in her seventeenth year, and possessing, in her own
right, some fifty or sixty thousand francs a year, not counting her
future expectations. Mademoiselle d’Uxelles thus became a duchess,
and, as her mother very well knew, she enjoyed the utmost liberty.
The duke, after obtaining the unexpected happiness of an heir, left
his wife entirely to her own devices, and went off to amuse himself
in the various garrisons of France, returning occasionally to Paris,
where he made debts which his father paid. He professed the most
entire conjugal indulgence, always giving the duchess a week’s warning
of his return; he was adored by his regiment, beloved by the
Dauphin, an adroit courtier, somewhat of a gambler, and totally devoid
of affectation. Having succeeded to his father’s office as governor
of one of the royal domains, he managed to please the two kings,
Louis XVIII. and Charles X., which proves he made the most of his
nonentity; and even the liberals liked him; but his conduct and life
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were covered with the finest varnish; language, noble manners, and
deportment were brought by him to a state of perfection. But, as the
old prince said, it was impossible for him to continue the traditions
of the Cadignans, who were all well known to have ruined their
wives, for the duchess was running through her property on her own
account.
These particulars were so well understood in the court circles and
in the faubourg Saint-Germain, that during the last five years of the
Restoration they were considered ancient history, and any one who
mentioned them would have been laughed at. Women never spoke
of the charming duke without praising him; he was excellent, they
said, to his wife; could a man be better? He had left her the entire
disposal of her own property, and had always defended her on every
occasion. It is true that, whether from pride, kindliness, or chivalry,
Monsieur de Maufrigneuse had saved the duchess under various circumstances
which might have ruined other women, in spite of Diane’s
surroundings, and the influence of her mother and that of the Duc
de Navarreins, her father-in-law, and her husband’s aunt.
For several ensuing days the princess revealed herself to d’Arthez as
remarkable for her knowledge of literature. She discussed with perfect
fearlessness the most difficult questions, thanks to her daily and
nightly reading, pursued with an intrepidity worthy of the highest
praise. D’Arthez, amazed, and incapable of suspecting that Diane
d’Uxelles merely repeated at night that which she read in the morning
(as some writers do), regarded her as a most superior woman.
These conversations, however, led away from Diane’s object, and she
tried to get back to the region of confidences from which d’Arthez
had prudently retired after her coquettish rebuff; but it was not as
easy as she expected to bring back a man of his nature who had once
been startled away.
However, after a month of literary campaigning and the finest platonic
discourses, d’Arthez grew bolder, and arrived every day at three
o’clock. He retired at six, and returned at nine, to remain until midnight,
or one in the morning, with the regularity of an ardent and
impatient lover. The princess was always dressed with more or less
studied elegance at the hour when d’Arthez presented himself. This
mutual fidelity, the care they each took of their appearance, in fact,
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all about them expressed sentiments that neither dared avow, for the
princess discerned very plainly that the great child with whom she
had to do shrank from the combat as much as she desired it. Nevertheless
d’Arthez put into his mute declarations a respectful awe which
was infinitely pleasing to her. Both felt, every day, all the more united
because nothing acknowledged or definite checked the course of their
ideas, as occurs between lovers when there are formal demands on
one side, and sincere or coquettish refusals on the other.
Like all men younger than their actual age, d’Arthez was a prey to
those agitating irresolutions which are caused by the force of desires
and the terror of displeasing,—a situation which a young woman
does not comprehend when she shares it, but which the princess had
too often deliberately produced not to enjoy its pleasures. In fact,
Diane enjoyed these delightful juvenilities all the more keenly because
she knew that she could put an end to them at any moment.
She was like a great artist delighting in the vague, undecided lines of
his sketch, knowing well that in a moment of inspiration he can
complete the masterpiece still waiting to come to birth. Many a time,
seeing d’Arthez on the point of advancing, she enjoyed stopping him
short, with an imposing air and manner. She drove back the hidden
storms of that still young heart, raised them again, and stilled them
with a look, holding out her hand to be kissed, or saying some trifling
insignificant words in a tender voice.
These manoeuvres, planned in cold blood, but enchantingly executed,
carved her image deeper and deeper on the soul of that great
writer and thinker whom she revelled in making childlike, confiding,
simple, and almost silly beside her. And yet she had moments of
repulsion against her own act, moments in which she could not help
admiring the grandeur of such simplicity. This game of choicest coquetry
attached her, insensibly, to her slave. At last, however, Diane
grew impatient with an Epictetus of love; and when she thought she
had trained him to the utmost credulity, she set to work to tie a
thicker bandage still over his eyes.
368

CHAPTER IV
THE CONFESSION OF A
PRETTY WOMAN
Balzac
ONE EVENING Daniel found the princess thoughtful, one elbow resting
on a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from
the lamp. She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth.
When d’Arthez had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and
stuck it in her belt.
“What is the matter?” asked d’Arthez; “you seem distressed.”
“I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan,” she replied.
“However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking
of his exile—without family, without son—from his native land.”
These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.
D’Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so
to speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know
the height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she
thus forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world,
taxed with frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such
angels. Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when
he first tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself,
trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful
Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said,—
“Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have
suffered?”
“Yes,” she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous
note that Tulou’s flute had ever sighed.
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Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained
in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity
of the occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it
were, clouds slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary
where the wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet.
“Well?” he said, in a soft, still voice.
Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes
slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None
but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in
the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again
lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of
that great man.
“Can I? ought I?” she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing
at d’Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness. “Men
have so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so
little bound to be discreet!”
“Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?” cried d’Arthez.
“Oh, friend!” she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an
involuntary avowal, “when a woman attaches herself for life, think
you she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse
you anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak.
I would willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am
at my age; but what would you think of a woman who could reveal
the secret wounds of her married life? Turenne kept his word to robbers;
do I not owe to my torturers the honor of a Turenne?”
“Have you passed your word to say nothing?”
“Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to
secrecy— You are asking more than my soul! Tyrant! you want me to
bury my honor itself in your breast,” she said, casting upon d’Arthez
a look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than
to her personal self.
“You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no
matter what, from me,” he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.
“Forgive me, friend,” she replied, taking his hand in hers caressingly,
and letting her fingers wander gently over it. “I know your
worth. You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is beautiful,
it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return, I
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owe you mine. But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating
secrets which are not wholly mine. How can you believe—you, a
man of solitude and poesy—the horrors of social life? Ah! you little
think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by
those that are played in families apparently united. You are wholly
ignorant of certain gilded sorrows.”
“I know all!” he cried.
“No, you know nothing.”
D’Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees,
at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the
princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his
back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a
weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.
“You have become to me almost my judge,” she said, with a desperate
air. “I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated
beings have to show their innocence. I have been, I am still (if a poor
recluse forced by the world to renounce the world is still remembered)
accused of such light conduct, and so many evil things, that it may be
allowed me to find in one strong heart a haven from which I cannot be
driven. Hitherto I have always considered self-justification an insult to
innocence; and that is why I have disdained to defend myself. Besides,
to whom could I appeal? Such cruel things can be confided to none
but God or to one who seems to us very near Him—a priest, or another
self. Well! I do know this, if my secrets are not as safe there,” she
said, laying her hand on d’Arthez’s heart, “as they are here” (pressing the
upper end of her busk beneath her fingers), “then you are not the grand
d’Arthez I think you—I shall have been deceived.”
A tear moistened d’Arthez’s eyes, and Diane drank it in with a side
look, which, however, gave no motion either to the pupils or the lids
of her eyes. It was quick and neat, like the action of a cat pouncing
on a mouse.
D’Arthez, for the first time, after sixty days of protocols, ventured
to take that warm and perfumed hand, and press it to his lips with a
long-drawn kiss, extending from the wrist to the tip of the fingers,
which made the princess augur well of literature. She thought to
herself that men of genius must know how to love with more perfection
than conceited fops, men of the world, diplomatists, and
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even soldiers, although such beings have nothing else to do. She was
a connoisseur, and knew very well that the capacity for love reveals
itself chiefly in mere nothings. A woman well informed in such matters
can read her future in a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say
from the fragment of a bone: This belonged to an animal of such or
such dimensions, with or without horns, carnivorous, herbivorous,
amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand years. Sure now of finding
in d’Arthez as much imagination in love as there was in his written
style, she thought it wise to bring him up at once to the highest pitch
of passion and belief.
She withdrew her hand hastily, with a magnificent movement full
of varied emotions. If she had said in words: “Stop, or I shall die,”
she could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment
with her eyes in d’Arthez’s eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness,
prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin
modesty. She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared
for this hour of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was
there in her armchair like a flower, ready to blossom at the first kiss
of sunshine. True or false, she intoxicated Daniel.
It if is permissible to risk a personal opinion we must avow that it
would be delightful to be thus deceived for a good long time. Certainly
Talma on the stage was often above and beyond nature, but
the Princesse de Cadignan is the greatest true comedian of our day.
Nothing was wanting to this woman but an attentive audience. Unfortunately,
at epochs perturbed by political storms, women disappear
like water-lilies which need a cloudless sky and balmy zephyrs to
spread their bloom to our enraptured eyes.
The hour had come; Diane was now to entangle that great man in
the inextricable meshes of a romance carefully prepared, to which he
was fated to listen as the neophyte of early Christian times listened to
the epistles of an apostle.
“My friend,” began Diane, “my mother, who still lives at Uxelles,
married me in 1814, when I was seventeen years old (you see how
old I am now!) to Monsieur de Maufrigneuse, not out of affection
for me, but out of regard for him. She discharged her debt to the
only man she had ever loved, for the happiness she had once received
from him. Oh! you need not be astonished at so horrible a con-
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spiracy; it frequently takes place. Many women are more lovers than
mothers, though the majority are more mothers than wives. The
two sentiments, love and motherhood, developed as they are by our
manners and customs, often struggle together in the hearts of women;
one or other must succumb when they are not of equal strength;
when they are, they produce some exceptional women, the glory of
our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend many things
that bewilder fools but are none the less true; indeed I may go further
and call them justifiable through difference of characters, temperaments,
attachments, situations. I, for example, at this moment, after
twenty years of misfortunes, of deceptions, of calumnies endured,
and weary days and hollow pleasures, is it not natural that I should
incline to fall at the feet of a man who would love me sincerely and
forever? And yet, the world would condemn me. But twenty years
of suffering might well excuse a few brief years which may still remain
to me of youth given to a sacred and real love. This will not
happen. I am not so rash as to sacrifice my hopes of heaven. I have
borne the burden and heat of the day, I shall finish my course and
win my recompense.”
“Angel!” thought d’Arthez.
“After all, I have never blamed my mother; she knew little of me.
Mothers who lead a life like that of the Duchesse d’Uxelles keep
their children at a distance. I saw and knew nothing of the world
until my marriage. You can judge of my innocence! I knew nothing;
I was incapable of understanding the causes of my marriage. I had a
fine fortune; sixty thousand francs a year in forests, which the Revolution
overlooked (or had not been able to sell) in the Nivernais,
with the noble chateau of d’Anzy. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was
steeped in debt. Later I learned what it was to have debts, but then I
was too utterly ignorant of life to suspect my position; the money
saved out of my fortune went to pacify my husband’s creditors.
Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years of age when I married
him; but those years were like military campaigns, they ought to
count for twice what they were. Ah! what a life I led for ten years! If
any one had known the suffering of this poor, calumniated little
woman! To be watched by a mother jealous of her daughter! Heavens!
You who make dramas, you will never invent anything as direful
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as that. Ordinarily, according to the little that I know of literature, a
drama is a suite of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a
catastrophe; but what I speak of was a catastrophe in action. It was an
avalanche fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to fall
again the next day. I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern
without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived. I, poor little
thing that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing
nothing of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed
the goodwill and harmony of our family. The birth of my poor boy,
who is all me—you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair,
my eyes, the shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth!—
well, his birth was a relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the
first joys of maternity from my husband, who gave me no pleasure
and did nothing for me that was kind or amiable; those joys were all
the keener because I knew no others. It had been so often rung into
my ears that a mother should respect herself. Besides, a young girl
loves to play the mother. I was so proud of my flower—for Georges
was beautiful, a miracle, I thought! I saw and thought of nothing but
my son, I lived with my son. I never let his nurse dress or undress
him. Such cares, so wearing to mothers who have a regiment of children,
were all my pleasure. But after three or four years, as I was not
an actual fool, light came to my eyes in spite of the pains taken to
blindfold me. Can you see me at that final awakening, in 1819? The
drama of ‘The Brothers at enmity’ is a rose-water tragedy beside that
of a mother and daughter placed as we then were. But I braved them
all, my mother, my husband, the world, by public coquetries which
society talked of,—and heaven knows how it talked! You can see, my
friend, how the men with whom I was accused of folly were to me
the dagger with which to stab my enemies. Thinking only of my
vengeance, I did not see or feel the wounds I was inflicting on myself.
Innocent as a child, I was thought a wicked woman, the worst
of women, and I knew nothing of it! The world is very foolish, very
blind, very ignorant; it can penetrate no secrets but those which amuse
it and serve its malice: noble things, great things, it puts its hand
before its eyes to avoid seeing. But, as I look back, it seems to me
that I had an attitude and aspect of indignant innocence, with movements
of pride, which a great painter would have recognized. I must
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have enlivened many a ball with my tempests of anger and disdain.
Lost poesy! such sublime poems are only made in the glowing indignation
which seizes us at twenty. Later, we are wrathful no longer, we
are too weary, vice no longer amazes us, we are cowards, we fear. But
then—oh! I kept a great pace! For all that I played the silliest personage
in the world; I was charged with crimes by which I never benefited.
But I had such pleasure in compromising myself. That was
my revenge! Ah! I have played many childish tricks! I went to Italy
with a thoughtless youth, whom I crushed when he spoke to me of
love, but later, when I herd that he was compromised on my account
(he had committed a forgery to get money) I rushed to save him. My
mother and husband kept me almost without means; but, this time,
I went to the king. Louis XVIII., that man without a heart, was
touched; he gave me a hundred thousand francs from his privy purse.
The Marquis d’Esgrignon—you must have seen him in society for
he ended by making a rich marriage—was saved from the abyss into
which he had plunged for my sake. That adventure, caused by my
own folly, led me to reflect. I saw that I myself was the first victim of
my vengeance. My mother, who knew I was too proud, too d’Uxelles,
to conduct myself really ill, began to see the harm that she had done
me and was frightened by it. She was then fifty-two years of age; she
left Paris and went to live at Uxelles. There she expiates her wrongdoing
by a life of devotion and expresses the utmost affection for
me. After her departure I was face to face, alone, with Monsieur de
Maufrigneuse. Oh! my friend, you men can never know what an old
man of gallantry can be. What a home is that of a man accustomed
to the adulation of women of the world, when he finds neither incense
nor censer in his own house! dead to all! and yet, perhaps for
that very reason, jealous. I wished—when Monsieur de Maufrigneuse
was wholly mine—I wished to be a good wife, but I found myself
repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by a man who treated
me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating my self-respect at
every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his experience, and in
convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on all occasions.
He did everything to make me detest him and to give me the right to
betray him; but I was still the dupe of my own hope and of my
desire to do right through several years. Shall I tell you the cruel
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saying that drove me to further follies? ‘The Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse has gone back to her husband,’ said the world. ‘Bah! it
is always a triumph to bring the dead to life; it is all she can now do,’
replied my best friend, a relation, she, at whose house I met you—”
“Madame d’Espard!” cried Daniel, with a gesture of horror.
“Oh! I have forgiven her. Besides, it was very witty; and I have
myself made just as cruel epigrams on other poor women as innocent
as myself.”
D’Arthez again kissed the hand of that saintly woman who, having
hacked her mother in pieces, and turned the Prince de Cadignan into
an Othello, now proceeded to accuse herself in order to appear in the
eyes of that innocent great man as immaculate as the silliest or the
wisest of women desire to seem at all costs to their lovers.
“You will readily understand, my friend, that I returned to society
for the purpose of excitement and I may say of notoriety. I felt that I
must conquer my independence. I led a life of dissipation. To divert
my mind, to forget my real life in fictitious enjoyments I was gay, I
shone, I gave fetes, I played the princess, and I ran in debt. At home
I could forget myself in the sleep of weariness, able to rise the next
day gay, and frivolous for the world; but in that sad struggle to escape
my real life I wasted my fortune. The revolution of 1830 came;
it came at the very moment when I had met, at the end of that
Arabian Nights’ life, a pure and sacred love which (I desire to be
honest) I had longed to know. Was it not natural in a woman whose
heart, repressed by many causes and accidents, was awakening at an
age when a woman feels herself cheated if she has never known, like
the women she sees about her, a happy love? Ah! why was Michel
Chrestien so respectful? Why did he not seek to meet me? There
again was another mockery! But what of that? in falling, I have lost
everything; I have no illusions left; I had tasted of all things except
the one fruit for which I have no longer teeth. Yes, I found myself
disenchanted with the world at the very moment when I was forced
to leave it. Providential, was it not? like all those strange insensibilities
which prepare us for death” (she made a gesture full of pious
unction). “All things served me then,” she continued; “the disasters
of the monarchy and its ruin helped me to bury myself. My son
consoles me for much. Maternal love takes the place of all frustrated
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feelings. The world is surprised at my retirement, but to me it has
brought peace. Ah! if you knew how happy the poor creature before
you is in this little place. In sacrificing all to my son I forget to think
of joys of which I am and ever must be ignorant. Yes, hope has flown,
I now fear everything; no doubt I should repulse the truest sentiment,
the purest and most veritable love, in memory of the deceptions
and the miseries of my life. It is all horrible, is it not? and yet,
what I have told you is the history of many women.”
The last few words were said in a tone of easy pleasantry which
recalled the presence of the woman of the world. D’Arthez was dumbfounded.
In his eyes convicts sent to the galleys for murder, or aggravated
robbery, or for putting a wrong name to checks, were saints
compared to the men and women of society. This atrocious elegy,
forged in the arsenal of lies, and steeped in the waters of the Parisian
Styx, had been poured into his ears with the inimitable accent of
truth. The grave author contemplated for a moment that adorable
woman lying back in her easy-chair, her two hands pendant from its
arms like dewdrops from a rose-leaf, overcome by her own revelation,
living over again the sorrows of her life as she told them—in
short an angel of melancholy.
“And judge,” she cried, suddenly lifting herself with a spring and
raising her hand, while lightning flashed from eyes where twenty chaste
years shone—”judge of the impression the love of a man like Michel
must have made upon me. But by some irony of fate—or was it the
hand of God?—well, he died; died in saving the life of, whom do you
suppose? of Monsieur de Cadignan. Are you now surprised to find me
thoughtful?”
This was the last drop; poor d’Arthez could bear no more. He fell
upon his knees, and laid his head on Diane’s hand, weeping soft tears
such as the angels shed,—if angels weep. As Daniel was in that bent
posture, Madame de Cadignan could safely let a malicious smile of
triumph flicker on her lips, a smile such as the monkeys wear after
playing a sly trick—if monkeys smile.
“Ah! I have him,” thought she; and, indeed, she had him fast.
“But you are—” he said, raising his fine head and looking at her
with eyes of love.
“Virgin and martyr,” she replied, smiling at the commonness of that
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hackneyed expression, but giving it a freshness of meaning by her smile,
so full of painful gayety. “If I laugh,” she continued, “it is that I am
thinking of that princess whom the world thinks it knows, that
Duchesse de Maufrigneuse to whom it gives as lovers de Marsay, that
infamous de Trailles (a political cutthroat), and that little fool of a
d’Esgrignon, and Rastignac, Rubempre, ambassadors, ministers, Russian
generals, heaven knows who! all Europe! They have gossiped about
that album which I ordered made, believing that those who admired
me were my friends. Ah! it is frightful! I wonder that I allow a man at
my feet! Despise them all, that should be my religion.”
She rose and went to the window with a gait and bearing magnificent
in motifs.
D’Arthez remained on the low seat to which he had returned not
daring to follow the princess; but he looked at her; he heard her
blowing her nose. Was there ever a princess who blew her nose? but
Diane attempted the impossible to convey an idea of her sensibility.
D’Arthez believed his angel was in tears; he rushed to her side, took
her round the waist, and pressed her to his heart.
“No, no, leave me!” she murmured in a feeble voice. “I have too
many doubts to be good for anything. To reconcile me with life is a
task beyond the powers of any man.”
“Diane! I will love you for your whole lost life.”
“No; don’t speak to me thus,” she answered. “At this moment I
tremble, I am ashamed as though I had committed the greatest sins.”
She was now entirely restored to the innocence of little girls, and
yet her bearing was august, grand, noble as that of a queen. It is
impossible to describe the effect of these manoeuvres, so clever that
they acted like the purest truth on a soul as fresh and honest as that of
d’Arthez. The great author remained dumb with admiration, passive
beside her in the recess of that window awaiting a word, while the
princess awaited a kiss; but she was far too sacred to him for that.
Feeling cold, the princess returned to her easy-chair; her feet were
frozen.
“It will take a long time,” she said to herself, looking at Daniel’s
noble brow and head.
“Is this a woman?” thought that profound observer of human nature.
“How ought I to treat her?”
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Until two o’clock in the morning they spent their time in saying to
each other the silly things that women of genius, like the princess,
know how to make adorable. Diane pretended to be too worn, too
old, too faded; D’Arthez proved to her (facts of which she was well
convinced) that her skin was the most delicate, the softest to the
touch, the whitest to the eye, the most fragrant; she was young and
in her bloom, how could she think otherwise? Thus they disputed,
beauty by beauty, detail by detail with many: “Oh! do you think
so?”—”You are beside yourself!”—”It is hope, it is fancy!”—”You
will soon see me as I am.—I am almost forty years of age. Can a man
love so old a woman?”
D’Arthez responded with impetuous and school-boy eloquence,
larded with exaggerated epithets. When the princess heard this wise
and witty writer talking the nonsense of an amorous sub-lieutenant
she listened with an absorbed air and much sensibility; but she laughed
in her sleeve.
When d’Arthez was in the street, he asked himself whether he might
not have been rather less respectful. He went over in memory those
strange confidences—which have, naturally, been much abridged here,
for they needed a volume to convey their mellifluous abundance and
the graces which accompanied them. The retrospective perspicacity
of this man, so natural, so profound, was baffled by the candor of
that tale and its poignancy, and by the tones of the princess.
“It is true,” he said to himself, being unable to sleep, “there are such
dramas as that in society. Society covers great horrors with the flowers
of its elegance, the embroidery of its gossip, the wit of its lies. We
writers invent no more than the truth. Poor Diane! Michel had penetrated
that enigma; he said that beneath her covering of ice there lay
volcanoes! Bianchon and Rastignac were right; when a man can join
the grandeurs of the ideal and the enjoyments of human passion in
loving a woman of perfect manners, of intellect, of delicacy, it must
be happiness beyond words.”
So thinking, he sounded the love that was in him and found it
infinite.
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380
CHAPTER V
A TRIAL OF FAITH
THE NEXT DAY, about two in the afternoon, Madame d’Espard, who
had seen and heard nothing of the princess for more than a month,
went to see her under the impulse of extreme curiosity. Nothing was
ever more amusing of its kind than the conversation of these two
crafty adders during the first half-hour of this visit.
Diane d’Uxelles cautiously avoided, as she would the wearing of a
yellow gown, all mention of d’Arthez. The marquise circled round
and round that topic like a Bedouin round a caravan. Diane amused
herself; the marquise fumed. Diane waited; she intended to utilize
her friend and use her in the chase. Of these two women, both so
celebrated in the social world, one was far stronger than the other.
The princess rose by a head above the marquise, and the marquise
was inwardly conscious of that superiority. In this, perhaps, lay the
secret of their intimacy. The weaker of the two crouched low in her
false attachment, watching for the hour, long awaited by feeble beings,
of springing at the throat of the stronger and leaving the mark
of a joyful bite. Diane saw clear; but the world was the dupe of the
wile caresses of the two friends.
The instant that the princess perceived a direct question on the lips
of her friend, she said:—
“Ah! dearest, I owe you a most complete, immense, infinite, celestial
happiness.”
“What can you mean?”
“Have you forgotten what we ruminated three months ago in
the little garden, sitting on a bench in the sun, under the jasmine?

Balzac
Ah! there are none but men of genius who know how to love! I
apply to my grand Daniel d’Arthez the Duke of Alba’s saying to
Catherine de’ Medici: ‘The head of a single salmon is worth all the
frogs in the world.’”
“I am not surprised that I no longer see you,” said Madame d’Espard.
“Promise me, if you meet him, not to say to him one word about
me, my angel,” said the princess, taking her friend’s hand. “I am
happy, oh! happy beyond all expression; but you know that in society
a word, a mere jest can do much harm. One speech can kill, for
they put such venom into a single sentence! Ah! if you knew how I
long that you might meet with a love like this! Yes, it is a sweet, a
precious triumph for women like ourselves to end our woman’s life
in this way; to rest in an ardent, pure, devoted, complete and absolute
love; above all, when we have sought it long.”
“Why do you ask me to be faithful to my dearest friend?” said
Madame d’Espard. “Do you think me capable of playing you some
villainous trick?”
“When a woman possesses such a treasure the fear of losing it is so
strong that it naturally inspires a feeling of terror. I am absurd, I
know; forgive me, dear.”
A few moments later the marquise departed; as she watched her go
the princess said to herself:—
“How she will pluck me! But to save her the trouble of trying to
get Daniel away from here I’ll send him to her.”
At three o’clock, or a few moments after, d’Arthez arrived. In the
midst of some interesting topic on which he was discoursing eloquently,
the princess suddenly cut him short by laying her hand on
his arm.
“Pardon me, my dear friend,” she said, interrupting him, “but I
fear I may forget a thing which seems a mere trifle but may be of
great importance. You have not set foot in Madame d’Espard’s salon
since the ever-blessed day when I met you there. Pray go at once; not
for your sake, nor by way of politeness, but for me. You may already
have made her an enemy of mine, if by chance she has discovered
that since her dinner you have scarcely left my house. Besides, my
friend, I don’t like to see you dropping your connection with society,
and neglecting your occupations and your work. I should again be
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strangely calumniated. What would the world say? That I held you
in leading-strings, absorbed you, feared comparisons, and clung to
my conquest knowing it to be my last! Who will know that you are
my friend, my only friend? If you love me indeed, as you say you
love me, you will make the world believe that we are purely and
simply brother and sister— Go on with what you were saying.”
In his armor of tenderness, riveted by the knowledge of so many
splendid virtues, d’Arthez obeyed this behest on the following day
and went to see Madame d’Espard, who received him with charming
coquetry. The marquise took very good care not to say a single word
to him about the princess, but she asked him to dinner on a coming
day.
On this occasion d’Arthez found a numerous company. The marquise
had invited Rastignac, Blondet, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto,
Maxime de Trailles, the Marquis d’Esgrignon, the two brothers
Vandenesse, du Tillet, one of the richest bankers in Paris, the Baron
de Nucingen, Raoul Nathan, Lady Dudley, two very treacherous secretaries
of embassies and the Chevalier d’Espard, the wiliest person in
this assemblage and the chief instigator of his sister-in-law’s policy.
When dinner was well under way, Maxime de Trailles turned to
d’Arthez and said smiling:—
“You see a great deal, don’t you, of the Princesse de Cadignan?”
To this question d’Arthez responded by curtly nodding his head.
Maxime de Trailles was a “bravo” of the social order, without faith or
law, capable of everything, ruining the women who trusted him, compelling
them to pawn their diamonds to give him money, but covering
this conduct with a brilliant varnish; a man of charming manners and
satanic mind. He inspired all who knew him with equal contempt and
fear; but as no one was bold enough to show him any sentiments but
those of the utmost courtesy he saw nothing of this public opinion, or
else he accepted and shared the general dissimulation. He owed to the
Comte de Marsay the greatest degree of elevation to which he could
attain. De Marsay, whose knowledge of Maxime was of long-standing,
judged him capable of fulfilling certain secret and diplomatic functions
which he confided to him and of which de Trailles acquitted
himself admirably. D’Arthez had for some time past mingled sufficiently
in political matters to know the man for what he was, and he
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alone had sufficient strength and height of character to express aloud
what others thought or said in a whisper.
“Is it for her that you neglect the Chamber?” asked Baron de
Nucingen in his German accent.
“Ah! the princess is one of the most dangerous women a man can
have anything to do with. I owe to her the miseries of my marriage,”
exclaimed the Marquis d’Esgrignon.
“Dangerous?” said Madame d’Espard. “Don’t speak so of my nearest
friend. I have never seen or known anything in the princess that
did not seem to come from the noblest sentiments.”
“Let the marquis say what he thinks,” cried Rastignac. “When a man
has been thrown by a fine horse he thinks it has vices and he sells it.”
Piqued by these words, the Marquis d’Esgrignon looked at d’Arthez
and said:—
“Monsieur is not, I trust, on such terms with the princess that we
cannot speak freely of her?”
D’Arthez kept silence. D’Esgrignon, who was not wanting in cleverness,
replied to Rastignac’s speech with an apologetic portrait of
the princess, which put the whole table in good humor. As the jest
was extremely obscure to d’Arthez he leaned towards his neighbor,
Madame de Montcornet, and asked her, in a whisper, what it meant.
“Excepting yourself—judging by the excellent opinion you seem
to have of the princess—all the other guests are said to have been in
her good graces.”
“I can assure you that such an accusation is absolutely false,” said
Daniel.
“And yet, here is Monsieur d’Esgrignon of an old family of Alencon,
who completely ruined himself for her some twelve years ago, and, if
all is true, came very near going to the scaffold.”
“I know the particulars of that affair,” said d’Arthez. “Madame de
Cadignan went to Alencon to save Monsieur d’Esgrignon from a trial
before the court of assizes; and this is how he rewards her to-day!”
Madame de Montcornet looked at d’Arthez with a surprise and
curiosity that were almost stupid, then she turned her eyes on Madame
d’Espard with a look which seemed to say: “He is bewitched!”
During this short conversation Madame de Cadignan was protected
by Madame d’Espard, whose protection was like that of the light-
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ning-rod which draws the flash. When d’Arthez returned to the general
conversation Maxime de Trailles was saying:—
“With Diane, depravity is not an effect but a cause; perhaps she
owes that cause to her exquisite nature; she doesn’t invent, she makes
no effort, she offers you the choicest refinements as the inspiration
of a spontaneous and naive love; and it is absolutely impossible not
to believe her.”
This speech, which seemed to have been prepared for a man of
d’Arthez’s stamp, was so tremendous an arraignment that the company
appeared to accept it as a conclusion. No one said more; the
princess was crushed. D’Arthez looked straight at de Trailles and then
at d’Esgrignon with a sarcastic air, and said:—
“The greatest fault of that woman is that she has followed in the
wake of men. She squanders patrimonies as they do; she drives her
lovers to usurers; she pockets “dots”; she ruins orphans; she inspires,
possibly she commits, crimes, but—”
Never had the two men, whom d’Arthez was chiefly addressing,
listened to such plain talk. At that BUT the whole table was startled,
every one paused, fork in air, their eyes fixed alternately on the brave
author and on the assailants of the princess, awaiting the conclusion
of that horrible silence.
“But,” said d’Arthez, with sarcastic airiness, “Madame la Princesse
de Cadignan has one advantage over men: when they have put themselves
in danger for her sake, she saves them, and says no harm of any
one. Among the multitude, why shouldn’t there be one woman who
amuses herself with men as men amuse themselves with women?
Why not allow the fair sex to take, from time to time, its revenge?”
“Genius is stronger than wit,” said Blondet to Nathan.
This broadside of sarcasms was in fact the discharge of a battery
of cannons against a platoon of musketry. When coffee was served,
Blondet and Nathan went up to d’Arthez with an eagerness no
one else dared to imitate, so unable were the rest of the company
to show the admiration his conduct inspired from the fear of
making two powerful enemies.
“This is not the first time we have seen that your character equals
your talent in grandeur,” said Blondet. “You behaved just now more
like a demi-god than a man. Not to have been carried away by your
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heart or your imagination, not to have taken up the defence of a
beloved woman—a fault they were enticing you to commit, because
it would have given those men of society eaten up with jealousy of
your literary fame a triumph over you—ah! give me leave to say you
have attained the height of private statesmanship.”
“Yes, you are a statesman,” said Nathan. “It is as clever as it is difficult
to avenge a woman without defending her.”
“The princess is one of those heroines of the legitimist party, and it
is the duty of all men of honor to protect her quand meme,” replied
d’Arthez, coldly. “What she has done for the cause of her masters
would excuse all follies.”
“He keeps his own counsel!” said Nathan to Blondet.
“Precisely as if the princess were worth it,” said Rastignac, joining
the other two.
D’Arthez went to the princess, who was awaiting him with the
keenest anxiety. The result of this experiment, which Diane had herself
brought about, might be fatal to her. For the first time in her life
this woman suffered in her heart. She knew not what she should do
in case d’Arthez believed the world which spoke the truth, instead of
believing her who lied; for never had so noble a nature, so complete
a man, a soul so pure, a conscience so ingenuous come beneath her
hand. Though she had told him cruel lies she was driven to do so by
the desire of knowing a true love. That love—she felt it dawning in
her heart; yes, she loved d’Arthez; and now she was condemned forever
to deceive him! She must henceforth remain to him the actress
who had played that comedy to blind his eyes.
When she heard Daniel’s step in the dining-room a violent commotion,
a shudder which reached to her very vitals came over her.
That convulsion, never felt during all the years of her adventurous
existence, told her that she had staked her happiness on this issue.
Her eyes, gazing into space, took in the whole of d’Arthez’s person;
their light poured through his flesh, she read his soul; suspicion had
not so much as touched him with its bat’s-wing. The terrible emotion
of that fear then came to its reaction; joy almost stifled her; for
there is no human being who is not more able to endure grief than to
bear extreme felicity.
“Daniel, they have calumniated me, and you have avenged me!”
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she cried, rising, and opening her arms to him.
In the profound amazement caused by these words, the roots of
which were utterly unknown to him, Daniel allowed his hand to be
taken between her beautiful hands, as the princess kissed him sacredly
on the forehead.
“But,” he said, “how could you know—”
“Oh! illustrious ninny! do you not see that I love you fondly?”
Since that day nothing has been said of the Princess de Cadignan,
nor of d’Arthez. The princess has inherited some fortune from her
mother and she spends all her summers in a villa on the lake of Geneva,
where the great writer joins her. She returns to Paris for a few months
in winter. D’Arthez is never seen except in the Chamber. His writings
are becoming exceedingly rare. Is this a conclusion? Yes, for people
of sense; no, for persons who want to know everything.
386
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Ajuda-Pinto, Marquis Miguel d’
Father Goriot
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Beatrix
Arthez, Daniel d’
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Member for Arcis
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
The Atheist’s Mass
Cesar Birotteau

The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
Blondet, Emile
Jealousies of a Country Town
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Firm of Nucingen
The Peasantry
Blondet, Virginie
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Balzac
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The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
Another Study of Woman
The Member for Arcis
A Daughter of Eve
Cadignan, Prince de
Modeste Mignon
Chrestien, Michel
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Cinq-Cygne, Laurence, Comtesse (afterwards Marquise de)
The Gondreville Mystery
The Seamy Side of History
The Member for Arcis
Dudley, Lady Arabella
The Lily of the Valley
The Ball at Sceaux
The Magic Skin
A Daughter of Eve
Letters of Two Brides
Esgrignon, Victurnien, Comte (then Marquis d’)
Jealousies of a Country Town
Letters of Two Brides
A Man of Business
Cousin Betty
Espard, Chevalier d’
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise
d’
The Commission in Lunacy
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
388

Letters of Two Brides
Another Study of Woman
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Beatrix
Galathionne, Prince and Princess (both not in each story)
The Middle Classes
Father Goriot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Daughter of Eve
Beatrix
Giraud, Leon
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Unconscious Humorists
Marsay, Henri de
The Thirteen
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modest Mignon
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Maufrigneuse, Duc de
A Start in Life
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Balzac
389

The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de
Modeste Mignon
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Muse of the Department
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Letters of Two Brides
Another Study of Woman
The Gondreville Mystery
The Member for Arcis
Maufrigneuse, Georges de
The Gondreville Mystery
Beatrix
The Member for Arcis
Mirbel, Madame de
Letters of Two Brides
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Nathan, Raoul
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
A Daughter of Eve
Letters of Two Brides
The Seamy Side of History
The Muse of the Department
A Prince of Bohemia
A Man of Business
The Unconscious Humorists
Navarreins, Duc de
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Colonel Chabert
The Muse of the Department
The Thirteen
390

Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Country Parson
The Magic Skin
The Gondreville Mystery
Cousin Betty
Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
The Firm of Nucingen
Father Goriot
Pierrette
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Another Study of Woman
A Man of Business
Cousin Betty
The Muse of the Department
The Unconscious Humorists
Rastignac, Eugene de
Father Goriot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Interdiction
A Study of Woman
Another Study of Woman
The Magic Skin
A Daughter of Eve
The Gondreville Mystery
The Firm of Nucingen
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
The Unconscious Humorists
Balzac
391

The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan
Rochefide, Marquise de
Beatrix
A Daughter of Eve
Sarrasine
A Prince of Bohemia
Tillet, Ferdinand du
Cesar Birotteau
The Firm of Nucingen
The Middle Classes
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Pierrette
Melmoth Reconciled
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Cousin Betty
The Unconscious Humorists
Toby (Joby, Paddy)
The Firm of Nucingen
Trailles, Comte Maxime de
Cesar Birotteau
Father Goriot
Gobseck
Ursule Mirouet
A Man of Business
The Member for Arcis
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
Beatrix
The Unconscious Humorists
Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
The Lily of the Valley
Lost Illusions
392

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Cesar Birotteau
Letters of Two Brides
A Start in Life
The Marriage Settlement
Another Study of Woman
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Balzac
393

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
At the Sign of the Cat
DEDICATION
394
and Racket
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
To Mademoiselle Marie de Montheau
HALF-WAY DOWN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS, almost at the corner of the
Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful
houses which enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy.
The threatening walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have
been decorated with hieroglyphics. For what other name could the
passer-by give to the Xs and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal
timbers traced on the front, outlined by little parallel cracks in the
plaster? It was evident that every beam quivered in its mortices at
the passing of the lightest vehicle. This venerable structure was
crowned by a triangular roof of which no example will, ere long,
be seen in Paris. This covering, warped by the extremes of the Paris
climate, projected three feet over the roadway, as much to protect
the threshold from the rainfall as to shelter the wall of a loft and its
sill-less dormer-window. This upper story was built of planks, over-

Balzac
lapping each other like slates, in order, no doubt, not to overweight
the frail house.
One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully
wrapped in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite
this old house, which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an
antiquary. In point of fact, this relic of the civic life of the sixteenth
century offered more than one problem to the consideration of an
observer. Each story presented some singularity; on the first floor
four tall, narrow windows, close together, were filled as to the lower
panes with boards, so as to produce the doubtful light by which a
clever salesman can ascribe to his goods the color his customers inquire
for. The young man seemed very scornful of this part of the
house; his eyes had not yet rested on it. The windows of the second
floor, where the Venetian blinds were drawn up, revealing little dingy
muslin curtains behind the large Bohemian glass panes, did not interest
him either. His attention was attracted to the third floor, to the
modest sash-frames of wood, so clumsily wrought that they might
have found a place in the Museum of Arts and Crafts to illustrate the
early efforts of French carpentry. These windows were glazed with
small squares of glass so green that, but for his good eyes, the young
man could not have seen the blue-checked cotton curtains which
screened the mysteries of the room from profane eyes. Now and
then the watcher, weary of his fruitless contemplation, or of the silence
in which the house was buried, like the whole neighborhood,
dropped his eyes towards the lower regions. An involuntary smile
parted his lips each time he looked at the shop, where, in fact, there
were some laughable details.
A formidable wooden beam, resting on four pillars, which appeared
to have bent under the weight of the decrepit house, had been encrusted
with as many coats of different paint as there are of rouge on an
old duchess’ cheek. In the middle of this broad and fantastically carved
joist there was an old painting representing a cat playing rackets. This
picture was what moved the young man to mirth. But it must be said
that the wittiest of modern painters could not invent so comical a
caricature. The animal held in one of its forepaws a racket as big as
itself, and stood on its hind legs to aim at hitting an enormous ball,
returned by a man in a fine embroidered coat. Drawing, color, and
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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
accessories, all were treated in such a way as to suggest that the artist
had meant to make game of the shop-owner and of the passing observer.
Time, while impairing this artless painting, had made it yet
more grotesque by introducing some uncertain features which must
have puzzled the conscientious idler. For instance, the cat’s tail had
been eaten into in such a way that it might now have been taken for
the figure of a spectator—so long, and thick, and furry were the tails of
our forefathers’ cats. To the right of the picture, on an azure field which
ill-disguised the decay of the wood, might be read the name
“Guillaume,” and to the left, “Successor to Master Chevrel.” Sun and
rain had worn away most of the gilding parsimoniously applied to the
letters of this superscription, in which the Us and Vs had changed
places in obedience to the laws of old-world orthography.
To quench the pride of those who believe that the world is growing
cleverer day by day, and that modern humbug surpasses everything,
it may be observed that these signs, of which the origin seems
so whimsical to many Paris merchants, are the dead pictures of once
living pictures by which our roguish ancestors contrived to tempt
customers into their houses. Thus the Spinning Sow, the Green
Monkey, and others, were animals in cages whose skills astonished
the passer-by, and whose accomplishments prove the patience of the
fifteenth-century artisan. Such curiosities did more to enrich their
fortunate owners than the signs of “Providence,” “Good-faith,” Grace
of God,” and “Decapitation of John the Baptist,” which may still be
seen in the Rue Saint-Denis.
However, our stranger was certainly not standing there to admire
the cat, which a minute’s attention sufficed to stamp on his memory.
The young man himself had his peculiarities. His cloak, folded after
the manner of an antique drapery, showed a smart pair of shoes, all
the more remarkable in the midst of the Paris mud, because he wore
white silk stockings, on which the splashes betrayed his impatience.
He had just come, no doubt, from a wedding or a ball; for at this
early hour he had in his hand a pair of white gloves, and his black
hair, now out of curl, and flowing over his shoulders, showed that it
had been dressed /a la Caracalla/, a fashion introduced as much by
David’s school of painting as by the mania for Greek and Roman
styles which characterized the early years of this century.
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Balzac
In spite of the noise made by a few market gardeners, who, being
late, rattled past towards the great market-place at a gallop, the busy
street lay in a stillness of which the magic charm is known only to
those who have wandered through deserted Paris at the hours when
its roar, hushed for a moment, rises and spreads in the distance like
the great voice of the sea. This strange young man must have seemed
as curious to the shopkeeping folk of the “Cat and Racket” as the
“Cat and Racket” was to him. A dazzlingly white cravat made his
anxious face look even paler than it really was. The fire that flashed in
his black eyes, gloomy and sparkling by turns, was in harmony with
the singular outline of his features, with his wide, flexible mouth, hardened
into a smile. His forehead, knit with violent annoyance, had a
stamp of doom. Is not the forehead the most prophetic feature of a
man? When the stranger’s brow expressed passion the furrows formed
in it were terrible in their strength and energy; but when he recovered
his calmness, so easily upset, it beamed with a luminous grace which
gave great attractiveness to a countenance in which joy, grief, love,
anger, or scorn blazed out so contagiously that the coldest man could
not fail to be impressed.
He was so thoroughly vexed by the time when the dormer-window
of the loft was suddenly flung open, that he did not observe the
apparition of three laughing faces, pink and white and chubby, but as
vulgar as the face of Commerce as it is seen in sculpture on certain
monuments. These three faces, framed by the window, recalled the
puffy cherubs floating among the clouds that surround God the Father.
The apprentices snuffed up the exhalations of the street with an
eagerness that showed how hot and poisonous the atmosphere of
their garret must be. After pointing to the singular sentinel, the most
jovial, as he seemed, of the apprentices retired and came back holding
an instrument whose hard metal pipe is now superseded by a
leather tube; and they all grinned with mischief as they looked down
on the loiterer, and sprinkled him with a fine white shower of which
the scent proved that three chins had just been shaved. Standing on
tiptoe, in the farthest corner of their loft, to enjoy their victim’s rage,
the lads ceased laughing on seeing the haughty indifference with which
the young man shook his cloak, and the intense contempt expressed
by his face as he glanced up at the empty window-frame.
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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
At this moment a slender white hand threw up the lower half of
one of the clumsy windows on the third floor by the aid of the sash
runners, of which the pulley so often suddenly gives way and releases
the heavy panes it ought to hold up. The watcher was then rewarded
for his long waiting. The face of a young girl appeared, as fresh as one
of the white cups that bloom on the bosom of the waters, crowned
by a frill of tumbled muslin, which gave her head a look of exquisite
innocence. Though wrapped in brown stuff, her neck and shoulders
gleamed here and there through little openings left by her movements
in sleep. No expression of embarrassment detracted from the
candor of her face, or the calm look of eyes immortalized long since
in the sublime works of Raphael; here were the same grace, the same
repose as in those Virgins, and now proverbial. There was a delightful
contrast between the cheeks of that face on which sleep had, as it
were, given high relief to a superabundance of life, and the antiquity
of the heavy window with its clumsy shape and black sill. Like those
day-blowing flowers, which in the early morning have not yet unfurled
their cups, twisted by the chills of night, the girl, as yet hardly
awake, let her blue eyes wander beyond the neighboring roofs to
look at the sky; then, from habit, she cast them down on the gloomy
depths of the street, where they immediately met those of her adorer.
Vanity, no doubt, distressed her at being seen in undress; she started
back, the worn pulley gave way, and the sash fell with the rapid run,
which in our day has earned for this artless invention of our forefathers
an odious name, Fenetre a la Guillotine. The vision had disappeared.
To the young man the most radiant star of morning seemed
to be hidden by a cloud.
During these little incidents the heavy inside shutters that protected
the slight windows of the shop of the “Cat and Racket” had been
removed as if by magic. The old door with its knocker was opened
back against the wall of the entry by a man-servant, apparently coeval
with the sign, who, with a shaking hand, hung upon it a square of
cloth, on which were embroidered in yellow silk the words:
“Guillaume, successor to Chevrel.” Many a passer-by would have
found it difficult to guess the class of trade carried on by Monsieur
Guillaume. Between the strong iron bars which protected his shop
windows on the outside, certain packages, wrapped in brown linen,
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Balzac
were hardly visible, though as numerous as herrings swimming in a
shoal. Notwithstanding the primitive aspect of the Gothic front,
Monsieur Guillaume, of all the merchant clothiers in Paris, was the
one whose stores were always the best provided, whose connections
were the most extensive, and whose commercial honesty never lay
under the slightest suspicion. If some of his brethren in business made
a contract with the Government, and had not the required quantity
of cloth, he was always ready to deliver it, however large the number
of pieces tendered for. The wily dealer knew a thousand ways of
extracting the largest profits without being obliged, like them, to
court patrons, cringing to them, or making them costly presents.
When his fellow-tradesmen could only pay in good bills of long
date, he would mention his notary as an accommodating man, and
managed to get a second profit out of the bargain, thanks to this
arrangement, which had made it a proverb among the traders of the
Rue Saint-Denis: “Heaven preserve you from Monsieur Guillaume’s
notary!” to signify a heavy discount.
The old merchant was to be seen standing on the threshold of his
shop, as if by a miracle, the instant the servant withdrew. Monsieur
Guillaume looked at the Rue Saint-Denis, at the neighboring shops,
and at the weather, like a man disembarking at Havre, and seeing
France once more after a long voyage. Having convinced himself
that nothing had changed while he was asleep, he presently perceived
the stranger on guard, and he, on his part, gazed at the patriarchal
draper as Humboldt may have scrutinized the first electric eel he saw
in America. Monsieur Guillaume wore loose black velvet breeches,
pepper-and-salt stockings, and square toed shoes with silver buckles.
His coat, with square-cut fronts, square-cut tails, and square-cut collar
clothed his slightly bent figure in greenish cloth, finished with
white metal buttons, tawny from wear. His gray hair was so accurately
combed and flattened over his yellow pate that it made it look
like a furrowed field. His little green eyes, that might have been pierced
with a gimlet, flashed beneath arches faintly tinged with red in the
place of eyebrows. Anxieties had wrinkled his forehead with as many
horizontal lines as there were creases in his coat. This colorless face
expressed patience, commercial shrewdness, and the sort of wily cupidity
which is needful in business. At that time these old families
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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
were less rare than they are now, in which the characteristic habits
and costume of their calling, surviving in the midst of more recent
civilization, were preserved as cherished traditions, like the antediluvian
remains found by Cuvier in the quarries.
The head of the Guillaume family was a notable upholder of ancient
practices; he might be heard to regret the Provost of Merchants,
and never did he mention a decision of the Tribunal of Commerce
without calling it the /Sentence of the Consuls/. Up and dressed the
first of the household, in obedience, no doubt, to these old customs,
he stood sternly awaiting the appearance of his three assistants, ready
to scold them in case they were late. These young disciples of Mercury
knew nothing more terrible than the wordless assiduity with
which the master scrutinized their faces and their movements on
Monday in search of evidence or traces of their pranks. But at this
moment the old clothier paid no heed to his apprentices; he was
absorbed in trying to divine the motive of the anxious looks which
the young man in silk stockings and a cloak cast alternately at his
signboard and into the depths of his shop. The daylight was now
brighter, and enabled the stranger to discern the cashier’s corner enclosed
by a railing and screened by old green silk curtains, where were
kept the immense ledgers, the silent oracles of the house. The too
inquisitive gazer seemed to covet this little nook, and to be taking
the plan of a dining-room at one side, lighted by a skylight, whence
the family at meals could easily see the smallest incident that might
occur at the shop-door. So much affection for his dwelling seemed
suspicious to a trader who had lived long enough to remember the
law of maximum prices; Monsieur Guillaume naturally thought that
this sinister personage had an eye to the till of the Cat and Racket.
After quietly observing the mute duel which was going on between
his master and the stranger, the eldest of the apprentices, having seen
that the young man was stealthily watching the windows of the third
floor, ventured to place himself on the stone flag where Monsieur
Guillaume was standing. He took two steps out into the street, raised
his head, and fancied that he caught sight of Mademoiselle Augustine
Guillaume in hasty retreat. The draper, annoyed by his assistant’s
perspicacity, shot a side glance at him; but the draper and his amorous
apprentice were suddenly relieved from the fears which the young
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Balzac
man’s presence had excited in their minds. He hailed a hackney cab
on its way to a neighboring stand, and jumped into it with an air of
affected indifference. This departure was a balm to the hearts of the
other two lads, who had been somewhat uneasy as to meeting the
victim of their practical joke.
“Well, gentlemen, what ails you that you are standing there with
your arms folded?” said Monsieur Guillaume to his three neophytes.
“In former days, bless you, when I was in Master Chevrel’s service, I
should have overhauled more than two pieces of cloth by this time.”
“Then it was daylight earlier,” said the second assistant, whose duty
this was.
The old shopkeeper could not help smiling. Though two of these
young fellows, who were confided to his care by their fathers, rich
manufacturers at Louviers and at Sedan, had only to ask and to have
a hundred thousand francs the day when they were old enough to
settle in life, Guillaume regarded it as his duty to keep them under
the rod of an old-world despotism, unknown nowadays in the showy
modern shops, where the apprentices expect to be rich men at thirty.
He made them work like Negroes. These three assistants were equal
to a business which would harry ten such clerks as those whose
sybaritical tastes now swell the columns of the budget. Not a sound
disturbed the peace of this solemn house, where the hinges were always
oiled, and where the meanest article of furniture showed the
respectable cleanliness which reveals strict order and economy. The
most waggish of the three youths often amused himself by writing
the date of its first appearance on the Gruyere cheese which was left
to their tender mercies at breakfast, and which it was their pleasure to
leave untouched. This bit of mischief, and a few others of the same
stamp, would sometimes bring a smile on the face of the younger of
Guillaume’s daughters, the pretty maiden who has just now appeared
to the bewitched man in the street.
Though each of these apprentices, even the eldest, paid a round
sum for his board, not one of them would have been bold enough to
remain at the master’s table when dessert was served. When Madame
Guillaume talked of dressing the salad, the hapless youths trembled
as they thought of the thrift with which her prudent hand dispensed
the oil. They could never think of spending a night away from the
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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
house without having given, long before, a plausible reason for such
an irregularity. Every Sunday, each in his turn, two of them accompanied
the Guillaume family to Mass at Saint-Leu, and to vespers.
Mesdemoiselles Virginie and Augustine, simply attired in cotton print,
each took the arm of an apprentice and walked in front, under the
piercing eye of their mother, who closed the little family procession
with her husband, accustomed by her to carry two large prayer-books,
bound in black morocco. The second apprentice received no salary.
As for the eldest, whose twelve years of perseverance and discretion
had initiated him into the secrets of the house, he was paid eight
hundred francs a year as the reward of his labors. On certain family
festivals he received as a gratuity some little gift, to which Madame
Guillaume’s dry and wrinkled hand alone gave value—netted purses,
which she took care to stuff with cotton wool, to show off the fancy
stitches, braces of the strongest make, or heavy silk stockings. Sometimes,
but rarely, this prime minister was admitted to share the pleasures
of the family when they went into the country, or when, after
waiting for months, they made up their mind to exert the right acquired
by taking a box at the theatre to command a piece which Paris
had already forgotten.
As to the other assistants, the barrier of respect which formerly divided
a master draper from his apprentices was that they would have
been more likely to steal a piece of cloth than to infringe this timehonored
etiquette. Such reserve may now appear ridiculous; but these
old houses were a school of honesty and sound morals. The masters
adopted their apprentices. The young man’s linen was cared for, mended,
and often replaced by the mistress of the house. If an apprentice fell ill,
he was the object of truly maternal attention. In a case of danger the
master lavished his money in calling in the most celebrated physicians,
for he was not answerable to their parents merely for the good conduct
and training of the lads. If one of them, whose character was unimpeachable,
suffered misfortune, these old tradesmen knew how to value
the intelligence he had displayed, and they did not hesitate to entrust
the happiness of their daughters to men whom they had long trusted
with their fortunes. Guillaume was one of these men of the old school,
and if he had their ridiculous side, he had all their good qualities; and
Joseph Lebas, the chief assistant, an orphan without any fortune, was
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Balzac
in his mind destined to be the husband of Virginie, his elder daughter.
But Joseph did not share the symmetrical ideas of his master, who
would not for an empire have given his second daughter in marriage
before the elder. The unhappy assistant felt that his heart was wholly
given to Mademoiselle Augustine, the younger. In order to justify this
passion, which had grown up in secret, it is necessary to inquire a little
further into the springs of the absolute government which ruled the
old cloth-merchant’s household.
Guillaume had two daughters. The elder, Mademoiselle Virginie,
was the very image of her mother. Madame Guillaume, daughter of
the Sieur Chevrel, sat so upright in the stool behind her desk, that
more than once she had heard some wag bet that she was a stuffed
figure. Her long, thin face betrayed exaggerated piety. Devoid of attractions
or of amiable manners, Madame Guillaume commonly
decorated her head—that of a woman near on sixty—with a cap of a
particular and unvarying shape, with long lappets, like that of a widow.
In all the neighborhood she was known as the “portress nun.” Her
speech was curt, and her movements had the stiff precision of a semaphore.
Her eye, with a gleam in it like a cat’s, seemed to spite the
world because she was so ugly. Mademoiselle Virginie, brought up,
like her younger sister, under the domestic rule of her mother, had
reached the age of eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated the graceless
effect which her likeness to her mother sometimes gave to her features,
but maternal austerity had endowed her with two great qualities
which made up for everything. She was patient and gentle. Mademoiselle
Augustine, who was but just eighteen, was not like either
her father or her mother. She was one of those daughters whose total
absence of any physical affinity with their parents makes one believe
in the adage: “God gives children.” Augustine was little, or, to describe
her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man
of the world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond
a certain meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes
a want of ease. Her silent and placid face was full of the transient
melancholy which comes over all young girls who are too weak to
dare to resist their mother’s will.
The two sisters, always plainly dressed, could not gratify the innate
vanity of womanhood but by a luxury of cleanliness which became
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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
them wonderfully, and made them harmonize with the polished
counters and the shining shelves, on which the old man-servant never
left a speck of dust, and with the old-world simplicity of all they saw
about them. As their style of living compelled them to find the elements
of happiness in persistent work, Augustine and Virginie had
hitherto always satisfied their mother, who secretly prided herself on
the perfect characters of her two daughters. It is easy to imagine the
results of the training they had received. Brought up to a commercial
life, accustomed to hear nothing but dreary arguments and calculations
about trade, having studied nothing but grammar, book-keeping,
a little Bible-history, and the history of France in Le Ragois, and
never reading any book but what their mother would sanction, their
ideas had not acquired much scope. They knew perfectly how to keep
house; they were familiar with the prices of things; they understood
the difficulty of amassing money; they were economical, and had a
great respect for the qualities that make a man of business. Although
their father was rich, they were as skilled in darning as in embroidery;
their mother often talked of having them taught to cook, so that they
might know how to order a dinner and scold a cook with due knowledge.
They knew nothing of the pleasures of the world; and, seeing
how their parents spent their exemplary lives, they very rarely suffered
their eyes to wander beyond the walls of their hereditary home, which
to their mother was the whole universe. The meetings to which family
anniversaries gave rise filled in the future of earthly joy to them.
When the great drawing-room on the second floor was to be prepared
to receive company—Madame Roguin, a Demoiselle Chevrel,
fifteen months younger than her cousin, and bedecked with diamonds;
young Rabourdin, employed in the Finance Office; Monsieur
Cesar Birotteau, the rich perfumer, and his wife, known as
Madame Cesar; Monsieur Camusot, the richest silk mercer in the
Rue des Bourdonnais, with his father-in-law, Monsieur Cardot, two
or three old bankers, and some immaculate ladies—the arrangements,
made necessary by the way in which everything was packed away—
the plate, the Dresden china, the candlesticks, and the glass—made a
variety in the monotonous lives of the three women, who came and
went and exerted themselves as nuns would to receive their bishop.
Then, in the evening, when all three were tired out with having wiped,
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rubbed, unpacked, and arranged all the gauds of the festival, as the girls
helped their mother to undress, Madame Guillaume would say to
them, “Children, we have done nothing today.”
When, on very great occasions, “the portress nun” allowed dancing,
restricting the games of boston, whist, and backgammon within
the limits of her bedroom, such a concession was accounted as the
most unhoped felicity, and made them happier than going to the
great balls, to two or three of which Guillaume would take the
girls at the time of the Carnival.
And once a year the worthy draper gave an entertainment, when
he spared no expense. However rich and fashionable the persons
invited might be, they were careful not to be absent; for the most
important houses on the exchange had recourse to the immense
credit, the fortune, or the time-honored experience of Monsieur
Guillaume. Still, the excellent merchant’s daughters did not benefit
as much as might be supposed by the lessons the world has to
offer to young spirits. At these parties, which were indeed set down
in the ledger to the credit of the house, they wore dresses the shabbiness
of which made them blush. Their style of dancing was not
in any way remarkable, and their mother’s surveillance did not allow
of their holding any conversation with their partners beyond
Yes and No. Also, the law of the old sign of the Cat and Racket
commanded that they should be home by eleven o’clock, the hour
when balls and fetes begin to be lively. Thus their pleasures, which
seemed to conform very fairly to their father’s position, were often
made insipid by circumstances which were part of the family habits
and principles.
As to their usual life, one remark will sufficiently paint it. Madame
Guillaume required her daughters to be dressed very early in the
morning, to come down every day at the same hour, and she ordered
their employments with monastic regularity. Augustine, however,
had been gifted by chance with a spirit lofty enough to feel the emptiness
of such a life. Her blue eyes would sometimes be raised as if to
pierce the depths of that gloomy staircase and those damp storerooms.
After sounding the profound cloistral silence, she seemed to
be listening to remote, inarticulate revelations of the life of passion,
which accounts feelings as of higher value than things. And at such
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moments her cheek would flush, her idle hands would lay the muslin
sewing on the polished oak counter, and presently her mother
would say in a voice, of which even the softest tones were sour, “Augustine,
my treasure, what are you thinking about?” It is possible
that two romances discovered by Augustine in the cupboard of a
cook Madame Guillaume had lately discharged—Hippolyte Comte
de Douglas and Le Comte de Comminges—may have contributed to
develop the ideas of the young girl, who had devoured them in secret,
during the long nights of the past winter.
And so Augustine’s expression of vague longing, her gentle voice,
her jasmine skin, and her blue eyes had lighted in poor Lebas’ soul a
flame as ardent as it was reverent. From an easily understood caprice,
Augustine felt no affection for the orphan; perhaps she did not know
that he loved her. On the other hand, the senior apprentice, with his
long legs, his chestnut hair, his big hands and powerful frame, had
found a secret admirer in Mademoiselle Virginie, who, in spite of
her dower of fifty thousand crowns, had as yet no suitor. Nothing
could be more natural than these two passions at cross-purposes,
born in the silence of the dingy shop, as violets bloom in the depths
of a wood. The mute and constant looks which made the young
people’s eyes meet by sheer need of change in the midst of persistent
work and cloistered peace, was sure, sooner or later, to give rise to
feelings of love. The habit of seeing always the same face leads insensibly
to our reading there the qualities of the soul, and at last effaces
all its defects.
“At the pace at which that man goes, our girls will soon have to go
on their knees to a suitor!” said Monsieur Guillaume to himself, as
he read the first decree by which Napoleon drew in advance on the
conscript classes.
From that day the old merchant, grieved at seeing his eldest daughter
fade, remembered how he had married Mademoiselle Chevrel under
much the same circumstances as those of Joseph Lebas and Virginie. A
good bit of business, to marry off his daughter, and discharge a sacred
debt by repaying to an orphan the benefit he had formerly received
from his predecessor under similar conditions! Joseph Lebas, who was
now three-and-thirty, was aware of the obstacle which a difference of
fifteen years placed between Augustine and himself. Being also too
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clear-sighted not to understand Monsieur Guillaume’s purpose, he knew
his inexorable principles well enough to feel sure that the second would
never marry before the elder. So the hapless assistant, whose heart was
as warm as his legs were long and his chest deep, suffered in silence.
This was the state of the affairs in the tiny republic which, in the
heart of the Rue Saint-Denis, was not unlike a dependency of La
Trappe. But to give a full account of events as well as of feelings, it is
needful to go back to some months before the scene with which this
story opens. At dusk one evening, a young man passing the darkened
shop of the Cat and Racket, had paused for a moment to gaze at a
picture which might have arrested every painter in the world. The
shop was not yet lighted, and was as a dark cave beyond which the
dining-room was visible. A hanging lamp shed the yellow light which
lends such charm to pictures of the Dutch school. The white linen,
the silver, the cut glass, were brilliant accessories, and made more
picturesque by strong contrasts of light and shade. The figures of the
head of the family and his wife, the faces of the apprentices, and the
pure form of Augustine, near whom a fat chubby-cheeked maid was
standing, composed so strange a group; the heads were so singular,
and every face had so candid an expression; it was so easy to read the
peace, the silence, the modest way of life in this family, that to an
artist accustomed to render nature, there was something hopeless in
any attempt to depict this scene, come upon by chance. The stranger
was a young painter, who, seven years before, had gained the first
prize for painting. He had now just come back from Rome. His
soul, full-fed with poetry; his eyes, satiated with Raphael and Michael
Angelo, thirsted for real nature after long dwelling in the pompous
land where art has everywhere left something grandiose. Right or
wrong, this was his personal feeling. His heart, which had long been
a prey to the fire of Italian passion, craved one of those modest and
meditative maidens whom in Rome he had unfortunately seen only
in painting. From the enthusiasm produced in his excited fancy by
the living picture before him, he naturally passed to a profound admiration
for the principal figure; Augustine seemed to be pensive,
and did not eat; by the arrangement of the lamp the light fell full on
her face, and her bust seemed to move in a circle of fire, which threw
up the shape of her head and illuminated it with almost supernatural
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effect. The artist involuntarily compared her to an exiled angel dreaming
of heaven. An almost unknown emotion, a limpid, seething love
flooded his heart. After remaining a minute, overwhelmed by the
weight of his ideas, he tore himself from his bliss, went home, ate
nothing, and could not sleep.
The next day he went to his studio, and did not come out of it till
he had placed on canvas the magic of the scene of which the memory
had, in a sense, made him a devotee; his happiness was incomplete
till he should possess a faithful portrait of his idol. He went many
times past the house of the Cat and Racket; he even ventured in once
or twice, under a disguise, to get a closer view of the bewitching
creature that Madame Guillaume covered with her wing. For eight
whole months, devoted to his love and to his brush, he was lost to
the sight of his most intimate friends forgetting the world, the theatre,
poetry, music, and all his dearest habits. One morning Girodet
broke through all the barriers with which artists are familiar, and
which they know how to evade, went into his room, and woke him
by asking, “What are you going to send to the Salon?” The artist
grasped his friend’s hand, dragged him off to the studio, uncovered a
small easel picture and a portrait. After a long and eager study of the
two masterpieces, Girodet threw himself on his comrade’s neck and
hugged him, without speaking a word. His feelings could only be
expressed as he felt them—soul to soul.
“You are in love?” said Girodet.
They both knew that the finest portraits by Titian, Raphael, and
Leonardo da Vinci, were the outcome of the enthusiastic sentiments
by which, indeed, under various conditions, every masterpiece is engendered.
The artist only bent his head in reply.
“How happy are you to be able to be in love, here, after coming
back from Italy! But I do not advise you to send such works as these
to the Salon,” the great painter went on. “You see, these two works
will not be appreciated. Such true coloring, such prodigious work,
cannot yet be understood; the public is not accustomed to such depths.
The pictures we paint, my dear fellow, are mere screens. We should
do better to turn rhymes, and translate the antique poets! There is
more glory to be looked for there than from our luckless canvases!”
Notwithstanding this charitable advice, the two pictures were ex-
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hibited. The Interior made a revolution in painting. It gave birth to
the pictures of genre which pour into all our exhibitions in such
prodigious quantity that they might be supposed to be produced by
machinery. As to the portrait, few artists have forgotten that lifelike
work; and the public, which as a body is sometimes discerning,
awarded it the crown which Girodet himself had hung over it. The
two pictures were surrounded by a vast throng. They fought for places,
as women say. Speculators and moneyed men would have covered
the canvas with double napoleons, but the artist obstinately refused
to sell or to make replicas. An enormous sum was offered him for
the right of engraving them, and the print-sellers were not more favored
than the amateurs.
Though these incidents occupied the world, they were not of a
nature to penetrate the recesses of the monastic solitude in the Rue
Saint-Denis. However, when paying a visit to Madame Guillaume,
the notary’s wife spoke of the exhibition before Augustine, of whom
she was very fond, and explained its purpose. Madame Roguin’s gossip
naturally inspired Augustine with a wish to see the pictures, and
with courage enough to ask her cousin secretly to take her to the
Louvre. Her cousin succeeded in the negotiations she opened with
Madame Guillaume for permission to release the young girl for two
hours from her dull labors. Augustine was thus able to make her way
through the crowd to see the crowned work. A fit of trembling shook
her like an aspen leaf as she recognized herself. She was terrified, and
looked about her to find Madame Roguin, from whom she had
been separated by a tide of people. At that moment her frightened
eyes fell on the impassioned face of the young painter. She at once
recalled the figure of a loiterer whom, being curious, she had frequently
observed, believing him to be a new neighbor.
“You see how love has inspired me,” said the artist in the timid
creature’s ear, and she stood in dismay at the words.
She found supernatural courage to enable her to push through the
crowd and join her cousin, who was still struggling with the mass of
people that hindered her from getting to the picture.
“You will be stifled!” cried Augustine. “Let us go.”
But there are moments, at the Salon, when two women are not
always free to direct their steps through the galleries. By the irregular
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course to which they were compelled by the press, Mademoiselle
Guillaume and her cousin were pushed to within a few steps of the
second picture. Chance thus brought them, both together, to where
they could easily see the canvas made famous by fashion, for once in
agreement with talent. Madame Roguin’s exclamation of surprise
was lost in the hubbub and buzz of the crowd; Augustine involuntarily
shed tears at the sight of this wonderful study. Then, by an
almost unaccountable impulse, she laid her finger on her lips, as she
perceived quite near her the ecstatic face of the young painter. The
stranger replied by a nod, and pointed to Madame Roguin, as a spoilsport,
to show Augustine that he had understood. This pantomime
struck the young girl like hot coals on her flesh; she felt quite guilty
as she perceived that there was a compact between herself and the
artist. The suffocating heat, the dazzling sight of beautiful dresses,
the bewilderment produced in Augustine’s brain by the truth of coloring,
the multitude of living or painted figures, the profusion of
gilt frames, gave her a sense of intoxication which doubled her alarms.
She would perhaps have fainted if an unknown rapture had not surged
up in her heart to vivify her whole being, in spite of this chaos of
sensations. She nevertheless believed herself to be under the power of
the Devil, of whose awful snares she had been warned of by the thundering
words of preachers. This moment was to her like a moment of
madness. She found herself accompanied to her cousin’s carriage by the
young man, radiant with joy and love. Augustine, a prey to an agitation
new to her experience, an intoxication which seemed to abandon
her to nature, listened to the eloquent voice of her heart, and looked
again and again at the young painter, betraying the emotion that came
over her. Never had the bright rose of her cheeks shown in stronger
contrast with the whiteness of her skin. The artist saw her beauty in all
its bloom, her maiden modesty in all its glory. She herself felt a sort of
rapture mingled with terror at thinking that her presence had brought
happiness to him whose name was on every lip, and whose talent lent
immortality to transient scenes. She was loved! It was impossible to
doubt it. When she no longer saw the artist, these simple words still
echoed in her ear, “You see how love has inspired me!” And the throbs
of her heart, as they grew deeper, seemed a pain, her heated blood
revealed so many unknown forces in her being. She affected a severe
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headache to avoid replying to her cousin’s questions concerning the
pictures; but on their return Madame Roguin could not forbear from
speaking to Madame Guillaume of the fame that had fallen on the
house of the Cat and Racket, and Augustine quaked in every limb as
she heard her mother say that she should go to the Salon to see her
house there. The young girl again declared herself suffering, and obtained
leave to go to bed.
“That is what comes of sight-seeing,” exclaimed Monsieur
Guillaume—”a headache. And is it so very amusing to see in a picture
what you can see any day in your own street? Don’t talk to me of
your artists! Like writers, they are a starveling crew. Why the devil
need they choose my house to flout it in their pictures?”
“It may help to sell a few ells more of cloth,” said Joseph Lebas.
This remark did not protect art and thought from being condemned
once again before the judgment-seat of trade. As may be supposed,
these speeches did not infuse much hope into Augustine, who, during
the night, gave herself up to the first meditations of love. The
events of the day were like a dream, which it was a joy to recall to her
mind. She was initiated into the fears, the hopes, the remorse, all the
ebb and flow of feeling which could not fail to toss a heart so simple
and timid as hers. What a void she perceived in this gloomy house!
What a treasure she found in her soul! To be the wife of a genius, to
share his glory! What ravages must such a vision make in the heart of
a girl brought up among such a family! What hopes must it raise in a
young creature who, in the midst of sordid elements, had pined for a
life of elegance! A sunbeam had fallen into the prison. Augustine was
suddenly in love. So many of her feelings were soothed that she succumbed
without reflection. At eighteen does not love hold a prism
between the world and the eyes of a young girl? She was incapable of
suspecting the hard facts which result from the union of a loving
woman with a man of imagination, and she believed herself called to
make him happy, not seeing any disparity between herself and him.
To her the future would be as the present. When, next day, her father
and mother returned from the Salon, their dejected faces proclaimed
some disappointment. In the first place, the painter had removed the
two pictures; and then Madame Guillaume had lost her cashmere
shawl. But the news that the pictures had disappeared from the walls
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since her visit revealed to Augustine a delicacy of sentiment which a
woman can always appreciate, even by instinct.
On the morning when, on his way home from a ball, Theodore de
Sommervieux—for this was the name which fame had stamped on
Augustine’s heart—had been squirted on by the apprentices while
awaiting the appearance of his artless little friend, who certainly did
not know that he was there, the lovers had seen each other for the
fourth time only since their meeting at the Salon. The difficulties
which the rule of the house placed in the way of the painter’s ardent
nature gave added violence to his passion for Augustine.
How could he get near to a young girl seated in a counting-house
between two such women as Mademoiselle Virginie and Madame
Guillaume? How could he correspond with her when her mother
never left her side? Ingenious, as lovers are, to imagine woes, Theodore
saw a rival in one of the assistants, to whose interests he supposed the
others to be devoted. If he should evade these sons of Argus, he
would yet be wrecked under the stern eye of the old draper or of
Madame Guillaume. The very vehemence of his passion hindered
the young painter from hitting on the ingenious expedients which,
in prisoners and in lovers, seem to be the last effort of intelligence
spurred by a wild craving for liberty, or by the fire of love. Theodore
wandered about the neighborhood with the restlessness of a madman,
as though movement might inspire him with some device.
After racking his imagination, it occurred to him to bribe the blowsy
waiting-maid with gold. Thus a few notes were exchanged at long
intervals during the fortnight following the ill-starred morning when
Monsieur Guillaume and Theodore had so scrutinized one another.
At the present moment the young couple had agreed to see each
other at a certain hour of the day, and on Sunday, at Saint-Leu, during
Mass and vespers. Augustine had sent her dear Theodore a list of
the relations and friends of the family, to whom the young painter
tried to get access, in the hope of interesting, if it were possible, in his
love affairs, one of these souls absorbed in money and trade, to whom
a genuine passion must appear a quite monstrous speculation, a thing
unheard-of. Nothing meanwhile, was altered at the sign of the Cat
and Racket. If Augustine was absent-minded, if, against all obedience
to the domestic code, she stole up to her room to make signals
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by means of a jar of flowers, if she sighed, if she were lost in thought,
no one observed it, not even her mother. This will cause some surprise
to those who have entered into the spirit of the household,
where an idea tainted with poetry would be in startling contrast to
persons and things, where no one could venture on a gesture or a
look which would not be seen and analyzed. Nothing, however, could
be more natural: the quiet barque that navigated the stormy waters
of the Paris Exchange, under the flag of the Cat and Racket, was just
now in the toils of one of these tempests which, returning periodically,
might be termed equinoctial. For the last fortnight the five
men forming the crew, with Madame Guillaume and Mademoiselle
Virginie, had been devoting themselves to the hard labor, known as
stock-taking.
Every bale was turned over, and the length verified to ascertain the
exact value of the remnant. The ticket attached to each parcel was
carefully examined to see at what time the piece had been bought.
The retail price was fixed. Monsieur Guillaume, always on his feet,
his pen behind his ear, was like a captain commanding the working
of the ship. His sharp tones, spoken through a trap-door, to inquire
into the depths of the hold in the cellar-store, gave utterance to the
barbarous formulas of trade-jargon, which find expression only in
cipher. “How much H. N. Z.?”— “All sold.”— “What is left of Q.
X.?”— “Two ells.”— “At what price?”— “Fifty-five three.”— “Set
down A. at three, with all of J. J., all of M. P., and what is left of V.
D. O.” —A hundred other injunctions equally intelligible were
spouted over the counters like verses of modern poetry, quoted by
romantic spirits, to excite each other’s enthusiasm for one of their
poets. In the evening Guillaume, shut up with his assistant and his
wife, balanced his accounts, carried on the balance, wrote to debtors
in arrears, and made out bills. All three were busy over this enormous
labor, of which the result could be stated on a sheet of foolscap,
proving to the head of the house that there was so much to the good
in hard cash, so much in goods, so much in bills and notes; that he
did not owe a sou; that a hundred or two hundred thousand francs
were owing to him; that the capital had been increased; that the farmlands,
the houses, or the investments were extended, or repaired, or
doubled. Whence it became necessary to begin again with increased
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ardor, to accumulate more crown-pieces, without its ever entering
the brain of these laborious ants to ask—”To what end?”
Favored by this annual turmoil, the happy Augustine escaped the
investigations of her Argus-eyed relations. At last, one Saturday
evening, the stock-taking was finished. The figures of the sum-total
showed a row of 0’s long enough to allow Guillaume for once to
relax the stern rule as to dessert which reigned throughout the year.
The shrewd old draper rubbed his hands, and allowed his assistants
to remain at table. The members of the crew had hardly swallowed
their thimbleful of some home-made liqueur, when the rumble of a
carriage was heard. The family party were going to see Cendrillon at
the Varietes, while the two younger apprentices each received a crown
of six francs, with permission to go wherever they chose, provided
they were in by midnight.
Notwithstanding this debauch, the old cloth-merchant was shaving
himself at six next morning, put on his maroon-colored coat, of which
the glowing lights afforded him perennial enjoyment, fastened a pair
of gold buckles on the knee-straps of his ample satin breeches; and
then, at about seven o’clock, while all were still sleeping in the house,
he made his way to the little office adjoining the shop on the first
floor. Daylight came in through a window, fortified by iron bars, and
looking out on a small yard surrounded by such black walls that it was
very like a well. The old merchant opened the iron-lined shutters, which
were so familiar to him, and threw up the lower half of the sash window.
The icy air of the courtyard came in to cool the hot atmosphere
of the little room, full of the odor peculiar to offices.
The merchant remained standing, his hand resting on the greasy
arm of a large cane chair lined with morocco, of which the original
hue had disappeared; he seemed to hesitate as to seating himself. He
looked with affection at the double desk, where his wife’s seat, opposite
his own, was fitted into a little niche in the wall. He contemplated
the numbered boxes, the files, the implements, the cash box—
objects all of immemorial origin, and fancied himself in the room
with the shade of Master Chevrel. He even pulled out the high stool
on which he had once sat in the presence of his departed master. This
stool, covered with black leather, the horse-hair showing at every
corner—as it had long done, without, however, coming out—he
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placed with a shaking hand on the very spot where his predecessor
had put it, and then, with an emotion difficult to describe, he pulled
a bell, which rang at the head of Joseph Lebas’ bed. When this decisive
blow had been struck, the old man, for whom, no doubt, these
reminiscences were too much, took up three or four bills of exchange,
and looked at them without seeing them.
Suddenly Joseph Lebas stood before him.
“Sit down there,” said Guillaume, pointing to the stool.
As the old master draper had never yet bid his assistant be seated in
his presence, Joseph Lebas was startled.
“What do you think of these notes?” asked Guillaume.
“They will never be paid.”
“Why?”
“Well, I heard the day before yesterday Etienne and Co. had made
their payments in gold.”
“Oh, oh!” said the draper. “Well, one must be very ill to show one’s
bile. Let us speak of something else.—Joseph, the stock-taking is
done.”
“Yes, monsieur, and the dividend is one of the best you have ever
made.”
“Do not use new-fangled words. Say the profits, Joseph. Do you
know, my boy, that this result is partly owing to you? And I do not
intend to pay you a salary any longer. Madame Guillaume has suggested
to me to take you into partnership.— ‘Guillaume and Lebas;’
will not that make a good business name? We might add, ‘and Co.’
to round off the firm’s signature.”
Tears rose to the eyes of Joseph Lebas, who tried to hide them.
“Oh, Monsieur Guillaume, how have I deserved such kindness? I
only do my duty. It was so much already that you should take an
interest in a poor orph—”
He was brushing the cuff of his left sleeve with his right hand, and
dared not look at the old man, who smiled as he thought that this
modest young fellow no doubt needed, as he had needed once on a
time, some encouragement to complete his explanation.
“To be sure,” said Virginie’s father, “you do not altogether deserve
this favor, Joseph. You have not so much confidence in me as I have
in you.” (The young man looked up quickly.) “You know all the
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secrets of the cash-box. For the last two years I have told you almost
all my concerns. I have sent you to travel in our goods. In short, I
have nothing on my conscience as regards you. But you—you have a
soft place, and you have never breathed a word of it.” Joseph Lebas
blushed. “Ah, ha!” cried Guillaume, “so you thought you could deceive
an old fox like me? When you knew that I had scented the
Lecocq bankruptcy?”
“What, monsieur?” replied Joseph Lebas, looking at his master as
keenly as his master looked at him, “you knew that I was in love?”
“I know everything, you rascal,” said the worthy and cunning old
merchant, pulling the assistant’s ear. “And I forgive you—I did the
same myself.”
“And you will give her to me?”
“Yes—with fifty thousand crowns; and I will leave you as much by
will, and we will start on our new career under the name of a new
firm. We will do good business yet, my boy!” added the old man,
getting up and flourishing his arms. “I tell you, son-in-law, there is
nothing like trade. Those who ask what pleasure is to be found in it
are simpletons. To be on the scent of a good bargain, to hold your
own on ‘Change, to watch as anxiously as at the gaming-table whether
Etienne and Co. will fail or no, to see a regiment of Guards march
past all dressed in your cloth, to trip your neighbor up—honestly of
course!—to make the goods cheaper than others can; then to carry
out an undertaking which you have planned, which begins, grows,
totters, and succeeds! to know the workings of every house of business
as well as a minister of police, so as never to make a mistake; to
hold up your head in the midst of wrecks, to have friends by correspondence
in every manufacturing town; is not that a perpetual game,
Joseph? That is life, that is! I shall die in that harness, like old Chevrel,
but taking it easy now, all the same.”
In the heat of his eager rhetoric, old Guillaume had scarcely looked
at his assistant, who was weeping copiously. “Why, Joseph, my poor
boy, what is the matter?”
“Oh, I love her so! Monsieur Guillaume, that my heart fails me; I
believe—”
“Well, well, boy,” said the old man, touched, “you are happier than
you know, by God! For she loves you. I know it.”
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And he blinked his little green eyes as he looked at the young man.
“Mademoiselle Augustine! Mademoiselle Augustine!” exclaimed
Joseph Lebas in his rapture.
He was about to rush out of the room when he felt himself clutched
by a hand of iron, and his astonished master spun him round in front
of him once more.
“What has Augustine to do with this matter?” he asked, in a voice
which instantly froze the luckless Joseph.
“Is it not she that—that—I love?” stammered the assistant.
Much put out by his own want of perspicacity, Guillaume sat down
again, and rested his long head in his hands to consider the perplexing
situation in which he found himself. Joseph Lebas, shamefaced and in
despair, remained standing.
“Joseph,” the draper said with frigid dignity, “I was speaking of
Virginie. Love cannot be made to order, I know. I know, too, that
you can be trusted. We will forget all this. I will not let Augustine
marry before Virginie.—Your interest will be ten per cent.”
The young man, to whom love gave I know not what power of
courage and eloquence, clasped his hand, and spoke in his turn—
spoke for a quarter of an hour, with so much warmth and feeling,
that he altered the situation. If the question had been a matter of
business the old tradesman would have had fixed principles to guide
his decision; but, tossed a thousand miles from commerce, on the
ocean of sentiment, without a compass, he floated, as he told himself,
undecided in the face of such an unexpected event. Carried away
by his fatherly kindness, he began to beat about the bush.
“Deuce take it, Joseph, you must know that there are ten years
between my two children. Mademoiselle Chevrel was no beauty,
still she has had nothing to complain of in me. Do as I did. Come,
come, don’t cry. Can you be so silly? What is to be done? It can be
managed perhaps. There is always some way out of a scrape. And we
men are not always devoted Celadons to our wives—you understand?
Madame Guillaume is very pious …. Come. By Gad, boy,
give your arm to Augustine this morning as we go to Mass.”
These were the phrases spoken at random by the old draper, and
their conclusion made the lover happy. He was already thinking of a
friend of his as a match for Mademoiselle Virginie, as he went out of
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the smoky office, pressing his future father-in-law’s hand, after saying
with a knowing look that all would turn out for the best.
“What will Madame Guillaume say to it?” was the idea that greatly
troubled the worthy merchant when he found himself alone.
At breakfast Madame Guillaume and Virginie, to whom the draper
had not yet confided his disappointment, cast meaning glances at
Joseph Lebas, who was extremely embarrassed. The young assistant’s
bashfulness commended him to his mother-in-law’s good graces. The
matron became so cheerful that she smiled as she looked at her husband,
and allowed herself some little pleasantries of time-honored
acceptance in such simple families. She wondered whether Joseph or
Virginie were the taller, to ask them to compare their height. This
preliminary fooling brought a cloud to the master’s brow, and he
even made such a point of decorum that he desired Augustine to take
the assistant’s arm on their way to Saint-Leu. Madame Guillaume,
surprised at this manly delicacy, honored her husband with a nod of
approval. So the procession left the house in such order as to suggest
no suspicious meaning to the neighbors.
“Does it not seem to you, Mademoiselle Augustine,” said the assistant,
and he trembled, “that the wife of a merchant whose credit is as
good as Monsieur Guillaume’s, for instance, might enjoy herself a
little more than Madame your mother does? Might wear diamonds—
or keep a carriage? For my part, if I were to marry, I should be glad to
take all the work, and see my wife happy. I would not put her into
the counting-house. In the drapery business, you see, a woman is not
so necessary now as formerly. Monsieur Guillaume was quite right
to act as he did—and besides, his wife liked it. But so long as a
woman knows how to turn her hand to the book-keeping, the correspondence,
the retail business, the orders, and her housekeeping, so
as not to sit idle, that is enough. At seven o’clock, when the shop is
shut, I shall take my pleasures, go to the play, and into company.—
But you are not listening to me.”
“Yes, indeed, Monsieur Joseph. What do you think of painting?
That is a fine calling.”
“Yes. I know a master house-painter, Monsieur Lourdois. He is
well-to-do.”
Thus conversing, the family reached the Church of Saint-Leu. There
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Madame Guillaume reasserted her rights, and, for the first time, placed
Augustine next herself, Virginie taking her place on the fourth chair,
next to Lebas. During the sermon all went well between Augustine
and Theodore, who, standing behind a pillar, worshiped his Madonna
with fervent devotion; but at the elevation of the Host, Madame
Guillaume discovered, rather late, that her daughter Augustine was
holding her prayer-book upside down. She was about to speak to her
strongly, when, lowering her veil, she interrupted her own devotions
to look in the direction where her daughter’s eyes found attraction. By
the help of her spectacles she saw the young artist, whose fashionable
elegance seemed to proclaim him a cavalry officer on leave rather than
a tradesman of the neighborhood. It is difficult to conceive of the state
of violent agitation in which Madame Guillaume found herself—she,
who flattered herself on having brought up her daughters to perfection—on
discovering in Augustine a clandestine passion of which her
prudery and ignorance exaggerated the perils. She believed her daughter
to be cankered to the core.
“Hold your book right way up, miss,” she muttered in a low voice,
tremulous with wrath. She snatched away the tell-tale prayer-book
and returned it with the letter-press right way up. “Do not allow
your eyes to look anywhere but at your prayers,” she added, “or I
shall have something to say to you. Your father and I will talk to you
after church.”
These words came like a thunderbolt on poor Augustine. She felt
faint; but, torn between the distress she felt and the dread of causing
a commotion in church she bravely concealed her anguish. It was,
however, easy to discern the stormy state of her soul from the trembling
of her prayer-book, and the tears which dropped on every page
she turned. From the furious glare shot at him by Madame Guillaume
the artist saw the peril into which his love affair had fallen; he went
out, with a raging soul, determined to venture all.
“Go to your room, miss!” said Madame Guillaume, on their return
home; “we will send for you, but take care not to quit it.”
The conference between the husband and wife was conducted so
secretly that at first nothing was heard of it. Virginie, however, who
had tried to give her sister courage by a variety of gentle remonstrances,
carried her good nature so far as to listen at the door of her mother’s
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bedroom where the discussion was held, to catch a word or two. The
first time she went down to the lower floor she heard her father exclaim,
“Then, madame, do you wish to kill your daughter?”
“My poor dear!” said Virginie, in tears, “papa takes your part.”
“And what do they want to do to Theodore?” asked the innocent
girl.
Virginie, inquisitive, went down again; but this time she stayed
longer; she learned that Joseph Lebas loved Augustine. It was written
that on this memorable day, this house, generally so peaceful, should
be a hell. Monsieur Guillaume brought Joseph Lebas to despair by
telling him of Augustine’s love for a stranger. Lebas, who had advised
his friend to become a suitor for Mademoiselle Virginie, saw all his
hopes wrecked. Mademoiselle Virginie, overcome by hearing that
Joseph had, in a way, refused her, had a sick headache. The dispute
that had arisen from the discussion between Monsieur and Madame
Guillaume, when, for the third time in their lives, they had been of
antagonistic opinions, had shown itself in a terrible form. Finally, at
half-past four in the afternoon, Augustine, pale, trembling, and with
red eyes, was haled before her father and mother. The poor child
artlessly related the too brief tale of her love. Reassured by a speech
from her father, who promised to listen to her in silence, she gathered
courage as she pronounced to her parents the name of Theodore
de Sommervieux, with a mischievous little emphasis on the aristocratic
de. And yielding to the unknown charm of talking of her feelings,
she was brave enough to declare with innocent decision that she
loved Monsieur de Sommervieux, that she had written to him, and
she added, with tears in her eyes: “To sacrifice me to another man
would make me wretched.”
“But, Augustine, you cannot surely know what a painter is?” cried
her mother with horror.
“Madame Guillaume!” said the old man, compelling her to silence.—”Augustine,”
he went on, “artists are generally little better
than beggars. They are too extravagant not to be always a bad sort. I
served the late Monsieur Joseph Vernet, the late Monsieur Lekain,
and the late Monsieur Noverre. Oh, if you could only know the
tricks played on poor Father Chevrel by that Monsieur Noverre, by
the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and especially by Monsieur Philidor!
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They are a set of rascals; I know them well! They all have a gab and
nice manners. Ah, your Monsieur Sumer—, Somm—”
“De Sommervieux, papa.”
“Well, well, de Sommervieux, well and good. He can never have been
half so sweet to you as Monsieur le Chevalier de Saint-Georges was to
me the day I got a verdict of the consuls against him. And in those days
they were gentlemen of quality.”
“But, father, Monsieur Theodore is of good family, and he wrote
me that he is rich; his father was called Chevalier de Sommervieux
before the Revolution.”
At these words Monsieur Guillaume looked at his terrible better
half, who, like an angry woman, sat tapping the floor with her foot
while keeping sullen silence; she avoided even casting wrathful looks
at Augustine, appearing to leave to Monsieur Guillaume the whole
responsibility in so grave a matter, since her opinion was not listened
to. Nevertheless, in spite of her apparent self-control, when she saw
her husband giving way so mildly under a catastrophe which had no
concern with business, she exclaimed:
“Really, monsieur, you are so weak with your daughters! However—”
The sound of a carriage, which stopped at the door, interrupted
the rating which the old draper already quaked at. In a minute Madame
Roguin was standing in the middle of the room, and looking
at the actors in this domestic scene: “I know all, my dear cousin,”
said she, with a patronizing air.
Madame Roguin made the great mistake of supposing that a Paris
notary’s wife could play the part of a favorite of fashion.
“I know all,” she repeated, “and I have come into Noah’s Ark, like
the dove, with the olive-branch. I read that allegory in the Genie du
Christianisme,” she added, turning to Madame Guillaume; “the allusion
ought to please you, cousin. Do you know,” she went on, smiling
at Augustine, “that Monsieur de Sommervieux is a charming
man? He gave me my portrait this morning, painted by a master’s
hand. It is worth at least six thousand francs.” And at these words she
patted Monsieur Guillaume on the arm. The old draper could not
help making a grimace with his lips, which was peculiar to him.
“I know Monsieur de Sommervieux very well,” the Dove ran on.
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“He has come to my evenings this fortnight past, and made them
delightful. He has told me all his woes, and commissioned me to
plead for him. I know since this morning that he adores Augustine,
and he shall have her. Ah, cousin, do not shake your head in refusal.
He will be created Baron, I can tell you, and has just been made
Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, by the Emperor himself, at the
Salon. Roguin is now his lawyer, and knows all his affairs. Well!
Monsieur de Sommervieux has twelve thousand francs a year in good
landed estate. Do you know that the father-in-law of such a man
may get a rise in life—be mayor of his arrondissement, for instance.
Have we not seen Monsieur Dupont become a Count of the Empire,
and a senator, all because he went as mayor to congratulate the Emperor
on his entry into Vienna? Oh, this marriage must take place! For
my part, I adore the dear young man. His behavior to Augustine is
only met with in romances. Be easy, little one, you shall be happy, and
every girl will wish she were in your place. Madame la Duchesse de
Carigliano, who comes to my ‘At Homes,’ raves about Monsieur de
Sommervieux. Some spiteful people say she only comes to me to meet
him; as if a duchesse of yesterday was doing too much honor to a
Chevrel, whose family have been respected citizens these hundred years!
“Augustine,” Madame Roguin went on, after a short pause, “I have
seen the portrait. Heavens! How lovely it is! Do you know that the
Emperor wanted to have it? He laughed, and said to the Deputy
High Constable that if there were many women like that in his court
while all the kings visited it, he should have no difficulty about preserving
the peace of Europe. Is not that a compliment?”
The tempests with which the day had begun were to resemble
those of nature, by ending in clear and serene weather. Madame Roguin
displayed so much address in her harangue, she was able to touch so
many strings in the dry hearts of Monsieur and Madame Guillaume,
that at last she hit on one which she could work upon. At this strange
period commerce and finance were more than ever possessed by the
crazy mania for seeking alliance with rank; and the generals of the
Empire took full advantage of this desire. Monsieur Guillaume, as a
singular exception, opposed this deplorable craving. His favorite axioms
were that, to secure happiness, a woman must marry a man of
her own class; that every one was punished sooner or later for having
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climbed too high; that love could so little endure under the worries
of a household, that both husband and wife needed sound good
qualities to be happy, that it would not do for one to be far in advance
of the other, because, above everything, they must understand
each other; if a man spoke Greek and his wife Latin, they might
come to die of hunger. He had himself invented this sort of adage.
And he compared such marriages to old-fashioned materials of mixed
silk and wool. Still, there is so much vanity at the bottom of man’s
heart that the prudence of the pilot who steered the Cat and Racket
so wisely gave way before Madame Roguin’s aggressive volubility.
Austere Madame Guillaume was the first to see in her daughter’s
affection a reason for abdicating her principles and for consenting to
receive Monsieur de Sommervieux, whom she promised herself she
would put under severe inquisition.
The old draper went to look for Joseph Lebas, and inform him of
the state of affairs. At half-past six, the dining-room immortalized
by the artist saw, united under its skylight, Monsieur and Madame
Roguin, the young painter and his charming Augustine, Joseph Lebas,
who found his happiness in patience, and Mademoiselle Virginie,
convalescent from her headache. Monsieur and Madame Guillaume
saw in perspective both their children married, and the fortunes of
the Cat and Racket once more in skilful hands. Their satisfaction was
at its height when, at dessert, Theodore made them a present of the
wonderful picture which they had failed to see, representing the interior
of the old shop, and to which they all owed so much happiness.
“Isn’t it pretty!” cried Guillaume. “And to think that any one would
pay thirty thousand francs for that!”
“Because you can see my lappets in it,” said Madame Guillaume.
“And the cloth unrolled!” added Lebas; “you might take it up in
your hand.”
“Drapery always comes out well,” replied the painter. “We should
be only too happy, we modern artists, if we could touch the perfection
of antique drapery.”
“So you like drapery!” cried old Guillaume. “Well, then, by Gad!
shake hands on that, my young friend. Since you can respect trade,
we shall understand each other. And why should it be despised? The
world began with trade, since Adam sold Paradise for an apple. He
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did not strike a good bargain though!” And the old man roared with
honest laughter, encouraged by the champagne, which he sent round
with a liberal hand. The band that covered the young artist’s eyes was
so thick that he thought his future parents amiable. He was not above
enlivening them by a few jests in the best taste. So he too pleased
every one. In the evening, when the drawing-room, furnished with
what Madame Guillaume called “everything handsome,” was deserted,
and while she flitted from the table to the chimney-piece, from the
candelabra to the tall candlesticks, hastily blowing out the wax-lights,
the worthy draper, who was always clear-sighted when money was in
question, called Augustine to him, and seating her on his knee, spoke
as follows:—
“My dear child, you shall marry your Sommervieux since you insist;
you may, if you like, risk your capital in happiness. But I am not
going to be hoodwinked by the thirty thousand francs to be made by
spoiling good canvas. Money that is lightly earned is lightly spent.
Did I not hear that hare-brained youngster declare this evening that
money was made round that it might roll. If it is round for spendthrifts,
it is flat for saving folks who pile it up. Now, my child, that
fine gentleman talks of giving you carriages and diamonds! He has
money, let him spend it on you; so be it. It is no concern of mine.
But as to what I can give you, I will not have the crown-pieces I have
picked up with so much toil wasted in carriages and frippery. Those
who spend too fast never grow rich. A hundred thousand crowns,
which is your fortune, will not buy up Paris. It is all very well to look
forward to a few hundred thousand francs to be yours some day; I
shall keep you waiting for them as long as possible, by Gad! So I
took your lover aside, and a man who managed the Lecocq bankruptcy
had not much difficulty in persuading the artist to marry
under a settlement of his wife’s money on herself. I will keep an eye
on the marriage contract to see that what he is to settle on you is
safely tied up. So now, my child, I hope to be a grandfather, by Gad!
I will begin at once to lay up for my grandchildren; but swear to me,
here and now, never to sign any papers relating to money without
my advice; and if I go soon to join old Father Chevrel, promise to
consult young Lebas, your brother-in-law.”
“Yes, father, I swear it.”
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At these words, spoken in a gentle voice, the old man kissed his
daughter on both cheeks. That night the lovers slept as soundly as
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume.
Some few months after this memorable Sunday the high altar of
Saint-Leu was the scene of two very different weddings. Augustine
and Theodore appeared in all the radiance of happiness, their eyes
beaming with love, dressed with elegance, while a fine carriage waited
for them. Virginie, who had come in a good hired fly with the rest of
the family, humbly followed her younger sister, dressed in the simplest
fashion like a shadow necessary to the harmony of the picture.
Monsieur Guillaume had exerted himself to the utmost in the church
to get Virginie married before Augustine, but the priests, high and
low, persisted in addressing the more elegant of the two brides. He
heard some of his neighbors highly approving the good sense of
Mademoiselle Virginie, who was making, as they said, the more substantial
match, and remaining faithful to the neighborhood; while
they fired a few taunts, prompted by envy of Augustine, who was
marrying an artist and a man of rank; adding, with a sort of dismay,
that if the Guillaumes were ambitious, there was an end to the business.
An old fan-maker having remarked that such a prodigal would
soon bring his wife to beggary, father Guillaume prided himself in
petto for his prudence in the matter of marriage settlements. In the
evening, after a splendid ball, followed by one of those substantial
suppers of which the memory is dying out in the present generation,
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume remained in a fine house belonging
to them in the Rue du Colombier, where the wedding had been
held; Monsieur and Madame Lebas returned in their fly to the old
home in the Rue Saint-Denis, to steer the good ship Cat and Racket.
The artist, intoxicated with happiness, carried off his beloved Augustine,
and eagerly lifting her out of their carriage when it reached the Rue
des Trois-Freres, led her to an apartment embellished by all the arts.
The fever of passion which possessed Theodore made a year fly
over the young couple without a single cloud to dim the blue sky
under which they lived. Life did not hang heavy on the lovers’ hands.
Theodore lavished on every day inexhaustible fioriture of enjoyment,
and he delighted to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor
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of those hours of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to
have forgotten all bodily union. Augustine was too happy for reflection;
she floated on an undulating tide of rapture; she thought she
could not do enough by abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred
married love; simple and artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves,
none of the dominion which a worldly-minded girl acquires over her
husband by ingenious caprice; she loved too well to calculate for the
future, and never imagined that so exquisite a life could come to an
end. Happy in being her husband’s sole delight, she believed that her
inextinguishable love would always be her greatest grace in his eyes,
as her devotion and obedience would be a perennial charm. And,
indeed, the ecstasy of love had made her so brilliantly lovely that her
beauty filled her with pride, and gave her confidence that she could
always reign over a man so easy to kindle as Monsieur de
Sommervieux. Thus her position as a wife brought her no knowledge
but the lessons of love.
In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who
had lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought
of acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she
had to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in
them, no doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement
of speech; but she used the language common to all women when
they find themselves plunged in passion, which seems to be their
element. When, by chance, Augustine expressed an idea that did not
harmonize with Theodore’s, the young artist laughed, as we laugh at
the first mistakes of a foreigner, though they end by annoying us if
they are not corrected.
In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as delightful
as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for resuming
his work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their first
child. He saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts of
the year when a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time, he
worked, no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion in
the fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to frequent
was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last attracted
the celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was quite
well again, and her boy no longer required the assiduous care which
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debars a mother from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the
stage of wishing to know the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in
society by a man who shows himself with a handsome woman, the
object of envy and admiration.
To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her
husband’s fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to
Augustine a new harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of
conjugal happiness. She first wounded her husband’s vanity when, in
spite of vain efforts, she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her
language, and the narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux’s nature,
subjugated for nearly two years and a half by the first transports of
love, now, in the calm of less new possession, recovered its bent and
habits, for a while diverted from their channel. Poetry, painting, and
the subtle joys of imagination have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit.
These cravings of a powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore
during these two years; they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as
the meadows of love had been ransacked, and the artist had gathered
roses and cornflowers as the children do, so greedily that he did not see
that his hands could hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter
showed his wife the sketches for his finest compositions he heard her
exclaim, as her father had done, “How pretty!” This tepid admiration
was not the outcome of conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the
strength of love.
Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The
only sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could
not resist the evidence of the cruel fact—his wife was insensible to
poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in
all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked
groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.
Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being
who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is
obliged constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to
thrust down into the void those images which a magic power compels
him to create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable
because his feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law,
that they should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of
their thought as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands
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of nature are not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which
is, indeed, a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the
peace and silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with
artists might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs
of lofty intelligence which some superior minds suppose must exist
in every being. But Augustine was too sincerely religious not to take
fright at the tone of artists. At the first dinner Theodore gave, she
heard a young painter say, with the childlike lightness, which to her
was unintelligible, and which redeems a jest from the taint of profanity,
“But, madame, your Paradise cannot be more beautiful than
Raphael’s Transfiguration!—Well, and I got tired of looking at that.”
Thus Augustine came among this sparkling set in a spirit of distrust
which no one could fail to see. She was a restraint on their
freedom. Now an artist who feels restraint is pitiless; he stays away,
or laughs it to scorn. Madame Guillaume, among other absurdities,
had an excessive notion of the dignity she considered the prerogative
of a married woman; and Augustine, though she had often made fun
of it, could not help a slight imitation of her mother’s primness.
This extreme propriety, which virtuous wives do not always avoid,
suggested a few epigrams in the form of sketches, in which the harmless
jest was in such good taste that Sommervieux could not take
offence; and even if they had been more severe, these pleasantries
were after all only reprisals from his friends. Still, nothing could
seem a trifle to a spirit so open as Theodore’s to impressions from
without. A coldness insensibly crept over him, and inevitably spread.
To attain conjugal happiness we must climb a hill whose summit is a
narrow ridge, close to a steep and slippery descent: the painter’s love
was falling down it. He regarded his wife as incapable of appreciating
the moral considerations which justified him in his own eyes for his
singular behavior to her, and believed himself quite innocent in hiding
from her thoughts she could not enter into, and peccadilloes
outside the jurisdiction of a bourgeois conscience. Augustine wrapped
herself in sullen and silent grief. These unconfessed feelings placed a
shroud between the husband and wife which could not fail to grow
thicker day by day. Though her husband never failed in consideration
for her, Augustine could not help trembling as she saw that he
kept for the outer world those treasures of wit and grace that he
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formerly would lay at her feet. She soon began to find sinister meaning
in the jocular speeches that are current in the world as to the
inconstancy of men. She made no complaints, but her demeanor
conveyed reproach.
Three years after her marriage this pretty young woman, who dashed
past in her handsome carriage, and lived in a sphere of glory and
riches to the envy of heedless folk incapable of taking a just view of
the situations of life, was a prey to intense grief. She lost her color;
she reflected; she made comparisons; then sorrow unfolded to her
the first lessons of experience. She determined to restrict herself bravely
within the round of duty, hoping that by this generous conduct she
might sooner or later win back her husband’s love. But it was not so.
When Sommervieux, fired with work, came in from his studio, Augustine
did not put away her work so quickly but that the painter
might find his wife mending the household linen, and his own, with
all the care of a good housewife. She supplied generously and without
a murmur the money needed for his lavishness; but in her anxiety to
husband her dear Theodore’s fortune, she was strictly economical for
herself and in certain details of domestic management. Such conduct is
incompatible with the easy-going habits of artists, who, at the end of
their life, have enjoyed it so keenly that they never inquire into the
causes of their ruin.
It is useless to note every tint of shadow by which the brilliant hues
of their honeymoon were overcast till they were lost in utter blackness.
One evening poor Augustine, who had for some time heard her
husband speak with enthusiasm of the Duchesse de Carigliano, received
from a friend certain malignantly charitable warnings as to the
nature of the attachment which Sommervieux had formed for this
celebrated flirt of the Imperial Court. At one-and-twenty, in all the
splendor of youth and beauty, Augustine saw herself deserted for a
woman of six-and-thirty. Feeling herself so wretched in the midst of
a world of festivity which to her was a blank, the poor little thing
could no longer understand the admiration she excited, or the envy
of which she was the object. Her face assumed a different expression.
Melancholy, tinged her features with the sweetness of resignation
and the pallor of scorned love. Ere long she too was courted by the
most fascinating men; but she remained lonely and virtuous. Some
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contemptuous words which escaped her husband filled her with incredible
despair. A sinister flash showed her the breaches which, as a
result of her sordid education, hindered the perfect union of her soul
with Theodore’s; she loved him well enough to absolve him and
condemn herself. She shed tears of blood, and perceived, too late,
that there are mesalliances of the spirit as well as of rank and habits.
As she recalled the early raptures of their union, she understood the
full extent of that lost happiness, and accepted the conclusion that so
rich a harvest of love was in itself a whole life, which only sorrow
could pay for. At the same time, she loved too truly to lose all hope.
At one-and-twenty she dared undertake to educate herself, and make
her imagination, at least, worthy of that she admired. “If I am not a
poet,” thought she, “at any rate, I will understand poetry.”
Then, with all the strength of will, all the energy which every woman
can display when she loves, Madame de Sommervieux tried to alter
her character, her manners, and her habits; but by dint of devouring
books and learning undauntedly, she only succeeded in becoming
less ignorant. Lightness of wit and the graces of conversation are a
gift of nature, or the fruit of education begun in the cradle. She
could appreciate music and enjoy it, but she could not sing with
taste. She understood literature and the beauties of poetry, but it was
too late to cultivate her refractory memory. She listened with pleasure
to social conversation, but she could contribute nothing brilliant.
Her religious notions and home-grown prejudices were antagonistic
to the complete emancipation of her intelligence. Finally,
a foregone conclusion against her had stolen into Theodore’s mind,
and this she could not conquer. The artist would laugh, at those who
flattered him about his wife, and his irony had some foundation; he
so overawed the pathetic young creature that, in his presence, or alone
with him, she trembled. Hampered by her too eager desire to please,
her wits and her knowledge vanished in one absorbing feeling. Even
her fidelity vexed the unfaithful husband, who seemed to bid her do
wrong by stigmatizing her virtue as insensibility. Augustine tried in
vain to abdicate her reason, to yield to her husband’s caprices and
whims, to devote herself to the selfishness of his vanity. Her sacrifices
bore no fruit. Perhaps they had both let the moment slip when
souls may meet in comprehension. One day the young wife’s too
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sensitive heart received one of those blows which so strain the bonds
of feeling that they seem to be broken. She withdrew into solitude.
But before long a fatal idea suggested to her to seek counsel and
comfort in the bosom of her family.
So one morning she made her way towards the grotesque facade of
the humble, silent home where she had spent her childhood. She
sighed as she looked up at the sash-window, whence one day she had
sent her first kiss to him who now shed as much sorrow as glory on
her life. Nothing was changed in the cavern, where the drapery business
had, however, started on a new life. Augustine’s sister filled her
mother’s old place at the desk. The unhappy young woman met her
brother-in-law with his pen behind his ear; he hardly listened to her,
he was so full of business. The formidable symptoms of stock-taking
were visible all round him; he begged her to excuse him. She was
received coldly enough by her sister, who owed her a grudge. In fact,
Augustine, in her finery, and stepping out of a handsome carriage,
had never been to see her but when passing by. The wife of the prudent
Lebas, imagining that want of money was the prime cause of
this early call, tried to keep up a tone of reserve which more than
once made Augustine smile. The painter’s wife perceived that, apart
from the cap and lappets, her mother had found in Virginie a successor
who could uphold the ancient honor of the Cat and Racket. At
breakfast she observed certain changes in the management of the house
which did honor to Lebas’ good sense; the assistants did not rise
before dessert; they were allowed to talk, and the abundant meal
spoke of ease without luxury. The fashionable woman found some
tickets for a box at the Francais, where she remembered having seen
her sister from time to time. Madame Lebas had a cashmere shawl
over her shoulders, of which the value bore witness to her husband’s
generosity to her. In short, the couple were keeping pace with the
times. During the two-thirds of the day she spent there, Augustine was
touched to the heart by the equable happiness, devoid, to be sure, of all
emotion, but equally free from storms, enjoyed by this well-matched
couple. They had accepted life as a commercial enterprise, in which,
above all, they must do credit to the business. Not finding any great
love in her husband, Virginie had set to work to create it. Having by
degrees learned to esteem and care for his wife, the time that his happi-
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ness had taken to germinate was to Joseph Lebas a guarantee of its
durability. Hence, when Augustine plaintively set forth her painful
position, she had to face the deluge of commonplace morality which
the traditions of the Rue Saint-Denis furnished to her sister.
“The mischief is done, wife,” said Joseph Lebas; “we must try to
give our sister good advice.” Then the clever tradesman ponderously
analyzed the resources which law and custom might offer Augustine
as a means of escape at this crisis; he ticketed every argument, so to
speak, and arranged them in their degrees of weight under various
categories, as though they were articles of merchandise of different
qualities; then he put them in the scale, weighed them, and ended by
showing the necessity for his sister-in-law’s taking violent steps which
could not satisfy the love she still had for her husband; and, indeed, the
feeling had revived in all its strength when she heard Joseph Lebas
speak of legal proceedings. Augustine thanked them, and returned home
even more undecided than she had been before consulting them. She
now ventured to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier, intending
to confide her troubles to her father and mother; for she was like a sick
man who, in his desperate plight, tries every prescription, and even
puts faith in old wives’ remedies.
The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that
touched her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and
that to them was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had
gone their way like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting
by the chimney corner, they would talk over their disasters under the
old law of maximum, of their great investments in cloth, of the way
they had weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure
of Lecocq, Monsieur Guillaume’s battle of Marengo. Then, when
they had exhausted the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum
total of their most profitable stock-takings, and told each other old
stories of the Saint-Denis quarter. At two o’clock old Guillaume
went to cast an eye on the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way
back he called at all the shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where
the young proprietors hoped to inveigle the old draper into some
risky discount, which, as was his wont, he never refused point-blank.
Two good Normandy horses were dying of their own fat in the stables
of the big house; Madame Guillaume never used them but to drag
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her on Sundays to high Mass at the parish church. Three times a
week the worthy couple kept open house. By the influence of his
son-in-law Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been named a
member of the consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since
her husband had stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had
decided that she must receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold
and silver ornaments, and furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value,
that the simplest room in the house looked like a chapel. Economy
and expense seemed to be struggling for the upper hand in every
accessory. It was as though Monsieur Guillaume had looked to a
good investment, even in the purchase of a candlestick. In the midst
of this bazaar, where splendor revealed the owner’s want of occupation,
Sommervieux’s famous picture filled the place of honor, and in
it Monsieur and Madame Guillaume found their chief consolation,
turning their eyes, harnessed with eye-glasses, twenty times a day on
this presentment of their past life, to them so active and amusing.
The appearance of this mansion and these rooms, where everything
had an aroma of staleness and mediocrity, the spectacle offered by
these two beings, cast away, as it were, on a rock far from the world
and the ideas which are life, startled Augustine; she could here contemplate
the sequel of the scene of which the first part had struck her
at the house of Lebas—a life of stir without movement, a mechanical
and instinctive existence like that of the beaver; and then she felt
an indefinable pride in her troubles, as she reflected that they had
their source in eighteen months of such happiness as, in her eyes, was
worth a thousand lives like this; its vacuity seemed to her horrible.
However, she concealed this not very charitable feeling, and displayed
for her parents her newly-acquired accomplishments of mind, and
the ingratiating tenderness that love had revealed to her, disposing
them to listen to her matrimonial grievances. Old people have a weakness
for this kind of confidence. Madame Guillaume wanted to know
the most trivial details of that alien life, which to her seemed almost
fabulous. The travels of Baron da la Houtan, which she began again
and again and never finished, told her nothing more unheard-of concerning
the Canadian savages.
“What, child, your husband shuts himself into a room with naked
women! And you are so simple as to believe that he draws them?”
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As she uttered this exclamation, the grandmother laid her spectacles
on a little work-table, shook her skirts, and clasped her hands
on her knees, raised by a foot-warmer, her favorite pedestal.
“But, mother, all artists are obliged to have models.”
“He took good care not to tell us that when he asked leave to marry
you. If I had known it, I would never had given my daughter to a man
who followed such a trade. Religion forbids such horrors; they are
immoral. And at what time of night do you say he comes home?”
“At one o’clock—two—”
The old folks looked at each other in utter amazement.
“Then he gambles?” said Monsieur Guillaume. “In my day only
gamblers stayed out so late.”
Augustine made a face that scorned the accusation.
“He must keep you up through dreadful nights waiting for him,”
said Madame Guillaume. “But you go to bed, don’t you? And when
he has lost, the wretch wakes you.”
“No, mamma, on the contrary, he is sometimes in very good spirits.
Not unfrequently, indeed, when it is fine, he suggests that I should
get up and go into the woods.”
“The woods! At that hour? Then have you such a small set of
rooms that his bedroom and his sitting-room are not enough, and
that he must run about? But it is just to give you cold that the wretch
proposes such expeditions. He wants to get rid of you. Did one ever
hear of a man settled in life, a well-behaved, quiet man galloping
about like a warlock?”
“But, my dear mother, you do not understand that he must have
excitement to fire his genius. He is fond of scenes which—”
“I would make scenes for him, fine scenes!” cried Madame
Guillaume, interrupting her daughter. “How can you show any consideration
to such a man? In the first place, I don’t like his drinking
water only; it is not wholesome. Why does he object to see a woman
eating? What queer notion is that! But he is mad. All you tell us
about him is impossible. A man cannot leave his home without a
word, and never come back for ten days. And then he tells you he has
been to Dieppe to paint the sea. As if any one painted the sea! He
crams you with a pack of tales that are too absurd.”
Augustine opened her lips to defend her husband; but Madame
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Guillaume enjoined silence with a wave of her hand, which she obeyed
by a survival of habit, and her mother went on in harsh tones: “Don’t
talk to me about the man! He never set foot in church excepting to
see you and to be married. People without religion are capable of
anything. Did Guillaume ever dream of hiding anything from me,
of spending three days without saying a word to me, and of chattering
afterwards like a blind magpie?”
“My dear mother, you judge superior people too severely. If their
ideas were the same as other folks’, they would not be men of genius.”
“Very well, then let men of genius stop at home and not get married.
What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he
is a genius it is all right! Genius, genius! It is not so very clever to say
black one minute and white the next, as he does, to interrupt other
people, to dance such rigs at home, never to let you know which foot
you are to stand on, to compel his wife never to be amused unless my
lord is in gay spirits, and to be dull when he is dull.”
“But, mother, the very nature of such imaginations—”
“What are such ‘imaginations’?” Madame Guillaume went on,
interrupting her daughter again. “Fine ones his are, my word! What
possesses a man that all on a sudden, without consulting a doctor,
he takes it into his head to eat nothing but vegetables? If indeed it
were from religious motives, it might do him some good—but he
has no more religion than a Huguenot. Was there ever a man known
who, like him, loved horses better than his fellow-creatures, had
his hair curled like a heathen, laid statues under muslin coverlets,
shut his shutters in broad day to work by lamp-light? There, get
along; if he were not so grossly immoral, he would be fit to shut
up in a lunatic asylum. Consult Monsieur Loraux, the priest at
Saint Sulpice, ask his opinion about it all, and he will tell you that
your husband, does not behave like a Christian.”
“Oh, mother, can you believe—?”
“Yes, I do believe. You loved him, and you can see none of these
things. But I can remember in the early days after your marriage. I
met him in the Champs-Elysees. He was on horseback. Well, at
one minute he was galloping as hard as he could tear, and then
pulled up to a walk. I said to myself at that moment, ‘There is a
man devoid of judgement.’”
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“Ah, ha!” cried Monsieur Guillaume, “how wise I was to have your
money settled on yourself with such a queer fellow for a husband!”
When Augustine was so imprudent as to set forth her serious grievances
against her husband, the two old people were speechless with
indignation. But the word “divorce” was ere long spoken by Madame
Guillaume. At the sound of the word divorce the apathetic old
draper seemed to wake up. Prompted by his love for his daughter,
and also by the excitement which the proceedings would bring into
his uneventful life, father Guillaume took up the matter. He made
himself the leader of the application for a divorce, laid down the
lines of it, almost argued the case; he offered to be at all the charges,
to see the lawyers, the pleaders, the judges, to move heaven and earth.
Madame de Sommervieux was frightened, she refused her father’s
services, said she would not be separated from her husband even if
she were ten times as unhappy, and talked no more about her sorrows.
After being overwhelmed by her parents with all the little wordless
and consoling kindnesses by which the old couple tried in vain to
make up to her for her distress of heart, Augustine went away, feeling
the impossibility of making a superior mind intelligible to weak intellects.
She had learned that a wife must hide from every one, even
from her parents, woes for which it is so difficult to find sympathy.
The storms and sufferings of the upper spheres are appreciated only
by the lofty spirits who inhabit there. In any circumstance we can
only be judged by our equals.
Thus poor Augustine found herself thrown back on the horror of
her meditations, in the cold atmosphere of her home. Study was
indifferent to her, since study had not brought her back her husband’s
heart. Initiated into the secret of these souls of fire, but bereft of their
resources, she was compelled to share their sorrows without sharing
their pleasures. She was disgusted with the world, which to her seemed
mean and small as compared with the incidents of passion. In short,
her life was a failure.
One evening an idea flashed upon her that lighted up her dark grief
like a beam from heaven. Such an idea could never have smiled on a
heart less pure, less virtuous than hers. She determined to go to the
Duchesse de Carigliano, not to ask her to give her back her husband’s
heart, but to learn the arts by which it had been captured; to engage the
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interest of this haughty fine lady for the mother of her lover’s children;
to appeal to her and make her the instrument of her future happiness,
since she was the cause of her present wretchedness.
So one day Augustine, timid as she was, but armed with supernatural
courage, got into her carriage at two in the afternoon to try
for admittance to the boudoir of the famous coquette, who was
never visible till that hour. Madame de Sommervieux had not yet
seen any of the ancient and magnificent mansions of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain. As she made her way through the stately corridors,
the handsome staircases, the vast drawing-rooms—full of flowers,
though it was in the depth of winter, and decorated with the taste
peculiar to women born to opulence or to the elegant habits of the
aristocracy, Augustine felt a terrible clutch at her heart; she coveted
the secrets of an elegance of which she had never had an idea; she
breathed in an air of grandeur which explained the attraction of the
house for her husband. When she reached the private rooms of the
Duchess she was filled with jealousy and a sort of despair, as she
admired the luxurious arrangement of the furniture, the draperies
and the hangings. Here disorder was a grace, here luxury affected a
certain contempt of splendor. The fragrance that floated in the warm
air flattered the sense of smell without offending it. The accessories
of the rooms were in harmony with a view, through plate-glass windows,
of the lawns in a garden planted with evergreen trees. It was all
bewitching, and the art of it was not perceptible. The whole spirit of
the mistress of these rooms pervaded the drawing-room where Augustine
awaited her. She tried to divine her rival’s character from the
aspect of the scattered objects; but there was here something as impenetrable
in the disorder as in the symmetry, and to the simpleminded
young wife all was a sealed letter. All that she could discern
was that, as a woman, the Duchess was a superior person. Then a
painful thought came over her.
“Alas! And is it true,” she wondered, “that a simple and loving heart
is not all-sufficient to an artist; that to balance the weight of these
powerful souls they need a union with feminine souls of a strength
equal to their own? If I had been brought up like this siren, our
weapons at least might have been equal in the hour of struggle.”
“But I am not at home!” The sharp, harsh words, though spoken
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in an undertone in the adjoining boudoir, were heard by Augustine,
and her heart beat violently.
“The lady is in there,” replied the maid.
“You are an idiot! Show her in,” replied the Duchess, whose voice
was sweeter, and had assumed the dulcet tones of politeness. She
evidently now meant to be heard.
Augustine shyly entered the room. At the end of the dainty boudoir
she saw the Duchess lounging luxuriously on an ottoman covered
with brown velvet and placed in the centre of a sort of apse
outlined by soft folds of white muslin over a yellow lining. Ornaments
of gilt bronze, arranged with exquisite taste, enhanced this
sort of dais, under which the Duchess reclined like a Greek statue.
The dark hue of the velvet gave relief to every fascinating charm. A
subdued light, friendly to her beauty, fell like a reflection rather than
a direct illumination. A few rare flowers raised their perfumed heads
from costly Sevres vases. At the moment when this picture was presented
to Augustine’s astonished eyes, she was approaching so noiselessly
that she caught a glance from those of the enchantress. This
look seemed to say to some one whom Augustine did not at first
perceive, “Stay; you will see a pretty woman, and make her visit seem
less of a bore.”
On seeing Augustine, the Duchess rose and made her sit down by
her.
“And to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, madame?” she said
with a most gracious smile.
“Why all the falseness?” thought Augustine, replying only with a
bow.
Her silence was compulsory. The young woman saw before her a
superfluous witness of the scene. This personage was, of all the Colonels
in the army, the youngest, the most fashionable, and the finest
man. His face, full of life and youth, but already expressive, was
further enhanced by a small moustache twirled up into points, and as
black as jet, by a full imperial, by whiskers carefully combed, and a
forest of black hair in some disorder. He was whisking a riding whip
with an air of ease and freedom which suited his self-satisfied expression
and the elegance of his dress; the ribbons attached to his buttonhole
were carelessly tied, and he seemed to pride himself much more
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on his smart appearance than on his courage. Augustine looked at the
Duchesse de Carigliano, and indicated the Colonel by a sidelong
glance. All its mute appeal was understood.
“Good-bye, then, Monsieur d’Aiglemont, we shall meet in the
Bois de Boulogne.”
These words were spoken by the siren as though they were the
result of an agreement made before Augustine’s arrival, and she winged
them with a threatening look that the officer deserved perhaps for
the admiration he showed in gazing at the modest flower, which
contrasted so well with the haughty Duchess. The young fop bowed
in silence, turned on the heels of his boots, and gracefully quitted the
boudoir. At this instant, Augustine, watching her rival, whose eyes
seemed to follow the brilliant officer, detected in that glance a sentiment
of which the transient expression is known to every woman.
She perceived with the deepest anguish that her visit would be useless;
this lady, full of artifice, was too greedy of homage not to have
a ruthless heart.
“Madame,” said Augustine in a broken voice, “the step I am about
to take will seem to you very strange; but there is a madness of despair
which ought to excuse anything. I understand only too well
why Theodore prefers your house to any other, and why your mind
has so much power over his. Alas! I have only to look into myself to
find more than ample reasons. But I am devoted to my husband,
madame. Two years of tears have not effaced his image from my
heart, though I have lost his. In my folly I dared to dream of a contest
with you; and I have come to you to ask you by what means I
may triumph over yourself. Oh, madame,” cried the young wife,
ardently seizing the hand which her rival allowed her to hold, “I will
never pray to God for my own happiness with so much fervor as I
will beseech Him for yours, if you will help me to win back
Sommervieux’s regard—I will not say his love. I have no hope but in
you. Ah! tell me how you could please him, and make him forget
the first days—” At these words Augustine broke down, suffocated
with sobs she could not suppress. Ashamed of her weakness, she hid
her face in her handkerchief, which she bathed with tears.
“What a child you are, my dear little beauty!” said the Duchess,
carried away by the novelty of such a scene, and touched, in spite of
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herself, at receiving such homage from the most perfect virtue perhaps
in Paris. She took the young wife’s handkerchief, and herself
wiped the tears from her eyes, soothing her by a few monosyllables
murmured with gracious compassion. After a moment’s silence the
Duchess, grasping poor Augustine’s hands in both her own—hands
that had a rare character of dignity and powerful beauty—said in a
gentle and friendly voice: “My first warning is to advise you not to
weep so bitterly; tears are disfiguring. We must learn to deal firmly
with the sorrows that make us ill, for love does not linger long by a
sick-bed. Melancholy, at first, no doubt, lends a certain attractive
grace, but it ends by dragging the features and blighting the loveliest
face. And besides, our tyrants are so vain as to insist that their slaves
should be always cheerful.”
“But, madame, it is not in my power not to feel. How is it possible,
without suffering a thousand deaths, to see the face which once
beamed with love and gladness turn chill, colorless, and indifferent?
I cannot control my heart!”
“So much the worse, sweet child. But I fancy I know all your story.
In the first place, if your husband is unfaithful to you, understand
clearly that I am not his accomplice. If I was anxious to have him in
my drawing-room, it was, I own, out of vanity; he was famous, and
he went nowhere. I like you too much already to tell you all the mad
things he has done for my sake. I will only reveal one, because it may
perhaps help us to bring him back to you, and to punish him for the
audacity of his behavior to me. He will end by compromising me. I
know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion
of a too superior man. You should know that one may allow
them to court one, but marry them—that is a mistake! We women
ought to admire men of genius, and delight in them as a spectacle,
but as to living with them? Never.—No, no. It is like wanting to
find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of
sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions. But this misfortune has
fallen on you, my poor child, has it not? Well, then, you must try to
arm yourself against tyranny.”
“Ah, madame, before coming in here, only seeing you as I came in,
I already detected some arts of which I had no suspicion.”
“Well, come and see me sometimes, and it will not be long before
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you have mastered the knowledge of these trifles, important, too, in
their way. Outward things are, to fools, half of life; and in that matter
more than one clever man is a fool, in spite of all his talent. But I
dare wager you never could refuse your Theodore anything!”
“How refuse anything, madame, if one loves a man?”
“Poor innocent, I could adore you for your simplicity. You should
know that the more we love the less we should allow a man, above
all, a husband, to see the whole extent of our passion. The one who
loves most is tyrannized over, and, which is worse, is sooner or later
neglected. The one who wishes to rule should—”
“What, madame, must I then dissimulate, calculate, become false,
form an artificial character, and live in it? How is it possible to live in
such a way? Can you—” she hesitated; the Duchess smiled.
“My dear child,” the great lady went on in a serious tone, “conjugal
happiness has in all times been a speculation, a business demanding
particular attention. If you persist in talking passion while I am talking
marriage, we shall soon cease to understand each other. Listen to me,”
she went on, assuming a confidential tone. “I have been in the way of
seeing some of the superior men of our day. Those who have married
have for the most part chosen quite insignificant wives. Well, those
wives governed them, as the Emperor governs us; and if they were not
loved, they were at least respected. I like secrets—especially those which
concern women—well enough to have amused myself by seeking the
clue to the riddle. Well, my sweet child, those worthy women had the
gift of analyzing their husbands’ nature; instead of taking fright, like
you, at their superiority, they very acutely noted the qualities they lacked,
and either by possessing those qualities, or by feigning to possess them,
they found means of making such a handsome display of them in their
husbands’ eyes that in the end they impressed them. Also, I must tell
you, all these souls which appear so lofty have just a speck of madness
in them, which we ought to know how to take advantage of. By firmly
resolving to have the upper hand and never deviating from that aim,
by bringing all our actions to bear on it, all our ideas, our cajolery, we
subjugate these eminently capricious natures, which, by the very mutability
of their thoughts, lend us the means of influencing them.”
“Good heavens!” cried the young wife in dismay. “And this is life.
It is a warfare—”
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“In which we must always threaten,” said the Duchess, laughing.
“Our power is wholly factitious. And we must never allow a man to
despise us; it is impossible to recover from such a descent but by
odious manoeuvring. Come,” she added, “I will give you a means of
bringing your husband to his senses.”
She rose with a smile to guide the young and guileless apprentice
to conjugal arts through the labyrinth of her palace. They came to a
back-staircase, which led up to the reception rooms. As Madame de
Carigliano pressed the secret springlock of the door she stopped, looking
at Augustine with an inimitable gleam of shrewdness and grace.
“The Duc de Carigliano adores me,” said she. “Well, he dare not
enter by this door without my leave. And he is a man in the habit of
commanding thousands of soldiers. He knows how to face a battery,
but before me,—he is afraid!”
Augustine sighed. They entered a sumptuous gallery, where the
painter’s wife was led by the Duchess up to the portrait painted by
Theodore of Mademoiselle Guillaume. On seeing it, Augustine uttered
a cry.
“I knew it was no longer in my house,” she said, “but—here!—”
“My dear child, I asked for it merely to see what pitch of idiocy a
man of genius may attain to. Sooner or later I should have returned
it to you, for I never expected the pleasure of seeing the original here
face to face with the copy. While we finish our conversation I will
have it carried down to your carriage. And if, armed with such a
talisman, you are not your husband’s mistress for a hundred years,
you are not a woman, and you deserve your fate.”
Augustine kissed the Duchess’ hand, and the lady clasped her to her
heart, with all the more tenderness because she would forget her by the
morrow. This scene might perhaps have destroyed for ever the candor
and purity of a less virtuous woman than Augustine, for the astute
politics of the higher social spheres were no more consonant to Augustine
than the narrow reasoning of Joseph Lebas, or Madame Guillaume’s
vapid morality. Strange are the results of the false positions into which
we may be brought by the slightest mistake in the conduct of life!
Augustine was like an Alpine cowherd surprised by an avalanche; if he
hesitates, if he listens to the shouts of his comrades, he is almost certainly
lost. In such a crisis the heart steels itself or breaks.
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Madame de Sommervieux returned home a prey to such agitation
as it is difficult to describe. Her conversation with the Duchesse de
Carigliano had roused in her mind a crowd of contradictory thoughts.
Like the sheep in the fable, full of courage in the wolf’s absence, she
preached to herself, and laid down admirable plans of conduct; she
devised a thousand coquettish stratagems; she even talked to her husband,
finding, away from him, all the springs of true eloquence which
never desert a woman; then, as she pictured to herself Theodore’s
clear and steadfast gaze, she began to quake. When she asked whether
monsieur were at home her voice shook. On learning that he would
not be in to dinner, she felt an unaccountable thrill of joy. Like a
criminal who has appealed against sentence of death, a respite, however
short, seemed to her a lifetime. She placed the portrait in her
room, and waited for her husband in all the agonies of hope. That
this venture must decide her future life, she felt too keenly not to
shiver at every sound, even the low ticking of the clock, which seemed
to aggravate her terrors by doling them out to her. She tried to cheat
time by various devices. The idea struck her of dressing in a way
which would make her exactly like the portrait. Then, knowing her
husband’s restless temper, she had her room lighted up with unusual
brightness, feeling sure that when he came in curiosity would bring
him there at once. Midnight had struck when, at the call of the groom,
the street gate was opened, and the artist’s carriage rumbled in over
the stones of the silent courtyard.
“What is the meaning of this illumination?” asked Theodore in
glad tones, as he came into her room.
Augustine skilfully seized the auspicious moment; she threw herself
into her husband’s arms, and pointed to the portrait. The artist
stood rigid as a rock, and his eyes turned alternately on Augustine, on
the accusing dress. The frightened wife, half-dead, as she watched her
husband’s changeful brow—that terrible brow—saw the expressive
furrows gathering like clouds; then she felt her blood curdling in her
veins when, with a glaring look, and in a deep hollow voice, he began
to question her:
“Where did you find that picture?”
“The Duchess de Carigliano returned it to me.”
“You asked her for it?”
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“I did not know that she had it.”
The gentleness, or rather the exquisite sweetness of this angel’s voice,
might have touched a cannibal, but not an artist in the clutches of
wounded vanity.
“It is worthy of her!” exclaimed the painter in a voice of thunder. “I
will be avenged!” he cried, striding up and down the room. “She
shall die of shame; I will paint her! Yes, I will paint her as Messalina
stealing out at night from the palace of Claudius.”
“Theodore!” said a faint voice.
“I will kill her!”
“My dear—”
“She is in love with that little cavalry colonel, because he rides
well—”
“Theodore!”
“Let me be!” said the painter in a tone almost like a roar.
It would be odious to describe the whole scene. In the end the
frenzy of passion prompted the artist to acts and words which any
woman not so young as Augustine would have ascribed to madness.
At eight o’clock next morning Madame Guillaume, surprising her
daughter, found her pale, with red eyes, her hair in disorder, holding
a handkerchief soaked with tears, while she gazed at the floor strewn
with the torn fragments of a dress and the broken fragments of a
large gilt picture-frame. Augustine, almost senseless with grief, pointed
to the wreck with a gesture of deep despair.
“I don’t know that the loss is very great!” cried the old mistress of the
Cat and Racket. “It was like you, no doubt; but I am told that there is
a man on the boulevard who paints lovely portraits for fifty crowns.”
“Oh, mother!”
“Poor child, you are quite right,” replied Madame Guillaume, who
misinterpreted the expression of her daughter’s glance at her. “True,
my child, no one ever can love you as fondly as a mother. My darling,
I guess it all; but confide your sorrows to me, and I will comfort
you. Did I not tell you long ago that the man was mad! Your
maid has told me pretty stories. Why, he must be a perfect monster!”
Augustine laid a finger on her white lips, as if to implore a moment’s
silence. During this dreadful night misery had led her to that patient
resignation which in mothers and loving wives transcends in its ef-
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Balzac
fects all human energy, and perhaps reveals in the heart of women the
existence of certain chords which God has withheld from men.
An inscription engraved on a broken column in the cemetery at
Montmartre states that Madame de Sommervieux died at the age of
twenty-seven. In the simple words of this epitaph one of the timid
creature’s friends can read the last scene of a tragedy. Every year, on
the second of November, the solemn day of the dead, he never passes
this youthful monument without wondering whether it does not
need a stronger woman than Augustine to endure the violent embrace
of genius?
“The humble and modest flowers that bloom in the valley,” he
reflects, “perish perhaps when they are transplanted too near the skies,
to the region where storms gather and the sun is scorching.”
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Aiglemont, General, Marquis Victor d’
The Firm of Nucingen
A Woman of Thirty
Birotteau, Cesar
Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Camusot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Cousin Pons
The Muse of the Department
Cesar Birotteau
445

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Cardot, Jean-Jerome-Severin
A Start in Life
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Cesar Birotteau
Carigliano, Marechal, Duc de
Father Goriot
Sarrasine
Carigliano, Duchesse de
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Peasantry
The Member for Arcis
Guillaume
Cesar Birotteau
Lebas, Joseph
Cesar Birotteau
Cousin Betty
Lebas, Madame Joseph (Virginie)
Cesar Birotteau
Cousin Betty
Lourdois
Cesar Birotteau
Rabourdin, Xavier
The Government Clerks
Cesar Birotteau
The Middle Classes
Roguin, Madame
446

Cesar Birotteau
Pierrette
A Second Home
A Daughter of Eve
Sommervieux, Theodore de
The Government Clerks
Modeste Mignon
Sommervieux, Madame Theodore de (Augustine)
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Cesar Birotteau
Balzac
447

Christ in Flanders
448
Christ in Flanders
Dedication
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
To Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore, a daughter of Flanders, of whom
these modern days may well be proud, I dedicate this quaint legend
of old Flanders.
De Balzac.
AT A DIMLY REMOTE PERIOD in the history of Brabant, communication
between the Island of Cadzand and the Flemish coast was kept
up by a boat which carried passengers from one shore to the other.
Middelburg, the chief town in the island, destined to become so
famous in the annals of Protestantism, at that time only numbered
some two or three hundred hearths; and the prosperous town of
Ostend was an obscure haven, a straggling village where pirates dwelt
in security among the fishermen and the few poor merchants who
lived in the place.
But though the town of Ostend consisted altogether of some score
of houses and three hundred cottages, huts or hovels built of the
driftwood of wrecked vessels, it nevertheless rejoiced in the possession
of a governor, a garrison, a forked gibbet, a convent, and a burgomaster,
in short, in all the institutions of an advanced civilization.

Balzac
Who reigned over Brabant and Flanders in those days? On this
point tradition is mute. Let us confess at once that this tale savors
strongly of the marvelous, the mysterious, and the vague; elements
which Flemish narrators have infused into a story retailed so often to
gatherings of workers on winter evenings, that the details vary widely
in poetic merit and incongruity of detail. It has been told by every
generation, handed down by grandames at the fireside, narrated night
and day, and the chronicle has changed its complexion somewhat in
every age. Like some great building that has suffered many modifications
of successive generations of architects, some sombre weatherbeaten
pile, the delight of a poet, the story would drive the commentator
and the industrious winnower of words, facts, and dates to
despair. The narrator believes in it, as all superstitious minds in Flanders
likewise believe; and is not a whit wiser nor more credulous than his
audience. But as it would be impossible to make a harmony of all
the different renderings, here are the outlines of the story; stripped, it
may be, of its picturesque quaintness, but with all its bold disregard
of historical truth, and its moral teachings approved by religion—a
myth, the blossom of imaginative fancy; an allegory that the wise
may interpret to suit themselves. To each his own pasturage, and the
task of separating the tares from the wheat.
The boat that served to carry passengers from the Island of Cadzand
to Ostend was upon the point of departure; but before the skipper
loosed the chain that secured the shallop to the little jetty, where
people embarked, he blew a horn several times, to warn late lingerers,
this being his last journey that day. Night was falling. It was scarcely
possible to see the coast of Flanders by the dying fires of the sunset,
or to make out upon the hither shore any forms of belated passengers
hurrying along the wall of the dykes that surrounded the open
country, or among the tall reeds of the marshes. The boat was full.
“What are you waiting for? Let us put off!” they cried.
Just at that moment a man appeared a few paces from the jetty, to
the surprise of the skipper, who had heard no sound of footsteps.
The traveler seemed to have sprung up from the earth, like a peasant
who had laid himself down on the ground to wait till the boat should
start, and had slept till the sound of the horn awakened him. Was he
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Christ in Flanders
a thief? or some one belonging to the custom-house or the police?
As soon as the man appeared on the jetty to which the boat was
moored, seven persons who were standing in the stern of the shallop
hastened to sit down on the benches, so as to leave no room for the
newcomer. It was the swift and instinctive working of the aristocratic
spirit, an impulse of exclusiveness that comes from the rich
man’s heart. Four of the seven personages belonged to the most aristocratic
families in Flanders. First among them was a young knight
with two beautiful greyhounds; his long hair flowed from beneath a
jeweled cap; he clanked his gilded spurs, curled the ends of his moustache
from time to time with a swaggering grace, and looked round
disdainfully on the rest of the crew. A high-born damsel, with a falcon
on her wrist, only spoke with her mother or with a churchman
of high rank, who was evidently a relation. All these persons made a
great deal of noise, and talked among themselves as though there
were no one else in the boat; yet close beside them sat a man of great
importance in the district, a stout burgher of Bruges, wrapped about
with a vast cloak. His servant, armed to the teeth, had set down a
couple of bags filled with gold at his side. Next to the burgher came
a man of learning, a doctor of the University of Louvain, who was
traveling with his clerk. This little group of folk, who looked contemptuously
at each other, was separated from the passengers in the
forward part of the boat by the bench of rowers.
The belated traveler glanced about him as he stepped on board, saw
that there was no room for him in the stern, and went to the bows in
quest of a seat. They were all poor people there. At first sight of the
bareheaded man in the brown camlet coat and trunk-hose, and plain
stiff linen collar, they noticed that he wore no ornaments, carried no
cap nor bonnet in his hand, and had neither sword nor purse at his
girdle, and one and all took him for a burgomaster sure of his authority,
a worthy and kindly burgomaster like so many a Fleming of old
times, whose homely features and characters have been immortalized
by Flemish painters. The poorer passengers, therefore, received him
with demonstrations of respect that provoked scornful tittering at the
other end of the boat. An old soldier, inured to toil and hardship, gave
up his place on the bench to the newcomer, and seated himself on the
edge of the vessel, keeping his balance by planting his feet against one
450

Balzac
of those traverse beams, like the backbone of a fish, that hold the
planks of a boat together. A young mother, who bore her baby in her
arms, and seemed to belong to the working class in Ostend, moved
aside to make room for the stranger. There was neither servility nor
scorn in her manner of doing this; it was a simple sign of the goodwill
by which the poor, who know by long experience the value of a service
and the warmth that fellowship brings, give expression to the openheartedness
and the natural impulses of their souls; so artlessly do they
reveal their good qualities and their defects. The stranger thanked her
by a gesture full of gracious dignity, and took his place between the
young mother and the old soldier. Immediately behind him sat a peasant
and his son, a boy ten years of age. A beggar woman, old, wrinkled,
and clad in rags, was crouching, with her almost empty wallet, on a
great coil of rope that lay in the prow. One of the rowers, an old sailor,
who had known her in the days of her beauty and prosperity, had let
her come in “for the love of God,” in the beautiful phrase that the
common people use.
“Thank you kindly, Thomas,” the old woman had said. “I will say
two Paters and two Aves for you in my prayers to-night.”
The skipper blew his horn for the last time, looked along the silent
shore, flung off the chain, ran along the side of the boat, and took up
his position at the helm. He looked at the sky, and as soon as they were
out in the open sea, he shouted to the men: “Pull away, pull with all
your might! The sea is smiling at a squall, the witch! I can feel the swell
by the way the rudder works, and the storm in my wounds.”
The nautical phrases, unintelligible to ears unused to the sound of
the sea, seemed to put fresh energy into the oars; they kept time
together, the rhythm of the movement was still even and steady, but
quite unlike the previous manner of rowing; it was as if a cantering
horse had broken into a gallop. The gay company seated in the stern
amused themselves by watching the brawny arms, the tanned faces,
and sparkling eyes of the rowers, the play of the tense muscles, the
physical and mental forces that were being exerted to bring them for
a trifling toll across the channel. So far from pitying the rowers’ distress,
they pointed out the men’s faces to each other, and laughed at
the grotesque expressions on the faces of the crew who were straining
every muscle; but in the fore part of the boat the soldier, the peasant,
451

Christ in Flanders
and the old beggar woman watched the sailors with the sympathy
naturally felt by toilers who live by the sweat of their brow and know
the rough struggle, the strenuous excitement of effort. These folk,
moreover, whose lives were spent in the open air, had all seen the
warnings of danger in the sky, and their faces were grave. The young
mother rocked her child, singing an old hymn of the Church for a
lullaby.
“If we ever get there at all,” the soldier remarked to the peasant, “it
will be because the Almighty is bent on keeping us alive.”
“Ah! He is the Master,” said the old woman, “but I think it will be
His good pleasure to take us to Himself. Just look at that light down
there …” and she nodded her head as she spoke towards the sunset.
Streaks of fiery red glared from behind the masses of crimsonflushed
brown cloud that seemed about to unloose a furious gale.
There was a smothered murmur of the sea, a moaning sound that
seemed to come from the depths, a low warning growl, such as a dog
gives when he only means mischief as yet. After all, Ostend was not
far away. Perhaps painting, like poetry, could not prolong the existence
of the picture presented by sea and sky at that moment beyond
the time of its actual duration. Art demands vehement contrasts,
wherefore artists usually seek out Nature’s most striking effects, doubtless
because they despair of rendering the great and glorious charm of
her daily moods; yet the human soul is often stirred as deeply by her
calm as by her emotion, and by silence as by storm.
For a moment no one spoke on board the boat. Every one watched
that sea and sky, either with some presentiment of danger, or because
they felt the influence of the religious melancholy that takes possession
of nearly all of us at the close of the day, the hour of prayer, when all
nature is hushed save for the voices of the bells. The sea gleamed pale
and wan, but its hues changed, and the surface took all the colors of
steel. The sky was almost overspread with livid gray, but down in the
west there were long narrow bars like streaks of blood; while lines of
bright light in the eastern sky, sharp and clean as if drawn by the tip of
a brush, were separated by folds of cloud, like the wrinkles on an old
man’s brow. The whole scene made a background of ashen grays and
half-tints, in strong contrast to the bale-fires of the sunset. If written
language might borrow of spoken language some of the bold figures
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Balzac
of speech invented by the people, it might be said with the soldier that
“the weather has been routed,” or, as the peasant would say, “the sky
glowered like an executioner.” Suddenly a wind arose from the quarter
of the sunset, and the skipper, who never took his eyes off the sea, saw
the swell on the horizon line, and cried:
“Stop rowing!”
The sailors stopped immediately, and let their oars lie on the water.
“The skipper is right,” said Thomas coolly. A great wave caught up
the boat, carried it high on its crest, only to plunge it, as it were, into
the trough of the sea that seemed to yawn for them. At this mighty
upheaval, this sudden outbreak of the wrath of the sea, the company
in the stern turned pale, and sent up a terrible cry.
“We are lost!”
“Oh, not yet!” said the skipper calmly.
As he spoke, the clouds immediately above their heads were torn
asunder by the vehemence of the wind. The gray mass was rent and
scattered east and west with ominous speed, a dim uncertain light
from the rift in the sky fell full upon the boat, and the travelers
beheld each other’s faces. All of them, the noble and the wealthy, the
sailors and the poor passengers alike, were amazed for a moment by
the appearance of the last comer. His golden hair, parted upon his
calm, serene forehead, fell in thick curls about his shoulders; and his
face, sublime in its sweetness and radiant with divine love, stood out
against the surrounding gloom. He had no contempt for death; he
knew that he should not die. But if at the first the company in the
stern forgot for a moment the implacable fury of the storm that
threatened their lives, selfishness and their habits of life soon prevailed
again.
“How lucky that stupid burgomaster is, not to see the risks we are
all running! He is just like a dog, he will die without a struggle,” said
the doctor.
He had scarcely pronounced this highly judicious dictum when
the storm unloosed all its legions. The wind blew from every quarter
of the heavens, the boat span round like a top, and the sea broke in.
“Oh! my poor child! my poor child! … Who will save my baby?”
the mother cried in a heart-rending voice.
“You yourself will save it,” the stranger said.
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Christ in Flanders
The thrilling tones of that voice went to the young mother’s heart
and brought hope with them; she heard the gracious words through
all the whistling of the wind and the shrieks of the passengers.
“Holy Virgin of Good Help, who art at Antwerp, I promise thee a
thousand pounds of wax and a statue, if thou wilt rescue me from
this!” cried the burgher, kneeling upon his bags of gold.
“The Virgin is no more at Antwerp than she is here,” was the
doctor’s comment on this appeal.
“She is in heaven,” said a voice that seemed to come from the sea.
“Who said that?”
“’Tis the devil!” exclaimed the servant. “He is scoffing at the Virgin
of Antwerp.”
“Let us have no more of your Holy Virgin at present,” the skipper
cried to the passengers. “Put your hands to the scoops and bail the
water out of the boat.—And the rest of you,” he went on, addressing
the sailors, “pull with all your might! Now is the time; in the name
of the devil who is leaving you in this world, be your own Providence!
Every one knows that the channel is fearfully dangerous; I
have been to and fro across it these thirty years. Am I facing a storm
for the first time to-night?”
He stood at the helm, and looked, as before, at his boat and at the
sea and sky in turn.
“The skipper always laughs at everything,” muttered Thomas.
“Will God leave us to perish along with those wretched creatures?”
asked the haughty damsel of the handsome cavalier.
“No, no, noble maiden …. Listen!” and he caught her by the
waist and said in her ear, “I can swim, say nothing about it! I will
hold you by your fair hair and bring you safely to the shore; but I
can only save you.”
The girl looked at her aged mother. The lady was on her knees
entreating absolution of the Bishop, who did not heed her. In the
beautiful eyes the knight read a vague feeling of filial piety, and spoke
in a smothered voice.
“Submit yourself to the will of God. If it is His pleasure to take
your mother to Himself, it will doubtless be for her happiness—in
another world,” he added, and his voice dropped still lower. “And for
ours in this,” he thought within himself.
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Balzac
The Dame of Rupelmonde was lady of seven fiefs beside the barony
of Gavres.
The girl felt the longing for life in her heart, and for love that spoke
through the handsome adventurer, a young miscreant who haunted
churches in search of a prize, an heiress to marry, or ready money. The
Bishop bestowed his benison on the waves, and bade them be calm; it
was all that he could do. He thought of his concubine, and of the
delicate feast with which she would welcome him; perhaps at that very
moment she was bathing, perfuming herself, robing herself in velvet,
fastening her necklace and her jeweled clasps; and the perverse Bishop,
so far from thinking of the power of Holy Church, of his duty to
comfort Christians and exhort them to trust in God, mingled worldly
regrets and lover’s sighs with the holy words of the breviary. By the
dim light that shone on the pale faces of the company, it was possible
to see their differing expressions as the boat was lifted high in air by a
wave, to be cast back into the dark depths; the shallop quivered like a
fragile leaf, the plaything of the north wind in the autumn; the hull
creaked, it seemed ready to go to pieces. Fearful shrieks went up, followed
by an awful silence.
There was a strange difference between the behavior of the folk in
the bows and that of the rich or great people at the other end of the
boat. The young mother clasped her infant tightly to her breast every
time that a great wave threatened to engulf the fragile vessel; but she
clung to the hope that the stranger’s words had set in her heart. Each
time that the eyes turned to his face she drew fresh faith at the sight,
the strong faith of a helpless woman, a mother’s faith. She lived by
that divine promise, the loving words from his lips; the simple creature
waited trustingly for them to be fulfilled, and scarcely feared the
danger any longer.
The soldier, holding fast to the vessel’s side, never took his eyes off
the strange visitor. He copied on his own rough and swarthy features
the imperturbability of the other’s face, applying to this task the
whole strength of a will and intelligence but little corrupted in the
course of a life of mechanical and passive obedience. So emulous was
he of a calm and tranquil courage greater than his own, that at last,
perhaps unconsciously, something of that mysterious nature passed
into his own soul. His admiration became an instinctive zeal for this
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Christ in Flanders
man, a boundless love for and belief in him, such a love as soldiers
feel for their leader when he has the power of swaying other men,
when the halo of victories surrounds him, and the magical fascination
of genius is felt in all that he does. The poor outcast was murmuring
to herself:
“Ah! miserable wretch that I am! Have I not suffered enough to
expiate the sins of my youth? Ah! wretched woman, why did you
leave the gay life of a frivolous Frenchwoman? why did you devour
the goods of God with churchmen, the substance of the poor with
extortioners and fleecers of the poor? Oh! I have sinned indeed!—
Oh my God! my God! let me finish my time in hell here in this
world of misery.”
And again she cried, “Holy Virgin, Mother of God, have pity
upon me!”
“Be comforted, mother. God is not a Lombard usurer. I may have
killed people good and bad at random in my time, but I am not
afraid of the resurrection.”
“Ah! master Lancepesade, how happy those fair ladies are, to be so
near to a bishop, a holy man! They will get absolution for their sins,”
said the old woman. “Oh! if I could only hear a priest say to me,
‘Thy sins are forgiven!’ I should believe it then.”
The stranger turned towards her, and the goodness in his face made
her tremble.
“Have faith,” he said, “and you will be saved.”
“May God reward you, good sir,” she answered. “If what you say is
true, I will go on pilgrimage barefooted to Our Lady of Loretto to
pray to her for you and for me.”
The two peasants, father and son, were silent, patient, and submissive
to the will of God, like folk whose wont it is to fall in instinctively
with the ways of Nature like cattle. At the one end of the boat
stood riches, pride, learning, debauchery, and crime—human society,
such as art and thought and education and worldly interests and
laws have made it; and at this end there was terror and wailing, innumerable
different impulses all repressed by hideous doubts—at this
end, and at this only, the agony of fear.
Above all these human lives stood a strong man, the skipper; no
doubts assailed him, the chief, the king, the fatalist among them. He
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Balzac
was trusting in himself rather than in Providence, crying, “Bail away!”
instead of “Holy Virgin,” defying the storm, in fact, and struggling
with the sea like a wrestler.
But the helpless poor at the other end of the wherry! The mother
rocking on her bosom the little one who smiled at the storm; the
woman once so frivolous and gay, and now tormented with bitter
remorse; the old soldier covered with scars, a mutilated life the sole
reward of his unflagging loyalty and faithfulness. This veteran could
scarcely count on the morsel of bread soaked in tears to keep the life in
him, yet he was always ready to laugh, and went his way merrily, happy
when he could drown his glory in the depths of a pot of beer, or could
tell tales of the wars to the children who admired him, leaving his
future with a light heart in the hands of God. Lastly, there were the
two peasants, used to hardships and toil, labor incarnate, the labor by
which the world lives. These simple folk were indifferent to thought
and its treasures, ready to sink them all in a belief; and their faith was
but so much the more vigorous because they had never disputed about
it nor analyzed it. Such a nature is a virgin soil, conscience has not been
tampered with, feeling is deep and strong; repentance, trouble, love,
and work have developed, purified, concentrated, and increased their
force of will a hundred times, the will—the one thing in man that
resembles what learned doctors call the Soul.
The boat, guided by the well-nigh miraculous skill of the steersman,
came almost within sight of Ostend, when, not fifty paces
from the shore, she was suddenly struck by a heavy sea and capsized.
The stranger with the light about his head spoke to this little world
of drowning creatures:
“Those who have faith shall be saved; let them follow me!”
He stood upright, and walked with a firm step upon the waves.
The young mother at once took her child in her arms, and followed
at his side across the sea. The soldier too sprang up, saying in his
homely fashion, “Ah! nom d’un pipe! I would follow /you/ to the
devil;” and without seeming astonished by it, he walked on the water.
The worn-out sinner, believing in the omnipotence of God, also
followed the stranger.
The two peasants said to each other, “If they are walking on the
sea, why should we not do as they do?” and they also arose and has-
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Christ in Flanders
tened after the others. Thomas tried to follow, but his faith tottered;
he sank in the sea more than once, and rose again, but the third time
he also walked on the sea. The bold steersman clung like a remora to
the wreck of his boat. The miser had had faith, and had risen to go,
but he tried to take his gold with him, and it was his gold that dragged
him down to the bottom. The learned man had scoffed at the charlatan
and at the fools who listened to him; and when he heard the
mysterious stranger propose to the passengers that they should walk
on the waves, he began to laugh, and the ocean swallowed him. The
girl was dragged down into the depths by her lover. The Bishop and
the older lady went to the bottom, heavily laden with sins, it may be,
but still more heavily laden with incredulity and confidence in idols,
weighted down by devotion, into which alms-deeds and true religion
entered but little.
The faithful flock, who walked with a firm step high and dry above
the surge, heard all about them the dreadful whistling of the blast;
great billows broke across their path, but an irresistible force cleft a
way for them through the sea. These believing ones saw through the
spray a dim speck of light flickering in the window of a fisherman’s
hut on the shore, and each one, as he pushed on bravely towards the
light, seemed to hear the voice of his fellow crying, “Courage!” through
all the roaring of the surf; yet no one had spoken a word—so absorbed
was each by his own peril. In this way they reached the shore.
When they were all seated near the fisherman’s fire, they looked
round in vain for their guide with the light about him. The sea washed
up the steersman at the base of the cliff on which the cottage stood;
he was clinging with might and main to the plank as a sailor can cling
when death stares him in the face; the man went down and rescued
the almost exhausted seaman; then he said, as he held out a succoring
hand above the man’s head:
“Good, for this once; but do not try it again; the example would
be too bad.”
He took the skipper on his shoulders, and carried him to the
fisherman’s door; knocked for admittance for the exhausted man; then,
when the door of the humble refuge opened, the Saviour disappeared.
The Convent of Mercy was built for sailors on this spot, where for
long afterwards (so it was said) the footprints of Jesus Christ could be
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Balzac
seen in the sand; but in 1793, at the time of the French invasion, the
monks carried away this precious relic, that bore witness to the Saviour’s
last visit to earth.
There at the convent I found myself shortly after the Revolution of
1830. I was weary of life. If you had asked me the reason of my
despair, I should have found it almost impossible to give it, so languid
had grown the soul that was melted within me. The west wind
had slackened the springs of my intelligence. A cold gray light poured
down from the heavens, and the murky clouds that passed overhead
gave a boding look to the land; all these things, together with the
immensity of the sea, said to me, “Die to-day or die to-morrow, still
must we not die?” And then—I wandered on, musing on the doubtful
future, on my blighted hopes. Gnawed by these gloomy thoughts,
I turned mechanically into the convent church, with the gray towers
that loomed like ghosts though the sea mists. I looked round with
no kindling of the imagination at the forest of columns, at the slender
arches set aloft upon the leafy capitals, a delicate labyrinth of
sculpture. I walked with careless eyes along the side aisles that opened
out before me like vast portals, ever turning upon their hinges. It was
scarcely possible to see, by the dim light of the autumn day, the
sculptured groinings of the roof, the delicate and clean-cut lines of
the mouldings of the graceful pointed arches. The organ pipes were
mute. There was no sound save the noise of my own footsteps to
awaken the mournful echoes lurking in the dark chapels. I sat down
at the base of one of the four pillars that supported the tower, near
the choir. Thence I could see the whole of the building. I gazed, and
no ideas connected with it arose in my mind. I saw without seeing
the mighty maze of pillars, the great rose windows that hung like a
network suspended as by a miracle in air above the vast doorways. I
saw the doors at the end of the side aisles, the aerial galleries, the
stained glass windows framed in archways, divided by slender columns,
fretted into flower forms and trefoil by fine filigree work of
carved stone. A dome of glass at the end of the choir sparkled as if it
had been built of precious stones set cunningly. In contrast to the
roof with its alternating spaces of whiteness and color, the two aisles
lay to right and left in shadow so deep that the faint gray outlines of
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Christ in Flanders
their hundred shafts were scarcely visible in the gloom. I gazed at the
marvelous arcades, the scroll-work, the garlands, the curving lines,
and arabesques interwoven and interlaced, and strangely lighted, until
by sheer dint of gazing my perceptions became confused, and I
stood upon the borderland between illusion and reality, taken in the
snare set for the eyes, and almost light-headed by reason of the multitudinous
changes of the shapes about me.
Imperceptibly a mist gathered about the carven stonework, and I
only beheld it through a haze of fine golden dust, like the motes that
hover in the bars of sunlight slanting through the air of a chamber.
Suddenly the stone lacework of the rose windows gleamed through
this vapor that had made all forms so shadowy. Every moulding, the
edges of every carving, the least detail of the sculpture was dipped in
silver. The sunlight kindled fires in the stained windows, their rich
colors sent out glowing sparks of light. The shafts began to tremble,
the capitals were gently shaken. A light shudder as of delight ran
through the building, the stones were loosened in their setting, the
wall-spaces swayed with graceful caution. Here and there a ponderous
pier moved as solemnly as a dowager when she condescends to
complete a quadrille at the close of a ball. A few slender and graceful
columns, their heads adorned with wreaths of trefoil, began to laugh
and dance here and there. Some of the pointed arches dashed at the
tall lancet windows, who, like ladies of the Middle Ages, wore the
armorial bearings of their houses emblazoned on their golden robes.
The dance of the mitred arcades with the slender windows became
like a fray at a tourney.
In another moment every stone in the church vibrated, without
leaving its place; for the organ-pipes spoke, and I heard divine music
mingling with the songs of angels, and unearthly harmony, accompanied
by the deep notes of the bells, that boomed as the giant towers
rocked and swayed on their square bases. This strange Sabbath
seemed to me the most natural thing in the world; and I, who had
seen Charles X. hurled from his throne, was no longer amazed by
anything. Nay, I myself was gently swaying with a see-saw movement
that influenced my nerves pleasurably in a manner of which it
is impossible to give any idea. Yet in the midst of this heated riot, the
cathedral choir felt cold as if it were a winter day, and I became aware
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Balzac
of a multitude of women, robed in white, silent, and impassive,
sitting there. The sweet incense smoke that arose from the censers
was grateful to my soul. The tall wax candles flickered. The lectern,
gay as a chanter undone by the treachery of wine, was skipping about
like a peal of Chinese bells.
Then I knew that the whole cathedral was whirling round so fast
that everything appeared to be undisturbed. The colossal Figure on
the crucifix above the altar smiled upon me with a mingled malice
and benevolence that frightened me; I turned my eyes away, and
marveled at the bluish vapor that slid across the pillars, lending to
them an indescribable charm. Then some graceful women’s forms
began to stir on the friezes. The cherubs who upheld the heavy columns
shook out their wings. I felt myself uplifted by some divine
power that steeped me in infinite joy, in a sweet and languid rapture.
I would have given my life, I think, to have prolonged these phantasmagoria
for a little, but suddenly a shrill voice clamored in my ears:
“Awake and follow me!”
A withered woman took my hand in hers; its icy coldness crept
through every nerve. The bones of her face showed plainly through
the sallow, almost olive-tinted wrinkles of the skin. The shrunken,
ice-cold old woman wore a black robe, which she trailed in the dust,
and at her throat there was something white, which I dared not examine.
I could scarcely see her wan and colorless eyes, for they were
fixed in a stare upon the heavens. She drew me after her along the
aisles, leaving a trace of her presence in the ashes that she shook from
her dress. Her bones rattled as she walked, like the bones of a skeleton;
and as we went I heard behind me the tinkling of a little bell, a
thin, sharp sound that rang through my head like the notes of a
harmonica.
“Suffer!” she cried, “suffer! So it must be!”
We came out of the church; we went through the dirtiest streets of
the town, till we came at last to a dingy dwelling, and she bade me
enter in. She dragged me with her, calling to me in a harsh, tuneless
voice like a cracked bell:
“Defend me! defend me!”
Together we went up a winding staircase. She knocked at a door
in the darkness, and a mute, like some familiar of the Inquisition,
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Christ in Flanders
opened to her. In another moment we stood in a room hung with
ancient, ragged tapestry, amid piles of old linen, crumpled muslin,
and gilded brass.
“Behold the wealth that shall endure for ever!” said she.
I shuddered with horror; for just then, by the light of a tall torch and
two altar candles, I saw distinctly that this woman was fresh from the
graveyard. She had no hair. I turned to fly. She raised her fleshless arm
and encircled me with a band of iron set with spikes, and as she raised
it a cry went up all about us, the cry of millions of voices—the shouting
of the dead!
“It is my purpose to make thee happy for ever,” she said. “Thou art
my son.”
We were sitting before the hearth, the ashes lay cold upon it; the old
shrunken woman grasped my hand so tightly in hers that I could not
choose but stay. I looked fixedly at her, striving to read the story of her
life from the things among which she was crouching. Had she indeed
any life in her? It was a mystery. Yet I saw plainly that once she must
have been young and beautiful; fair, with all the charm of simplicity,
perfect as some Greek statue, with the brow of a vestal.
“Ah! ah!” I cried, “now I know thee! Miserable woman, why hast
thou prostituted thyself? In the age of thy passions, in the time of thy
prosperity, the grace and purity of thy youth were forgotten. Forgetful
of thy heroic devotion, thy pure life, thy abundant faith, thou didst
resign thy primitive power and thy spiritual supremacy for fleshly power.
Thy linen vestments, thy couch of moss, the cell in the rock, bright
with rays of the Light Divine, was forsaken; thou hast sparkled with
diamonds, and shone with the glitter of luxury and pride. Then, grown
bold and insolent, seizing and overturning all things in thy course like
a courtesan eager for pleasure in her days of splendor, thou hast steeped
thyself in blood like some queen stupefied by empery. Dost thou not
remember to have been dull and heavy at times, and the sudden marvelous
lucidity of other moments; as when Art emerges from an orgy?
Oh! poet, painter, and singer, lover of splendid ceremonies and protector
of the arts, was thy friendship for art perchance a caprice, that so
thou shouldst sleep beneath magnificent canopies? Was there not a day
when, in thy fantastic pride, though chastity and humility were prescribed
to thee, thou hadst brought all things beneath thy feet, and set
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Balzac
thy foot on the necks of princes; when earthly dominion, and wealth,
and the mind of man bore thy yoke? Exulting in the abasement of
humanity, joying to witness the uttermost lengths to which man’s folly
would go, thou hast bidden thy lovers walk on all fours, and required
of them their lands and wealth, nay, even their wives if they were worth
aught to thee. Thou hast devoured millions of men without a cause;
thou hast flung away lives like sand blown by the wind from West to
East. Thou hast come down from the heights of thought to sit among
the kings of men. Woman! instead of comforting men, thou hast tormented
and afflicted them! Knowing that thou couldst ask and have,
thou hast demanded—blood! A little flour surely should have contented
thee, accustomed as thou hast been to live on bread and to
mingle water with thy wine. Unlike all others in all things, formerly
thou wouldst bid thy lovers fast, and they obeyed. Why should thy
fancies have led thee to require things impossible? Why, like a courtesan
spoiled by her lovers, hast thou doted on follies, and left those
undeceived who sought to explain and justify all thy errors? Then came
the days of thy later passions, terrible like the love of a woman of forty
years, with a fierce cry thou hast sought to clasp the whole universe in
one last embrace—and thy universe recoiled from thee!
“Then old men succeeded to thy young lovers; decrepitude came
to thy feet and made thee hideous. Yet, even then, men with the
eagle power of vision said to thee in a glance, ‘Thou shalt perish
ingloriously, because thou hast fallen away, because thou hast broken
the vows of thy maidenhood. The angel with peace written on her
forehead, who should have shed light and joy along her path, has
been a Messalina, delighting in the circus, in debauchery, and abuse
of power. The days of thy virginity cannot return; henceforward thou
shalt be subject to a master. Thy hour has come; the hand of death is
upon thee. Thy heirs believe that thou art rich; they will kill thee and
find nothing. Yet try at least to fling away this raiment no longer in
fashion; be once more as in the days of old!—Nay, thou art dead,
and by thy own deed!’
“Is not this thy story?” so I ended. “Decrepit, toothless, shivering
crone, now forgotten, going thy ways without so much as a glance
from passers-by! Why art thou still alive? What doest thou in that
beggar’s garb, uncomely and desired of none? Where are thy riches?—
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Christ in Flanders
for what were they spent? Where are thy treasures?—what great deeds
hast thou done?”
At this demand, the shriveled woman raised her bony form, flung
off her rags, and grew tall and radiant, smiling as she broke forth
from the dark chrysalid sheath. Then like a butterfly, this diaphanous
creature emerged, fair and youthful, clothed in white linen, an
Indian from creation issuing her palms. Her golden hair rippled over
her shoulders, her eyes glowed, a bright mist clung about her, a ring
of gold hovered above her head, she shook the flaming blade of a
sword towards the spaces of heaven.
“See and believe!” she cried.
And suddenly I saw, afar off, many thousands of cathedrals like the
one that I had just quitted; but these were covered with pictures and
with frescoes, and I heard them echo with entrancing music. Myriads
of human creatures flocked to these great buildings, swarming about
them like ants on an ant-heap. Some were eager to rescue books from
oblivion or to copy manuscripts, others were helping the poor, but
nearly all were studying. Up above this countless multitude rose giant
statues that they had erected in their midst, and by the gleams of a
strange light from some luminary as powerful as the sun, I read the
inscriptions on the bases of the statues—Science, History, Literature.
The light died out. Again I faced the young girl. Gradually she
slipped into the dreary sheath, into the ragged cere-cloths, and became
an aged woman again. Her familiar brought her a little dust,
and she stirred it into the ashes of her chafing-dish, for the weather
was cold and stormy; and then he lighted for her, whose palaces had
been lit with thousands of wax-tapers, a little cresset, that she might
see to read her prayers through the hours of night.
“There is no faith left in the earth! …” she said.
In such a perilous plight did I behold the fairest and the greatest,
the truest and most life-giving of all Powers.
“Wake up, sir, the doors are just about to be shut,” said a hoarse
voice. I turned and beheld the beadle’s ugly countenance; the man
was shaking me by the arm, and the cathedral lay wrapped in shadows
as a man is wrapped in his cloak.
“Belief,” I said to myself, “is Life! I have just witnessed the funeral
464

of a monarchy, now we must defend the church.”
Paris, February 183l.
Balzac
465

Colonel Chabert
Dedication
466
Colonel Chabert
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
To Madame la Comtesse Ida de Bocarme nee du Chasteler.
Colonel Chabert
“Hullo! There is that old Box-coat again!”
This exclamation was made by a lawyer’s clerk of the class called in
French offices a gutter-jumper—a messenger in fact—who at this
moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He
pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it
gleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was
leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the
window, after hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the courtyard
of a house in the Rue Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville,
attorney-at-law.
“Come, Simonnin, don’t play tricks on people, or I will turn you
out of doors. However poor a client may be, he is still a man, hang it
all!” said the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill of costs.
The lawyer’s messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of

Balzac
thirteen or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special jurisdiction
of the managing clerk, whose errands and billets-doux keep
him employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitions
to the Courts. He is akin to the street boy in his habits, and to the
pettifogger by fate. The boy is almost always ruthless, unbroken,
unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And
yet, almost all these clerklings have an old mother lodging on some
fifth floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty or forty
francs a month.
“If he is a man, why do you call him old Box-coat?” asked Simonnin,
with the air of a schoolboy who has caught out his master.
And he went on eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder
against the window jamb; for he rested standing like a cab-horse, one
of his legs raised and propped against the other, on the toe of his shoe.
“What trick can we play that cove?” said the third clerk, whose name
was Godeschal, in a low voice, pausing in the middle of a discourse he
was extemporizing in an appeal engrossed by the fourth clerk, of which
copies were being made by two neophytes from the provinces.
Then he went on improvising:
“But, in his noble and beneficent wisdom, his Majesty, Louis the
Eighteenth—(write it at full length, heh! Desroches the learned—
you, as you engross it!)—when he resumed the reins of Government,
understood—(what did that old nincompoop ever understand?)—
the high mission to which he had been called by Divine Providence!—
(a note of admiration and six stops. They are pious enough at the
Courts to let us put six)—and his first thought, as is proved by the
date of the order hereinafter designated, was to repair the misfortunes
caused by the terrible and sad disasters of the revolutionary times, by
restoring to his numerous and faithful adherents—(‘numerous’ is flattering,
and ought to please the Bench)—all their unsold estates,
whether within our realm, or in conquered or acquired territory, or in
the endowments of public institutions, for we are, and proclaim ourselves
competent to declare, that this is the spirit and meaning of the
famous, truly loyal order given in—Stop,” said Godeschal to the three
copying clerks, “that rascally sentence brings me to the end of my
page.—Well,” he went on, wetting the back fold of the sheet with
his tongue, so as to be able to fold back the page of thick stamped
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Colonel Chabert
paper, “well, if you want to play him a trick, tell him that the master
can only see his clients between two and three in the morning; we
shall see if he comes, the old ruffian!”
And Godeschal took up the sentence he was dictating— “given
in—Are you ready?”
“Yes,” cried the three writers.
It all went all together, the appeal, the gossip, and the conspiracy.
“Given in—Here, Daddy Boucard, what is the date of the order? We
must dot our i’s and cross our t’s, by Jingo! it helps to fill the pages.”
“By Jingo!” repeated one of the copying clerks before Boucard, the
head clerk, could reply.
“What! have you written by Jingo?” cried Godeschal, looking at
one of the novices, with an expression at once stern and humorous.
“Why, yes,” said Desroches, the fourth clerk, leaning across his
neighbor’s copy, “he has written, ‘We must dot our i’s’ and spelt it by
Gingo!”
All the clerks shouted with laughter.
“Why! Monsieur Hure, you take ‘By Jingo’ for a law term, and
you say you come from Mortagne!” exclaimed Simonnin.
“Scratch it cleanly out,” said the head clerk. “If the judge, whose
business it is to tax the bill, were to see such things, he would say you
were laughing at the whole boiling. You would hear of it from the
chief! Come, no more of this nonsense, Monsieur Hure! A Norman
ought not to write out an appeal without thought. It is the ‘Shoulder
arms!’ of the law.”
“Given in—in?” asked Godeschal.—”Tell me when, Boucard.”
“June 1814,” replied the head clerk, without looking up from
his work.
A knock at the office door interrupted the circumlocutions of the
prolix document. Five clerks with rows of hungry teeth, bright,
mocking eyes, and curly heads, lifted their noses towards the door,
after crying all together in a singing tone, “Come in!”
Boucard kept his face buried in a pile of papers—broutilles (odds
and ends) in French law jargon—and went on drawing out the bill of
costs on which he was busy.
The office was a large room furnished with the traditional stool
which is to be seen in all these dens of law-quibbling. The stove-pipe
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Balzac
crossed the room diagonally to the chimney of a bricked-up fireplace;
on the marble chimney-piece were several chunks of bread,
triangles of Brie cheese, pork cutlets, glasses, bottles, and the head
clerk’s cup of chocolate. The smell of these dainties blended so completely
with that of the immoderately overheated stove and the odor
peculiar to offices and old papers, that the trail of a fox would not
have been perceptible. The floor was covered with mud and snow,
brought in by the clerks. Near the window stood the desk with a
revolving lid, where the head clerk worked, and against the back of it
was the second clerk’s table. The second clerk was at this moment in
Court. It was between eight and nine in the morning.
The only decoration of the office consisted in huge yellow posters,
announcing seizures of real estate, sales, settlements under trust, final
or interim judgments,—all the glory of a lawyer’s office. Behind the
head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was
crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets
hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar
physiognomy to law papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard
boxes, yellow with use, on which might be read the names of
the more important clients whose cases were juicily stewing at this
present time. The dirty window-panes admitted but little daylight.
Indeed, there are very few offices in Paris where it is possible to write
without lamplight before ten in the morning in the month of February,
for they are all left to very natural neglect; every one comes and
no one stays; no one has any personal interest in a scene of mere
routine —neither the attorney, nor the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble
themselves about the appearance of a place which, to the youths, is a
schoolroom; to the clients, a passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The
greasy furniture is handed down to successive owners with such scrupulous
care, that in some offices may still be seen boxes of remainders,
machines for twisting parchment gut, and bags left by the prosecuting
parties of the Chatelet (abbreviated to Chlet)—a Court which,
under the old order of things, represented the present Court of First
Instance (or County Court).
So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its fellows,
something repulsive to the clients—something which made it
one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for
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Colonel Chabert
the mouldy sacristies where prayers are weighed out and paid for like
groceries, and for the old-clothes shops, where flutter the rags that
blight all the illusions of life by showing us the last end of all our
festivities—an attorney’s office would be, of all social marts, the most
loathsome. But we might say the same of the gambling-hell, of the
Law Court, of the lottery office, of the brothel.
But why? In these places, perhaps, the drama being played in a
man’s soul makes him indifferent to accessories, which would also
account for the single-mindedness of great thinkers and men of
great ambitions.
“Where is my penknife?”
“I am eating my breakfast.”
“You go and be hanged! here is a blot on the copy.”
“Silence, gentlemen!”
These various exclamations were uttered simultaneously at the
moment when the old client shut the door with the sort of humility
which disfigures the movements of a man down on his luck. The
stranger tried to smile, but the muscles of his face relaxed as he vainly
looked for some symptoms of amenity on the inexorably indifferent
faces of the six clerks. Accustomed, no doubt, to gauge men, he very
politely addressed the gutter-jumper, hoping to get a civil answer
from this boy of all work.
“Monsieur, is your master at home?”
The pert messenger made no reply, but patted his ear with the
fingers of his left hand, as much as to say, “I am deaf.”
“What do you want, sir?” asked Godeschal, swallowing as he spoke
a mouthful of bread big enough to charge a four-pounder, flourishing
his knife and crossing his legs, throwing up one foot in the air to
the level of his eyes.
“This is the fifth time I have called,” replied the victim. “I wish to
speak to M. Derville.”
“On business?”
“Yes, but I can explain it to no one but—”
“M. Derville is in bed; if you wish to consult him on some difficulty,
he does no serious work till midnight. But if you will lay the
case before us, we could help you just as well as he can to—”
The stranger was unmoved; he looked timidly about him, like a
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Balzac
dog who has got into a strange kitchen and expects a kick. By grace
of their profession, lawyers’ clerks have no fear of thieves; they did
not suspect the owner of the box-coat, and left him to study the
place, where he looked in vain for a chair to sit on, for he was evidently
tired. Attorneys, on principle, do not have many chairs in
their offices. The inferior client, being kept waiting on his feet, goes
away grumbling, but then he does not waste time, which, as an old
lawyer once said, is not allowed for when the bill is taxed.
“Monsieur,” said the old man, “as I have already told you, I cannot
explain my business to any one but M. Derville. I will wait till
he is up.”
Boucard had finished his bill. He smelt the fragrance of his chocolate,
rose from his cane armchair, went to the chimney-piece, looked
the old man from head to foot, stared at his coat, and made an
indescribable grimace. He probably reflected that whichever way
his client might be wrung, it would be impossible to squeeze out a
centime, so he put in a few brief words to rid the office of a bad
customer.
“It is the truth, monsieur. The chief only works at night. If your
business is important, I recommend you to return at one in the morning.”
The stranger looked at the head clerk with a bewildered expression,
and remained motionless for a moment. The clerks, accustomed
to every change of countenance, and the odd whimsicalities to which
indecision or absence of mind gives rise in “parties,” went on eating,
making as much noise with their jaws as horses over a manger, and
paying no further heed to the old man.
“I will come again to-night,” said the stranger at length, with the
tenacious desire, peculiar to the unfortunate, to catch humanity at fault.
The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence
to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of
falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy of God.
“What do you think of that for a cracked pot?” said Simonnin,
without waiting till the old man had shut the door.
“He looks as if he had been buried and dug up again,” said a clerk.
“He is some colonel who wants his arrears of pay,” said the head
clerk.
“No, he is a retired concierge,” said Godeschal.
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Colonel Chabert
“I bet you he is a nobleman,” cried Boucard.
“I bet you he has been a porter,” retorted Godeschal. “Only porters
are gifted by nature with shabby box-coats, as worn and greasy and
frayed as that old body’s. And did you see his trodden-down boots
that let the water in, and his stock which serves for a shirt? He has
slept in a dry arch.”
“He may be of noble birth, and yet have pulled the doorlatch,”
cried Desroches. “It has been known!”
“No,” Boucard insisted, in the midst of laughter, “I maintain that
he was a brewer in 1789, and a colonel in the time of the Republic.”
“I bet theatre tickets round that he never was a soldier,” said
Godeschal.
“Done with you,” answered Boucard.
“Monsieur! Monsieur!” shouted the little messenger, opening the
window.
“What are you at now, Simonnin?” asked Boucard.
“I am calling him that you may ask him whether he is a colonel or
a porter; he must know.”
All the clerks laughed. As to the old man, he was already coming
upstairs again.
“What can we say to him?” cried Godeschal.
“Leave it to me,” replied Boucard.
The poor man came in nervously, his eyes cast down, perhaps not
to betray how hungry he was by looking too greedily at the eatables.
“Monsieur,” said Boucard, “will you have the kindness to leave
your name, so that M. Derville may know—”
“Chabert.”
“The Colonel who was killed at Eylau?” asked Hure, who, having
so far said nothing, was jealous of adding a jest to all the others.
“The same, monsieur,” replied the good man, with antique simplicity.
And he went away.
“Whew!”
“Done brown!”
“Poof!”
“Oh!”
“Ah!”
“Boum!”
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Balzac
“The old rogue!”
“Ting-a-ring-ting!”
“Sold again!”
“Monsieur Desroches, you are going to the play without paying,”
said Hure to the fourth clerk, giving him a slap on the shoulder that
might have killed a rhinoceros.
There was a storm of cat-calls, cries, and exclamations, which all
the onomatopeia of the language would fail to represent.
“Which theatre shall we go to?”
“To the opera,” cried the head clerk.
“In the first place,” said Godeschal, “I never mentioned which theatre.
I might, if I chose, take you to see Madame Saqui.”
“Madame Saqui is not the play.”
“What is a play?” replied Godeschal. “First, we must define the
point of fact. What did I bet, gentlemen? A play. What is a play? A
spectacle. What is a spectacle? Something to be seen—”
“But on that principle you would pay your bet by taking us to see
the water run under the Pont Neuf!” cried Simonnin, interrupting
him.
“To be seen for money,” Godeschal added.
“But a great many things are to be seen for money that are not
plays. The definition is defective,” said Desroches.
“But do listen to me!”
“You are talking nonsense, my dear boy,” said Boucard.
“Is Curtius’ a play?” said Godeschal.
“No,” said the head clerk, “it is a collection of figures—but it is a
spectacle.”
“I bet you a hundred francs to a sou,” Godeschal resumed, “that
Curtius’ Waxworks forms such a show as might be called a play or
theatre. It contains a thing to be seen at various prices, according to
the place you choose to occupy.”
“And so on, and so forth!” said Simonnin.
“You mind I don’t box your ears!” said Godeschal.
The clerk shrugged their shoulders.
“Besides, it is not proved that that old ape was not making game
of us,” he said, dropping his argument, which was drowned in the
laughter of the other clerks. “On my honor, Colonel Chabert is re-
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Colonel Chabert
ally and truly dead. His wife is married again to Comte Ferraud,
Councillor of State. Madame Ferraud is one of our clients.”
“Come, the case is remanded till to-morrow,” said Boucard. “To
work, gentlemen. The deuce is in it; we get nothing done here. Finish
copying that appeal; it must be handed in before the sitting of the
Fourth Chamber, judgment is to be given to-day. Come, on you
go!”
“If he really were Colonel Chabert, would not that impudent rascal
Simonnin have felt the leather of his boot in the right place when
he pretended to be deaf?” said Desroches, regarding this remark as
more conclusive than Godeschal’s.
“Since nothing is settled,” said Boucard, “let us all agree to go to
the upper boxes of the Francais and see Talma in ‘Nero.’ Simonnin
may go to the pit.”
And thereupon the head clerk sat down at his table, and the others
followed his example.
“Given in June eighteen hundred and fourteen (in words),” said
Godeschal. “Ready?”
“Yes,” replied the two copying-clerks and the engrosser, whose pens
forthwith began to creak over the stamped paper, making as much
noise in the office as a hundred cockchafers imprisoned by schoolboys
in paper cages.
“And we hope that my lords on the Bench,” the extemporizing clerk
went on. “Stop! I must read my sentence through again. I do not
understand it myself.”
“Forty-six (that must often happen) and three forty-nines,” said
Boucard.
“We hope,” Godeschal began again, after reading all through the
document, “that my lords on the Bench will not be less magnanimous
than the august author of the decree, and that they will do justice
against the miserable claims of the acting committee of the chief Board
of the Legion of Honor by interpreting the law in the wide sense we
have here set forth—”
“Monsieur Godeschal, wouldn’t you like a glass of water?” said the
little messenger.
“That imp of a boy!” said Boucard. “Here, get on your doublesoled
shanks-mare, take this packet, and spin off to the Invalides.”
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“Here set forth,” Godeschal went on. “Add in the interest of Madame
la Vicomtesse (at full length) de Grandlieu.”
“What!” cried the chief, “are you thinking of drawing up an appeal
in the case of Vicomtesse de Grandlieu against the Legion of Honor—
a case for the office to stand or fall by? You are something like an ass!
Have the goodness to put aside your copies and your notes; you may
keep all that for the case of Navarreins against the Hospitals. It is
late. I will draw up a little petition myself, with a due allowance of
‘inasmuch,’ and go to the Courts myself.”
This scene is typical of the thousand delights which, when we look
back on our youth, make us say, “Those were good times.”
At about one in the morning Colonel Chabert, self-styled, knocked
at the door of Maitre Derville, attorney to the Court of First Instance
in the Department of the Seine. The porter told him that
Monsieur Derville had not yet come in. The old man said he had an
appointment, and was shown upstairs to the rooms occupied by the
famous lawyer, who, notwithstanding his youth, was considered to
have one of the longest heads in Paris.
Having rung, the distrustful applicant was not a little astonished at
finding the head clerk busily arranging in a convenient order on his
master’s dining-room table the papers relating to the cases to be tried
on the morrow. The clerk, not less astonished, bowed to the Colonel
and begged him to take a seat, which the client did.
“On my word, monsieur, I thought you were joking yesterday
when you named such an hour for an interview,” said the old man,
with the forced mirth of a ruined man, who does his best to smile.
“The clerks were joking, but they were speaking the truth too,”
replied the man, going on with his work. “M. Derville chooses this
hour for studying his cases, taking stock of their possibilities, arranging
how to conduct them, deciding on the line of defence. His prodigious
intellect is freer at this hour—the only time when he can
have the silence and quiet needed for the conception of good ideas.
Since he entered the profession, you are the third person to come to
him for a consultation at this midnight hour. After coming in the
chief will discuss each case, read everything, spend four or five hours
perhaps over the business, then he will ring for me and explain to me
475

Colonel Chabert
his intentions. In the morning from ten to two he hears what his
clients have to say, then he spends the rest of his day in appointments.
In the evening he goes into society to keep up his connections.
So he has only the night for undermining his cases, ransacking
the arsenal of the code, and laying his plan of battle. He is determined
never to lose a case; he loves his art. He will not undertake
every case, as his brethren do. That is his life, an exceptionally active
one. And he makes a great deal of money.”
As he listened to this explanation, the old man sat silent, and his
strange face assumed an expression so bereft of intelligence, that the
clerk, after looking at him, thought no more about him.
A few minutes later Derville came in, in evening dress; his head
clerk opened the door to him, and went back to finish arranging
the papers. The young lawyer paused for a moment in amazement
on seeing in the dim light the strange client who awaited him.
Colonel Chabert was as absolutely immovable as one of the wax
figures in Curtius’ collection to which Godeschal had proposed to
treat his fellow-clerks. This quiescence would not have been a subject
for astonishment if it had not completed the supernatural aspect
of the man’s whole person. The old soldier was dry and lean.
His forehead, intentionally hidden under a smoothly combed wig,
gave him a look of mystery. His eyes seemed shrouded in a transparent
film; you would have compared them to dingy mother-ofpearl
with a blue iridescence changing in the gleam of the wax lights.
His face, pale, livid, and as thin as a knife, if I may use such a vulgar
expression, was as the face of the dead. Round his neck was a tight
black silk stock.
Below the dark line of this rag the body was so completely hidden
in shadow that a man of imagination might have supposed the old
head was due to some chance play of light and shade, or have taken it
for a portrait by Rembrandt, without a frame. The brim of the hat
which covered the old man’s brow cast a black line of shadow on the
upper part of the face. This grotesque effect, though natural, threw
into relief by contrast the white furrows, the cold wrinkles, the colorless
tone of the corpse-like countenance. And the absence of all
movement in the figure, of all fire in the eye, were in harmony with
a certain look of melancholy madness, and the deteriorating symp-
476

Balzac
toms characteristic of senility, giving the face an indescribably illstarred
look which no human words could render.
But an observer, especially a lawyer, could also have read in this
stricken man the signs of deep sorrow, the traces of grief which had
worn into this face, as drops of water from the sky falling on fine
marble at last destroy its beauty. A physician, an author, or a judge
might have discerned a whole drama at the sight of its sublime horror,
while the least charm was its resemblance to the grotesques which
artists amuse themselves by sketching on a corner of the lithographic
stone while chatting with a friend.
On seeing the attorney, the stranger started, with the convulsive
thrill that comes over a poet when a sudden noise rouses him from a
fruitful reverie in silence and at night. The old man hastily removed
his hat and rose to bow to the young man; the leather lining of his
hat was doubtless very greasy; his wig stuck to it without his noticing
it, and left his head bare, showing his skull horribly disfigured by a
scar beginning at the nape of the neck and ending over the right eye,
a prominent seam all across his head. The sudden removal of the
dirty wig which the poor man wore to hide this gash gave the two
lawyers no inclination to laugh, so horrible to behold was this riven
skull. The first idea suggested by the sight of this old wound was,
“His intelligence must have escaped through that cut.”
“If this is not Colonel Chabert, he is some thorough-going trooper!”
thought Boucard.
“Monsieur,” said Derville, “to whom have I the honor of speaking?”
“To Colonel Chabert.”
“Which?”
“He who was killed at Eylau,” replied the old man.
On hearing this strange speech, the lawyer and his clerk glanced at
each other, as much as to say, “He is mad.”
“Monsieur,” the Colonel went on, “I wish to confide to you the
secret of my position.”
A thing worthy of note is the natural intrepidity of lawyers. Whether
from the habit of receiving a great many persons, or from the deep
sense of the protection conferred on them by the law, or from confidence
in their missions, they enter everywhere, fearing nothing, like
priests and physicians. Derville signed to Boucard, who vanished.
477

Colonel Chabert
“During the day, sir,” said the attorney, “I am not so miserly of my
time, but at night every minute is precious. So be brief and concise.
Go to the facts without digression. I will ask for any explanations I
may consider necessary. Speak.”
Having bid his strange client to be seated, the young man sat down
at the table; but while he gave his attention to the deceased Colonel,
he turned over the bundles of papers.
“You know, perhaps,” said the dead man, “that I commanded a cavalry
regiment at Eylau. I was of important service to the success of
Murat’s famous charge which decided the victory. Unhappily for me,
my death is a historical fact, recorded in Victoires et Conquetes, where it
is related in full detail. We cut through the three Russian lines, which at
once closed up and formed again, so that we had to repeat the movement
back again. At the moment when we were nearing the Emperor,
after having scattered the Russians, I came against a squadron of the
enemy’s cavalry. I rushed at the obstinate brutes. Two Russian officers,
perfect giants, attacked me both at once. One of them gave me a cut
across the head that crashed through everything, even a black silk cap I
wore next my head, and cut deep into the skull. I fell from my horse.
Murat came up to support me. He rode over my body, he and all his
men, fifteen hundred of them—there might have been more! My death
was announced to the Emperor, who as a precaution —for he was
fond of me, was the master—wished to know if there were no hope of
saving the man he had to thank for such a vigorous attack. He sent two
surgeons to identify me and bring me into Hospital, saying, perhaps
too carelessly, for he was very busy, ‘Go and see whether by any chance
poor Chabert is still alive.’ These rascally saw-bones, who had just seen
me lying under the hoofs of the horses of two regiments, no doubt did
not trouble themselves to feel my pulse, and reported that I was quite
dead. The certificate of death was probably made out in accordance
with the rules of military jurisprudence.”
As he heard his visitor express himself with complete lucidity, and
relate a story so probable though so strange, the young lawyer ceased
fingering the papers, rested his left elbow on the table, and with his
head on his hand looked steadily at the Colonel.
“Do you know, monsieur, that I am lawyer to the Countess Ferraud,”
he said, interrupting the speaker, “Colonel Chabert’s widow?”
478

Balzac
“My wife—yes monsieur. Therefore, after a hundred fruitless attempts
to interest lawyers, who have all thought me mad, I made up
my mind to come to you. I will tell you of my misfortunes afterwards;
for the present, allow me to prove the facts, explaining rather
how things must have fallen out rather than how they did occur.
Certain circumstances, known, I suppose to no one but the Almighty,
compel me to speak of some things as hypothetical. The wounds I
had received must presumably have produced tetanus, or have thrown
me into a state analogous to that of a disease called, I believe, catalepsy.
Otherwise how is it conceivable that I should have been stripped,
as is the custom in time of the war, and thrown into the common
grave by the men ordered to bury the dead?
“Allow me here to refer to a detail of which I could know nothing
till after the event, which, after all, I must speak of as my death. At
Stuttgart, in 1814, I met an old quartermaster of my regiment. This
dear fellow, the only man who chose to recognize me, and of whom
I will tell you more later, explained the marvel of my preservation,
by telling me that my horse was shot in the flank at the moment
when I was wounded. Man and beast went down together, like a
monk cut out of card-paper. As I fell, to the right or to the left, I was
no doubt covered by the body of my horse, which protected me
from being trampled to death or hit by a ball.
“When I came to myself, monsieur, I was in a position and an
atmosphere of which I could give you no idea if I talked till tomorrow.
the little air there was to breathe was foul. I wanted to
move, and found no room. I opened my eyes, and saw nothing. The
most alarming circumstance was the lack of air, and this enlightened
me as to my situation. I understood that no fresh air could penetrate
to me, and that I must die. This thought took off the sense of intolerable
pain which had aroused me. There was a violent singing in my
ears. I heard—or I thought I heard, I will assert nothing—groans
from the world of dead among whom I was lying. Some nights I still
think I hear those stifled moans; though the remembrance of that
time is very obscure, and my memory very indistinct, in spite of my
impressions of far more acute suffering I was fated to go through,
and which have confused my ideas.
“But there was something more awful than cries; there was a si-
479

Colonel Chabert
lence such as I have never known elsewhere—literally, the silence of
the grave. At last, by raising my hands and feeling the dead, I discerned
a vacant space between my head and the human carrion above.
I could thus measure the space, granted by a chance of which I knew
not the cause. It would seem that, thanks to the carelessness and the
haste with which we had been pitched into the trench, two dead
bodies had leaned across and against each other, forming an angle like
that made by two cards when a child is building a card castle. Feeling
about me at once, for there was no time for play, I happily felt an
arm lying detached, the arm of a Hercules! A stout bone, to which I
owed my rescue. But for this unhoped-for help, I must have perished.
But with a fury you may imagine, I began to work my way
through the bodies which separated me from the layer of earth which
had no doubt been thrown over us—I say us, as if there had been
others living! I worked with a will, monsieur, for here I am! But to
this day I do not know how I succeeded in getting through the pile
of flesh which formed a barrier between me and life. You will say I
had three arms. This crowbar, which I used cleverly enough, opened
out a little air between the bodies I moved, and I economized my
breath. At last I saw daylight, but through snow!
“At that moment I perceived that my head was cut open. Happily
my blood, or that of my comrades, or perhaps the torn skin of my
horse, who knows, had in coagulating formed a sort of natural plaster.
But, in spite of it, I fainted away when my head came into contact
with the snow. However, the little warmth left in me melted the
snow about me; and when I recovered consciousness, I found myself
in the middle of a round hole, where I stood shouting as long as I
could. But the sun was rising, so I had very little chance of being
heard. Was there any one in the fields yet? I pulled myself up, using
my feet as a spring, resting on one of the dead, whose ribs were firm.
You may suppose that this was not the moment for saying, ‘Respect
courage in misfortune!’ In short, monsieur, after enduring the anguish,
if the word is strong enough for my frenzy, of seeing for a long
time, yes, quite a long time, those cursed Germans flying from a
voice they heard where they could see no one, I was dug out by a
woman, who was brave or curious enough to come close to my head,
which must have looked as though it had sprouted from the ground
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Balzac
like a mushroom. This woman went to fetch her husband, and between
them they got me to their poor hovel.
“It would seem that I must have again fallen into a catalepsy—
allow me to use the word to describe a state of which I have no idea,
but which, from the account given by my hosts, I suppose to have
been the effect of that malady. I remained for six months between
life and death; not speaking, or, if I spoke, talking in delirium. At
last, my hosts got me admitted to the hospital at Heilsberg.
“You will understand, Monsieur, that I came out of the womb of
the grave as naked as I came from my mother’s; so that six months
afterwards, when I remembered, one fine morning, that I had been
Colonel Chabert, and when, on recovering my wits, I tried to exact
from my nurse rather more respect than she paid to any poor devil,
all my companions in the ward began to laugh. Luckily for me, the
surgeon, out of professional pride, had answered for my cure, and
was naturally interested in his patient. When I told him coherently
about my former life, this good man, named Sparchmann, signed a
deposition, drawn up in the legal form of his country, giving an
account of the miraculous way in which I had escaped from the trench
dug for the dead, the day and hour when I had been found by my
benefactress and her husband, the nature and exact spot of my injuries,
adding to these documents a description of my person.
“Well, monsieur, I have neither these important pieces of evidence,
nor the declaration I made before a notary at Heilsberg, with a view
to establishing my identity. From the day when I was turned out of
that town by the events of the war, I have wandered about like a
vagabond, begging my bread, treated as a madman when I have told
my story, without ever having found or earned a sou to enable me to
recover the deeds which would prove my statements, and restore me
to society. My sufferings have often kept me for six months at a time
in some little town, where every care was taken of the invalid Frenchman,
but where he was laughed at to his face as soon as he said he was
Colonel Chabert. For a long time that laughter, those doubts, used
to put me into rages which did me harm, and which even led to my
being locked up at Stuttgart as a madman. And indeed, as you may
judge from my story, there was ample reason for shutting a man up.
“At the end of two years’ detention, which I was compelled to submit
481

Colonel Chabert
to, after hearing my keepers say a thousand times, ‘Here is a poor man
who thinks he is Colonel Chabert’ to people who would reply, ‘Poor
fellow!’ I became convinced of the impossibility of my own adventure.
I grew melancholy, resigned, and quiet, and gave up calling myself Colonel
Chabert, in order to get out of my prison, and see France once more.
Oh, monsieur! To see Paris again was a delirium which I—”
Without finishing his sentence, Colonel Chabert fell into a deep
study, which Derville respected.
“One fine day,” his visitor resumed, “one spring day, they gave me
the key of the fields, as we say, and ten thalers, admitting that I
talked quite sensibly on all subjects, and no longer called myself
Colonel Chabert. On my honor, at that time, and even to this day,
sometimes I hate my name. I wish I were not myself. The sense of
my rights kills me. If my illness had but deprived me of all memory
of my past life, I could be happy. I should have entered the service
again under any name, no matter what, and should, perhaps, have
been made Field-Marshal in Austria or Russia. Who knows?”
“Monsieur,” said the attorney, “you have upset all my ideas. I feel
as if I heard you in a dream. Pause for a moment, I beg of you.”
“You are the only person,” said the Colonel, with a melancholy
look, “who ever listened to me so patiently. No lawyer has been
willing to lend me ten napoleons to enable me to procure from Germany
the necessary documents to begin my lawsuit—”
“What lawsuit?” said the attorney, who had forgotten his client’s
painful position in listening to the narrative of his past sufferings.
“Why, monsieur, is not the Comtesse Ferraud my wife? She has
thirty thousand francs a year, which belong to me, and she will not
give me a son. When I tell lawyers these things—men of sense; when
I propose—I, a beggar—to bring action against a Count and Countess;
when I—a dead man—bring up as against a certificate of death a
certificate of marriage and registers of births, they show me out, either
with the air of cold politeness, which you all know how to
assume to rid yourself of a hapless wretch, or brutally, like men who
think they have to deal with a swindler or a madman—it depends on
their nature. I have been buried under the dead; but now I am buried
under the living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society,
which wants to shove me underground again!”
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Balzac
“Pray resume your narrative,” said Derville.
“‘Pray resume it!’ “ cried the hapless old man, taking the young
lawyer’s hand. “That is the first polite word I have heard since—”
The Colonel wept. Gratitude choked his voice. The appealing and
unutterable eloquence that lies in the eyes, in a gesture, even in silence,
entirely convinced Derville, and touched him deeply.
“Listen, monsieur,” said he; “I have this evening won three hundred
francs at cards. I may very well lay out half that sum in making
a man happy. I will begin the inquiries and researches necessary to
obtain the documents of which you speak, and until they arrive I
will give you five francs a day. If you are Colonel Chabert, you will
pardon the smallness of the loan as it is coming from a young man
who has his fortune to make. Proceed.”
The Colonel, as he called himself, sat for a moment motionless
and bewildered; the depth of his woes had no doubt destroyed his
powers of belief. Though he was eager in pursuit of his military distinction,
of his fortune, of himself, perhaps it was in obedience to
the inexplicable feeling, the latent germ in every man’s heart, to which
we owe the experiments of alchemists, the passion for glory, the discoveries
of astronomy and of physics, everything which prompts man
to expand his being by multiplying himself through deeds or ideas.
In his mind the Ego was now but a secondary object, just as the
vanity of success or the pleasures of winning become dearer to the
gambler than the object he has at stake. The young lawyer’s words
were as a miracle to this man, for ten years repudiated by his wife, by
justice, by the whole social creation. To find in a lawyer’s office the
ten gold pieces which had so long been refused him by so many
people, and in so many ways! The colonel was like the lady who,
having been ill of a fever for fifteen years, fancied she had some fresh
complaint when she was cured. There are joys in which we have
ceased to believe; they fall on us, it is like a thunderbolt; they burn
us. The poor man’s gratitude was too great to find utterance. To
superficial observers he seemed cold, but Derville saw complete honesty
under this amazement. A swindler would have found his voice.
“Where was I?” said the Colonel, with the simplicity of a child or of
a soldier, for there is often something of the child in a true soldier, and
almost always something of the soldier in a child, especially in France.
483

Colonel Chabert
“At Stuttgart. You were out of prison,” said Derville.
“You know my wife?” asked the Colonel.
“Yes,” said Derville, with a bow.
“What is she like?”
“Still quite charming.”
The old man held up his hand, and seemed to be swallowing down
some secret anguish with the grave and solemn resignation that is
characteristic of men who have stood the ordeal of blood and fire on
the battlefield.
“Monsieur,” said he, with a sort of cheerfulness—for he breathed
again, the poor Colonel; he had again risen from the grave; he had
just melted a covering of snow less easily thawed than that which had
once before frozen his head; and he drew a deep breath, as if he had
just escaped from a dungeon—”Monsieur, if I had been a handsome
young fellow, none of my misfortunes would have befallen me.
Women believe in men when they flavor their speeches with the
word Love. They hurry then, they come, they go, they are everywhere
at once; they intrigue, they assert facts, they play the very devil
for a man who takes their fancy. But how could I interest a woman?
I had a face like a Requiem. I was dressed like a sans-culotte. I was
more like an Esquimaux than a Frenchman—I, who had formerly
been considered one of the smartest of fops in 1799!—I, Chabert,
Count of the Empire.
“Well, on the very day when I was turned out into the streets like a
dog, I met the quartermaster of whom I just now spoke. This old
soldier’s name was Boutin. The poor devil and I made the queerest
pair of broken-down hacks I ever set eyes on. I met him out walking;
but though I recognized him, he could not possibly guess who I was.
We went into a tavern together. In there, when I told him my name,
Boutin’s mouth opened from ear to ear in a roar of laughter, like the
bursting of a mortar. That mirth, monsieur, was one of the keenest
pangs I have known. It told me without disguise how great were the
changes in me! I was, then, unrecognizable even to the humblest and
most grateful of my former friends!
“I had once saved Boutin’s life, but it was only the repayment of a
debt I owed him. I need not tell you how he did me this service; it
was at Ravenna, in Italy. The house where Boutin prevented my be-
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Balzac
ing stabbed was not extremely respectable. At that time I was not a
colonel, but, like Boutin himself, a common trooper. Happily there
were certain details of this adventure which could be known only to
us two, and when I recalled them to his mind his incredulity diminished.
I then told him the story of my singular experiences. Although
my eyes and my voice, he told me, were strangely altered, although I
had neither hair, teeth, nor eyebrows, and was as colorless as an Albino,
he at last recognized his Colonel in the beggar, after a thousand
questions, which I answered triumphantly.
“He related his adventures; they were not less extraordinary than my
own; he had lately come back from the frontiers of China, which he
had tried to cross after escaping from Siberia. He told me of the catastrophe
of the Russian campaign, and of Napoleon’s first abdication.
That news was one of the things which caused me most anguish!
“We were two curious derelicts, having been rolled over the globe
as pebbles are rolled by the ocean when storms bear them from shore
to shore. Between us we had seen Egypt, Syria, Spain, Russia, Holland,
Germany, Italy and Dalmatia, England, China, Tartary, Siberia;
the only thing wanting was that neither of us had been to America or
the Indies. Finally, Boutin, who still was more locomotive than I,
undertook to go to Paris as quickly as might be to inform my wife of
the predicament in which I was. I wrote a long letter full of details to
Madame Chabert. That, monsieur, was the fourth! If I had had any
relations, perhaps nothing of all this might have happened; but, to
be frank with you, I am but a workhouse child, a soldier, whose sole
fortune was his courage, whose sole family is mankind at large, whose
country is France, whose only protector is the Almighty.—Nay, I am
wrong! I had a father—the Emperor! Ah! if he were but here, the
dear man! If he could see his Chabert, as he used to call me, in the
state in which I am now, he would be in a rage! What is to be done?
Our sun is set, and we are all out in the cold now. After all, political
events might account for my wife’s silence!
“Boutin set out. He was a lucky fellow! He had two bears, admirably
trained, which brought him in a living. I could not go with him;
the pain I suffered forbade my walking long stages. I wept, monsieur,
when we parted, after I had gone as far as my state allowed in
company with him and his bears. At Carlsruhe I had an attack of
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Colonel Chabert
neuralgia in the head, and lay for six weeks on straw in an inn. I
should never have ended if I were to tell you all the distresses of my
life as a beggar. Moral suffering, before which physical suffering pales,
nevertheless excites less pity, because it is not seen. I remember shedding
tears, as I stood in front of a fine house in Strassburg where once
I had given an entertainment, and where nothing was given me, not
even a piece of bread. Having agreed with Boutin on the road I was
to take, I went to every post-office to ask if there were a letter or
some money for me. I arrived at Paris without having found either.
What despair I had been forced to endure! ‘Boutin must be dead! I
told myself, and in fact the poor fellow was killed at Waterloo. I
heard of his death later, and by mere chance. His errand to my wife
had, of course, been fruitless.
“At last I entered Paris—with the Cossacks. To me this was grief
on grief. On seeing the Russians in France, I quite forgot that I had
no shoes on my feet nor money in my pocket. Yes, monsieur, my
clothes were in tatters. The evening before I reached Paris I was obliged
to bivouac in the woods of Claye. The chill of the night air no doubt
brought on an attack of some nameless complaint which seized me
as I was crossing the Faubourg Saint-Martin. I dropped almost senseless
at the door of an ironmonger’s shop. When I recovered I was in
a bed in the Hotel-Dieu. There I stayed very contentedly for about a
month. I was then turned out; I had no money, but I was well, and
my feet were on the good stones of Paris. With what delight and
haste did I make my way to the Rue du Mont-Blanc, where my wife
should be living in a house belonging to me! Bah! the Rue du Mont-
Blanc was now the Rue de la Chausee d’Antin; I could not find my
house; it had been sold and pulled down. Speculators had built several
houses over my gardens. Not knowing that my wife had married M.
Ferraud, I could obtain no information.
“At last I went to the house of an old lawyer who had been in
charge of my affairs. This worthy man was dead, after selling his
connection to a younger man. This gentleman informed me, to my
great surprise, of the administration of my estate, the settlement of
the moneys, of my wife’s marriage, and the birth of her two children.
When I told him that I was Colonel Chabert, he laughed so
heartily that I left him without saying another word. My detention
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at Stuttgart had suggested possibilities of Charenton, and I determined
to act with caution. Then, monsieur, knowing where my wife
lived, I went to her house, my heart high with hope.—Well,” said
the Colonel, with a gesture of concentrated fury, “when I called under
an assumed name I was not admitted, and on the day when I
used my own I was turned out of doors.
“To see the Countess come home from a ball or the play in the early
morning, I have sat whole nights through, crouching close to the wall
of her gateway. My eyes pierced the depths of the carriage, which flashed
past me with the swiftness of lightning, and I caught a glimpse of the
woman who is my wife and no longer mine. Oh, from that day I have
lived for vengeance!” cried the old man in a hollow voice, and suddenly
standing up in front of Derville. “She knows that I am alive;
since my return she has had two letters written with my own hand.
She loves me no more!—I—I know not whether I love or hate her. I
long for her and curse her by turns. To me she owes all her fortune, all
her happiness; well, she has not sent me the very smallest pittance.
Sometimes I do not know what will become of me!”
With these words the veteran dropped on to his chair again and
remained motionless. Derville sat in silence, studying his client.
“It is a serious business,” he said at length, mechanically. “Even
granting the genuineness of the documents to be procured from
Heilsberg, it is not proved to me that we can at once win our case. It
must go before three tribunals in succession. I must think such a
matter over with a clear head; it is quite exceptional.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel, coldly, with a haughty jerk of his head, “if
I fail, I can die—but not alone.”
The feeble old man had vanished. The eyes were those of a man of
energy, lighted up with the spark of desire and revenge.
“We must perhaps compromise,” said the lawyer.
“Compromise!” echoed Colonel Chabert. “Am I dead, or am I alive?”
“I hope, monsieur,” the attorney went on, “that you will follow
my advice. Your cause is mine. You will soon perceive the interest I
take in your situation, almost unexampled in judicial records. For
the moment I will give you a letter to my notary, who will pay to
your order fifty francs every ten days. It would be unbecoming for
you to come here to receive alms. If you are Colonel Chabert, you
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Colonel Chabert
ought to be at no man’s mercy. I shall record these advances as a loan;
you have estates to recover; you are rich.”
This delicate compassion brought tears to the old man’s eyes.
Derville rose hastily, for it was perhaps not correct for a lawyer to
show emotion; he went into the adjoining room, and came back
with an unsealed letter, which he gave to the Colonel. When the
poor man held it in his hand, he felt through the paper two gold
pieces.
“Will you be good enough to describe the documents, and tell me
the name of the town, and in what kingdom?” said the lawyer.
The Colonel dictated the information, and verified the spelling of
the names of places; then he took his hat in one hand, looked at
Derville, and held out the other—a horny hand, saying with much
simplicity:
“On my honor, sir, after the Emperor, you are the man to whom I
shall owe most. You are a splendid fellow!”
The attorney clapped his hand into the Colonel’s, saw him to the
stairs, and held a light for him.
“Boucard,” said Derville to his head clerk, “I have just listened to a
tale that may cost me five and twenty louis. If I am robbed, I shall
not regret the money, for I shall have seen the most consummate
actor of the day.”
When the Colonel was in the street and close to a lamp, he took
the two twenty-franc pieces out of the letter and looked at them
for a moment under the light. It was the first gold he had seen for
nine years.
“I may smoke cigars!” he said to himself.
About three months after this interview, at night, in Derville’s room,
the notary commissioned to advance the half-pay on Derville’s account
to his eccentric client, came to consult the attorney on a serious
matter, and began by begging him to refund the six hundred
francs that the old soldier had received.
“Are you amusing yourself with pensioning the old army?” said the
notary, laughing—a young man named Crottat, who had just bought
up the office in which he had been head clerk, his chief having fled in
consequence of a disastrous bankruptcy.
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“I have to thank you, my dear sir, for reminding me of that affair,”
replied Derville. “My philanthropy will not carry me beyond twentyfive
louis; I have, I fear, already been the dupe of my patriotism.”
As Derville finished the sentence, he saw on his desk the papers his head
clerk had laid out for him. His eye was struck by the appearance of the
stamps—long, square, and triangular, in red and blue ink, which distinguished
a letter that had come through the Prussian, Austrian, Bavarian,
and French post-offices.
“Ah ha!” said he with a laugh, “here is the last act of the comedy;
now we shall see if I have been taken in!”
He took up the letter and opened it; but he could not read it; it
was written in German.
“Boucard, go yourself and have this letter translated, and bring it
back immediately,” said Derville, half opening his study door, and
giving the letter to the head clerk.
The notary at Berlin, to whom the lawyer had written, informed
him that the documents he had been requested to forward would
arrive within a few days of this note announcing them. They were,
he said, all perfectly regular and duly witnessed, and legally stamped
to serve as evidence in law. He also informed him that almost all the
witnesses to the facts recorded under these affidavits were still to be
found at Eylau, in Prussia, and that the woman to whom M. le
Comte Chabert owed his life was still living in a suburb of Heilsberg.
“This looks like business,” cried Derville, when Boucard had given
him the substance of the letter. “But look here, my boy,” he went on,
addressing the notary, “I shall want some information which ought
to exist in your office. Was it not that old rascal Roguin—?”
“We will say that unfortunate, that ill-used Roguin,” interrupted
Alexandre Crottat with a laugh.
“Well, was it not that ill-used man who has just carried off eight
hundred thousand francs of his clients’ money, and reduced several
families to despair, who effected the settlement of Chabert’s estate? I
fancy I have seen that in the documents in our case of Ferraud.”
“Yes,” said Crottat. “It was when I was third clerk; I copied the papers
and studied them thoroughly. Rose Chapotel, wife and widow of
Hyacinthe, called Chabert, Count of the Empire, grand officer of the
Legion of Honor. They had married without settlement; thus, they
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Colonel Chabert
held all the property in common. To the best of my recollections, the
personalty was about six hundred thousand francs. Before his marriage,
Colonel Chabert had made a will in favor of the hospitals of
Paris, by which he left them one-quarter of the fortune he might possess
at the time of his decease, the State to take the other quarter. The
will was contested, there was a forced sale, and then a division, for the
attorneys went at a pace. At the time of the settlement the monster
who was then governing France handed over to the widow, by special
decree, the portion bequeathed to the treasury.”
“So that Comte Chabert’s personal fortune was no more than three
hundred thousand francs?”
“Consequently so it was, old fellow!” said Crottat. “You lawyers
sometimes are very clear-headed, though you are accused of false practices
in pleading for one side or the other.”
Colonel Chabert, whose address was written at the bottom of the
first receipt he had given the notary, was lodging in the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau, Rue du Petit-Banquier, with an old quartermaster of
the Imperial Guard, now a cowkeeper, named Vergniaud. Having
reached the spot, Derville was obliged to go on foot in search of his
client, for his coachman declined to drive along an unpaved street,
where the ruts were rather too deep for cab wheels. Looking about
him on all sides, the lawyer at last discovered at the end of the street
nearest to the boulevard, between two walls built of bones and mud,
two shabby stone gate-posts, much knocked about by carts, in spite
of two wooden stumps that served as blocks. These posts supported
a cross beam with a penthouse coping of tiles, and on the beam, in
red letters, were the words, “Vergniaud, dairyman.” To the right of
this inscription were some eggs, to the left a cow, all painted in white.
The gate was open, and no doubt remained open all day. Beyond a
good-sized yard there was a house facing the gate, if indeed the name
of house may be applied to one of the hovels built in the neighborhood
of Paris, which are like nothing else, not even the most wretched
dwellings in the country, of which they have all the poverty without
their poetry.
Indeed, in the midst of the fields, even a hovel may have a certain
grace derived from the pure air, the verdure, the open country—a
hill, a serpentine road, vineyards, quickset hedges, moss-grown thatch
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and rural implements; but poverty in Paris gains dignity only by
horror. Though recently built, this house seemed ready to fall into
ruins. None of its materials had found a legitimate use; they had
been collected from the various demolitions which are going on every
day in Paris. On a shutter made of the boards of a shop-sign
Derville read the words, “Fancy Goods.” The windows were all mismatched
and grotesquely placed. The ground floor, which seemed to
be the habitable part, was on one side raised above the soil, and on
the other sunk in the rising ground. Between the gate and the house
lay a puddle full of stable litter, into which flowed the rain-water and
house waste. The back wall of this frail construction, which seemed
rather more solidly built than the rest, supported a row of barred
hutches, where rabbits bred their numerous families. To the right of
the gate was the cowhouse, with a loft above for fodder; it communicated
with the house through the dairy. To the left was a poultry
yard, with a stable and pig-styes, the roofs finished, like that of the
house, with rough deal boards nailed so as to overlap, and shabbily
thatched with rushes.
Like most of the places where the elements of the huge meal daily
devoured by Paris are every day prepared, the yard Derville now entered
showed traces of the hurry that comes of the necessity for being
ready at a fixed hour. The large pot-bellied tin cans in which milk is
carried, and the little pots for cream, were flung pell-mell at the dairy
door, with their linen-covered stoppers. The rags that were used to
clean them, fluttered in the sunshine, riddled with holes, hanging to
strings fastened to poles. The placid horse, of a breed known only to
milk-women, had gone a few steps from the cart, and was standing
in front of the stable, the door being shut. A goat was munching the
shoots of a starved and dusty vine that clung to the cracked yellow
wall of the house. A cat, squatting on the cream jars, was licking
them over. The fowls, scared by Derville’s approach, scuttered away
screaming, and the watch-dog barked.
“And the man who decided the victory at Eylau is to be found
here!” said Derville to himself, as his eyes took in at a glance the
general effect of the squalid scene.
The house had been left in charge of three little boys. One, who
had climbed to the top of the cart loaded with hay, was pitching
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Colonel Chabert
stones into the chimney of a neighboring house, in the hope that
they might fall into a saucepan; another was trying to get a pig into a
cart, to hoist it by making the whole thing tilt. When Derville asked
them if M. Chabert lived there, neither of them replied, but all three
looked at him with a sort of bright stupidity, if I may combine those
two words. Derville repeated his questions, but without success. Provoked
by the saucy cunning of these three imps, he abused them
with the sort of pleasantry which young men think they have the
right to address to little boys, and they broke the silence with a horselaugh.
Then Derville was angry.
The Colonel, hearing him, now came out of the little low room,
close to the dairy, and stood on the threshold of his doorway with
indescribable military coolness. He had in his mouth a very finelycolored
pipe—a technical phrase to a smoker—a humble, short clay
pipe of the kind called “brule-queule.” He lifted the peak of a dreadfully
greasy cloth cap, saw Derville, and came straight across the
midden to join his benefactor the sooner, calling out in friendly tones
to the boys:
“Silence in the ranks!”
The children at once kept a respectful silence, which showed the
power the old soldier had over them.
“Why did you not write to me?” he said to Derville. “Go along by
the cowhouse! There—the path is paved there,” he exclaimed, seeing
the lawyer’s hesitancy, for he did not wish to wet his feet in the
manure heap.
Jumping from one dry spot to another, Derville reached the door
by which the Colonel had come out. Chabert seemed but ill pleased
at having to receive him in the bed-room he occupied; and, in fact,
Derville found but one chair there. The Colonel’s bed consisted of
some trusses of straw, over which his hostess had spread two or three
of those old fragments of carpet, picked up heaven knows where,
which milk-women use to cover the seats of their carts. The floor
was simply the trodden earth. The walls, sweating salt-petre, green
with mould, and full of cracks, were so excessively damp that on the
side where the Colonel’s bed was a reed mat had been nailed. The
famous box-coat hung on a nail. Two pairs of old boots lay in a
corner. There was not a sign of linen. On the worm-eaten table the
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Balzac
Bulletins de la Grande Armee, reprinted by Plancher, lay open, and
seemed to be the Colonel’s reading; his countenance was calm and
serene in the midst of this squalor. His visit to Derville seemed to
have altered his features; the lawyer perceived in them traces of a
happy feeling, a particular gleam set there by hope.
“Does the smell of the pipe annoy you?” he said, placing the dilapidated
straw-bottomed chair for his lawyer.
“But, Colonel, you are dreadfully uncomfortable here!”
The speech was wrung from Derville by the distrust natural to
lawyers, and the deplorable experience which they derive early in life
from the appalling and obscure tragedies at which they look on.
“Here,” said he to himself, “is a man who has of course spent my
money in satisfying a trooper’s three theological virtues—play, wine,
and women!”
“To be sure, monsieur, we are not distinguished for luxury here. It
is a camp lodging, tempered by friendship, but—” And the soldier
shot a deep glance at the man of law—”I have done no one wrong, I
have never turned my back on anybody, and I sleep in peace.”
Derville reflected that there would be some want of delicacy in
asking his client to account for the sums of money he had advanced,
so he merely said:
“But why would you not come to Paris, where you might have
lived as cheaply as you do here, but where you would have been
better lodged?”
“Why,” replied the Colonel, “the good folks with whom I am living
had taken me in and fed me gratis for a year. How could I leave
them just when I had a little money? Besides, the father of those
three pickles is an old Egyptian—”
“An Egyptian!”
“We give that name to the troopers who came back from the expedition
into Egypt, of which I was one. Not merely are all who get
back brothers; Vergniaud was in my regiment. We have shared a
draught of water in the desert; and besides, I have not yet finished
teaching his brats to read.”
“He might have lodged you better for your money,” said Derville.
“Bah!” said the Colonel, “his children sleep on the straw as I do.
He and his wife have no better bed; they are very poor you see. They
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Colonel Chabert
have taken a bigger business than they can manage. But if I recover
my fortune …. However, it does very well.”
“Colonel, to-morrow or the next day, I shall receive your papers
from Heilsberg. The woman who dug you out is still alive!”
“Curse the money! To think I haven’t got any!” he cried, flinging
his pipe on the ground.
Now, a well-colored pipe is to a smoker a precious possession; but
the impulse was so natural, the emotion so generous, that every smoker,
and the excise office itself, would have pardoned this crime of treason
to tobacco. Perhaps the angels may have picked up the pieces.
“Colonel, it is an exceedingly complicated business,” said Derville
as they left the room to walk up and down in the sunshine.
“To me,” said the soldier, “it appears exceedingly simple. I was thought
to be dead, and here I am! Give me back my wife and my fortune; give
me the rank of General, to which I have a right, for I was made Colonel
of the Imperial Guard the day before the battle of Eylau.”
“Things are not done so in the legal world,” said Derville. “Listen to
me. You are Colonel Chabert, I am glad to think it; but it has to be
proved judicially to persons whose interest it will be to deny it. Hence,
your papers will be disputed. That contention will give rise to ten or
twelve preliminary inquiries. Every question will be sent under contradiction
up to the supreme court, and give rise to so many costly suits,
which will hang on for a long time, however eagerly I may push them.
Your opponents will demand an inquiry, which we cannot refuse, and
which may necessitate the sending of a commission of investigation to
Prussia. But even if we hope for the best; supposing that justice should
at once recognize you as Colonel Chabert—can we know how the
questions will be settled that will arise out of the very innocent bigamy
committed by the Comtesse Ferraud?
“In your case, the point of law is unknown to the Code, and can
only be decided as a point in equity, as a jury decides in the delicate
cases presented by the social eccentricities of some criminal prosecutions.
Now, you had no children by your marriage; M. le Comte
Ferraud has two. The judges might pronounce against the marriage
where the family ties are weakest, to the confirmation of that where
they are stronger, since it was contracted in perfect good faith. Would
you be in a very becoming moral position if you insisted, at your age,
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and in your present circumstances, in resuming your rights over a
woman who no longer loves you? You will have both your wife and
her husband against you, two important persons who might influence
the Bench. Thus, there are many elements which would prolong
the case; you will have time to grow old in the bitterest regrets.”
“And my fortune?”
“Do you suppose you had a fine fortune?”
“Had I not thirty thousand francs a year?”
“My dear Colonel, in 1799 you made a will before your marriage,
leaving one-quarter of your property to hospitals.”
“That is true.”
“Well, when you were reported dead, it was necessary to make a
valuation, and have a sale, to give this quarter away. Your wife was not
particular about honesty as to the poor. The valuation, in which she no
doubt took care not to include the ready money or jewelry, or too
much of the plate, and in which the furniture would be estimated at
two-thirds of its actual cost, either to benefit her, or to lighten the
succession duty, and also because a valuer can be held responsible for
the declared value—the valuation thus made stood at six hundred thousand
francs. Your wife had a right of half for her share. Everything was
sold and bought in by her; she got something out of it all, and the
hospitals got their seventy-five thousand francs. Then, as the remainder
went to the State, since you had made no mention of your wife in
your will, the Emperor restored to your widow by decree the residue
which would have reverted to the Exchequer. So, now, what can you
claim? Three hundred thousand francs, no more, and minus the costs.”
“And you call that justice!” said the Colonel, in dismay.
“Why, certainly—”
“A pretty kind of justice!”
“So it is, my dear Colonel. You see, that what you thought so easy
is not so. Madame Ferraud might even choose to keep the sum given
to her by the Emperor.”
“But she was not a widow. The decree is utterly void—”
“I agree with you. But every case can get a hearing. Listen to me. I
think that under these circumstances a compromise would be both
for her and for you the best solution of the question. You will gain
by it a more considerable sum than you can prove a right to.”
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Colonel Chabert
“That would be to sell my wife!”
“With twenty-four thousand francs a year you could find a woman
who, in the position in which you are, would suit you better than
your own wife, and make you happier. I propose going this very day
to see the Comtesse Ferraud and sounding the ground; but I would
not take such a step without giving you due notice.”
“Let us go together.”
“What, just as you are?” said the lawyer. “No, my dear Colonel,
no. You might lose your case on the spot.”
“Can I possibly gain it?”
“On every count,” replied Derville. “But, my dear Colonel Chabert,
you overlook one thing. I am not rich; the price of my connection is
not wholly paid up. If the bench should allow you a maintenance,
that is to say, a sum advanced on your prospects, they will not do so
till you have proved that you are Comte Chabert, grand officer of
the Legion of Honor.”
“To be sure, I am a grand officer of the Legion of Honor; I had
forgotten that,” said he simply.
“Well, until then,” Derville went on, “will you not have to engage
pleaders, to have documents copied, to keep the underlings of the
law going, and to support yourself? The expenses of the preliminary
inquiries will, at a rough guess, amount to ten or twelve thousand
francs. I have not so much to lend you—I am crushed as it is by the
enormous interest I have to pay on the money I borrowed to buy my
business; and you?—Where can you find it.”
Large tears gathered in the poor veteran’s faded eyes, and rolled
down his withered cheeks. This outlook of difficulties discouraged
him. The social and the legal world weighed on his breast like a
nightmare.
“I will go to the foot of the Vendome column!” he cried. “I will
call out: ‘I am Colonel Chabert who rode through the Russian square
at Eylau!’—The statue—he—he will know me.”
“And you will find yourself in Charenton.”
At this terrible name the soldier’s transports collapsed.
“And will there be no hope for me at the Ministry of War?”
“The war office!” said Derville. “Well, go there; but take a formal
legal opinion with you, nullifying the certificate of your death. The
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government offices would be only too glad if they could annihilate
the men of the Empire.”
The Colonel stood for a while, speechless, motionless, his eyes
fixed, but seeing nothing, sunk in bottomless despair. Military justice
is ready and swift; it decides with Turk-like finality, and almost
always rightly. This was the only justice known to Chabert. As he
saw the labyrinth of difficulties into which he must plunge, and how
much money would be required for the journey, the poor old soldier
was mortally hit in that power peculiar to man, and called the Will.
He thought it would be impossible to live as party to a lawsuit; it
seemed a thousand times simpler to remain poor and a beggar, or to
enlist as a trooper if any regiment would pass him.
His physical and mental sufferings had already impaired his bodily
health in some of the most important organs. He was on the verge of
one of those maladies for which medicine has no name, and of which
the seat is in some degree variable, like the nervous system itself, the
part most frequently attacked of the whole human machine, a malady
which may be designated as the heart-sickness of the unfortunate.
However serious this invisible but real disorder might already be, it
could still be cured by a happy issue. But a fresh obstacle, an unexpected
incident, would be enough to wreck this vigorous constitution,
to break the weakened springs, and produce the hesitancy, the
aimless, unfinished movements, which physiologists know well in
men undermined by grief.
Derville, detecting in his client the symptoms of extreme dejection,
said to him:
“Take courage; the end of the business cannot fail to be in your
favor. Only, consider whether you can give me your whole confidence
and blindly accept the result I may think best for your interests.”
“Do what you will,” said Chabert.
“Yes, but you surrender yourself to me like a man marching to his
death.”
“Must I not be left to live without a position, without a name? Is
that endurable?”
“That is not my view of it,” said the lawyer. “We will try a friendly
suit, to annul both your death certificate and your marriage, so as to
put you in possession of your rights. You may even, by Comte
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Colonel Chabert
Ferraud’s intervention, have your name replaced on the army list as
general, and no doubt you will get a pension.”
“Well, proceed then,” said Chabert. “I put myself entirely in your
hands.”
“I will send you a power of attorney to sign,” said Derville. “Goodbye.
Keep up your courage. If you want money, rely on me.”
Chabert warmly wrung the lawyer’s hand, and remained standing
with his back against the wall, not having the energy to follow him
excepting with his eyes. Like all men who know but little of legal
matters, he was frightened by this unforeseen struggle.
During their interview, several times, the figure of a man posted in
the street had come forward from behind one of the gate-pillars,
watching for Derville to depart, and he now accosted the lawyer. He
was an old man, wearing a blue waistcoat and a white-pleated kilt,
like a brewer’s; on his head was an otter-skin cap. His face was tanned,
hollow-cheeked, and wrinkled, but ruddy on the cheek-bones by
hard work and exposure to the open air.
“Asking your pardon, sir,” said he, taking Derville by the arm, “if I
take the liberty of speaking to you. But I fancied, from the look of
you, that you were a friend of our General’s.”
“And what then?” replied Derville. “What concern have you with
him?—But who are you?” said the cautious lawyer.
“I am Louis Vergniaud,” he replied at once. “I have a few words to
say to you.”
“So you are the man who has lodged Comte Chabert as I have
found him?”
“Asking your pardon, sir, he has the best room. I would have given
him mine if I had had but one; I could have slept in the stable. A
man who has suffered as he has, who teaches my kids to read, a
general, an Egyptian, the first lieutenant I ever served under—What
do you think? —Of us all, he is best served. I shared what I had with
him. Unfortunately, it is not much to boast of—bread, milk, eggs.
Well, well; it’s neighbors’ fare, sir. And he is heartily welcome.—But
he has hurt our feelings.”
“He?”
“Yes, sir, hurt our feelings. To be plain with you, I have taken a
larger business than I can manage, and he saw it. Well, it worried
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him; he must needs mind the horse! I says to him, ‘Really, General—
’ ‘Bah!’ says he, ‘I am not going to eat my head off doing nothing. I
learned to rub a horse down many a year ago.’—I had some bills out
for the purchase money of my dairy—a fellow named Grados—Do
you know him, sir?”
“But, my good man, I have not time to listen to your story. Only
tell me how the Colonel offended you.”
“He hurt our feelings, sir, as sure as my name is Louis Vergniaud,
and my wife cried about it. He heard from our neighbors that we
had not a sou to begin to meet the bills with. The old soldier, as he is,
he saved up all you gave him, he watched for the bill to come in, and
he paid it. Such a trick! While my wife and me, we knew he had no
tobacco, poor old boy, and went without.—Oh! now—yes, he has
his cigar every morning! I would sell my soul for it—No, we are
hurt. Well, so I wanted to ask you—for he said you were a good
sort—to lend us a hundred crowns on the stock, so that we may get
him some clothes, and furnish his room. He thought he was getting
us out of debt, you see? Well, it’s just the other way; the old man is
running us into debt—and hurt our feelings!—He ought not to have
stolen a march on us like that. And we his friends, too!—On my
word as an honest man, as sure as my name is Louis Vergniaud, I
would sooner sell up and enlist than fail to pay you back your
money—”
Derville looked at the dairyman, and stepped back a few paces to
glance at the house, the yard, the manure-pool, the cowhouse, the
rabbits, the children.
“On my honor, I believe it is characteristic of virtue to have nothing
to do with riches!” thought he.
“All right, you shall have your hundred crowns, and more. But I
shall not give them to you; the Colonel will be rich enough to help,
and I will not deprive him of the pleasure.”
“And will that be soon?”
“Why, yes.”
“Ah, dear God! how glad my wife will be!” and the cowkeeper’s
tanned face seemed to expand.
“Now,” said Derville to himself, as he got into his cab again, “let us
call on our opponent. We must not show our hand, but try to see
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Colonel Chabert
hers, and win the game at one stroke. She must be frightened. She is
a woman. Now, what frightens women most? A woman is afraid of
nothing but …”
And he set to work to study the Countess’ position, falling into
one of those brown studies to which great politicians give themselves
up when concocting their own plans and trying to guess the secrets
of a hostile Cabinet. Are not attorneys, in a way, statesmen in charge
of private affairs?
But a brief survey of the situation in which the Comte Ferraud and
his wife now found themselves is necessary for a comprehension of
the lawyer’s cleverness.
Monsieur le Comte Ferraud was the only son of a former Councillor
in the old Parlement of Paris, who had emigrated during the Reign
of Terror, and so, though he saved his head, lost his fortune. He came
back under the Consulate, and remained persistently faithful to the
cause of Louis XVIII., in whose circle his father had moved before the
Revolution. He thus was one of the party in the Faubourg Saint-
Germain which nobly stood out against Napoleon’s blandishments.
The reputation for capacity gained by the young Count—then simply
called Monsieur Ferraud—made him the object of the Emperor’s advances,
for he was often as well pleased at his conquests among the
aristocracy as at gaining a battle. The Count was promised the restitution
of his title, of such of his estates as had not been sold, and he was
shown in perspective a place in the ministry or as senator.
The Emperor fell.
At the time of Comte Chabert’s death, M. Ferraud was a young
man of six-and-twenty, without a fortune, of pleasing appearance,
who had had his successes, and whom the Faubourg Saint-Germain
had adopted as doing it credit; but Madame la Comtesse Chabert
had managed to turn her share of her husband’s fortune to such good
account that, after eighteen months of widowhood, she had about
forty thousand francs a year. Her marriage to the young Count was
not regarded as news in the circles of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Napoleon, approving of this union, which carried out his idea of
fusion, restored to Madame Chabert the money falling to the Exchequer
under her husband’s will; but Napoleon’s hopes were again disappointed.
Madame Ferraud was not only in love with her lover; she
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had also been fascinated by the notion of getting into the haughty
society which, in spite of its humiliation, was still predominant at
the Imperial Court. By this marriage all her vanities were as much
gratified as her passions. She was to become a real fine lady. When
the Faubourg Saint-Germain understood that the young Count’s
marriage did not mean desertion, its drawing-rooms were thrown
open to his wife.
Then came the Restoration. The Count’s political advancement
was not rapid. He understood the exigencies of the situation in which
Louis XVIII. found himself; he was one of the inner circle who waited
till the “Gulf of Revolution should be closed”—for this phrase of
the King’s, at which the Liberals laughed so heartily, had a political
sense. The order quoted in the long lawyer’s preamble at the beginning
of this story had, however, put him in possession of two tracts
of forest, and of an estate which had considerably increased in value
during its sequestration. At the present moment, though Comte
Ferraud was a Councillor of State, and a Director-General, he regarded
his position as merely the first step of his political career.
Wholly occupied as he was by the anxieties of consuming ambition,
he had attached to himself, as secretary, a ruined attorney named
Delbecq, a more than clever man, versed in all the resources of the
law, to whom he left the conduct of his private affairs. This shrewd
practitioner had so well understood his position with the Count as
to be honest in his own interest. He hoped to get some place by his
master’s influence, and he made the Count’s fortune his first care.
His conduct so effectually gave the lie to his former life, that he was
regarded as a slandered man. The Countess, with the tact and shrewdness
of which most women have a share more or less, understood the
man’s motives, watched him quietly, and managed him so well, that
she had made good use of him for the augmentation of her private
fortune. She had contrived to make Delbecq believe that she ruled
her husband, and had promised to get him appointed President of an
inferior court in some important provincial town, if he devoted himself
entirely to her interests.
The promise of a place, not dependent on changes of ministry,
which would allow of his marrying advantageously, and rising subsequently
to a high political position, by being chosen Depute, made
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Colonel Chabert
Delbecq the Countess’ abject slave. He had never allowed her to miss
one of those favorable chances which the fluctuations of the Bourse
and the increased value of property afforded to clever financiers in
Paris during the first three years after the Restoration. He had trebled
his protectress’ capital, and all the more easily because the Countess
had no scruples as to the means which might make her an enormous
fortune as quickly as possible. The emoluments derived by the Count
from the places he held she spent on the housekeeping, so as to reinvest
her dividends; and Delbecq lent himself to these calculations of
avarice without trying to account for her motives. People of that sort
never trouble themselves about any secrets of which the discovery is
not necessary to their own interests. And, indeed, he naturally found
the reason in the thirst for money, which taints almost every Parisian
woman; and as a fine fortune was needed to support the pretensions
of Comte Ferraud, the secretary sometimes fancied that he saw in the
Countess’ greed a consequence of her devotion to a husband with
whom she still was in love. The Countess buried the secrets of her
conduct at the bottom of her heart. There lay the secrets of life and
death to her, there lay the turning-point of this history.
At the beginning of the year 1818 the Restoration was settled on
an apparently immovable foundation; its doctrines of government,
as understood by lofty minds, seemed calculated to bring to France
an era of renewed prosperity, and Parisian society changed its aspect.
Madame la Comtesse Ferraud found that by chance she had achieved
for love a marriage that had brought her fortune and gratified ambition.
Still young and handsome, Madame Ferraud played the part of
a woman of fashion, and lived in the atmosphere of the Court. Rich
herself, with a rich husband who was cried up as one of the ablest
men of the royalist party, and, as a friend of the King, certain to be
made Minister, she belonged to the aristocracy, and shared its magnificence.
In the midst of this triumph she was attacked by a moral
canker. There are feelings which women guess in spite of the care
men take to bury them. On the first return of the King, Comte
Ferraud had begun to regret his marriage. Colonel Chabert’s widow
had not been the means of allying him to anybody; he was alone and
unsupported in steering his way in a course full of shoals and beset by
enemies. Also, perhaps, when he came to judge his wife coolly, he
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may have discerned in her certain vices of education which made her
unfit to second him in his schemes.
A speech he made, a propos of Talleyrand’s marriage, enlightened
the Countess, to whom it proved that if he had still been a free man
she would never have been Madame Ferraud. What woman could
forgive this repentance? Does it not include the germs of every insult,
every crime, every form of repudiation? But what a wound must it
have left in the Countess’ heart, supposing that she lived in the dread
of her first husband’s return? She had known that he still lived, and
she had ignored him. Then during the time when she had heard no
more of him, she had chosen to believe that he had fallen at Waterloo
with the Imperial Eagle, at the same time as Boutin. She resolved,
nevertheless, to bind the Count to her by the strongest of all
ties, by a chain of gold, and vowed to be so rich that her fortune
might make her second marriage dissoluble, if by chance Colonel
Chabert should ever reappear. And he had reappeared; and she could
not explain to herself why the struggle she had dreaded had not already
begun. Suffering, sickness, had perhaps delivered her from that
man. Perhaps he was half mad, and Charenton might yet do her
justice. She had not chosen to take either Delbecq or the police into
her confidence, for fear of putting herself in their power, or of hastening
the catastrophe. There are in Paris many women who, like the
Countess Ferraud, live with an unknown moral monster, or on the
brink of an abyss; a callus forms over the spot that tortures them,
and they can still laugh and enjoy themselves.
“There is something very strange in Comte Ferraud’s position,”
said Derville to himself, on emerging from his long reverie, as his cab
stopped at the door of the Hotel Ferraud in the Rue de Varennes.
“How is it that he, so rich as he is, and such a favorite with the King,
is not yet a peer of France? It may, to be sure, be true that the King,
as Mme. de Grandlieu was telling me, desires to keep up the value of
the pairie by not bestowing it right and left. And, after all, the son of
a Councillor of the Parlement is not a Crillon nor a Rohan. A Comte
Ferraud can only get into the Upper Chamber surreptitiously. But if
his marriage were annulled, could he not get the dignity of some old
peer who has only daughters transferred to himself, to the King’s
great satisfaction? At any rate this will be a good bogey to put for-
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Colonel Chabert
ward and frighten the Countess,” thought he as he went up the steps.
Derville had without knowing it laid his finger on the hidden
wound, put his hand on the canker that consumed Madame Ferraud.
She received him in a pretty winter dining-room, where she was at
breakfast, while playing with a monkey tethered by a chain to a little
pole with climbing bars of iron. The Countess was in an elegant wrapper;
the curls of her hair, carelessly pinned up, escaped from a cap,
giving her an arch look. She was fresh and smiling. Silver, gilding, and
mother-of-pearl shone on the table, and all about the room were rare
plants growing in magnificent china jars. As he saw Colonel Chabert’s
wife, rich with his spoil, in the lap of luxury and the height of fashion,
while he, poor wretch, was living with a poor dairyman among the
beasts, the lawyer said to himself:
“The moral of all this is that a pretty woman will never acknowledge
as her husband, nor even as a lover, a man in an old box-coat, a
tow wig, and boots with holes in them.”
A mischievous and bitter smile expressed the feelings, half philosophical
and half satirical, which such a man was certain to experience—a
man well situated to know the truth of things in spite of the
lies behind which most families in Paris hide their mode of life.
“Good-morning, Monsieur Derville,” said she, giving the monkey
some coffee to drink.
“Madame,” said he, a little sharply, for the light tone in which she
spoke jarred on him. “I have come to speak with you on a very serious
matter.”
“I am so grieved, M. le Comte is away—”
“I, madame, am delighted. It would be grievous if he could be present
at our interview. Besides, I am informed through M. Delbecq that you
like to manage your own business without troubling the Count.”
“Then I will send for Delbecq,” said she.
“He would be of no use to you, clever as he is,” replied Derville.
“Listen to me, madame; one word will be enough to make you grave.
Colonel Chabert is alive!”
“Is it by telling me such nonsense as that that you think you can
make me grave?” said she with a shout of laughter. But she was suddenly
quelled by the singular penetration of the fixed gaze which
Derville turned on her, seeming to read to the bottom of her soul.
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“Madame,” he said with cold and piercing solemnity, “you know
not the extent of the danger that threatens you. I need say nothing of
the indisputable authenticity of the evidence nor of the fulness of
proof which testifies to the identity of Comte Chabert. I am not, as
you know, the man to take up a bad cause. If you resist our proceedings
to show that the certificate of death was false, you will lose that
first case, and that matter once settled, we shall gain every point.”
“What, then, do you wish to discuss with me?”
“Neither the Colonel nor yourself. Nor need I allude to the briefs
which clever advocates may draw up when armed with the curious facts
of this case, or the advantage they may derive from the letters you received
from your first husband before your marriage to your second.”
“It is false,” she cried, with the violence of a spoilt woman. “I never
had a letter from Comte Chabert; and if some one is pretending to
be the Colonel, it is some swindler, some returned convict, like
Coignard perhaps. It makes me shudder only to think of it. Can the
Colonel rise from the dead, monsieur? Bonaparte sent an aide-decamp
to inquire for me on his death, and to this day I draw the
pension of three thousand francs granted to this widow by the Government.
I have been perfectly in the right to turn away all the Chaberts
who have ever come, as I shall all who may come.”
“Happily we are alone, madame. We can tell lies at our ease,” said
he coolly, and finding it amusing to lash up the Countess’ rage so as
to lead her to betray herself, by tactics familiar to lawyers, who are
accustomed to keep cool when their opponents or their clients are in
a passion. “Well, then, we must fight it out,” thought he, instantly
hitting on a plan to entrap her and show her her weakness.
“The proof that you received the first letter, madame, is that it
contained some securities—”
“Oh, as to securities—that it certainly did not.”
“Then you received the letter,” said Derville, smiling. “You are
caught, madame, in the first snare laid for you by an attorney, and
you fancy you could fight against Justice—”
The Countess colored, and then turned pale, hiding her face in her
hands. Then she shook off her shame, and retorted with the natural
impertinence of such women, “Since you are the so-called Chabert’s
attorney, be so good as to—”
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Colonel Chabert
“Madame,” said Derville, “I am at this moment as much your lawyer
as I am Colonel Chabert’s. Do you suppose I want to lose so
valuable a client as you are?—But you are not listening.”
“Nay, speak on, monsieur,” said she graciously.
“Your fortune came to you from M. le Comte Chabert, and you
cast him off. Your fortune is immense, and you leave him to beg. An
advocate can be very eloquent when a cause is eloquent in itself; there
are here circumstances which might turn public opinion strongly
against you.”
“But, monsieur,” said the Comtesse, provoked by the way in which
Derville turned and laid her on the gridiron, “even if I grant that your
M. Chabert is living, the law will uphold my second marriage on
account of the children, and I shall get off with the restitution of two
hundred and twenty-five thousand francs to M. Chabert.”
“It is impossible to foresee what view the Bench may take of the
question. If on one side we have a mother and children, on the other
we have an old man crushed by sorrows, made old by your refusals
to know him. Where is he to find a wife? Can the judges contravene
the law? Your marriage with Colonel Chabert has priority on its side
and every legal right. But if you appear under disgraceful colors, you
might have an unlooked-for adversary. That, madame, is the danger
against which I would warn you.”
“And who is he?”
“Comte Ferraud.”
“Monsieur Ferraud has too great an affection for me, too much
respect for the mother of his children—”
“Do not talk of such absurd things,” interrupted Derville, “to lawyers,
who are accustomed to read hearts to the bottom. At this instant
Monsieur Ferraud has not the slightest wish to annual your
union, and I am quite sure that he adores you; but if some one were
to tell him that his marriage is void, that his wife will be called before
the bar of public opinion as a criminal—”
“He would defend me, monsieur.”
“No, madame.”
“What reason could he have for deserting me, monsieur?”
“That he would be free to marry the only daughter of a peer of France,
whose title would be conferred on him by patent from the King.”
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The Countess turned pale.
“A hit!” said Derville to himself. “I have you on the hip; the poor
Colonel’s case is won.”—”Besides, madame,” he went on aloud,
“he would feel all the less remorse because a man covered with
glory—a General, Count, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor—
is not such a bad alternative; and if that man insisted on his wife’s
returning to him—”
“Enough, enough, monsieur!” she exclaimed. “I will never have
any lawyer but you. What is to be done?”
“Compromise!” said Derville.
“Does he still love me?” she said.
“Well, I do not think he can do otherwise.”
The Countess raised her head at these words. A flash of hope shone
in her eyes; she thought perhaps that she could speculate on her first
husband’s affection to gain her cause by some feminine cunning.
“I shall await your orders, madame, to know whether I am to report
our proceedings to you, or if you will come to my office to
agree to the terms of a compromise,” said Derville, taking leave.
A week after Derville had paid these two visits, on a fine morning in June,
the husband and wife, who had been separated by an almost supernatural
chance, started from the opposite ends of Paris to meet in the office of the
lawyer who was engaged by both. The supplies liberally advanced by Derville
to Colonel Chabert had enabled him to dress as suited his position in life,
and the dead man arrived in a very decent cab. He wore a wig suited to his
face, was dressed in blue cloth with white linen, and wore under his waistcoat
the broad red ribbon of the higher grade of the Legion of Honor. In
resuming the habits of wealth he had recovered his soldierly style. He held
himself up; his face, grave and mysterious-looking, reflected his happiness
and all his hopes, and seemed to have acquired youth and impasto, to
borrow a picturesque word from the painter’s art. He was no more like the
Chabert of the old box-coat than a cartwheel double sou is like a newly
coined forty-franc piece. The passer-by, only to see him, would have recognized
at once one of the noble wrecks of our old army, one of the heroic
men on whom our national glory is reflected, as a splinter of ice on which
the sun shines seems to reflect every beam. These veterans are at once a
picture and a book.
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Colonel Chabert
When the Count jumped out of his carriage to go into Derville’s
office, he did it as lightly as a young man. Hardly had his cab moved
off, when a smart brougham drove up, splendid with coats-of-arms.
Madame la Comtesse Ferraud stepped out in a dress which, though
simple, was cleverly designed to show how youthful her figure was.
She wore a pretty drawn bonnet lined with pink, which framed her
face to perfection, softening its outlines and making it look younger.
If the clients were rejuvenescent, the office was unaltered, and presented
the same picture as that described at the beginning of this
story. Simonnin was eating his breakfast, his shoulder leaning against
the window, which was then open, and he was staring up at the blue
sky in the opening of the courtyard enclosed by four gloomy houses.
“Ah, ha!” cried the little clerk, “who will bet an evening at the play
that Colonel Chabert is a General, and wears a red ribbon?”
“The chief is a great magician,” said Godeschal.
“Then there is no trick to play on him this time?” asked Desroches.
“His wife has taken that in hand, the Comtesse Ferraud,” said
Boucard.
“What next?” said Godeschal. “Is Comtesse Ferraud required to
belong to two men?”
“Here she is,” answered Simonnin.
“So you are not deaf, you young rogue!” said Chabert, taking the
gutter-jumper by the ear and twisting it, to the delight of the other
clerks, who began to laugh, looking at the Colonel with the curious
attention due to so singular a personage.
Comte Chabert was in Derville’s private room at the moment when
his wife came in by the door of the office.
“I say, Boucard, there is going to be a queer scene in the chief’s
room! There is a woman who can spend her days alternately, the odd
with Comte Ferraud, and the even with Comte Chabert.”
“And in leap year,” said Godeschal, “they must settle the count between
them.”
“Silence, gentlemen, you can be heard!” said Boucard severely. “I
never was in an office where there was so much jesting as there is here
over the clients.”
Derville had made the Colonel retire to the bedroom when the
Countess was admitted.
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“Madame,” he said, “not knowing whether it would be agreeable
to you to meet M. le Comte Chabert, I have placed you apart. If,
however, you should wish it—”
“It is an attention for which I am obliged to you.”
“I have drawn up the memorandum of an agreement of which you
and M. Chabert can discuss the conditions, here, and now. I will go
alternately to him and to you, and explain your views respectively.”
“Let me see, monsieur,” said the Countess impatiently.
Derville read aloud:
“‘Between the undersigned:
“ ‘M. Hyacinthe Chabert, Count, Marechal de Camp, and Grand
Officer of the Legion of Honor, living in Paris, Rue du Petit-Banquier,
on the one part;
“‘And Madame Rose Chapotel, wife of the aforesaid M. le Comte
Chabert, /nee/—’”
“Pass over the preliminaries,” said she. “Come to the conditions.”
“Madame,” said the lawyer, “the preamble briefly sets forth the position
in which you stand to each other. Then, by the first clause, you
acknowledge, in the presence of three witnesses, of whom two shall be
notaries, and one the dairyman with whom your husband has been lodging,
to all of whom your secret is known, and who will be absolutely
silent—you acknowledge, I say, that the individual designated in the
documents subjoined to the deed, and whose identity is to be further
proved by an act of recognition prepared by your notary, Alexandre
Crottat, is your first husband, Comte Chabert. By the second clause
Comte Chabert, to secure your happiness, will undertake to assert his
rights only under certain circumstances set forth in the deed.—And these,”
said Derville, in a parenthesis, “are none other than a failure to carry out
the conditions of this secret agreement.—M. Chabert, on his part, agrees
to accept judgment on a friendly suit, by which his certificate of death
shall be annulled, and his marriage dissolved.”
“That will not suit me in the least,” said the Countess with surprise.
“I will be a party to no suit; you know why.”
“By the third clause,” Derville went on, with imperturbable coolness,
“you pledge yourself to secure to Hyacinthe Comte Chabert an
income of twenty-four thousand francs on government stock held in
his name, to revert to you at his death—”
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Colonel Chabert
“But it is much too dear!” exclaimed the Countess.
“Can you compromise the matter cheaper?”
“Possibly.”
“But what do you want, madame?”
“I want—I will not have a lawsuit. I want—”
“You want him to remain dead?” said Derville, interrupting her
hastily.
“Monsieur,” said the Countess, “if twenty-four thousand francs a
year are necessary, we will go to law—”
“Yes, we will go to law,” said the Colonel in a deep voice, as he
opened the door and stood before his wife, with one hand in his
waistcoat and the other hanging by his side—an attitude to which
the recollection of his adventure gave horrible significance.
“It is he,” said the Countess to herself.
“Too dear!” the old soldier exclaimed. “I have given you near on a
million, and you are cheapening my misfortunes. Very well; now I
will have you—you and your fortune. Our goods are in common,
our marriage is not dissolved—”
“But monsieur is not Colonel Chabert!” cried the Countess, in
feigned amazement.
“Indeed!” said the old man, in a tone of intense irony. “Do you
want proofs? I found you in the Palais Royal—”
The Countess turned pale. Seeing her grow white under her rouge,
the old soldier paused, touched by the acute suffering he was inflicting
on the woman he had once so ardently loved; but she shot such a
venomous glance at him that he abruptly went on:
“You were with La—”
“Allow me, Monsieur Derville,” said the Countess to the lawyer.
“You must give me leave to retire. I did not come here to listen to
such dreadful things.”
She rose and went out. Derville rushed after her; but the Countess
had taken wings, and seemed to have flown from the place.
On returning to his private room, he found the Colonel in a towering
rage, striding up and down.
“In those times a man took his wife where he chose,” said he. “But I
was foolish and chose badly; I trusted to appearances. She has no heart.”
“Well, Colonel, was I not right to beg you not to come?—I am
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Balzac
now positive of your identity; when you came in, the Countess gave
a little start, of which the meaning was unequivocal. But you have
lost your chances. Your wife knows that you are unrecognizable.”
“I will kill her!”
“Madness! you will be caught and executed like any common wretch.
Besides you might miss! That would be unpardonable. A man must
not miss his shot when he wants to kill his wife.—Let me set things
straight; you are only a big child. Go now. Take care of yourself; she is
capable of setting some trap for you and shutting you up in Charenton.
I will notify her of our proceedings to protect you against a surprise.”
The unhappy Colonel obeyed his young benefactor, and went away,
stammering apologies. He slowly went down the dark staircase, lost
in gloomy thoughts, and crushed perhaps by the blow just dealt
him—the most cruel he could feel, the thrust that could most deeply
pierce his heart—when he heard the rustle of a woman’s dress on the
lowest landing, and his wife stood before him.
“Come, monsieur,” said she, taking his arm with a gesture like
those familiar to him of old. Her action and the accent of her voice,
which had recovered its graciousness, were enough to allay the
Colonel’s wrath, and he allowed himself to be led to the carriage.
“Well, get in!” said she, when the footman had let down the step.
And as if by magic, he found himself sitting by his wife in the
brougham.
“Where to?” asked the servant.
“To Groslay,” said she.
The horses started at once, and carried them all across Paris.
“Monsieur,” said the Countess, in a tone of voice which betrayed
one of those emotions which are rare in our lives, and which agitate
every part of our being. At such moments the heart, fibres, nerves,
countenance, soul, and body, everything, every pore even, feels a thrill.
Life no longer seems to be within us; it flows out, springs forth, is
communicated as if by contagion, transmitted by a look, a tone of
voice, a gesture, impressing our will on others. The old soldier started
on hearing this single word, this first, terrible “monsieur!” But still it
was at once a reproach and a pardon, a hope and a despair, a question
and an answer. This word included them all; none but an actress
could have thrown so much eloquence, so many feelings into a single
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Colonel Chabert
word. Truth is less complete in its utterance; it does not put everything
on the outside; it allows us to see what is within. The Colonel
was filled with remorse for his suspicions, his demands, and his anger;
he looked down not to betray his agitation.
“Monsieur,” repeated she, after an imperceptible pause, “I knew
you at once.”
“Rosine,” said the old soldier, “those words contain the only balm
that can help me to forget my misfortunes.”
Two large tears rolled hot on to his wife’s hands, which he pressed
to show his paternal affection.
“Monsieur,” she went on, “could you not have guessed what it cost
me to appear before a stranger in a position so false as mine now is? If
I have to blush for it, at least let it be in the privacy of my family.
Ought not such a secret to remain buried in our hearts? You will forgive
me, I hope, for my apparent indifference to the woes of a Chabert
in whose existence I could not possibly believe. I received your letters,”
she hastily added, seeing in his face the objection it expressed, “but they
did not reach me till thirteen months after the battle of Eylau. They
were opened, dirty, the writing was unrecognizable; and after obtaining
Napoleon’s signature to my second marriage contract, I could not
help believing that some clever swindler wanted to make a fool of me.
Therefore, to avoid disturbing Monsieur Ferraud’s peace of mind, and
disturbing family ties, I was obliged to take precautions against a pretended
Chabert. Was I not right, I ask you?”
“Yes, you were right. It was I who was the idiot, the owl, the dolt,
not to have calculated better what the consequences of such a position
might be.—But where are we going?” he asked, seeing that they
had reached the barrier of La Chapelle.
“To my country house near Groslay, in the valley of Montmorency.
There, monsieur, we will consider the steps to be taken. I know my
duties. Though I am yours by right, I am no longer yours in fact.
Can you wish that we should become the talk of Paris? We need not
inform the public of a situation, which for me has its ridiculous side,
and let us preserve our dignity. You still love me,” she said, with a
sad, sweet gaze at the Colonel, “but have not I been authorized to
form other ties? In so strange a position, a secret voice bids me trust
to your kindness, which is so well known to me. Can I be wrong in
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taking you as the sole arbiter of my fate? Be at once judge and party
to the suit. I trust in your noble character; you will be generous enough
to forgive me for the consequences of faults committed in innocence.
I may then confess to you: I love M. Ferraud. I believed that I
had a right to love him. I do not blush to make this confession to
you; even if it offends you, it does not disgrace us. I cannot conceal
the facts. When fate made me a widow, I was not a mother.”
The Colonel with a wave of his hand bid his wife be silent, and for
a mile and a half they sat without speaking a single word. Chabert
could fancy he saw the two little ones before him.
“Rosine.”
“Monsieur?”
“The dead are very wrong to come to life again.”
“Oh, monsieur, no, no! Do not think me ungrateful. Only, you
find me a lover, a mother, while you left me merely a wife. Though
it is no longer in my power to love, I know how much I owe you,
and I can still offer you all the affection of a daughter.”
“Rosine,” said the old man in a softened tone, “I no longer feel any
resentment against you. We will forget anything,” he added, with
one of those smiles which always reflect a noble soul; “I have not so
little delicacy as to demand the mockery of love from a wife who no
longer loves me.”
The Countess gave him a flashing look full of such deep gratitude
that poor Chabert would have been glad to sink again into his grave
at Eylau. Some men have a soul strong enough for such self-devotion,
of which the whole reward consists in the assurance that they
have made the person they love happy.
“My dear friend, we will talk all this over later when our hearts
have rested,” said the Countess.
The conversation turned to other subjects, for it was impossible to
dwell very long on this one. Though the couple came back again and
again to their singular position, either by some allusion or of serious
purpose, they had a delightful drive, recalling the events of their former
life together and the times of the Empire. The Countess knew how
to lend peculiar charm to her reminiscences, and gave the conversation
the tinge of melancholy that was needed to keep it serious. She
revived his love without awakening his desires, and allowed her first
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Colonel Chabert
husband to discern the mental wealth she had acquired while trying
to accustom him to moderate his pleasure to that which a father may
feel in the society of a favorite daughter.
The Colonel had known the Countess of the Empire; he found
her a Countess of the Restoration.
At last, by a cross-road, they arrived at the entrance to a large park
lying in the little valley which divides the heights of Margency from
the pretty village of Groslay. The Countess had there a delightful
house, where the Colonel on arriving found everything in readiness
for his stay there, as well as for his wife’s. Misfortune is a kind of
talisman whose virtue consists in its power to confirm our original
nature; in some men it increases their distrust and malignancy, just as
it improves the goodness of those who have a kind heart.
Sorrow had made the Colonel even more helpful and good than
he had always been, and he could understand some secrets of womanly
distress which are unrevealed to most men. Nevertheless, in spite
of his loyal trustfulness, he could not help saying to his wife:
“Then you felt quite sure you would bring me here?”
“Yes,” replied she, “if I found Colonel Chabert in Derville’s client.”
The appearance of truth she contrived to give to this answer dissipated
the slight suspicions which the Colonel was ashamed to have
felt. For three days the Countess was quite charming to her first husband.
By tender attentions and unfailing sweetness she seemed anxious
to wipe out the memory of the sufferings he had endured, and to earn
forgiveness for the woes which, as she confessed, she had innocently
caused him. She delighted in displaying for him the charms she knew
he took pleasure in, while at the same time she assumed a kind of
melancholy; for men are more especially accessible to certain ways,
certain graces of the heart or of the mind which they cannot resist. She
aimed at interesting him in her position, and appealing to his feelings
so far as to take possession of his mind and control him despotically.
Ready for anything to attain her ends, she did not yet know what
she was to do with this man; but at any rate she meant to annihilate
him socially. On the evening of the third day she felt that in spite of
her efforts she could not conceal her uneasiness as to the results of her
manoeuvres. To give herself a minute’s reprieve she went up to her
room, sat down before her writing-table, and laid aside the mask of
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Balzac
composure which she wore in Chabert’s presence, like an actress who,
returning to her dressing-room after a fatiguing fifth act, drops half
dead, leaving with the audience an image of herself which she no
longer resembles. She proceeded to finish a letter she had begun to
Delbecq, whom she desired to go in her name and demand of Derville
the deeds relating to Colonel Chabert, to copy them, and to come to
her at once to Groslay. She had hardly finished when she heard the
Colonel’s step in the passage; uneasy at her absence, he had come to
look for her.
“Alas!” she exclaimed, “I wish I were dead! My position is intolerable
…”
“Why, what is the matter?” asked the good man.
“Nothing, nothing!” she replied.
She rose, left the Colonel, and went down to speak privately to her
maid, whom she sent off to Paris, impressing on her that she was
herself to deliver to Delbecq the letter just written, and to bring it
back to the writer as soon as he had read it. Then the Countess went
out to sit on a bench sufficiently in sight for the Colonel to join her
as soon as he might choose. The Colonel, who was looking for her,
hastened up and sat down by her.
“Rosine,” said he, “what is the matter with you?”
She did not answer.
It was one of those glorious, calm evenings in the month of June,
whose secret harmonies infuse such sweetness into the sunset. The air
was clear, the stillness perfect, so that far away in the park they could
hear the voices of some children, which added a kind of melody to the
sublimity of the scene.
“You do not answer me?” the Colonel said to his wife.
“My husband——” said the Countess, who broke off, started a
little, and with a blush stopped to ask him, “What am I to say when
I speak of M. Ferraud?”
“Call him your husband, my poor child,” replied the Colonel, in a
kind voice. “Is he not the father of your children?”
“Well, then,” she said, “if he should ask what I came here for, if he
finds out that I came here, alone, with a stranger, what am I to say to
him? Listen, monsieur,” she went on, assuming a dignified attitude,
“decide my fate, I am resigned to anything—”
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Colonel Chabert
“My dear,” said the Colonel, taking possession of his wife’s hands,
“I have made up my mind to sacrifice myself entirely for your happiness—”
“That is impossible!” she exclaimed, with a sudden spasmodic
movement. “Remember that you would have to renounce your identity,
and in an authenticated form.”
“What?” said the Colonel. “Is not my word enough for you?”
The word “authenticated” fell on the old man’s heart, and roused
involuntary distrust. He looked at his wife in a way that made her
color, she cast down her eyes, and he feared that he might find himself
compelled to despise her. The Countess was afraid lest she had
scared the shy modesty, the stern honesty, of a man whose generous
temper and primitive virtues were known to her. Though these feelings
had brought the clouds to her brow, they immediately recovered
their harmony. This was the way of it. A child’s cry was heard in
the distance.
“Jules, leave your sister in peace,” the Countess called out.
“What, are your children here?” said Chabert.
“Yes, but I told them not to trouble you.”
The old soldier understood the delicacy, the womanly tact of so
gracious a precaution, and took the Countess’ hand to kiss it.
“But let them come,” said he.
The little girl ran up to complain of her brother.
“Mamma!”
“Mamma!”
“It was Jules—”
“It was her—”
Their little hands were held out to their mother, and the two childish
voices mingled; it was an unexpected and charming picture.
“Poor little things!” cried the Countess, no longer restraining her
tears, “I shall have to leave them. To whom will the law assign them?
A mother’s heart cannot be divided; I want them, I want them.”
“Are you making mamma cry?” said Jules, looking fiercely at
the Colonel.
“Silence, Jules!” said the mother in a decided tone.
The two children stood speechless, examining their mother and
the stranger with a curiosity which it is impossible to express in words.
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Balzac
“Oh yes!” she cried. “If I am separated from the Count, only leave
me my children, and I will submit to anything …”
This was the decisive speech which gained all that she had hoped
from it.
“Yes,” exclaimed the Colonel, as if he were ending a sentence already
begun in his mind, “I must return underground again. I had
told myself so already.”
“Can I accept such a sacrifice?” replied his wife. “If some men have
died to save a mistress’ honor, they gave their life but once. But in this
case you would be giving your life every day. No, no. It is impossible. If
it were only your life, it would be nothing; but to sign a declaration that
you are not Colonel Chabert, to acknowledge yourself an imposter, to
sacrifice your honor, and live a lie every hour of the day! Human devotion
cannot go so far. Only think!—No. But for my poor children I
would have fled with you by this time to the other end of the world.”
“But,” said Chabert, “cannot I live here in your little lodge as one
of your relations? I am as worn out as a cracked cannon; I want
nothing but a little tobacco and the Constitutionnel.”
The Countess melted into tears. There was a contest of generosity
between the Comtesse Ferraud and Colonel Chabert, and the soldier
came out victorious. One evening, seeing this mother with her children,
the soldier was bewitched by the touching grace of a family
picture in the country, in the shade and the silence; he made a resolution
to remain dead, and, frightened no longer at the authentication
of a deed, he asked what he could do to secure beyond all risk the
happiness of this family.
“Do exactly as you like,” said the Countess. “I declare to you that I will
have nothing to do with this affair. I ought not.”
Delbecq had arrived some days before, and in obedience to the
Countess’ verbal instructions, the intendant had succeeded in gaining
the old soldier’s confidence. So on the following morning Colonel
Chabert went with the erewhile attorney to Saint-Leu-Taverny, where
Delbecq had caused the notary to draw up an affidavit in such terms
that, after hearing it read, the Colonel started up and walked out of
the office.
“Turf and thunder! What a fool you must think me! Why, I should
make myself out a swindler!” he exclaimed.
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Colonel Chabert
“Indeed, monsieur,” said Delbecq, “I should advise you not to sign
in haste. In your place I would get at least thirty thousand francs a
year out of the bargain. Madame would pay them.”
After annihilating this scoundrel emeritus by the lightning look of
an honest man insulted, the Colonel rushed off, carried away by a
thousand contrary emotions. He was suspicious, indignant, and calm
again by turns.
Finally he made his way back into the park of Groslay by a gap in
a fence, and slowly walked on to sit down and rest, and meditate at
his ease, in a little room under a gazebo, from which the road to
Saint-Leu could be seen. The path being strewn with the yellowish
sand which is used instead of river-gravel, the Countess, who was
sitting in the upper room of this little summer-house, did not hear
the Colonel’s approach, for she was too much preoccupied with the
success of her business to pay the smallest attention to the slight
noise made by her husband. Nor did the old man notice that his wife
was in the room over him.
“Well, Monsieur Delbecq, has he signed?” the Countess asked her
secretary, whom she saw alone on the road beyond the hedge of a haha.
“No, madame. I do not even know what has become of our man.
The old horse reared.”
“Then we shall be obliged to put him into Charenton,” said she,
“since we have got him.”
The Colonel, who recovered the elasticity of youth to leap the
haha, in the twinkling of an eye was standing in front of Delbecq,
on whom he bestowed the two finest slaps that ever a scoundrel’s
cheeks received.
“And you may add that old horses can kick!” said he.
His rage spent, the Colonel no longer felt vigorous enough to leap
the ditch. He had seen the truth in all its nakedness. The Countess’
speech and Delbecq’s reply had revealed the conspiracy of which he
was to be the victim. The care taken of him was but a bait to entrap
him in a snare. That speech was like a drop of subtle poison, bringing
on in the old soldier a return of all his sufferings, physical and moral.
He came back to the summer-house through the park gate, walking
slowly like a broken man.
Then for him there was to be neither peace nor truce. From this
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Balzac
moment he must begin the odious warfare with this woman of which
Derville had spoken, enter on a life of litigation, feed on gall, drink
every morning of the cup of bitterness. And then—fearful thought!—
where was he to find the money needful to pay the cost of the first
proceedings? He felt such disgust of life, that if there had been any
water at hand he would have thrown himself into it; that if he had had
a pistol, he would have blown out his brains. Then he relapsed into the
indecision of mind which, since his conversation with Derville at the
dairyman’s had changed his character.
At last, having reached the kiosque, he went up to the gazebo,
where little rose-windows afforded a view over each lovely landscape
of the valley, and where he found his wife seated on a chair. The
Countess was gazing at the distance, and preserved a calm countenance,
showing that impenetrable face which women can assume
when resolved to do their worst. She wiped her eyes as if she had
been weeping, and played absently with the pink ribbons of her sash.
Nevertheless, in spite of her apparent assurance, she could not help
shuddering slightly when she saw before her her venerable benefactor,
standing with folded arms, his face pale, his brow stern.
“Madame,” he said, after gazing at her fixedly for a moment and
compelling her to blush, “Madame, I do not curse you—I scorn
you. I can now thank the chance that has divided us. I do not feel
even a desire for revenge; I no longer love you. I want nothing from
you. Live in peace on the strength of my word; it is worth more than
the scrawl of all the notaries in Paris. I will never assert my claim to
the name I perhaps have made illustrious. I am henceforth but a poor
devil named Hyacinthe, who asks no more than his share of the
sunshine.—Farewell!”
The Countess threw herself at his feet; she would have detained him
by taking his hands, but he pushed her away with disgust, saying:
“Do not touch me!”
The Countess’ expression when she heard her husband’s retreating
steps is quite indescribable. Then, with the deep perspicacity given
only by utter villainy, or by fierce worldly selfishness, she knew that
she might live in peace on the word and the contempt of this loyal
veteran.
Chabert, in fact, disappeared. The dairyman failed in business, and
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Colonel Chabert
became a hackney-cab driver. The Colonel, perhaps, took up some
similar industry for a time. Perhaps, like a stone flung into a chasm,
he went falling from ledge to ledge, to be lost in the mire of rags that
seethes through the streets of Paris.
Six months after this event, Derville, hearing no more of Colonel
Chabert or the Comtesse Ferraud, supposed that they had no
doubt come to a compromise, which the Countess, out of revenge,
had had arranged by some other lawyer. So one morning he added
up the sums he had advanced to the said Chabert with the costs,
and begged the Comtesse Ferraud to claim from M. le Comte
Chabert the amount of the bill, assuming that she would know
where to find her first husband.
The very next day Comte Ferraud’s man of business, lately appointed
President of the County Court in a town of some importance,
wrote this distressing note to Derville:
“Monsieur,—
“Madame la Comtesse Ferraud desires me to inform you that your
client took complete advantage of your confidence, and that the individual
calling himself Comte Chabert has acknowledged that he came
forward under false pretences.
“Yours, etc.,
“Delbecq.”
“One comes across people who are, on my honor, too stupid by
half,” cried Derville. “They don’t deserve to be Christians! Be humane,
generous, philanthropical, and a lawyer, and you are bound to
be cheated! There is a piece of business that will cost me two thousand-franc
notes!”
Some time after receiving this letter, Derville went to the Palais de
Justice in search of a pleader to whom he wished to speak, and who
was employed in the Police Court. As chance would have it, Derville
went into Court Number 6 at the moment when the Presiding
Magistrate was sentencing one Hyacinthe to two months’ imprisonment
as a vagabond, and subsequently to be taken to the Mendicity
House of Detention, a sentence which, by magistrates’ law, is equivalent
to perpetual imprisonment. On hearing the name of Hyacinthe,
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Balzac
Derville looked at the deliquent, sitting between two gendarmes on
the bench for the accused, and recognized in the condemned man his
false Colonel Chabert.
The old soldier was placid, motionless, almost absentminded. In
spite of his rags, in spite of the misery stamped on his countenance, it
gave evidence of noble pride. His eye had a stoical expression which
no magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man
has fallen into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity,
a matter of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero.
When the veteran was taken back to the lock-up, to be removed
later with the batch of vagabonds at that moment at the bar, Derville
availed himself of the privilege accorded to lawyers of going wherever
they please in the Courts, and followed him to the lock-up,
where he stood scrutinizing him for some minutes, as well as the
curious crew of beggars among whom he found himself. The passage
to the lock-up at that moment afforded one of those spectacles which,
unfortunately, neither legislators, nor philanthropists, nor painters,
nor writers come to study. Like all the laboratories of the law, this
ante-room is a dark and malodorous place; along the walls runs a
wooden seat, blackened by the constant presence there of the wretches
who come to this meeting-place of every form of social squalor, where
not one of them is missing.
A poet might say that the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful
sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot
on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured;
not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by
the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not
there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the
pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris
rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist
who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous
suicides complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of
taking a step to prevent them—for that justification is written in
that ante-room, like a preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to
those enacted on the Place de la Greve.
At this moment Colonel Chabert was sitting among these men—
men with coarse faces, clothed in the horrible livery of misery, and
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Colonel Chabert
silent at intervals, or talking in a low tone, for three gendarmes on
duty paced to and fro, their sabres clattering on the floor.
“Do you recognize me?” said Derville to the old man, standing in
front of him.
“Yes, sir,” said Chabert, rising.
“If you are an honest man,” Derville went on in an undertone,
“how could you remain in my debt?”
The old soldier blushed as a young girl might when accused by her
mother of a clandestine love affair.
“What! Madame Ferraud has not paid you?” cried he in a loud
voice.
“Paid me?” said Derville. “She wrote to me that you were a swindler.”
The Colonel cast up his eyes in a sublime impulse of horror and
imprecation, as if to call heaven to witness to this fresh subterfuge.
“Monsieur,” said he, in a voice that was calm by sheer huskiness,
“get the gendarmes to allow me to go into the lock-up, and I will
sign an order which will certainly be honored.”
At a word from Derville to the sergeant he was allowed to take his
client into the room, where Hyacinthe wrote a few lines, and addressed
them to the Comtesse Ferraud.
“Send her that,” said the soldier, “and you will be paid your costs
and the money you advanced. Believe me, monsieur, if I have not
shown you the gratitude I owe you for your kind offices, it is not the
less there,” and he laid his hand on his heart. “Yes, it is there, deep and
sincere. But what can the unfortunate do? They live, and that is all.”
“What!” said Derville. “Did you not stipulate for an allowance?”
“Do not speak of it!” cried the old man. “You cannot conceive how deep
my contempt is for the outside life to which most men cling. I was suddenly
attacked by a sickness—disgust of humanity. When I think that
Napoleon is at Saint-Helena, everything on earth is a matter of indifference
to me. I can no longer be a soldier; that is my only real grief. After all,”
he added with a gesture of childish simplicity, “it is better to enjoy luxury
of feeling than of dress. For my part, I fear nobody’s contempt.”
And the Colonel sat down on his bench again.
Derville went away. On returning to his office, he sent Godeschal, at
that time his second clerk, to the Comtesse Ferraud, who, on reading
the note, at once paid the sum due to Comte Chabert’s lawyer.
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Balzac
In 1840, towards the end of June, Godeschal, now himself an attorney,
went to Ris with Derville, to whom he had succeeded. When
they reached the avenue leading from the highroad to Bicetre, they
saw, under one of the elm-trees by the wayside, one of those old,
broken, and hoary paupers who have earned the Marshal’s staff among
beggars by living on at Bicetre as poor women live on at la Salpetriere.
This man, one of the two thousand poor creatures who are lodged in
the infirmary for the aged, was seated on a corner-stone, and seemed
to have concentrated all his intelligence on an operation well known
to these pensioners, which consists in drying their snuffy pockethandkerchiefs
in the sun, perhaps to save washing them. This old
man had an attractive countenance. He was dressed in a reddish cloth
wrapper-coat which the work-house affords to its inmates, a sort of
horrible livery.
“I say, Derville,” said Godeschal to his traveling companion, “look
at that old fellow. Isn’t he like those grotesque carved figures we get
from Germany? And it is alive, perhaps it is happy.”
Derville looked at the poor man through his eyeglass, and with a
little exclamation of surprise he said:
“That old man, my dear fellow, is a whole poem, or, as the romantics
say, a drama.—Did you ever meet the Comtesse Ferraud?”
“Yes; she is a clever woman, and agreeable; but rather too pious,”
said Godeschal.
“That old Bicetre pauper is her lawful husband, Comte Chabert,
the old Colonel. She has had him sent here, no doubt. And if he is in
this workhouse instead of living in a mansion, it is solely because he
reminded the pretty Countess that he had taken her, like a hackney
cab, on the street. I can remember now the tiger’s glare she shot at
him at that moment.”
This opening having excited Godeschal’s curiosity, Derville related
the story here told.
Two days later, on Monday morning, as they returned to Paris, the
two friends looked again at Bicetre, and Derville proposed that they
should call on Colonel Chabert. Halfway up the avenue they found
the old man sitting on the trunk of a felled tree. With his stick in one
hand, he was amusing himself with drawing lines in the sand. On
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Colonel Chabert
looking at him narrowly, they perceived that he had been breakfasting
elsewhere than at Bicetre.
“Good-morning, Colonel Chabert,” said Derville.
“Not Chabert! not Chabert! My name is Hyacinthe,” replied the
veteran. “I am no longer a man, I am No. 164, Room 7,” he added,
looking at Derville with timid anxiety, the fear of an old man and a
child.—”Are you going to visit the man condemned to death?” he
asked after a moment’s silence. “He is not married! He is very lucky!”
“Poor fellow!” said Godeschal. “Would you like something to buy
snuff?”
With all the simplicity of a street Arab, the Colonel eagerly held
out his hand to the two strangers, who each gave him a twenty-franc
piece; he thanked them with a puzzled look, saying:
“Brave troopers!”
He ported arms, pretended to take aim at them, and shouted with
a smile:
“Fire! both arms! Vive Napoleon!” And he drew a flourish in the air
with his stick.
“The nature of his wound has no doubt made him childish,” said
Derville.
“Childish! he?” said another old pauper, who was looking on. “Why,
there are days when you had better not tread on his corns. He is an
old rogue, full of philosophy and imagination. But to-day, what can
you expect! He has had his Monday treat.—He was here, monsieur,
so long ago as 1820. At that time a Prussian officer, whose chaise was
crawling up the hill of Villejuif, came by on foot. We two were
together, Hyacinthe and I, by the roadside. The officer, as he walked,
was talking to another, a Russian, or some animal of the same species,
and when the Prussian saw the old boy, just to make fun, he said
to him, ‘Here is an old cavalry man who must have been at
Rossbach.’— ‘I was too young to be there,’ said Hyacinthe. ‘But I
was at Jena.’ And the Prussian made off pretty quick, without asking
any more questions.”
“What a destiny!” exclaimed Derville. “Taken out of the Foundling
Hospital to die in the Infirmary for the Aged, after helping Napoleon
between whiles to conquer Egypt and Europe.—Do you
know, my dear fellow,” Derville went on after a pause, “there are in
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modern society three men who can never think well of the world—
the priest, the doctor, and the man of law? And they wear black
robes, perhaps because they are in mourning for every virtue and
every illusion. The most hapless of the three is the lawyer. When a
man comes in search of the priest, he is prompted by repentance, by
remorse, by beliefs which make him interesting, which elevate him
and comfort the soul of the intercessor whose task will bring him a
sort of gladness; he purifies, repairs and reconciles. But we lawyers,
we see the same evil feelings repeated again and again, nothing can
correct them; our offices are sewers which can never be cleansed.
“How many things have I learned in the exercise of my profession!
I have seen a father die in a garret, deserted by two daughters, to
whom he had given forty thousand francs a year! I have known wills
burned; I have seen mothers robbing their children, wives killing
their husbands, and working on the love they could inspire to make
the men idiotic or mad, that they might live in peace with a lover. I
have seen women teaching the child of their marriage such tastes as
must bring it to the grave in order to benefit the child of an illicit
affection. I could not tell you all I have seen, for I have seen crimes
against which justice is impotent. In short, all the horrors that romancers
suppose they have invented are still below the truth. You
will know something of these pretty things; as for me, I am going to
live in the country with my wife. I have a horror of Paris.”
“I have seen plenty of them already in Desroches’ office,” replied
Godeschal.
Paris, February-March 1832.
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Colonel Chabert
526
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bonaparte, Napoleon
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Domestic Peace
The Seamy Side of History
A Woman of Thirty
Crottat, Alexandre
Cesar Birotteau
A Start in Life
A Woman of Thirty
Cousin Pons
Derville
Gobseck
A Start in Life
The Gondreville Mystery
Father Goriot
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Desroches (son)
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Start in Life
A Woman of Thirty
The Commission in Lunacy
The Government Clerks
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Firm of Nucingen
A Man of Business
The Middle Classes

Ferraud, Comtesse
The Government Clerks
Godeschal, Francois-Claude-Marie
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Start in Life
The Commission in Lunacy
The Middle Classes
Cousin Pons
Grandlieu, Vicomtesse de
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Gobseck
Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier
The Chouans
The Seamy Side of History
The Gondreville Mystery
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Lily of the Valley
The Government Clerks
Murat, Joachim, Prince
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Domestic Peace
The Country Doctor
Navarreins, Duc de
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Muse of the Department
The Thirteen
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Country Parson
Balzac
527

Colonel Chabert
The Magic Skin
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
Vergniaud, Louis
The Vendetta
528

Balzac
The Commission in
Dedication
Lunacy
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
Dedicated to Monsieur le Contre-Amiral Bazoche, Governor of the
Isle of Bourbon, by the grateful writer.
De Balzac.
IN 1828, at about one o’clock one morning, two persons came out
of a large house in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, near the
Elysee-Bourbon. One was the famous doctor, Horace Bianchon; the
other was one of the most elegant men in Paris, the Baron de
Rastignac; they were friends of long standing. Each had sent away his
carriage, and no cab was to be seen in the street; but the night was
fine, and the pavement dry.
“We will walk as far as the boulevard,” said Eugene de Rastignac to
Bianchon. “You can get a hackney cab at the club; there is always one
to be found there till daybreak. Come with me as far as my house.”
“With pleasure.”
“Well, and what have you to say about it?”
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“About that woman?” said the doctor coldly.
“There I recognize my Bianchon!” exclaimed Rastignac.
“Why, how?”
“Well, my dear fellow, you speak of the Marquise d’Espard as if
she were a case for your hospital.”
“Do you want to know what I think, Eugene? If you throw over
Madame de Nucingen for this Marquise, you will swap a one-eyed
horse for a blind one.”
“Madame de Nucingen is six-and-thirty, Bianchon.”
“And this woman is three-and-thirty,” said the doctor quickly.
“Her worst enemies only say six-and-twenty.”
“My dear boy, when you really want to know a woman’s age, look
at her temples and the tip of her nose. Whatever women may achieve
with their cosmetics, they can do nothing against those incorruptible
witnesses to their experiences. There each year of life has left its stigmata.
When a woman’s temples are flaccid, seamed, withered in a
particular way; when at the tip of her nose you see those minute
specks, which look like the imperceptible black smuts which are shed
in London by the chimneys in which coal is burnt. . . . Your servant,
sir! That woman is more than thirty. She may be handsome, witty,
loving—whatever you please, but she is past thirty, she is arriving at
maturity. I do not blame men who attach themselves to that kind of
woman; only, a man of your superior distinction must not mistake a
winter pippin for a little summer apple, smiling on the bough, and
waiting for you to crunch it. Love never goes to study the registers of
birth and marriage; no one loves a woman because she is handsome
or ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we love.”
“Well, for my part, I love for quite other reasons. She is Marquise
d’Espard; she was a Blamont-Chauvry; she is the fashion; she has
soul; her foot is as pretty as the Duchesse de Berri’s; she has perhaps a
hundred thousand francs a year—some day, perhaps, I may marry
her! In short, she will put me into a position which will enable me to
pay my debts.”
“I thought you were rich,” interrupted Bianchon.
“Bah! I have twenty thousand francs a year—just enough to keep up
my stables. I was thoroughly done, my dear fellow, in that Nucingen
business; I will tell you about that.—I have got my sisters married; that
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is the clearest profit I can show since we last met; and I would rather
have them provided for than have five hundred thousand francs a year.
No, what would you have me do? I am ambitious. To what can Madame
de Nucingen lead? A year more and I shall be shelved, stuck in a
pigeon-hole like a married man. I have all the discomforts of marriage
and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false position to
which every man must come who remains tied too long to the same
apron-string.”
“So you think you will come upon a treasure here?” said Bianchon.
“Your Marquise, my dear fellow, does not hit my fancy at all.”
“Your liberal opinions blur your eyesight. If Madame d’Espard were
a Madame Rabourdin …”
“Listen to me. Noble or simple, she would still have no soul; she
would still be a perfect type of selfishness. Take my word for it, medical
men are accustomed to judge of people and things; the sharpest of
us read the soul while we study the body. In spite of that pretty boudoir
where we have spent this evening, in spite of the magnificence of
the house, it is quite possible that Madame la Marquise is in debt.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I do not assert it; I am supposing. She talked of her soul as Louis
XVIII. used to talk of his heart. I tell you this: That fragile, fair
woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be
pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf’s, and the
strength and cowardice of a tiger. Gauze, and silk, and muslin were
never more cleverly twisted round a lie! Ecco.”
“Bianchon, you frighten me! You have learned a good many things,
then, since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?”
“Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and manikins.
I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies
we attend to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child—if
they love it—or their pretty faces, which they always worship. A
man spends his nights by their pillow, wearing himself to death to
spare them the slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he
keeps their secret like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think
it horribly exorbitant. Who saved them? Nature. Far from recommending
him, they speak ill of him, fearing lest he should become
the physician of their best friends.
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“My dear fellow, those women of whom you say, ‘They are angels!’
I—I—have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which
they hide their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise
their defects—without manners and without stays; they are
not beautiful.
“We saw a great deal of mud, a great deal of dirt, under the waters
of the world when we were aground for a time on the shoals of the
Maison Vauquer.—What we saw there was nothing. Since I have
gone into high society, I have seen monsters dressed in satin,
Michonneaus in white gloves, Poirets bedizened with orders, fine
gentlemen doing more usurious business than old Gobseck! To the
shame of mankind, when I have wanted to shake hands with Virtue,
I have found her shivering in a loft, persecuted by calumny, halfstarving
on a income or a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, and
regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile.
“In short, my dear boy, the Marquise is a woman of fashion, and I
have a particular horror of that kind of woman. Do you want to
know why? A woman who has a lofty soul, fine taste, gentle wit, a
generously warm heart, and who lives a simple life, has not a chance
of being the fashion. Ergo: A woman of fashion and a man in power
are analogous; but there is this difference: the qualities by which a
man raises himself above others ennoble him and are a glory to him;
whereas the qualities by which a woman gains power for a day are
hideous vices; she belies her nature to hide her character, and to live
the militant life of the world she must have iron strength under a
frail appearance.
“I, as a physician, know that a sound stomach excludes a good
heart. Your woman of fashion feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has
its source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for excitement
and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night
by the footlights at the opera. As she has more brain than heart, she
sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a general
sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win a
battle. The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither
mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the
brain. And your Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her monstrosity,
the beak of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the gentle
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voice—she is as polished as the steel of a machine, she touches everything
except the heart.”
“There is some truth in what you say, Bianchon.”
“Some truth?” replied Bianchon. “It is all true. Do you suppose
that I was not struck to the heart by the insulting politeness by which
she made me measure the imaginary distance which her noble birth
sets between us? That I did not feel the deepest pity for her cat-like
civilities when I remembered what her object was? A year hence she
will not write one word to do me the slightest service, and this evening
she pelted me with smiles, believing that I can influence my uncle
Popinot, on whom the success of her case—”
“Would you rather she should have played the fool with you, my
dear fellow?—I accept your diatribe against women of fashion; but
you are beside the mark. I should always prefer for a wife a Marquise
d’Espard to the most devout and devoted creature on earth. Marry
an angel! you would have to go and bury your happiness in the depths
of the country! The wife of a politician is a governing machine, a
contrivance that makes compliments and courtesies. She is the most
important and most faithful tool which an ambitious man can use; a
friend, in short, who may compromise herself without mischief, and
whom he may belie without harmful results. Fancy Mahomet in
Paris in the nineteenth century! His wife would be a Rohan, a
Duchesse de Chevreuse of the Fronde, as keen and as flattering as an
Ambassadress, as wily as Figaro. Your loving wives lead nowhere; a
woman of the world leads to everything; she is the diamond with
which a man cuts every window when he has not the golden key
which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the humdrum,
ambitious vices to the ambitious.
“Besides, my dear fellow, do you imagine that the love of a Duchesse
de Langeais, or de Maufrigneuse, or of a Lady Dudley does not bestow
immense pleasure? If only you knew how much value the cold,
severe style of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their
affection! What a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through
the snow! A smile from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an
assumed attitude, and is worth all the unbridled tenderness of your
middle-class women with their mortgaged devotion; for, in love,
devotion is nearly akin to speculation.
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“And, then, a woman of fashion, a Blamont-Chauvry, has her virtues
too! Her virtues are fortune, power, effect, a certain contempt of
all that is beneath her—”
“Thank you!” said Bianchon.
“Old curmudgeon!” said Rastignac, laughing. “Come—do not be so
common, do like your friend Desplein; be a Baron, a Knight of Saint-
Michael; become a peer of France, and marry your daughters to dukes.”
“I! May the five hundred thousand devils—”
“Come, come! Can you be superior only in medicine? Really, you
distress me …”
“I hate that sort of people; I long for a revolution to deliver us
from them for ever.”
“And so, my dear Robespierre of the lancet, you will not go tomorrow
to your uncle Popinot?”
“Yes, I will,” said Bianchon; “for you I would go to hell to fetch
water …”
“My good friend, you really touch me. I have sworn that a commission
shall sit on the Marquis. Why, here is even a long-saved tear
to thank you.”
“But,” Bianchon went on, “I do not promise to succeed as you
wish with Jean-Jules Popinot. You do not know him. However, I
will take him to see your Marquise the day after to-morrow; she may
get round him if she can. I doubt it. If all the truffles, all the Duchesses,
all the mistresses, and all the charmers in Paris were there in the
full bloom of their beauty; if the King promised him the prairie, and
the Almighty gave him the Order of Paradise with the revenues of
Purgatory, not one of all these powers would induce him to transfer
a single straw from one saucer of his scales into the other. He is a
judge, as Death is Death.”
The two friends had reached the office of the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, at the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines.
“Here you are at home,” said Bianchon, laughing, as he pointed to
the ministerial residence. “And here is my carriage,” he added, calling
a hackney cab. “And these—express our fortune.”
“You will be happy at the bottom of the sea, while I am still struggling
with the tempests on the surface, till I sink and go to ask you
for a corner in your grotto, old fellow!”
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“Till Saturday,” replied Bianchon.
“Agreed,” said Rastignac. “And you promise me Popinot?”
“I will do all my conscience will allow. Perhaps this appeal for a
commission covers some little dramorama, to use a word of our
good bad times.”
“Poor Bianchon! he will never be anything but a good fellow,” said
Rastignac to himself as the cab drove off.
“Rastignac has given me the most difficult negotiation in the world,”
said Bianchon to himself, remembering, as he rose next morning,
the delicate commission intrusted to him. “However, I have never
asked the smallest service from my uncle in Court, and have paid
more than a thousand visits gratis for him. And, after all, we are not
apt to mince matters between ourselves. He will say Yes or No, and
there an end.”
After this little soliloquy the famous physician bent his steps, at seven
in the morning, towards the Rue du Fouarre, where dwelt Monsieur
Jean-Jules Popinot, judge of the Lower Court of the Department of
the Seine. The Rue du Fouarre—an old word meaning straw—was in
the thirteenth century the most important street in Paris. There stood
the Schools of the University, where the voices of Abelard and of Gerson
were heard in the world of learning. It is now one of the dirtiest streets
of the Twelfth Arrondissement, the poorest quarter of Paris, that in
which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which leaves
most brats at the gate of the Foundling Hospital, which sends most
beggars to the poorhouse, most rag-pickers to the street corners, most
decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun shines,
most delinquents to the police courts.
Half-way down this street, which is always damp, and where the
gutter carries to the Seine the blackened waters from some dye-works,
there is an old house, restored no doubt under Francis I., and built of
bricks held together by a few courses of masonry. That it is substantial
seems proved by the shape of its front wall, not uncommonly
seen in some parts of Paris. It bellies, so to speak, in a manner caused
by the protuberance of its first floor, crushed under the weight of the
second and third, but upheld by the strong wall of the ground floor.
At first sight it would seem as though the piers between the win-
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dows, though strengthened by the stone mullions, must give way,
but the observer presently perceives that, as in the tower at Bologna,
the old bricks and old time-eaten stones of this house persistently
preserve their centre of gravity.
At every season of the year the solid piers of the ground floor have
the yellow tone and the imperceptible sweating surface that moisture
gives to stone. The passer-by feels chilled as he walks close to this
wall, where worn corner-stones ineffectually shelter him from the
wheels of vehicles. As is always the case in houses built before carriages
were in use, the vault of the doorway forms a very low archway
not unlike the barbican of a prison. To the right of this entrance there
are three windows, protected outside by iron gratings of so close a
pattern, that the curious cannot possibly see the use made of the
dark, damp rooms within, and the panes too are dirty and dusty; to
the left are two similar windows, one of which is sometimes open,
exposing to view the porter, his wife, and his children; swarming,
working, cooking, eating, and screaming, in a floored and wainscoted
room where everything is dropping to pieces, and into which you
descend two steps—a depth which seems to suggest the gradual elevation
of the soil of Paris.
If on a rainy day some foot-passenger takes refuge under the long
vault, with projecting lime-washed beams, which leads from the door
to the staircase, he will hardly fail to pause and look at the picture
presented by the interior of this house. To the left is a square gardenplot,
allowing of not more than four long steps in each direction, a
garden of black soil, with trellises bereft of vines, and where, in default
of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers collect, old
rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a barren ground,
where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and branches of
the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts of the
house, set at a right angle, derive light from this garden-court shut in
by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers, decrepit and ready
to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence is to be seen of
the craft pursued by some lodger within. Here long poles are hung
with immense skeins of dyed worsted put out to dry; there, on ropes,
dance clean-washed shirts; higher up, on a shelf, volumes display
their freshly marbled edges; women sing, husbands whistle, children
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shout; the carpenter saws his planks, a copper-turner makes the metal
screech; all kinds of industries combine to produce a noise which the
number of instruments renders distracting.
The general system of decoration in this passage, which is neither
courtyard, garden, nor vaulted way, though a little of all, consists of
wooden pillars resting on square stone blocks, and forming arches.
Two archways open on to the little garden; two others, facing the
front gateway, lead to a wooden staircase, with an iron balustrade
that was once a miracle of smith’s work, so whimsical are the shapes
given to the metal; the worn steps creak under every tread. The entrance
to each flat has an architrave dark with dirt, grease, and dust,
and outer doors, covered with Utrecht velvet set with brass nails,
once gilt, in a diamond pattern. These relics of splendor show that in
the time of Louis XIV. the house was the residence of some councillor
to the Parlement, some rich priests, or some treasurer of the ecclesiastical
revenue. But these vestiges of former luxury bring a smile to
the lips by the artless contrast of past and present.
M. Jean-Jules Popinot lived on the first floor of this house, where the
gloom, natural to all first floors in Paris houses, was increased by the
narrowness of the street. This old tenement was known to all the twelfth
arrondissement, on which Providence had bestowed this lawyer, as it
gives a beneficent plant to cure or alleviate every malady. Here is a sketch
of a man whom the brilliant Marquise d’Espard hoped to fascinate.
M. Popinot, as is seemly for a magistrate, was always dressed in
black —a style which contributed to make him ridiculous in the eyes
of those who were in the habit of judging everything from a superficial
examination. Men who are jealous of maintaining the dignity
required by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and
minute care of their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable
of forcing himself to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands.
His trousers, always threadbare, looked like camlet—the stuff of which
attorneys’ gowns are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time,
in such innumerable creases, that in places they were traced with lines,
whitish, rusty, or shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or the most
unheeding poverty. His coarse worsted stockings were twisted anyhow
in his ill-shaped shoes. His linen had the tawny tinge acquired
by long sojourn in a wardrobe, showing that the late lamented Ma-
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dame Popinot had had a mania for much linen; in the Flemish fashion,
perhaps, she had given herself the trouble of a great wash no
more than twice a year. The old man’s coat and waistcoat were in
harmony with his trousers, shoes, stockings, and linen. He always
had the luck of his carelessness; for, the first day he put on a new
coat, he unfailingly matched it with the rest of his costume by staining
it with incredible promptitude. The good man waited till his
housekeeper told him that his hat was too shabby before buying a
new one. His necktie was always crumpled and starchless, and he
never set his dog-eared shirt collar straight after his judge’s bands had
disordered it. He took no care of his gray hair, and shaved but twice
a week. He never wore gloves, and generally kept his hands stuffed
into his empty trousers’ pockets; the soiled pocket-holes, almost always
torn, added a final touch to the slovenliness of his person.
Any one who knows the Palais de Justice at Paris, where every variety
of black attire may be studied, can easily imagine the appearance
of M. Popinot. The habit of sitting for days at a time modifies the
structure of the body, just as the fatigue of hearing interminable pleadings
tells on the expression of a magistrate’s face. Shut up as he is in
courts ridiculously small, devoid of architectural dignity, and where
the air is quickly vitiated, a Paris judge inevitably acquires a countenance
puckered and seamed by reflection, and depressed by weariness;
his complexion turns pallid, acquiring an earthy or greenish hue
according to his individual temperament. In short, within a given
time the most blooming young man is turned into an “inasmuch”
machine—an instrument which applies the Code to individual cases
with the indifference of clockwork.
Hence, nature, having bestowed on M. Popinot a not too pleasing
exterior, his life as a lawyer had not improved it. His frame was
graceless and angular. His thick knees, huge feet, and broad hands
formed a contrast with a priest-like face having a vague resemblance
to a calf’s head, meek to unmeaningness, and but little brightened
by divergent bloodless eyes, divided by a straight flat nose, surmounted
by a flat forehead, flanked by enormous ears, flabby and
graceless. His thin, weak hair showed the baldness through various
irregular partings.
One feature only commended this face to the physiognomist. This
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man had a mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness.
They were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile,
by which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which
spoke to the heart and proclaimed the man’s intelligence and lucidity, a
gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged
him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless
eyes, and his shambling gait. His life answered to his countenance; it
was full of secret labor, and hid the virtue of a saint. His superior
knowledge of law proved so strong a recommendation at a time when
Napoleon was reorganizing it in 1808 and 1811, that, by the advice of
Cambaceres, he was one of the first men named to sit on the Imperial
High Court of Justice at Paris. Popinot was no schemer. Whenever any
demand was made, any request preferred for an appointment, the
Minister would overlook Popinot, who never set foot in the house of
the High Chancellor or the Chief Justice. From the High Court he
was sent down to the Common Court, and pushed to the lowest rung
of the ladder by active struggling men. There he was appointed supernumerary
judge. There was a general outcry among the lawyers:
“Popinot a supernumerary!” Such injustice struck the legal world with
dismay—the attorneys, the registrars, everybody but Popinot himself,
who made no complaint. The first clamor over, everybody was satisfied
that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which
must certainly be the legal world. Popinot remained supernumerary
judge till the day when the most famous Great Seal under the Restoration
avenged the oversights heaped on this modest and uncomplaining
man by the Chief Justices of the Empire. After being a supernumerary
for twelve years, M. Popinot would no doubt die a puisne judge of the
Court of the Seine.
To account for the obscure fortunes of one of the superior men of
the legal profession, it is necessary to enter here into some details
which will serve to reveal his life and character, and which will, at the
same time, display some of the wheels of the great machine known
as Justice. M. Popinot was classed by the three Presidents who successively
controlled the Court of the Seine under the category of
possible judges, the stuff of which judges are made. Thus classified,
he did not achieve the reputation for capacity which his previous
labors had deserved. Just as a painter is invariably included in a cat-
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egory as a landscape painter, a portrait painter, a painter of history, of
sea pieces, or of genre, by a public consisting of artists, connoisseurs,
and simpletons, who, out of envy, or critical omnipotence, or prejudice,
fence in his intellect, assuming, one and all, that there are ganglions
in every brain—a narrow judgment which the world applies
to writers, to statesmen, to everybody who begins with some specialty
before being hailed as omniscient; so Popinot’s fate was sealed,
and he was hedged round to do a particular kind of work. Magistrates,
attorneys, pleaders, all who pasture on the legal common, distinguish
two elements in every case—law and equity. Equity is the
outcome of facts, law is the application of principles to facts. A man
may be right in equity but wrong in law, without any blame to the
judge. Between his conscience and the facts there is a whole gulf of
determining reasons unknown to the judge, but which condemn or
legitimatize the act. A judge is not God; the duty is to adapt facts to
principles, to judge cases of infinite variety while measuring them by
a fixed standard.
France employs about six thousand judges; no generation has six
thousand great men at her command, much less can she find them in
the legal profession. Popinot, in the midst of the civilization of Paris,
was just a very clever cadi, who, by the character of his mind, and by
dint of rubbing the letter of the law into the essence of facts, had
learned to see the error of spontaneous and violent decisions. By the
help of his judicial second-sight he could pierce the double casing of
lies in which advocates hide the heart of a trial. He was a judge, as the
great Desplein was a surgeon; he probed men’s consciences as the anatomist
probed their bodies. His life and habits had led him to an exact
appreciation of their most secret thoughts by a thorough study of facts.
He sifted a case as Cuvier sifted the earth’s crust. Like that great
thinker, he proceeded from deduction to deduction before drawing
his conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as
Cuvier reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief
he would often wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly
sparkling in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is
the end of these contests, in which everything is against the honest
man, everything to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up
in favor of equity against law in such cases as bore on questions of
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what may be termed divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues
as a man not of a practical mind; his arguments on two lines
of deduction made their deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed
their dislike to listening to him he gave his opinion briefly; it
was said that he was not a good judge in this class of cases; but as his
gift of discrimination was remarkable, his opinion lucid, and his penetration
profound, he was considered to have a special aptitude for
the laborious duties of an examining judge. So an examining judge
he remained during the greater part of his legal career.
Although his qualifications made him eminently fitted for its difficult
functions, and he had the reputation of being so learned in
criminal law that his duty was a pleasure to him, the kindness of his
heart constantly kept him in torture, and he was nipped as in a vise
between his conscience and his pity. The services of an examining
judge are better paid than those of a judge in civil actions, but they
do not therefore prove a temptation; they are too onerous. Popinot,
a man of modest and virtuous learning, without ambition, an indefatigable
worker, never complained of his fate; he sacrificed his tastes
and his compassionate soul to the public good, and allowed himself
to be transported to the noisome pools of criminal examinations,
where he showed himself alike severe and beneficent. His clerk sometimes
would give the accused some money to buy tobacco, or a warm
winter garment, as he led him back from the judge’s office to the
Souriciere, the mouse-trap—the House of Detention where the accused
are kept under the orders of the Examining Judge. He knew
how to be an inflexible judge and a charitable man. And no one
extracted a confession so easily as he without having recourse to judicial
trickery. He had, too, all the acumen of an observer. This man,
apparently so foolishly good-natured, simple, and absent-minded,
could guess all the cunning of a prison wag, unmask the astutest
street huzzy, and subdue a scoundrel. Unusual circumstances had sharpened
his perspicacity; but to relate these we must intrude on his domestic
history, for in him the judge was the social side of the man;
another man, greater and less known, existed within.
Twelve years before the beginning of this story, in 1816, during
the terrible scarcity which coincided disastrously with the stay in
France of the so-called Allies, Popinot was appointed President of
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the Commission Extraordinary formed to distribute food to the
poor of his neighborhood, just when he had planned to move from
the Rue du Fouarre, which he as little liked to live in as his wife
did. The great lawyer, the clear-sighted criminal judge, whose superiority
seemed to his colleagues a form of aberration, had for five
years been watching legal results without seeing their causes. As he
scrambled up into the lofts, as he saw the poverty, as he studied the
desperate necessities which gradually bring the poor to criminal
acts, as he estimated their long struggles, compassion filled his soul.
The judge then became the Saint Vincent de Paul of these grownup
children, these suffering toilers. The transformation was not
immediately complete. Beneficence has its temptations as vice has.
Charity consumes a saint’s purse, as roulette consumes the possessions
of a gambler, quite gradually. Popinot went from misery to
misery, from charity to charity; then, by the time he had lifted all
the rags which cover public pauperism, like a bandage under which
an inflamed wound lies festering, at the end of a year he had become
the Providence incarnate of that quarter of the town. He was
a member of the Benevolent Committee and of the Charity Organization.
Wherever any gratuitous services were needed he was ready,
and did everything without fuss, like the man with the short cloak,
who spends his life in carrying soup round the markets and other
places where there are starving folks.
Popinot was fortunate in acting on a larger circle and in a higher
sphere; he had an eye on everything, he prevented crime, he gave
work to the unemployed, he found a refuge for the helpless, he distributed
aid with discernment wherever danger threatened, he made
himself the counselor of the widow, the protector of homeless children,
the sleeping partner of small traders. No one at the Courts, no
one in Paris, knew of this secret life of Popinot’s. There are virtues so
splendid that they necessitate obscurity; men make haste to hide them
under a bushel. As to those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at
work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises;
theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because
they owe too much. There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what
heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?
By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had
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turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted
by the three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this spacious
room were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden
benches like those seen in schools, a clumsy cupboard, a walnutwood
writing-table, and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers
of donations, his tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He
kept his ledger like a tradesman, that he might not be ruined by
kindness. All the sorrows of the neighborhood were entered and numbered
in a book, where each had its little account, as merchants’ customers
have theirs. When there was any question as to a man or a
family needing help, the lawyer could always command information
from the police.
Lavienne, a man made for his master, was his aide-de-camp. He redeemed
or renewed pawn-tickets, and visited the districts most threatened
with famine, while his master was in court.
From four till seven in the morning in summer, from six till nine
in winter, this room was full of women, children, and paupers,
while Popinot gave audience. There was no need for a stove in
winter; the crowd was so dense that the air was warmed; only,
Lavienne strewed straw on the wet floor. By long use the benches
were as polished as varnished mahogany; at the height of a man’s
shoulders the wall had a coat of dark, indescribable color, given to
it by the rags and tattered clothes of these poor creatures. The poor
wretches loved Popinot so well that when they assembled before
his door was opened, before daybreak on a winter’s morning, the
women warming themselves with their foot-brasiers, the men swinging
their arms for circulation, never a sound had disturbed his sleep.
Rag-pickers and other toilers of the night knew the house, and
often saw a light burning in the lawyer’s private room at unholy
hours. Even thieves, as they passed by, said, “That is his house,”
and respected it. The morning he gave to the poor, the mid-day
hours to criminals, the evening to law work.
Thus the gift of observation that characterized Popinot was necessarily
bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper—good feelings nipped,
fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice, just as he could read
at the bottom of a man’s conscience the faintest outlines of a crime, the
slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer all the rest.
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Popinot’s inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,
sister to M. Bianchon SENIOR, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought
him about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her
fortune to her husband. As the salary of a supernumerary judge is not
large, and Popinot had been a fully salaried judge only for four years,
we may guess his reasons for parsimony in all that concerned his person
and mode of life, when we consider how small his means were and
how great his beneficence. Besides, is not such indifference to dress as
stamped Popinot an absent-minded man, a distinguishing mark of
scientific attainment, of art passionately pursued, of a perpetually active
mind? To complete this portrait, it will be enough to add that
Popinot was one of the few judges of the Court of the Seine on whom
the ribbon of the Legion of Honor had not been conferred.
Such was the man who had been instructed by the President of the
Second Chamber of the Court—to which Popinot had belonged
since his reinstatement among the judges in civil law—to examine
the Marquis d’Espard at the request of his wife, who sued for a Commission
in Lunacy.
The Rue du Fouarre, where so many unhappy wretches swarmed in
the early morning, would be deserted by nine o’clock, and as gloomy
and squalid as ever. Bianchon put his horse to a trot in order to find his
uncle in the midst of his business. It was not without a smile that he
thought of the curious contrast the judge’s appearance would make in
Madame d’Espard’s room; but he promised himself that he would persuade
him to dress in a way that should not be too ridiculous.
“If only my uncle happens to have a new coat!” said Bianchon to
himself, as he turned into the Rue du Fouarre, where a pale light
shone from the parlor windows. “I shall do well, I believe, to talk
that over with Lavienne.”
At the sound of wheels half a score of startled paupers came out
from under the gateway, and took off their hats on recognizing
Bianchon; for the doctor, who treated gratuitously the sick recommended
to him by the lawyer, was not less well known than he to
the poor creatures assembled there.
Bianchon found his uncle in the middle of the parlor, where the
benches were occupied by patients presenting such grotesque singularities
of costume as would have made the least artistic passer-by turn round
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to gaze at them. A draughtsman—a Rembrandt, if there were one in
our day—might have conceived of one of his finest compositions from
seeing these children of misery, in artless attitudes, and all silent.
Here was the rugged countenance of an old man with a white beard
and an apostolic head—a Saint Peter ready to hand; his chest, partly
uncovered, showed salient muscles, the evidence of an iron constitution
which had served him as a fulcrum to resist a whole poem of
sorrows. There a young woman was suckling her youngest-born to
keep it from crying, while another of about five stood between her
knees. Her white bosom, gleaming amid rags, the baby with its transparent
flesh-tints, and the brother, whose attitude promised a street
arab in the future, touched the fancy with pathos by its almost graceful
contrast with the long row of faces crimson with cold, in the
midst of which sat this family group. Further away, an old woman,
pale and rigid, had the repulsive look of rebellious pauperism, eager
to avenge all its past woes in one day of violence.
There, again, was the young workman, weakly and indolent, whose
brightly intelligent eye revealed fine faculties crushed by necessity
struggled with in vain, saying nothing of his sufferings, and nearly
dead for lack of an opportunity to squeeze between the bars of the
vast stews where the wretched swim round and round and devour
each other.
The majority were women; their husbands, gone to their work,
left it to them, no doubt, to plead the cause of the family with the
ingenuity which characterizes the woman of the people, who is almost
always queen in her hovel. You would have seen a torn bandana
on every head, on every form a skirt deep in mud, ragged kerchiefs,
worn and dirty jackets, but eyes that burnt like live coals. It was a
horrible assemblage, raising at first sight a feeling of disgust, but giving
a certain sense of terror the instant you perceived that the resignation
of these souls, all engaged in the struggle for every necessary of
life, was purely fortuitous, a speculation on benevolence. The two
tallow candles which lighted the parlor flickered in a sort of fog caused
by the fetid atmosphere of the ill-ventilated room.
The magistrate himself was not the least picturesque figure in the
midst of this assembly. He had on his head a rusty cotton nightcap;
as he had no cravat, his neck was visible, red with cold and
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The Commission in Lunacy
wrinkled, in contrast with the threadbare collar of his old dressinggown.
His worn face had the half-stupid look that comes of absorbed
attention. His lips, like those of all men who work, were
puckered up like a bag with the strings drawn tight. His knitted
brows seemed to bear the burden of all the sorrows confided to
him: he felt, analyzed, and judged them all. As watchful as a Jew
money-lender, he never raised his eyes from his books and registers
but to look into the very heart of the persons he was examining,
with the flashing glance by which a miser expresses his alarm.
Lavienne, standing behind his master, ready to carry out his orders,
served no doubt as a sort of police, and welcomed newcomers by
encouraging them to get over their shyness. When the doctor appeared
there was a stir on the benches. Lavienne turned his head, and
was strangely surprised to see Bianchon.
“Ah! It is you, old boy!” exclaimed Popinot, stretching himself.
“What brings you so early?”
“I was afraid lest you should make an official visit about which I
wish to speak to you before I could see you.”
“Well,” said the lawyer, addressing a stout little woman who was
still standing close to him, “if you do not tell me what it is you want,
I cannot guess it, child.”
“Make haste,” said Lavienne. “Do not waste other people’s time.”
“Monsieur,” said the woman at last, turning red, and speaking so
low as only to be heard by Popinot and Lavienne, “I have a greengrocery
truck, and I have my last baby to nurse, and I owe for his
keep. Well, I had hidden my little bit of money——”
“Yes; and your man took it?” said Popinot, guessing the sequel.
“Yes, sir.”
“What is your name?”
“La Pomponne.”
“And your husband’s?”
“Toupinet.”
“Rue du Petit-Banquier?” said Popinot, turning over his register.
“He is in prison,” he added, reading a note at the margin of the
section in which this family was described.
“For debt, my kind monsieur.”
Popinot shook his head.
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“But I have nothing to buy any stock for my truck; the landlord
came yesterday and made me pay up; otherwise I should have been
turned out.”
Lavienne bent over his master, and whispered in his ear.
“Well, how much do you want to buy fruit in the market?”
“Why, my good monsieur, to carry on my business, I should want—
Yes, I should certainly want ten francs.”
Popinot signed to Lavienne, who took ten francs out of a large
bag, and handed them to the woman, while the lawyer made a note
of the loan in his ledger. As he saw the thrill of delight that made the
poor hawker tremble, Bianchon understood the apprehensions that
must have agitated her on her way to the lawyer’s house.
“You next,” said Lavienne to the old man with the white beard.
Bianchon drew the servant aside, and asked him how long this
audience would last.
“Monsieur has had two hundred persons this morning, and there
are eight to be turned off,” said Lavienne. “You will have time to pay
your early visit, sir.”
“Here, my boy,” said the lawyer, turning round and taking Horace
by the arm; “here are two addresses near this—one in the Rue de
Seine, and the other in the Rue de l’Arbalete. Go there at once. Rue
de Seine, a young girl has just asphyxiated herself; and Rue de
l’Arbalete, you will find a man to remove to your hospital. I will
wait breakfast for you.”
Bianchon returned an hour later. The Rue du Fouarre was deserted;
day was beginning to dawn there; his uncle had gone up to his rooms;
the last poor wretch whose misery the judge had relieved was departing,
and Lavienne’s money bag was empty.
“Well, how are they going on?” asked the old lawyer, as the doctor
came in.
“The man is dead,” replied Bianchon; “the girl will get over it.”
Since the eye and hand of a woman had been lacking, the flat in
which Popinot lived had assumed an aspect in harmony with its
master’s. The indifference of a man who is absorbed in one dominant
idea had set its stamp of eccentricity on everything. Everywhere
lay unconquerable dust, every object was adapted to a wrong purpose
with a pertinacity suggestive of a bachelor’s home. There were
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The Commission in Lunacy
papers in the flower vases, empty ink-bottles on the tables, plates
that had been forgotten, matches used as tapers for a minute when
something had to be found, drawers or boxes half-turned out and
left unfinished; in short, all the confusion and vacancies resulting
from plans for order never carried out. The lawyer’s private room,
especially disordered by this incessant rummage, bore witness to his
unresting pace, the hurry of a man overwhelmed with business, hunted
by contradictory necessities. The bookcase looked as if it had been
sacked; there were books scattered over everything, some piled up
open, one on another, others on the floor face downwards; registers
of proceedings laid on the floor in rows, lengthwise, in front of the
shelves; and that floor had not been polished for two years.
The tables and shelves were covered with ex votos, the offerings of
the grateful poor. On a pair of blue glass jars which ornamented the
chimney-shelf there were two glass balls, of which the core was made
up of many-colored fragments, giving them the appearance of some
singular natural product. Against the wall hung frames of artificial
flowers, and decorations in which Popinot’s initials were surrounded
by hearts and everlasting flowers. Here were boxes of elaborate and
useless cabinet work; there letter-weights carved in the style of work
done by convicts in penal servitude. These masterpieces of patience,
enigmas of gratitude, and withered bouquets gave the lawyer’s room
the appearance of a toyshop. The good man used these works of art
as hiding-places which he filled with bills, worn-out pens, and scraps
of paper. All these pathetic witnesses to his divine charity were thick
with dust, dingy, and faded.
Some birds, beautifully stuffed, but eaten by moth, perched in this
wilderness of trumpery, presided over by an Angora cat, Madame
Popinot’s pet, restored to her no doubt with all the graces of life by
some impecunious naturalist, who thus repaid a gift of charity with
a perennial treasure. Some local artist whose heart had misguided his
brush had painted portraits of M. and Madame Popinot. Even in the
bedroom there were embroidered pin-cushions, landscapes in crossstitch,
and crosses in folded paper, so elaborately cockled as to show
the senseless labor they had cost.
The window-curtains were black with smoke, and the hangings
absolutely colorless. Between the fireplace and the large square table
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Balzac
at which the magistrate worked, the cook had set two cups of coffee
on a small table, and two armchairs, in mahogany and horsehair,
awaited the uncle and nephew. As daylight, darkened by the windows,
could not penetrate to this corner, the cook had left two dips
burning, whose unsnuffed wicks showed a sort of mushroom growth,
giving the red light which promises length of life to the candle from
slowness of combustion—a discovery due to some miser.
“My dear uncle, you ought to wrap yourself more warmly when
you go down to that parlor.”
“I cannot bear to keep them waiting, poor souls!—Well, and what
do you want of me?”
“I have come to ask you to dine to-morrow with the Marquise
d’Espard.”
“A relation of ours?” asked Popinot, with such genuine absence of
mind that Bianchon laughed.
“No, uncle; the Marquise d’Espard is a high and puissant lady, who
has laid before the Courts a petition desiring that a Commission in
Lunacy should sit on her husband, and you are appointed—”
“And you want me to dine with her! Are you mad?” said the lawyer,
taking up the code of proceedings. “Here, only read this article,
prohibiting any magistrate’s eating or drinking in the house of either
of two parties whom he is called upon to decide between. Let her
come and see me, your Marquise, if she has anything to say to me. I
was, in fact, to go to examine her husband to-morrow, after working
the case up to-night.”
He rose, took up a packet of papers that lay under a weight where
he could see it, and after reading the title, he said:
“Here is the affidavit. Since you take an interest in this high and
puissant lady, let us see what she wants.”
Popinot wrapped his dressing-gown across his body, from which it
was constantly slipping and leaving his chest bare; he sopped his bread
in the half-cold coffee, and opened the petition, which he read, allowing
himself to throw in a parenthesis now and then, and some
discussions, in which his nephew took part:—
“ ‘To Monsieur the President of the Civil Tribunal of the Lower
Court of the Department of the Seine, sitting at the Palais de Justice.
“ ‘Madame Jeanne Clementine Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, wife
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The Commission in Lunacy
of M. Charles Maurice Marie Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse,
Marquis d’Espard’—a very good family—’landowner, the said Mme.
d’Espard living in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, No. 104,
and the said M. d’Espard in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve,
No. 22,’—to be sure, the President told me he lived in this part of
the town—’having for her solicitor Maitre Desroches’—Desroches!
a pettifogging jobber, a man looked down upon by his brother lawyers,
and who does his clients no good—”
“Poor fellow!” said Bianchon, “unluckily he has no money, and he
rushes round like the devil in holy water—That is all.”
“ ‘Has the honor to submit to you, Monsieur the President, that
for a year past the moral and intellectual powers of her husband, M.
d’Espard, have undergone so serious a change, that at the present day
they have reached the state of dementia and idiocy provided for by
Article 448 of the Civil Code, and require the application of the
remedies set forth by that article, for the security of his fortune and
his person, and to guard the interest of his children whom he keeps
to live with him.
“ ‘That, in point of fact, the mental condition of M. d’Espard,
which for some years has given grounds for alarm based on the system
he has pursued in the management of his affairs, has reached,
during the last twelvemonth, a deplorable depth of depression; that
his infirm will was the first thing to show the results of the malady;
and that its effete state leaves M. the Marquis d’Espard exposed to all
the perils of his incompetency, as is proved by the following facts:
“ ‘For a long time all the income accruing from M. d’Espard’s
estates are paid, without any reasonable cause, or even temporary
advantage, into the hands of an old woman, whose repulsive ugliness
is generally remarked on, named Madame Jeanrenaud, living sometimes
in Paris, Rue de la Vrilliere, No. 8, sometimes at Villeparisis,
near Claye, in the Department of Seine et Marne, and for the benefit
of her son, aged thirty-six, an officer in the ex-Imperial Guards, whom
the Marquis d’Espard has placed by his influence in the King’s Guards,
as Major in the First Regiment of Cuirassiers. These two persons,
who in 1814 were in extreme poverty, have since then purchased
house-property of considerable value; among other items, quite recently,
a large house in the Grand Rue Verte, where the said Jeanrenaud
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is laying out considerable sums in order to settle there with the woman
Jeanrenaud, intending to marry: these sums amount already to more
than a hundred thousand francs. The marriage has been arranged by
the intervention of M. d’Espard with his banker, one Mongenod,
whose niece he has asked in marriage for the said Jeanrenaud, promising
to use his influence to procure him the title and dignity of
baron. This has in fact been secured by His Majesty’s letters patent,
dated December 29th of last year, at the request of the Marquis
d’Espard, as can be proved by His Excellency the Keeper of the Seals,
if the Court should think proper to require his testimony.
“ ‘That no reason, not even such as morality and the law would
concur in disapproving, can justify the influence which the said Mme.
Jeanrenaud exerts over M. d’Espard, who, indeed, sees her very seldom;
nor account for his strange affection for the said Baron
Jeanrenaud, Major with whom he has but little intercourse. And yet
their power is so considerable, that whenever they need money, if
only to gratify a mere whim, this lady, or her son——’ Heh, heh! No
reason even such as morality and the law concur in disapproving! What
does the clerk or the attorney mean to insinuate?” said Popinot.
Bianchon laughed.
“ ‘This lady, or her son, obtain whatever they ask of the Marquis
d’Espard without demur; and if he has not ready money, M. d’Espard
draws bills to be paid by the said Mongenod, who has offered to give
evidence to that effect for the petitioner.
“ ‘That, moreover, in further proof of these facts, lately, on the
occasion of the renewal of the leases on the Espard estate, the farmers
having paid a considerable premium for the renewal of their leases on
the old terms, M. Jeanrenaud at once secured the payment of it into
his own hands.
“ ‘That the Marquis d’Espard parts with these sums of money so
little of his own free-will, that when he was spoken to on the subject
he seemed to remember nothing of the matter; that whenever anybody
of any weight has questioned him as to his devotion to these
two persons, his replies have shown so complete an absence of ideas
and of sense of his own interests, that there obviously must be some
occult cause at work to which the petitioner begs to direct the eye of
justice, inasmuch as it is impossible but that this cause should be
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The Commission in Lunacy
criminal, malignant, and wrongful, or else of a nature to come under
medical jurisdiction; unless this influence is of the kind which constitutes
an abuse of moral power—such as can only be described by
the word possession—’ The devil!” exclaimed Popinot. “What do you
say to that, doctor. These are strange statements.”
“They might certainly,” said Bianchon, “be an effect of magnetic
force.”
“Then do you believe in Mesmer’s nonsense, and his tub, and seeing
through walls?”
“Yes, uncle,” said the doctor gravely. “As I heard you read that petition
I thought of that. I assure you that I have verified, in another
sphere of action, several analogous facts proving the unlimited influence
one man may acquire over another. In contradiction to the opinion
of my brethren, I am perfectly convinced of the power of the
will regarded as a motor force. All collusion and charlatanism apart,
I have seen the results of such a possession. Actions promised during
sleep by a magnetized patient to the magnetizer have been scrupulously
performed on waking. The will of one had become the will of
the other.”
“Every kind of action?”
“Yes.”
“Even a criminal act?”
“Even a crime.”
“If it were not from you, I would not listen to such a thing.”
“I will make you witness it,” said Bianchon.
“Hm, hm,” muttered the lawyer. “But supposing that this so-called
possession fell under this class of facts, it would be difficult to prove
it as legal evidence.”
“If this woman Jeanrenaud is so hideously old and ugly, I do not
see what other means of fascination she can have used,” observed
Bianchon.
“But,” observed the lawyer, “in 1814, the time at which this fascination
is supposed to have taken place, this woman was fourteen
years younger; if she had been connected with M. d’Espard ten years
before that, these calculations take us back four-and-twenty years, to
a time when the lady may have been young and pretty, and have won
for herself and her son a power over M. d’Espard which some men
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do not know how to evade. Though the source of this power is
reprehensible in the sight of justice, it is justifiable in the eye of nature.
Madame Jeanrenaud may have been aggrieved by the marriage,
contracted probably at about that time, between the Marquis d’Espard
and Mademoiselle de Blamont-Chauvry, and at the bottom of all
this there may be nothing more than the rivalry of two women, since
the Marquis had for a long time lived apart from Mme. d’Espard.”
“But her repulsive ugliness, uncle?”
“Power of fascination is in direct proportion to ugliness,” said the
lawyer; “that is the old story. And then think of the smallpox, doctor.
But to proceed.
“ ‘That so long ago as in 1815, in order to supply the sums of
money required by these two persons, the Marquis d’Espard went
with his two children to live in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-
Genevieve, in rooms quite unworthy of his name and rank’—well,
we may live as we please—’that he keeps his two children there, the
Comte Clement d’Espard and Vicomte Camille d’Espard, in a style
of living quite unsuited to their future prospects, their name and
fortune; that he often wants money, to such a point, that not long
since the landlord, one Mariast, put in an execution on the furniture
in the rooms; that when this execution was carried out in his presence,
the Marquis d’Espard helped the bailiff, whom he treated like
a man of rank, paying him all the marks of attention and respect
which he would have shown to a person of superior birth and dignity
to himself.’”
The uncle and nephew glanced at each other and laughed.
“ ‘That, moreover, every act of his life, besides the facts with reference
to the widow Jeanrenaud and the Baron Jeanrenaud, her son,
are those of a madman; that for nearly ten years he has given his
thoughts exclusively to China, its customs, manners, and history;
that he refers everything to a Chinese origin; that when he is questioned
on the subject, he confuses the events of the day and the business
of yesterday with facts relating to China; that he censures the
acts of the Government and the conduct of the King, though he is
personally much attached to him, by comparing them with the politics
of China;
“ ‘That this monomania has driven the Marquis d’Espard to con-
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The Commission in Lunacy
duct devoid of all sense: against the customs of men of rank, and, in
opposition to his own professed ideas as to the duties of the nobility,
he has joined a commercial undertaking, for which he constantly
draws bills which, as they fall due, threaten both his honor and his
fortune, since they stamp him as a trader, and in default of payment
may lead to his being declared insolvent; that these debts, which are
owing to stationers, printers, lithographers, and print-colorists, who
have supplied the materials for his publication, called A Picturesque
History of China, now coming out in parts, are so heavy that these
tradesmen have requested the petitioner to apply for a Commission
in Lunacy with regard to the Marquis d’Espard in order to save their
own credit.’”
“The man is mad!” exclaimed Bianchon.
“You think so, do you?” said his uncle. “If you listen to only one
bell, you hear only one sound.”
“But it seems to me—” said Bianchon.
“But it seems to me,” said Popinot, “that if any relation of mine
wanted to get hold of the management of my affairs, and if, instead
of being a humble lawyer, whose colleagues can, any day, verify what
his condition is, I were a duke of the realm, an attorney with a little
cunning, like Desroches, might bring just such a petition against me.
“ ‘That his children’s education has been neglected for this monomania;
and that he has taught them, against all the rules of education,
the facts of Chinese history, which contradict the tenets of the
Catholic Church. He also has them taught the Chinese dialects.’ “
“Here Desroches strikes me as funny,” said Bianchon.
“The petition is drawn up by his head-clerk Godeschal, who, as
you know, is not strong in Chinese,” said the lawyer.
“ ‘That he often leaves his children destitute of the most necessary
things; that the petitioner, notwithstanding her entreaties, can never
see them; that the said Marquis d’Espard brings them to her only
once a year; that, knowing the privations to which they are exposed,
she makes vain efforts to give them the things most necessary for
their existence, and which they require——’ Oh! Madame la Marquise,
this is preposterous. By proving too much you prove nothing.—My
dear boy,” said the old man, laying the document on his
knee, “where is the mother who ever lacked heart and wit and yearn-
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Balzac
ing to such a degree as to fall below the inspirations suggested by her
animal instinct? A mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl
can be in the conduct of a love intrigue. If your Marquise really
wanted to give her children food and clothes, the Devil himself would
not have hindered her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an old
lawyer to swallow! —To proceed.
“ ‘That at the age the said children have now attained it is necessary
that steps should be taken to preserve them from the evil effects of
such an education; that they should be provided for as beseems their
rank, and that they should cease to have before their eyes the sad
example of their father’s conduct;
“ ‘That there are proofs in support of these allegations which the
Court can easily order to be produced. Many times has M. d’Espard
spoken of the judge of the Twelfth Arrondissement as a mandarin of
the third class; he often speaks of the professors of the College Henri
IV. as “men of letters”’ —and that offends them! ‘In speaking of the
simplest things, he says, “They were not done so in China;” in the
course of the most ordinary conversation he will sometimes allude to
Madame Jeanrenaud, or sometimes to events which happened in the
time of Louis XIV., and then sit plunged in the darkest melancholy;
sometimes he fancies he is in China. Several of his neighbors, among
others one Edme Becker, medical student, and Jean Baptiste Fremiot,
a professor, living under the same roof, are of opinion, after frequent
intercourse with the Marquis d’Espard, that his monomania with regard
to everything Chinese is the result of a scheme laid by the said
Baron Jeanrenaud and the widow his mother to bring about the deadening
of all the Marquis d’Espard’s mental faculties, since the only
service which Mme. Jeanrenaud appears to render M. d’Espard is to
procure him everything that relates to the Chinese Empire;
“ ‘Finally, that the petitioner is prepared to show to the Court that
the moneys absorbed by the said Baron and Mme. Jeanrenaud between
1814 and 1828 amount to not less than one million francs.
“ ‘In confirmation of the facts herein set forth, the petitioner can
bring the evidence of persons who are in the habit of seeing the Marquis
d’Espard, whose names and professions are subjoined, many of
whom have urged her to demand a commission in lunacy to declare
M. d’Espard incapable of managing his own affairs, as being the only
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way to preserve his fortune from the effects of his maladministration
and his children from his fatal influence.
“ ‘Taking all this into consideration, M. le President, and the affidavits
subjoined, the petitioner desires that it may please you, inasmuch
as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and incompetency
of the Marquis d’Espard herein described with his titles
and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared incompetent
by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may
be laid before the King’s public prosecutor; and that you will charge
one of the judges of this Court to make his report to you on any day
you may be pleased to name, and thereupon to pronounce judgment,’
etc.
“And here,” said Popinot, “is the President’s order instructing me!—
Well, what does the Marquise d’Espard want with me? I know everything.
But I shall go to-morrow with my registrar to see M. le
Marquis, for this does not seem at all clear to me.”
“Listen, my dear uncle, I have never asked the least little favor of
you that had to do with your legal functions; well, now I beg you to
show Madame d’Espard the kindness which her situation deserves. If
she came here, you would listen to her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, go and listen to her in her own house. Madame d’Espard
is a sickly, nervous, delicate woman, who would faint in your rathole
of a place. Go in the evening, instead of accepting her dinner,
since the law forbids your eating or drinking at your client’s expense.”
“And does not the law forbid you from taking any legacy from
your dead?” said Popinot, fancying that he saw a touch of irony on
his nephew’s lips.
“Come, uncle, if it were only to enable you to get at the truth of this
business, grant my request. You will come as the examining judge, since
matters do not seem to you very clear. Deuce take it! It is as necessary to
cross-question the Marquise as it is to examine the Marquis.”
“You are right,” said the lawyer. “It is quite possible that it is she
who is mad. I will go.”
“I will call for you. Write down in your engagement book: ‘Tomorrow
evening at nine, Madame d’Espard.’—Good!” said Bianchon,
seeing his uncle make a note of the engagement.
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Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle’s dusty staircase,
and found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment.
The coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent,
so Popinot put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned
whose appearance made those laugh who did not know the
secrets of his private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to
pull his cravat straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains
by crossing the breast of it with the right side over the left, and so
displaying the new front of the cloth. But in a minute the judge
rucked the coat up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his
hands into his pockets, obeying an irresistible habit. Thus the coat,
deeply wrinkled both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in
the middle of the back, leaving a gap between the waistcoat and
trousers through which his shirt showed. Bianchon, to his sorrow,
only discovered this crowning absurdity at the moment when his
uncle entered the Marquise’s room.
A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose
presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary
for an understanding of her interview with Popinot.
Madame d’Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the
fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various
personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or
forgotten, are at last quite intolerable—as discarded ministers are, and
every kind of decayed sovereignty. These flatterers of the past, odious
with their stale pretensions, know everything, speak ill of everything,
and, like ruined profligates, are friends with all the world. Since her
husband had separated from her in 1815, Madame d’Espard must
have married in the beginning of 1812. Her children, therefore, were
aged respectively fifteen and thirteen. By what luck was the mother of
a family, about three-and-thirty years of age, still the fashion?
Though Fashion is capricious, and no one can foresee who shall be
her favorites, though she often exalts a banker’s wife, or some woman
of very doubtful elegance and beauty, it certainly seems supernatural
when Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for
age. But in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted
Madame d’Espard as still young.
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The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was
twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening. But by what care,
what artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples. She condemned
herself to live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting
tones of light filtered through muslin. Like Diane de Poitiers,
she used cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise
slept on a horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve
her hair; she ate very little, only drank water, and observed
monastic regularity in the smallest actions of her life.
This severe system has, it is said, been carried so far as to the use of ice
instead of water, and nothing but cold food, by a famous Polish lady
of our day who spends a life, now verging on a century old, after the
fashion of a town belle. Fated to live as long as Marion Delorme,
whom history has credited with surviving to be a hundred and thirty,
the old vice-queen of Poland, at the age of nearly a hundred, has the
heart and brain of youth, a charming face, an elegant shape; and in her
conversation, sparkling with brilliancy like faggots in the fire, she can
compare the men and books of our literature with the men and books
of the eighteenth century. Living in Warsaw, she orders her caps of
Herbault in Paris. She is a great lady with the amiability of a mere girl;
she swims, she runs like a schoolboy, and can sink on to a sofa with the
grace of a young coquette; she mocks at death, and laughs at life. After
having astonished the Emperor Alexander, she can still amaze the Emperor
Nicholas by the splendor of her entertainments. She can still
bring tears to the eyes of a youthful lover, for her age is whatever she
pleases, and she has the exquisite self-devotion of a grisette. In short,
she is herself a fairy tale, unless, indeed, she is a fairy.
Had Madame d’Espard known Madame Zayonseck? Did she mean
to imitate her career? Be that as it may, the Marquise proved the
merits of the treatment; her complexion was clear, her brow
unwrinkled, her figure, like that of Henri II.’s lady-love, preserved
the litheness, the freshness, the covered charms which bring a woman
love and keep it alive. The simple precautions of this course, suggested
by art and nature, and perhaps by experience, had met in her
with a general system which confirmed the results. The Marquise
was absolutely indifferent to everything that was not herself: men
amused her, but no man had ever caused her those deep agitations
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which stir both natures to their depths, and wreck one on the other.
She knew neither hatred nor love. When she was offended, she avenged
herself coldly, quietly, at her leisure, waiting for the opportunity to
gratify the ill-will she cherished against anybody who dwelt in her
unfavorable remembrance. She made no fuss, she did not excite herself,
she talked, because she knew that by two words a woman may
cause the death of three men.
She had parted from M. d’Espard with the greatest satisfaction.
Had he not taken with him two children who at present were troublesome,
and in the future would stand in the way of her pretensions?
Her most intimate friends, as much as her least persistent admirers,
seeing about her none of Cornelia’s jewels, who come and go, and
unconsciously betray their mother’s age, took her for quite a young
woman. The two boys, about whom she seemed so anxious in her
petition, were, like their father, as unknown in the world as the northwest
passage is unknown to navigators. M. d’Espard was supposed
to be an eccentric personage who had deserted his wife without having
the smallest cause for complaint against her.
Mistress of herself at two-and-twenty, and mistress of her fortune
of twenty-six thousand francs a year, the Marquise hesitated long
before deciding on a course of action and ordering her life. Though
she benefited by the expenses her husband had incurred in his house,
though she had all the furniture, the carriages, the horses, in short, all
the details of a handsome establishment, she lived a retired life during
the years 1816, 17, and 18, a time when families were recovering
from the disasters resulting from political tempests. She belonged to
one of the most important and illustrious families of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, and her parents advised her to live with them as much
as possible after the separation forced upon her by her husband’s
inexplicable caprice.
In 1820 the Marquise roused herself from her lethargy; she went
to Court, appeared at parties, and entertained in her own house. From
1821 to 1827 she lived in great style, and made herself remarked for
her taste and her dress; she had a day, an hour, for receiving visits, and
ere long she had seated herself on the throne, occupied before her by
Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauseant, the Duchesse de Langeais, and
Madame Firmiani—who on her marriage with M. de Camps had
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resigned the sceptre in favor of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, from
whom Madame d’Espard snatched it. The world knew nothing beyond
this of the private live of the Marquise d’Espard. She seemed
likely to shine for long on the Parisian horizon, like the sun near its
setting, but which will never set.
The Marquise was on terms of great intimacy with a duchess as
famous for her beauty as for her attachment to a prince just now in
banishment, but accustomed to play a leading part in every prospective
government. Madame d’Espard was also a friend of a foreign
lady, with whom a famous and very wily Russian diplomate was in
the habit of discussing public affairs. And then an antiquated countess,
who was accustomed to shuffle the cards for the great game of
politics, had adopted her in a maternal fashion. Thus, to any man of
high ambitions, Madame d’Espard was preparing a covert but very
real influence to follow the public and frivolous ascendency she now
owed to fashion. Her drawing-room was acquiring political individuality:
“What do they say at Madame d’Espard’s?” “Are they against
the measure in Madame d’Espard’s drawing-room?” were questions
repeated by a sufficient number of simpletons to give the flock of
the faithful who surrounded her the importance of a coterie. A few
damaged politicians whose wounds she had bound up, and whom
she flattered, pronounced her as capable in diplomacy as the wife of
the Russian ambassador to London. The Marquise had indeed several
times suggested to deputies or to peers words and ideas that had
rung through Europe. She had often judged correctly of certain events
on which her circle of friends dared not express an opinion. The
principal persons about the Court came in the evening to play whist
in her rooms.
Then she also had the qualities of her defects; she was thought to
be —and she was—indiscreet. Her friendship seemed to be staunch;
she worked for her proteges with a persistency which showed that
she cared less for patronage than for increased influence. This conduct
was based on her dominant passion, Vanity. Conquests and
pleasure, which so many women love, to her seemed only means to
an end; she aimed at living on every point of the largest circle that
life can describe.
Among the men still young, and to whom the future belonged,
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who crowded her drawing-room on great occasions, were to be seen
MM. de Marsay and de Ronquerolles, de Montriveau, de la Roche-
Hugon, de Serizy, Ferraud, Maxime de Trailles, de Listomere, the
two Vandenesses, du Chatelet, and others. She would frequently receive
a man whose wife she would not admit, and her power was
great enough to induce certain ambitious men to submit to these
hard conditions, such as two famous royalist bankers, M. de Nucingen
and Ferdinand du Tillet. She had so thoroughly studied the strength
and the weakness of Paris life, that her conduct had never given any
man the smallest advantage over her. An enormous price might have
been set on a note or letter by which she might have compromised
herself, without one being produced.
If an arid soul enabled her to play her part to the life, her person was
no less available for it. She had a youthful figure. Her voice was, at
will, soft and fresh, or clear and hard. She possessed in the highest
degree the secret of that aristocratic pose by which a woman wipes out
the past. The Marquise knew well the art of setting an immense space
between herself and the sort of man who fancies he may be familiar
after some chance advances. Her imposing gaze could deny everything.
In her conversation fine and beautiful sentiments and noble resolutions
flowed naturally, as it seemed, from a pure heart and soul; but in
reality she was all self, and quite capable of blasting a man who was
clumsy in his negotiations, at the very time when she was shamelessly
making a compromise for the benefit of her own interest.
Rastignac, in trying to fasten on to this woman, had discerned her
to be the cleverest of tools, but he had not yet used it; far from
handling it, he was already finding himself crushed by it. This young
Condottiere of the brain, condemned, like Napoleon, to give battle
constantly, while knowing that a single defeat would prove the grave
of his fortunes, had met a dangerous adversary in his protectress. For
the first time in his turbulent life, he was playing a game with a
partner worthy of him. He saw a place as Minister in the conquest of
Madame d’Espard, so he was her tool till he could make her his—a
perilous beginning.
The Hotel d’Espard needed a large household, and the Marquise
had a great number of servants. The grand receptions were held in
the ground-floor rooms, but she lived on the first floor of the house.
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The perfect order of a fine staircase splendidly decorated, and rooms
fitted in the dignified style which formerly prevailed at Versailles,
spoke of an immense fortune. When the judge saw the carriage gates
thrown open to admit his nephew’s cab, he took in with a rapid
glance the lodge, the porter, the courtyard, the stables, the arrangement
of the house, the flowers that decorated the stairs, the perfect
cleanliness of the banisters, walls, and carpets, and counted the footmen
in livery who, as the bell rang, appeared on the landing. His
eyes, which only yesterday in his parlor had sounded the dignity of
misery under the muddy clothing of the poor, now studied with the
same penetrating vision the furniture and splendor of the rooms he
passed through, to pierce the misery of grandeur.
“M. Popinot—M. Bianchon.”
The two names were pronounced at the door of the boudoir where
the Marquise was sitting, a pretty room recently refurnished, and
looking out on the garden behind the house. At the moment Madame
d’Espard was seated in one of the old rococo armchairs of
which Madame had set the fashion. Rastignac was at her left hand on
a low chair, in which he looked settled like an Italian lady’s “cousin.”
A third person was standing by the corner of the chimney-piece. As
the shrewd doctor had suspected, the Marquise was a woman of a
parched and wiry constitution. But for her regimen her complexion
must have taken the ruddy tone that is produced by constant heat;
but she added to the effect of her acquired pallor by the strong colors
of the stuffs she hung her rooms with, or in which she dressed. Reddish-brown,
marone, bistre with a golden light in it, suited her to
perfection. Her boudoir, copied from that of a famous lady then at
the height of fashion in London, was in tan-colored velvet; but she
had added various details of ornament which moderated the pompous
splendor of this royal hue. Her hair was dressed like a girl’s in
bands ending in curls, which emphasized the rather long oval of her
face; but an oval face is as majestic as a round one is ignoble. The
mirrors, cut with facets to lengthen or flatten the face at will, amply
proved the rule as applied to the physiognomy.
On seeing Popinot, who stood in the doorway craning his neck like
a startled animal, with his left hand in his pocket, and the right hand
holding a hat with a greasy lining, the Marquise gave Rastignac a look
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wherein lay a germ of mockery. The good man’s rather foolish appearance
was so completely in harmony with his grotesque figure and scared
looks, that Rastignac, catching sight of Bianchon’s dejected expression
of humiliation through his uncle, could not help laughing, and turned
away. The Marquise bowed a greeting, and made a great effort to rise
from her seat, falling back again, not without grace, with an air of
apologizing for her incivility by affected weakness.
At this instant the person who was standing between the fireplace
and the door bowed slightly, and pushed forward two chairs, which he
offered by a gesture to the doctor and the judge; then, when they had
seated themselves, he leaned against the wall again, crossing his arms.
A word as to this man. There is living now, in our day, a painter—
Decamps—who possesses in the very highest degree the art of commanding
your interest in everything he sets before your eyes, whether
it be a stone or a man. In this respect his pencil is more skilful than
his brush. He will sketch an empty room and leave a broom against
the wall. If he chooses, you shall shudder; you shall believe that this
broom has just been the instrument of crime, and is dripping with
blood; it shall be the broom which the widow Bancal used to clean
out the room where Fualdes was murdered. Yes, the painter will
touzle that broom like a man in a rage; he will make each hair of it
stand on-end as though it were on your own bristling scalp; he will
make it the interpreter between the secret poem of his imagination
and the poem that shall have its birth in yours. After terrifying you
by the aspect of that broom, to-morrow he will draw another, and
lying by it a cat, asleep, but mysterious in its sleep, shall tell you that
this broom is that on which the wife of a German cobbler rides off
to the Sabbath on the Brocken. Or it will be a quite harmless broom,
on which he will hang the coat of a clerk in the Treasury. Decamps
had in his brush what Paganini had in his bow—a magnetically communicative
power.
Well, I should have to transfer to my style that striking genius, that
marvelous knack of the pencil, to depict the upright, tall, lean man
dressed in black, with black hair, who stood there without speaking
a word. This gentleman had a face like a knife-blade, cold and harsh,
with a color like Seine water when it was muddy and strewn with
fragments of charcoal from a sunken barge. He looked at the floor,
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The Commission in Lunacy
listening and passing judgment. His attitude was terrifying. He stood
there like the dreadful broom to which Decamps has given the power
of revealing a crime. Now and then, in the course of conversation,
the Marquise tried to get some tacit advice; but however eager her
questioning, he was as grave and as rigid as the statue of the
Commendatore.
The worthy Popinot, sitting on the edge of his chair in front of the
fire, his hat between his knees, stared at the gilt chandeliers, the clock,
and the curiosities with which the chimney-shelf was covered, the
velvet and trimmings of the curtains, and all the costly and elegant
nothings that a woman of fashion collects about her. He was roused
from his homely meditations by Madame d’Espard, who addressed
him in a piping tone:
“Monsieur, I owe you a million thanks—”
“A million thanks,” thought he to himself, “that is too many; it
does not mean one.”
“For the trouble you condescend—”
“Condescend!” thought he; “she is laughing at me.”
“To take in coming to see an unhappy client, who is too ill to go
out—”
Here the lawyer cut the Marquise short by giving her an inquisitorial
look, examining the sanitary condition of the unhappy client.
“As sound as a bell,” said he to himself.
“Madame,” said he, assuming a respectful mien, “you owe me nothing.
Although my visit to you is not in strict accordance with the
practice of the Court, we ought to spare no pains to discover the
truth in cases of this kind. Our judgment is then guided less by the
letter of the law than by the promptings of our conscience. Whether
I seek the truth here or in my own consulting-room, so long as I find
it, all will be well.”
While Popinot was speaking, Rastignac was shaking hands with
Bianchon; the Marquise welcomed the doctor with a little bow full
of gracious significance.
“Who is that?” asked Bianchon in a whisper of Rastignac, indicating
the dark man.
“The Chevalier d’Espard, the Marquis’ brother.”
“Your nephew told me,” said the Marquise to Popinot, “how much
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you are occupied, and I know too that you are so good as to wish to
conceal your kind actions, so as to release those whom you oblige
from the burden of gratitude. The work in Court is most fatiguing,
it would seem. Why have they not twice as many judges?”
“Ah, madame, that would not be difficult; we should be none the
worse if they had. But when that happens, fowls will cut their teeth!”
As he heard this speech, so entirely in character with the lawyer’s
appearance, the Chevalier measured him from head to foot, out of
one eye, as much as to say, “We shall easily manage him.”
The Marquise looked at Rastignac, who bent over her. “That is the
sort of man,” murmured the dandy in her ear, “who is trusted to pass
judgments on the life and interests of private individuals.”
Like most men who have grown old in a business, Popinot readily
let himself follow the habits he had acquired, more particularly habits
of mind. His conversation was all of “the shop.” He was fond of questioning
those he talked to, forcing them to unexpected conclusions,
making them tell more than they wished to reveal. Pozzo di Borgo, it
is said, used to amuse himself by discovering other folks’ secrets, and
entangling them in his diplomatic snares, and thus, by invincible habit,
showed how his mind was soaked in wiliness. As soon as Popinot had
surveyed the ground, so to speak, on which he stood, he saw that it
would be necessary to have recourse to the cleverest subtleties, the most
elaborately wrapped up and disguised, which were in use in the Courts,
to detect the truth.
Bianchon sat cold and stern, as a man who has made up his mind
to endure torture without revealing his sufferings; but in his heart he
wished that his uncle could only trample on this woman as we trample
on a viper—a comparison suggested to him by the Marquise’s long
dress, by the curve of her attitude, her long neck, small head, and
undulating movements.
“Well, monsieur,” said Madame d’Espard, “however great my dislike
to be or seem selfish, I have been suffering too long not to wish that you
may settle matters at once. Shall I soon get a favorable decision?”
“Madame, I will do my best to bring matters to a conclusion,” said
Popinot, with an air of frank good-nature. “Are you ignorant of the
reason which made the separation necessary which now subsists between
you and the Marquis d’Espard?”
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The Commission in Lunacy
“Yes, monsieur,” she replied, evidently prepared with a story to tell.
“At the beginning of 1816 M. d’Espard, whose temper had completely
changed within three months or so, proposed that we should
go to live on one of his estates near Briancon, without any regard for
my health, which that climate would have destroyed, or for my habits
of life; I refused to go. My refusal gave rise to such unjustifiable
reproaches on his part, that from that hour I had my suspicions as to
the soundness of his mind. On the following day he left me, leaving
me his house and the free use of my own income, and he went to live
in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, taking with him my
two children—”
“One moment, madame,” said the lawyer, interrupting her. “What
was that income?”
“Twenty-six thousand francs a year,” she replied parenthetically. “I at
once consulted old M. Bordin as to what I ought to do,” she went on;
“but it seems that there are so many difficulties in the way of depriving
a father of the care of his children, that I was forced to resign myself to
remaining alone at the age of twenty-two—an age at which many young
women do very foolish things. You have read my petition, no doubt,
monsieur; you know the principal facts on which I rely to procure a
Commission in Lunacy with regard to M. d’Espard?”
“Have you ever applied to him, madame, to obtain the care of
your children?”
“Yes, monsieur; but in vain. It is very hard on a mother to be deprived
of the affection of her children, particularly when they can
give her such happiness as every woman clings to.”
“The elder must be sixteen,” said Popinot.
“Fifteen,” said the Marquise eagerly.
Here Bianchon and Rastignac looked at each other. Madame
d’Espard bit her lips.
“What can the age of my children matter to you?”
“Well, madame,” said the lawyer, without seeming to attach any
importance to his words, “a lad of fifteen and his brother, of thirteen,
I suppose, have legs and their wits about them; they might come to
see you on the sly. If they do not, it is because they obey their father,
and to obey him in that matter they must love him very dearly.”
“I do not understand,” said the Marquise.
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“You do not know, perhaps,” replied Popinot, “that in your petition
your attorney represents your children as being very unhappy
with their father?”
Madame d’Espard replied with charming innocence:
“I do not know what my attorney may have put into my mouth.”
“Forgive my inferences,” said Popinot, “but Justice weighs everything.
What I ask you, madame, is suggested by my wish thoroughly
to understand the matter. By your account M. d’Espard deserted you
on the most frivolous pretext. Instead of going to Briancon, where
he wished to take you, he remained in Paris. This point is not clear.
Did he know this Madame Jeanrenaud before his marriage?”
“No, monsieur,” replied the Marquise, with some asperity, visible
only to Rastignac and the Chevalier d’Espard.
She was offended at being cross-examined by this layer when she
had intended to beguile his judgment; but as Popinot still looked
stupid from sheer absence of mind, she ended by attributing his interrogatory
to the Questioning Spirit of Voltaire’s bailiff.
“My parents,” she went on, “married me at the age of sixteen to M.
d’Espard, whose name, fortune, and mode of life were such as my
family looked for in the man who was to be my husband. M. d’Espard
was then six-and-twenty; he was a gentleman in the English sense of
the word; his manners pleased me, he seemed to have plenty of ambition,
and I like ambitious people,” she added, looking at Rastignac.
“If M. d’Espard had never met that Madame Jeanrenaud, his character,
his learning, his acquirements would have raised him—as his
friends then believed—to high office in the Government. King
Charles X., at that time Monsieur, had the greatest esteem for him,
and a peer’s seat, an appointment at Court, some important post
certainly would have been his. That woman turned his head, and has
ruined all the prospects of my family.”
“What were M. d’Espard’s religious opinions at that time?”
“He was, and is still, a very pious man.”
“You do not suppose that Madame Jeanrenaud may have influenced
him by mysticism?”
“No, monsieur.”
“You have a very fine house, madame,” said Popinot suddenly, taking
his hands out of his pockets, and rising to pick up his coat-tails
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The Commission in Lunacy
and warm himself. “This boudoir is very nice, those chairs are magnificent,
the whole apartment is sumptuous. You must indeed be
most unhappy when, seeing yourself here, you know that your children
are ill lodged, ill clothed, and ill fed. I can imagine nothing
more terrible for a mother.”
“Yes, indeed. I should be so glad to give the poor little fellows
some amusement, while their father keeps them at work from morning
till night at that wretched history of China.”
“You give handsome balls; they would enjoy them, but they might
acquire a taste for dissipation. However, their father might send them
to you once or twice in the course of the winter.”
“He brings them here on my birthday and on New Year’s Day. On
those days M. d’Espard does me the favor of dining here with them.”
“It is very singular behaviour,” said the judge, with an air of conviction.
“Have you ever seen this Dame Jeanrenaud?”
“My brother-in-law one day, out of interest in his brother—”
“Ah! monsieur is M. d’Espard’s brother?” said the lawyer, interrupting
her.
The Chevalier bowed, but did not speak.
“M. d’Espard, who has watched this affair, took me to the Oratoire,
where this woman goes to sermon, for she is a Protestant. I saw her;
she is not in the least attractive; she looks like a butcher’s wife, extremely
fat, horribly marked with the smallpox; she has feet and
hands like a man’s, she squints, in short, she is monstrous!”
“It is inconceivable,” said the judge, looking like the most imbecile
judge in the whole kingdom. “And this creature lives near here, Rue
Verte, in a fine house? There are no plain folk left, it would seem?”
“In a mansion on which her son has spent absurd sums.”
“Madame,” said Popinot, “I live in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau; I
know nothing of such expenses. What do you call absurd sums?”
“Well,” said the Marquise, “a stable with five horses and three carriages,
a phaeton, a brougham, and a cabriolet.”
“That costs a large sum, then?” asked Popinot in surprise.
“Enormous sums!” said Rastignac, intervening. “Such an establishment
would cost, for the stables, the keeping the carriages in order,
and the liveries for the men, between fifteen and sixteen thousand
francs a year.”
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“Should you think so, madame?” said the judge, looking much
astonished.
“Yes, at least,” replied the Marquise.
“And the furniture, too, must have cost a lot of money?”
“More than a hundred thousand francs,” replied Madame d’Espard,
who could not help smiling at the lawyer’s vulgarity.
“Judges, madame, are apt to be incredulous; it is what they are paid
for, and I am incredulous. The Baron Jeanrenaud and his mother
must have fleeced M. d’Espard most preposterously, if what you say
is correct. There is a stable establishment which, by your account,
costs sixteen thousand francs a year. Housekeeping, servants’ wages,
and the gross expenses of the house itself must run to twice as much;
that makes a total of from fifty to sixty thousand francs a year. Do
you suppose that these people, formerly so extremely poor, can have
so large a fortune? A million yields scarcely forty thousand a year.”
“Monsieur, the mother and son invested the money given them by
M. d’Espard in the funds when they were at 60 to 80. I should think
their income must be more than sixty thousand francs. And then the
son has fine appointments.”
“If they spend sixty thousand francs a year,” said the judge, “how
much do you spend?”
“Well,” said Madame d’Espard, “about the same.” The Chevalier
started a little, the Marquise colored; Bianchon looked at Rastignac;
but Popinot preserved an expression of simplicity which quite deceived
Madame d’Espard. The chevalier took no part in the conversation;
he saw that all was lost.
“These people, madame, might be indicted before the superior
Court,” said Popinot.
“That was my opinion,” exclaimed the Marquise, enchanted. “If
threatened with the police, they would have come to terms.”
“Madame,” said Popinot, “when M. d’Espard left you, did he not
give you a power of attorney enabling you to manage and control
your own affairs?”
“I do not understand the object of all these questions,” said the
Marquise with petulance. “It seems to me that if you would only
consider the state in which I am placed by my husband’s insanity,
you ought to be troubling yourself about him, and not about me.”
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“We are coming to that, madame,” said the judge. “Before placing in
your hands, or in any others, the control of M. d’Espard’s property,
supposing he were pronounced incapable, the Court must inquire as
to how you have managed your own. If M. d’Espard gave you the
power, he would have shown confidence in you, and the Court would
recognize the fact. Had you any power from him? You might have
bought or sold house property or invested money in business?”
“No, monsieur, the Blamont-Chauvrys are not in the habit of trading,”
said she, extremely nettled in her pride as an aristocrat, and
forgetting the business in hand. “My property is intact, and M.
d’Espard gave me no power to act.”
The Chevalier put his hand over his eyes not to betray the vexation
he felt at his sister-in-law’s short-sightedness, for she was ruining herself
by her answers. Popinot had gone straight to the mark in spite of
his apparent doublings.
“Madame,” said the lawyer, indicating the Chevalier, “this gentleman,
of course, is your near connection? May we speak openly before
these other gentlemen?”
“Speak on,” said the Marquise, surprised at this caution.
“Well, madame, granting that you spend only sixty thousand francs
a year, to any one who sees your stables, your house, your train of
servants, and a style of housekeeping which strikes me as far more
luxurious than that of the Jeanrenauds, that sum would seem well
laid out.”
The Marquise bowed an agreement.
“But,” continued the judge, “if you have no more than twenty-six
thousand francs a year, you may have a hundred thousand francs of
debt. The Court would therefore have a right to imagine that the
motives which prompt you to ask that your husband may be deprived
of the control of his property are complicated by self-interest
and the need of paying your debts—if—you—have—any. The requests
addressed to me have interested me in your position; consider
fully and make your confession. If my suppositions have hit the truth,
there is yet time to avoid the blame which the Court would have a
perfect right to express in the saving clauses of the verdict if you
could not show your attitude to be absolutely honorable and clear.
“It is our duty to examine the motives of the applicant as well as to
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listen to the plea of the witness under examination, to ascertain whether
the petitioner may not have been prompted by passion, by a desire
for money, which is unfortunately too common—”
The Marquise was on Saint Laurence’s gridiron.
“And I must have explanations on this point. Madame, I have no
wish to call you to account; I only want to know how you have
managed to live at the rate of sixty thousand francs a year, and that
for some years past. There are plenty of women who achieve this in
their housekeeping, but you are not one of those. Tell me, you may
have the most legitimate resources, a royal pension, or some claim
on the indemnities lately granted; but even then you must have had
your husband’s authority to receive them.”
The Marquise did not speak.
“You must remember,” Popinot went on, “that M. d’Espard may
wish to enter a protest, and his counsel will have a right to find out
whether you have any creditors. This boudoir is newly furnished,
your rooms are not now furnished with the things left to you by M.
d’Espard in 1816. If, as you did me the honor of informing me,
furniture is costly for the Jeanrenauds, it must be yet more so for
you, who are a great lady. Though I am a judge, I am but a man; I
may be wrong—tell me so. Remember the duties imposed on me by
the law, and the rigorous inquiries it demands, when the case before
it is the suspension from all his functions of the father of a family in
the prime of life. So you will pardon me, Madame la Marquise, for
laying all these difficulties before you; it will be easy for you to give
me an explanation.
“When a man is pronounced incapable of the control of his own
affairs, a trustee has to be appointed. Who will be the trustee?”
“His brother,” said the Marquise.
The Chevalier bowed. There was a short silence, very uncomfortable
for the five persons who were present. The judge, in sport as it
were, had laid open the woman’s sore place. Popinot’s countenance
of common, clumsy good-nature, at which the Marquise, the Chevalier,
and Rastignac had been inclined to laugh, had gained importance
in their eyes. As they stole a look at him, they discerned the
various expressions of that eloquent mouth. The ridiculous mortal
was a judge of acumen. His studious notice of the boudoir was ac-
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counted for: he had started from the gilt elephant supporting the
chimney-clock, examining all this luxury, and had ended by reading
this woman’s soul.
“If the Marquis d’Espard is mad about China, I see that you are
not less fond of its products,” said Popinot, looking at the porcelain
on the chimney-piece. “But perhaps it was from M. le Marquis that
you had these charming Oriental pieces,” and he pointed to some
precious trifles.
This irony, in very good taste, made Bianchon smile, and petrified
Rastignac, while the Marquise bit her thin lips.
“Instead of being the protector of a woman placed in a cruel dilemma—an
alternative between losing her fortune and her children,
and being regarded as her husband’s enemy,” she said, “you accuse
me, monsieur! You suspect my motives! You must own that your
conduct is strange!”
“Madame,” said the judge eagerly, “the caution exercised by the
Court in such cases as these might have given you, in any other judge,
a perhaps less indulgent critic than I am.—And do you suppose that
M. d’Espard’s lawyer will show you any great consideration? Will he
not be suspicious of motives which may be perfectly pure and disinterested?
Your life will be at his mercy; he will inquire into it without
qualifying his search by the respectful deference I have for you.”
“I am much obliged to you, monsieur,” said the Marquise satirically.
“Admitting for the moment that I owe thirty thousand or fifty
thousand francs, in the first place, it would be a mere trifle to the
d’Espards and the Blamont-Chauvrys. But if my husband is not in
the possession of his mental faculties, would that prevent his being
pronounced incapable?”
“No, madame,” said Popinot.
“Although you have questioned me with a sort of cunning which I
should not have suspected in a judge, and under circumstances where
straightforwardness would have answered your purpose,” she went
on, “I will tell you without subterfuge that my position in the world,
and the efforts I have to make to keep up my connection, are not in
the least to my taste. I began my life by a long period of solitude; but
my children’s interest appealed to me; I felt that I must fill their
father’s place. By receiving my friends, by keeping up all this connec-
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tion, by contracting these debts, I have secured their future welfare; I
have prepared for them a brilliant career where they will find help
and favor; and to have what has thus been acquired, many a man of
business, lawyer or banker, would gladly pay all it has cost me.”
“I appreciate your devoted conduct, madame,” replied Popinot. “It
does you honor, and I blame you for nothing. A judge belongs to all:
he must know and weigh every fact.”
Madame d’Espard’s tact and practice in estimating men made her
understand that M. Popinot was not to be influenced by any consideration.
She had counted on an ambitious lawyer, she had found a
man of conscience. She at once thought of finding other means for
securing the success of her side.
The servants brought in tea.
“Have you any further explanations to give me, madame?” said
Popinot, seeing these preparations.
“Monsieur,” she replied haughtily, “do your business your own way;
question M. d’Espard, and you will pity me, I am sure.” She raised
her head, looking Popinot in the face with pride, mingled with impertinence;
the worthy man bowed himself out respectfully.
“A nice man is your uncle,” said Rastignac to Bianchon. “Is he
really so dense? Does not he know what the Marquise d’Espard is,
what her influence means, her unavowed power over people? The
Keeper of the Seals will be with her to-morrow—”
“My dear fellow, how can I help it?” said Bianchon. “Did not I
warn you? He is not a man you can get over.”
“No,” said Rastignac; “he is a man you must run over.”
The doctor was obliged to make his bow to the Marquise and her
mute Chevalier to catch up Popinot, who, not being the man to
endure an embarrassing position, was pacing through the rooms.
“That woman owes a hundred thousand crowns,” said the judge,
as he stepped into his nephew’s cab.
“And what do you think of the case?”
“I,” said the judge. “I never have an opinion till I have gone into
everything. To-morrow early I will send to Madame Jeanrenaud to
call on me in my private office at four o’clock, to make her explain
the facts which concern her, for she is compromised.”
“I should very much like to know what the end will be.”
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The Commission in Lunacy
“Why, bless me, do not you see that the Marquise is the tool of
that tall lean man who never uttered a word? There is a strain of
Cain in him, but of the Cain who goes to the Law Courts for his
bludgeon, and there, unluckily for him, we keep more than one
Damocles’ sword.”
“Oh, Rastignac! what brought you into that boat, I wonder?” exclaimed
Bianchon.
“Ah, we are used to seeing these little family conspiracies,” said
Popinot. “Not a year passes without a number of verdicts of ‘insufficient
evidence’ against applications of this kind. In our state of society
such an attempt brings no dishonor, while we send a poor devil
to the galleys who breaks a pane of glass dividing him from a bowl
full of gold. Our Code is not faultless.”
“But these are the facts?”
“My boy, do you not know all the judicial romances with which
clients impose on their attorneys? If the attorneys condemned themselves
to state nothing but the truth, they would not earn enough to
keep their office open.”
* * *
Next day, at four in the afternoon, a very stout dame, looking a good
deal like a cask dressed up in a gown and belt, mounted Judge
Popinot’s stairs, perspiring and panting. She had, with great difficulty,
got out of a green landau, which suited her to a miracle; you
could not think of the woman without the landau, or the landau
without the woman.
“It is I, my dear sir,” said she, appearing in the doorway of the
judge’s room. “Madame Jeanrenaud, whom you summoned exactly
as if I were a thief, neither more nor less.”
The common words were spoken in a common voice, broken by
the wheezing of asthma, and ending in a cough.
“When I go through a damp place, I can’t tell you what I suffer, sir.
I shall never make old bones, saving your presence. However, here I
am.”
The lawyer was quite amazed at the appearance of this supposed
Marechale d’Ancre. Madame Jeanrenaud’s face was pitted with an
infinite number of little holes, was very red, with a pug nose and a
low forehead, and was as round as a ball; for everything about the
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good woman was round. She had the bright eyes of a country woman,
an honest gaze, a cheerful tone, and chestnut hair held in place by a
bonnet cap under a green bonnet decked with a shabby bunch of
auriculas. Her stupendous bust was a thing to laugh at, for it made
one fear some grotesque explosion every time she coughed. Her enormous
legs were of the shape which make the Paris street boy describe
such a woman as being built on piles. The widow wore a green gown
trimmed with chinchilla, which looked on her as a splash of dirty oil
would look on a bride’s veil. In short, everything about her harmonized
with her last words: “Here I am.”
“Madame,” said Popinot, “you are suspected of having used some
seductive arts to induce M. d’Espard to hand over to you very considerable
sums of money.”
“Of what! of what!” cried she. “Of seductive arts? But, my dear sir,
you are a man to be respected, and, moreover, as a lawyer you ought
to have some good sense. Look at me! Tell me if I am likely to seduce
any one. I cannot tie my own shoes, nor even stoop. For these twenty
years past, the Lord be praised, I have not dared to put on a pair of
stays under pain of sudden death. I was as thin as an asparagus stalk
when I was seventeen, and pretty too—I may say so now. So I married
Jeanrenaud, a good fellow, and headman on the salt-barges. I
had my boy, who is a fine young man; he is my pride, and it is not
holding myself cheap to say he is my best piece of work. My little
Jeanrenaud was a soldier who did Napoleon credit, and who served
in the Imperial Guard. But, alas! at the death of my old man, who
was drowned, times changed for the worse. I had the smallpox. I was
kept two years in my room without stirring, and I came out of it the
size you see me, hideous for ever, and as wretched as could be. These
are my seductive arts.”
“But what, then, can the reasons be that have induced M. d’Espard
to give you sums—”
“Hugious sums, monsieur, say the word; I do not mind. But as to
his reasons, I am not at liberty to explain them.”
“You are wrong. At this moment, his family, very naturally alarmed,
are about to bring an action—”
“Heavens above us!” said the good woman, starting up. “Is it possible
that he should be worried on my account? That king of men, a
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The Commission in Lunacy
man that has not his match! Rather than he should have the smallest
trouble, or hair less on his head I could almost say, we would return
every sou, monsieur. Write that down on your papers. Heaven above
us! I will go at once and tell Jeanrenaud what is going on! A pretty
thing indeed!”
And the little old woman went out, rolled herself downstairs, and
disappeared.
“That one tells no lies,” said Popinot to himself. “Well, to-morrow
I shall know the whole story, for I shall go to see the Marquis
d’Espard.”
People who have outlived the age when a man wastes his vitality at
random, know how great an influence may be exercised on more important
events by apparently trivial incidents, and will not be surprised
at the weight here given to the following minor fact. Next day Popinot
had an attack of coryza, a complaint which is not dangerous, and generally
known by the absurd and inadequate name of a cold in the head.
The judge, who could not suppose that the delay could be serious,
feeling himself a little feverish, kept his room, and did not go to see
the Marquis d’Espard. This day lost was, to this affair, what on the
Day of Dupes the cup of soup had been, taken by Marie de Medici,
which, by delaying her meeting with Louis XIII., enabled Richelieu
to arrive at Saint-Germain before her, and recapture his royal slave.
Before accompanying the lawyer and his registering clerk to the
Marquis d’Espard’s house, it may be as well to glance at the home
and the private affairs of this father of sons whom his wife’s petition
represented to be a madman.
Here and there in the old parts of Paris a few buildings may still be
seen in which the archaeologist can discern an intention of decorating
the city, and that love of property, which leads the owner to give
a durable character to the structure. The house in which M. d’Espard
was then living, in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, was
one of these old mansions, built in stone, and not devoid of a certain
richness of style; but time had blackened the stone, and revolutions
in the town had damaged it both outside and inside. The dignitaries
who formerly dwelt in the neighborhood of the University having
disappeared with the great ecclesiastical foundations, this house had
become the home of industries and of inhabitants whom it was never
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destined to shelter. During the last century a printing establishment
had worn down the polished floors, soiled the carved wood, blackened
the walls, and altered the principal internal arrangements. Formerly
the residence of a Cardinal, this fine house was now divided
among plebeian tenants. The character of the architecture showed
that it had been built under the reigns of Henry III., Henry IV., and
Louis XIII., at the time when the hotels Mignon and Serpente were
erected in the same neighborhood, with the palace of the Princess
Palatine, and the Sorbonne. An old man could remember having
heard it called, in the last century, the hotel Duperron, so it seemed
probable that the illustrious Cardinal of that name had built, or perhaps
merely lived in it.
There still exists, indeed, in the corner of the courtyard, a perron or
flight of several outer steps by which the house is entered; and the
way into the garden on the garden front is down a similar flight of
steps. In spite of dilapidations, the luxury lavished by the architect
on the balustrade and entrance porch crowning these two perrons
suggests the simple-minded purpose of commemorating the owner’s
name, a sort of sculptured pun which our ancestors often allowed
themselves. Finally, in support of this evidence, archaeologists can
still discern in the medallions which show on the principal front
some traces of the cords of the Roman hat.
M. le Marquis d’Espard lived on the ground floor, in order, no
doubt, to enjoy the garden, which might be called spacious for that
neighborhood, and which lay open for his children’s health. The situation
of the house, in a street on a steep hill, as its name indicates,
secured these ground-floor rooms against ever being damp. M.
d’Espard had taken them, no doubt, for a very moderate price, rents
being low at the time when he settled in that quarter, in order to be
among the schools and to superintend his boys’ education. Moreover,
the state in which he found the place, with everything to repair,
had no doubt induced the owner to be accommodating. Thus M.
d’Espard had been able to go to some expense to settle himself suitably
without being accused of extravagance. The loftiness of the
rooms, the paneling, of which nothing survived but the frames, the
decoration of the ceilings, all displayed the dignity which the prelacy
stamped on whatever it attempted or created, and which artists dis-
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The Commission in Lunacy
cern to this day in the smallest relic that remains, though it be but a
book, a dress, the panel of a bookcase, or an armchair.
The Marquis had the rooms painted in the rich brown tones loved
of the Dutch and of the citizens of Old Paris, hues which lend such
good effects to the painter of genre. The panels were hung with plain
paper in harmony with the paint. The window curtains were of inexpensive
materials, but chosen so as to produce a generally happy result;
the furniture was not too crowded and judiciously placed. Any
one on going into this home could not resist a sense of sweet peacefulness,
produced by the perfect calm, the stillness which prevailed,
by the unpretentious unity of color, the keeping of the picture, in the
words a painter might use. A certain nobleness in the details, the
exquisite cleanliness of the furniture, and a perfect concord of men
and things, all brought the word “suavity” to the lips.
Few persons were admitted to the rooms used by the Marquis and
his two sons, whose life might perhaps seem mysterious to their
neighbors. In a wing towards the street, on the third floor, there are
three large rooms which had been left in the state of dilapidation and
grotesque bareness to which they had been reduced by the printing
works. These three rooms, devoted to the evolution of the Picturesque
History of China, were contrived to serve as a writing-room, a
depository, and a private room, where M. d’Espard sat during part of
the day; for after breakfast till four in the afternoon the Marquis
remained in this room on the third floor to work at the publication
he had undertaken. Visitors wanting to see him commonly found
him there, and often the two boys on their return from school resorted
thither. Thus the ground-floor rooms were a sort of sanctuary
where the father and sons spent their time from the hour of dinner
till the next day, and his domestic life was carefully closed against the
public eye.
His only servants were a cook—an old woman who had long been
attached to his family—and a man-servant forty years old, who was
with him when he married Mademoiselle de Blamont. His children’s
nurse had also remained with them, and the minute care to which
the apartment bore witness revealed the sense of order and the maternal
affections expended by this woman in her master’s interest, in the
management of his house, and the charge of his children. These three
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good souls, grave, and uncommunicative folk, seemed to have entered
into the idea which ruled the Marquis’ domestic life. And the
contrast between their habits and those of most servants was a peculiarity
which cast an air of mystery over the house, and fomented the
calumny to which M. d’Espard himself lent occasion. Very laudable
motives had made him determine never to be on visiting terms with
any of the other tenants in the house. In undertaking to educate his
boys he wished to keep them from all contact with strangers. Perhaps,
too, he wished to avoid the intrusion of neighbors.
In a man of his rank, at a time when the Quartier Latin was distracted
by Liberalism, such conduct was sure to rouse in opposition
a host of petty passions, of feelings whose folly is only to be measured
by their meanness, the outcome of porters’ gossip and malevolent
tattle from door to door, all unknown to M. d’Espard and his
retainers. His man-servant was stigmatized as a Jesuit, his cook as a
sly fox; the nurse was in collusion with Madame Jeanrenaud to rob
the madman. The madman was the Marquis. By degrees the other
tenants came to regard as proofs of madness a number of things they
had noticed in M. d’Espard, and passed through the sieve of their
judgment without discerning any reasonable motive for them.
Having no belief in the success of the History of China, they had
managed to convince the landlord of the house that M. d’Espard had
no money just at a time when, with the forgetfulness which often
befalls busy men, he had allowed the tax-collector to send him a
summons for non-payment of arrears. The landlord forthwith claimed
his quarter’s rent from January 1st by sending in a receipt, which the
porter’s wife had amused herself by detaining. On the 15th a summons
to pay was served on M. d’Espard, the portress had delivered it
at her leisure, and he supposed it to be some misunderstanding, not
conceiving of any incivility from a man in whose house he had been
living for twelve years. The Marquis was actually seized by a bailiff at
the time when his man-servant had gone to carry the money for the
rent to the landlord.
This arrest, assiduously reported to the persons with whom he was
in treaty for his undertaking, had alarmed some of them who were
already doubtful of M. d’Espard’s solvency in consequence of the
enormous sums which Baron Jeanrenaud and his mother were said
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The Commission in Lunacy
to be receiving from him. And, indeed, these suspicions on the part
of the tenants, the creditors, and the landlord had some excuse in the
Marquis’ extreme economy in housekeeping. He conducted it as a
ruined man might. His servants always paid in ready money for the
most trifling necessaries of life, and acted as not choosing to take
credit; if now they had asked for anything on credit, it would probably
have been refused, calumnious gossip had been so widely believed
in the neighborhood. There are tradesmen who like those of
their customers who pay badly when they see them often, while they
hate others, and very good ones, who hold themselves on too high a
level to allow of any familiarity as chums, a vulgar but expressive
word. Men are made so; in almost every class they will allow to a
gossip, or a vulgar soul that flatters them, facilities and favors they
refuse to the superiority they resent, in whatever form it may show
itself. The shopkeeper who rails at the Court has his courtiers.
In short, the manners of the Marquis and his children were certain
to arouse ill-feeling in their neighbors, and to work them up by degrees
to the pitch of malevolence when men do not hesitate at an act
of meanness if only it may damage the adversary they have themselves
created.
M. d’Espard was a gentleman, as his wife was a lady, by birth and
breeding; noble types, already so rare in France that the observer can
easily count the persons who perfectly realize them. These two characters
are based on primitive ideas, on beliefs that may be called innate,
on habits formed in infancy, and which have ceased to exist. To
believe in pure blood, in a privileged race, to stand in thought above
other men, must we not from birth have measured the distance which
divides patricians from the mob? To command, must we not have
never met our equal? And finally, must not education inculcate the
ideas with which Nature inspires those great men on whose brow she
has placed a crown before their mother has ever set a kiss there? These
ideas, this education, are no longer possible in France, where for forty
years past chance has arrogated the right of making noblemen by
dipping them in the blood of battles, by gilding them with glory, by
crowning them with the halo of genius; where the abolition of entail
and of eldest sonship, by frittering away estates, compels the nobleman
to attend to his own business instead of attending to affairs of
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state, and where personal greatness can only be such greatness as is
acquired by long and patient toil: quite a new era.
Regarded as a relic of that great institution know as feudalism, M.
d’Espard deserved respectful admiration. If he believed himself to be
by blood the superior of other men, he also believed in all the obligations
of nobility; he had the virtues and the strength it demands. He
had brought up his children in his own principles, and taught them
from the cradle the religion of their caste. A deep sense of their own
dignity, pride of name, the conviction that they were by birth great,
gave rise in them to a kingly pride, the courage of knights, and the
protecting kindness of a baronial lord; their manners, harmonizing
with their notions, would have become princes, and offended all the
world of the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve —a world, above
all others, of equality, where every one believed that M. d’Espard was
ruined, and where all, from the lowest to the highest, refused the
privileges of nobility to a nobleman without money, because they
were all ready to allow an enriched bourgeois to usurp them. Thus
the lack of communion between this family and other persons was as
much moral as it was physical.
In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized
with the spirit within. M. d’Espard, at this time about fifty, might
have sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the nineteenth
century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline and
general expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of
lofty sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness which
commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent at
the tip from left to right, a slight crookedness which was not devoid
of grace; his blue eyes, his high forehead, prominent enough at the
brows to form a thick ridge that checked the light and shaded his
eyes, all indicated a spirit of rectitude, capable of perseverance and
perfect loyalty, while it gave a singular look to his countenance. This
penthouse forehead might, in fact, hint at a touch of madness, and
his thick-knitted eyebrows added to the apparent eccentricity. He
had the white well-kept hands of a gentleman; his foot was high and
narrow. His hesitating speech—not merely as to his pronunciation,
which was that of a stammerer, but also in the expression of his ideas,
his thought and language—produced on the mind of the hearer the
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The Commission in Lunacy
impression of a man who, in familiar phraseology, comes and goes,
feels his way, tries everything, breaks off his gestures, and finishes
nothing. This defect was purely superficial, and in contrast with the
decisiveness of a firmly-set mouth, and the strongly-marked character
of his physiognomy. His rather jerky gait matched his mode of
speech. These peculiarities helped to affirm his supposed insanity. In
spite of his elegant appearance, he was systematically parsimonious
in his personal expenses, and wore the same black frock-coat for three
or four years, brushed with extreme care by his old man-servant.
As to the children, they both were handsome, and endowed with a
grace which did not exclude an expression of aristocratic disdain. They
had the bright coloring, the clear eye, the transparent flesh which reveal
habits of purity, regularity of life, and a due proportion of work and
play. They both had black hair and blue eyes, and a twist in their nose,
like their father; but their mother, perhaps, had transmitted to them
the dignity of speech, of look and mien, which are hereditary in the
Blamont-Chauvrys. Their voices, as clear as crystal, had an emotional
quality, the softness which proves so seductive; they had, in short, the
voice a woman would willingly listen to after feeling the flame of their
looks. But, above all, they had the modesty of pride, a chaste reserve, a
touch-me-not which at a maturer age might have seemed intentional
coyness, so much did their demeanor inspire a wish to know them.
The elder, Comte Clement de Negrepelisse, was close upon his sixteenth
year. For the last two years he had ceased to wear the pretty
English round jacket which his brother, Vicomte Camille d’Espard,
still wore. The Count, who for the last six months went no more to
the College Henri IV., was dressed in the style of a young man enjoying
the first pleasures of fashion. His father had not wished to condemn
him to a year’s useless study of philosophy; he was trying to give
his knowledge some consistency by the study of transcendental mathematics.
At the same time, the Marquis was having him taught Eastern
languages, the international law of Europe, heraldry, and history from
the original sources, charters, early documents, and collections of edicts.
Camille had lately begun to study rhetoric.
The day when Popinot arranged to go to question M. d’Espard
was a Thursday, a holiday. At about nine in the morning, before their
father was awake, the brothers were playing in the garden. Clement
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was finding it hard to refuse his brother, who was anxious to go to
the shooting-gallery for the first time, and who begged him to second
his request to the Marquis. The Viscount always rather took
advantage of his weakness, and was very fond of wrestling with his
brother. So the couple were quarreling and fighting in play like schoolboys.
As they ran in the garden, chasing each other, they made so
much noise as to wake their father, who came to the window without
their perceiving him in the heat of the fray. The Marquis amused
himself with watching his two children twisted together like snakes,
their faces flushed by the exertion of their strength; their complexion
was rose and white, their eyes flashed sparks, their limbs writhed like
cords in the fire; they fell, sprang up again, and caught each other like
athletes in a circus, affording their father one of those moments of
happiness which would make amends for the keenest anxieties of a
busy life. Two other persons, one on the second and one on the first
floor, were also looking into the garden, and saying that the old madman
was amusing himself by making his children fight. Immediately
a number of heads appeared at the windows; the Marquis, noticing
them, called a word to his sons, who at once climbed up to the
window and jumped into his room, and Clement obtained the permission
asked by Camille.
All through the house every one was talking of the Marquis’ new
form of insanity. When Popinot arrived at about twelve o’clock, accompanied
by his clerk, the portress, when asked for M. d’Espard,
conducted him to the third floor, telling him “as how M. d’Espard,
no longer ago than that very morning, had set on his two children to
fight, and laughed like the monster he was on seeing the younger
biting the elder till he bled, and as how no doubt he longed to see
them kill each other.—Don’t ask me the reason why,” she added; “he
doesn’t show himself!”
Just as the woman spoke these decisive words, she had brought the
judge to the landing on the third floor, face to face with a door
covered with notices announcing the successive numbers of the Picturesque
History of China. The muddy floor, the dirty banisters, the
door where the printers had left their marks, the dilapidated window,
and the ceiling on which the apprentices had amused themselves
with drawing monstrosities with the smoky flare of their tal-
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The Commission in Lunacy
low dips, the piles of paper and litter heaped up in the corners, intentionally
or from sheer neglect—in short, every detail of the picture
lying before his eyes, agreed so well with the facts alleged by the
Marquise that the judge, in spite of his impartiality, could not help
believing them.
“There you are, gentlemen,” said the porter’s wife; “there is the
manifactor, where the Chinese swallow up enough to feed the whole
neighborhood.”
The clerk looked at the judge with a smile, and Popinot found it
hard to keep his countenance. They went together into the outer
room, where sat an old man, who, no doubt, performed the functions
of office clerk, shopman, and cashier. This old man was the
Maitre Jacques of China. Along the walls ran long shelves, on which
the published numbers lay in piles. A partition in wood, with a grating
lined with green curtains, cut off the end of the room, forming a
private office. A till with a slit to admit or disgorge crown pieces
indicated the cash-desk.
“M. d’Espard?” said Popinot, addressing the man, who wore a gray
blouse.
The shopman opened the door into the next room, where the
lawyer and his companion saw a venerable old man, white-headed
and simply dressed, wearing the Cross of Saint-Louis, seated at a
desk. He ceased comparing some sheets of colored prints to look up
at the two visitors. This room was an unpretentious office, full of
books and proof-sheets. There was a black wood table at which some
one, at the moment absent, no doubt was accustomed to work.
“The Marquis d’Espard?” said Popinot.
“No, monsieur,” said the old man, rising; “what do you want with
him?” he added, coming forward, and showing by his demeanor the
dignified manners and habits due to a gentlemanly education.
“We wish to speak with him on business exclusively personal to
himself,” replied Popinot.
“D’Espard, here are some gentlemen who want to see you,” then
said the old man, going into the furthest room, where the Marquis
was sitting by the fire reading the newspaper.
This innermost room had a shabby carpet, the windows were hung
with gray holland curtains; the furniture consisted of a few mahogany
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Balzac
chairs, two armchairs, a desk with a revolving front, an ordinary office
table, and on the chimney-shelf, a dingy clock and two old candlesticks.
The old man led the way for Popinot and his registrar, and
pulled forward two chairs, as though he were master of the place; M.
d’Espard left it to him. After the preliminary civilities, during which
the judge watched the supposed lunatic, the Marquis naturally asked
what was the object of this visit. On this Popinot glanced significantly
at the old gentleman and the Marquis.
“I believe, Monsieur le Marquis,” said he, “that the character of my
functions, and the inquiry that has brought me here, make it desirable
that we should be alone, though it is understood by law that in
such cases the inquiries have a sort of family publicity. I am judge on
the Inferior Court of Appeal for the Department of the Seine, and
charged by the President with the duty of examining you as to certain
facts set forth in a petition for a Commission in Lunacy on the
part of the Marquise d’Espard.”
The old man withdrew. When the lawyer and the Marquis were
alone, the clerk shut the door, and seated himself unceremoniously
at the office table, where he laid out his papers and prepared to take
down his notes. Popinot had still kept his eye on M. d’Espard; he
was watching the effect on him of this crude statement, so painful
for a man in full possession of his reason. The Marquis d’Espard,
whose face was usually pale, as are those of fair men, suddenly turned
scarlet with anger; he trembled for an instant, sat down, laid his paper
on the chimney-piece, and looked down. In a moment he had
recovered his gentlemanly dignity, and looked steadily at the judge,
as if to read in his countenance the indications of his character.
“How is it, monsieur,” he asked, “that I have had no notice of such
a petition?”
“Monsieur le Marquis, persons on whom such a commission is
held not being supposed to have the use of their reason, any notice of
the petition is unnecessary. The duty of the Court chiefly consists in
verifying the allegations of the petitioner.”
“Nothing can be fairer,” replied the Marquis. “Well, then, monsieur,
be so good as to tell me what I ought to do—”
“You have only to answer my questions, omitting nothing. However
delicate the reasons may be which may have led you to act in
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The Commission in Lunacy
such a manner as to give Madame d’Espard a pretext for her petition,
speak without fear. It is unnecessary to assure you that lawyers know
their duties, and that in such cases the profoundest secrecy—”
“Monsieur,” said the Marquis, whose face expressed the sincerest
pain, “if my explanations should lead to any blame being attached to
Madame d’Espard’s conduct, what will be the result?”
“The Court may add its censure to its reasons for its decision.”
“Is such censure optional? If I were to stipulate with you, before
replying, that nothing should be said that could annoy Madame
d’Espard in the event of your report being in my favor, would the
Court take my request into consideration?”
The judge looked at the Marquis, and the two men exchanged
sentiments of equal magnanimity.
“Noel,” said Popinot to his registrar, “go into the other room. If you
can be of use, I will call you in.—If, as I am inclined to think,” he went
on, speaking to the Marquis when the clerk had gone out, “I find that
there is some misunderstanding in this case, I can promise you, monsieur,
that on your application the Court will act with due courtesy.
“There is a leading fact put forward by Madame d’Espard, the
most serious of all, of which I must beg for an explanation,” said the
judge after a pause. “It refers to the dissipation of your fortune to the
advantage of a certain Madame Jeanrenaud, the widow of a
bargemaster—or rather, to that of her son, Colonel Jeanrenaud, for
whom you are said to have procured an appointment, to have exhausted
your influence with the King, and at last to have extended
such protection as secures him a good marriage. The petition suggests
that such a friendship is more devoted than any feelings, even
those which morality must disapprove—”
A sudden flush crimsoned the Marquis’ face and forehead, tears
even started to his eyes, for his eyelashes were wet, then wholesome
pride crushed the emotions, which in a man are accounted a weakness.
“To tell you the truth, monsieur,” said the Marquis, in a broken
voice, “you place me in a strange dilemma. The motives of my conduct
were to have died with me. To reveal them I must disclose to
you some secret wounds, must place the honor of my family in your
keeping, and must speak of myself, a delicate matter, as you will
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fully understand. I hope, monsieur, that it will all remain a secret
between us. You will, no doubt, be able to find in the formulas of
the law one which will allow of judgment being pronounced without
any betrayal of my confidences.”
“So far as that goes, it is perfectly possible, Monsieur le Marquis.”
“Some time after my marriage,” said M. d’Espard, “my wife having
run into considerable expenses, I was obliged to have recourse to
borrowing. You know what was the position of noble families during
the Revolution; I had not been able to keep a steward or a man of
business. Nowadays gentlemen are for the most part obliged to manage
their affairs themselves. Most of my title-deeds had been brought to
Paris, from Languedoc, Provence, or le Comtat, by my father, who
dreaded, and not without reason, the inquisition which family titledeeds,
and what was then styled the ‘parchments’ of the privileged
class, brought down on the owners.
“Our name is Negrepelisse; d’Espard is a title acquired in the
time of Henri IV. by a marriage which brought us the estates and
titles of the house of d’Espard, on condition of our bearing an
escutcheon of pretence on our coat-of-arms, those of the house of
d’Espard, an old family of Bearn, connected in the female line with
that of Albret: quarterly, paly of or and sable; and azure two griffins’
claws armed, gules in saltire, with the famous motto Des partem
leonis. At the time of this alliance we lost Negrepelisse, a little
town which was as famous during the religious struggles as was my
ancestor who then bore the name. Captain de Negrepelisse was
ruined by the burning of all his property, for the Protestants did
not spare a friend of Montluc’s.
“The Crown was unjust to M. de Negrepelisse; he received neither
a marshal’s baton, nor a post as governor, nor any indemnity; King
Charles IX., who was fond of him, died without being able to reward
him; Henri IV. arranged his marriage with Mademoiselle
d’Espard, and secured him the estates of that house, but all those of
the Negrepelisses had already passed into the hands of his creditors.
“My great-grandfather, the Marquis d’Espard, was, like me, placed
early in life at the head of his family by the death of his father, who,
after dissipating his wife’s fortune, left his son nothing but the entailed
estates of the d’Espards, burdened with a jointure. The young
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The Commission in Lunacy
Marquis was all the more straitened for money because he held a
post at Court. Being in great favor with Louis XIV., the King’s goodwill
brought him a fortune. But here, monsieur, a blot stained our
escutcheon, an unconfessed and horrible stain of blood and disgrace
which I am making it my business to wipe out. I discovered the
secret among the deeds relating to the estate of Negrepelisse and the
packets of letters.”
At this solemn moment the Marquis spoke without hesitation or
any of the repetition habitual with him; but it is a matter of common
observation that persons who, in ordinary life, are afflicted with these
two defects, are freed from them as soon as any passionate emotion
underlies their speech.
“The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was decreed,” he went on.
“You are no doubt aware, monsieur, that this was an opportunity for
many favorites to make their fortunes. Louis XIV. bestowed on the
magnates about his Court the confiscated lands of those Protestant
families who did not take the prescribed steps for the sale of their
property. Some persons in high favor went ‘Protestant-hunting,’ as
the phrase was. I have ascertained beyond a doubt that the fortune
enjoyed to this day by two ducal families is derived from lands seized
from hapless merchants.
“I will not attempt to explain to you, a man of law, all the
manoeuvres employed to entrap the refugees who had large fortunes
to carry away. It is enough to say that the lands of Negrepelisse,
comprising twenty-two churches and rights over the town, and those
of Gravenges which had formerly belonged to us, were at that time
in the hands of a Protestant family. My grandfather recovered them
by gift from Louis XIV. This gift was effected by documents hallmarked
by atrocious iniquity. The owner of these two estates, thinking
he would be able to return, had gone through the form of a sale,
and was going to Switzerland to join his family, whom he had sent
in advance. He wished, no doubt, to take advantage of every delay
granted by the law, so as to settle the concerns of his business.
“This man was arrested by order of the governor, the trustee confessed
the truth, the poor merchant was hanged, and my ancestor
had the two estates. I would gladly have been able to ignore the share
he took in the plot; but the governor was his uncle on the mother’s
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Balzac
side, and I have unfortunately read the letter in which he begged him
to apply to Deodatus, the name agreed upon by the Court to designate
the King. In this letter there is a tone of jocosity with reference
to the victim, which filled me with horror. In the end, the sums of
money sent by the refugee family to ransom the poor man were kept
by the governor, who despatched the merchant all the same.”
The Marquis paused, as though the memory of it were still too
heavy for him to bear.
“This unfortunate family were named Jeanrenaud,” he went on.
“That name is enough to account for my conduct. I could never
think without keen pain of the secret disgrace that weighed on my
family. That fortune enabled my grandfather to marry a demoiselle
de Navarreins-Lansac, heiress to the younger branch of that house,
who were at that time much richer than the elder branch of the
Navarreins. My father thus became one of the largest landowners in
the kingdom. He was able to marry my mother, a Grandlieu of the
younger branch. Though ill-gotten, this property has been singularly
profitable.
“For my part, being determined to remedy the mischief, I wrote to
Switzerland, and knew no peace till I was on the traces of the Protestant
victim’s heirs. At last I discovered that the Jeanrenauds, reduced
to abject want, had left Fribourg and returned to live in France. Finally,
I found a M. Jeanrenaud, lieutenant in a cavalry regiment under
Napoleon, the sole heir of this unhappy family. In my eyes,
monsieur, the rights of the Jeanrenauds were clear. To establish a
prescriptive right is it not necessary that there should have been some
possibility of proceeding against those who are in the enjoyment of
it? To whom could these refugees have appealed? Their Court of
Justice was on high, or rather, monsieur, it was here,” and the Marquis
struck his hand on his heart. “I did not choose that my children
should be able to think of me as I have thought of my father and of
my ancestors. I aim at leaving them an unblemished inheritance and
escutcheon. I did not choose that nobility should be a lie in my
person. And, after all, politically speaking, ought those emigres who
are now appealing against revolutionary confiscations, to keep the
property derived from antecedent confiscations by positive crimes?
“I found in M. Jeanrenaud and his mother the most perverse hon-
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The Commission in Lunacy
esty; to hear them you would suppose that they were robbing me. In
spite of all I could say, they will accept no more than the value of the
lands at the time when the King bestowed them on my family. The
price was settled between us at the sum of eleven hundred thousand
francs, which I was to pay at my convenience and without interest.
To achieve this I had to forego my income for a long time. And then,
monsieur, began the destruction of some illusions I had allowed myself
as to Madame d’Espard’s character. When I proposed to her that we
should leave Paris and go into the country, where we could live respected
on half of her income, and so more rapidly complete a restitution
of which I spoke to her without going into the more serious
details, Madame d’Espard treated me as a madman. I then understood
my wife’s real character. She would have approved of my
grandfather’s conduct without a scruple, and have laughed at the Huguenots.
Terrified by her coldness, and her little affection for her
children, whom she abandoned to me without regret, I determined
to leave her the command of her fortune, after paying our common
debts. It was no business of hers, as she told me, to pay for my
follies. As I then had not enough to live on and pay for my sons’
education, I determined to educate them myself, to make them gentlemen
and men of feeling. By investing my money in the funds I have
been enabled to pay off my obligation sooner than I had dared to
hope, for I took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the improvement
in prices. If I had kept four thousand francs a year for my
boys and myself, I could only have paid off twenty thousand crowns
a year, and it would have taken almost eighteen years to achieve my
freedom. As it is, I have lately repaid the whole of the eleven hundred
thousand francs that were due. Thus I enjoy the happiness of having
made this restitution without doing my children the smallest wrong.
“These, monsieur, are the reasons for the payments made to Madame
Jeanrenaud and her son.”
“So Madame d’Espard knew the motives of your retirement?” said
the judge, controlling the emotion he felt at this narrative.
“Yes, monsieur.”
Popinot gave an expressive shrug; he rose and opened the door into
the next room.
“Noel, you can go,” said he to his clerk.
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Balzac
“Monsieur,” he went on, “though what you have told me is enough
to enlighten me thoroughly, I should like to hear what you have to
say to the other facts put forward in the petition. For instance, you
are here carrying on a business such as is not habitually undertaken by
a man of rank.”
“We cannot discuss that matter here,” said the Marquis, signing to
the judge to quit the room. “Nouvion,” said he to the old man, “I am
going down to my rooms; the children will soon be in; dine with us.”
“Then, Monsieur le Marquis,” said Popinot on the stairs, “that is
not your apartment?”
“No, monsieur; I took those rooms for the office of this undertaking.
You see,” and he pointed to an advertisement sheet, “the History
is being brought out by one of the most respectable firms in Paris,
and not by me.”
The Marquis showed the lawyer into the ground-floor rooms, saying,
“This is my apartment.”
Popinot was quite touched by the poetry, not aimed at but pervading
this dwelling. The weather was lovely, the windows were open,
the air from the garden brought in a wholesome earthy smell, the
sunshine brightened and gilded the woodwork, of a rather gloomy
brown. At the sight Popinot made up his mind that a madman would
hardly be capable of inventing the tender harmony of which he was
at that moment conscious.
“I should like just such an apartment,” thought he. “You think of
leaving this part of town?” he inquired.
“I hope so,” replied the Marquis. “But I shall remain till my
younger son has finished his studies, and till the children’s character
is thoroughly formed, before introducing them to the world and
to their mother’s circle. Indeed, after giving them the solid information
they possess, I intend to complete it by taking them to
travel to the capitals of Europe, that they may see men and things,
and become accustomed to speak the languages they have learned.
And, monsieur,” he went on, giving the judge a chair in the drawing-room,
“I could not discuss the book on China with you, in the
presence of an old friend of my family, the Comte de Nouvion,
who, having emigrated, has returned to France without any fortune
whatever, and who is my partner in this concern, less for my
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The Commission in Lunacy
profit than his. Without telling him what my motives were, I explained
to him that I was as poor as he, but that I had enough
money to start a speculation in which he might be usefully employed.
My tutor was the Abbe Grozier, whom Charles X. on my
recommendation appointed Keeper of the Books at the Arsenal,
which were returned to that Prince when he was still Monsieur.
The Abbe Grozier was deeply learned with regard to China, its
manners and customs; he made me heir to this knowledge at an age
when it is difficult not to become a fanatic for the things we learn.
At five-and-twenty I knew Chinese, and I confess I have never been
able to check myself in an exclusive admiration for that nation,
who conquered their conquerors, whose annals extend back indisputably
to a period more remote than mythological or Bible times,
who by their immutable institutions have preserved the integrity
of their empire, whose monuments are gigantic, whose administration
is perfect, among whom revolutions are impossible, who have
regarded ideal beauty as a barren element in art, who have carried
luxury and industry to such a pitch that we cannot outdo them in
anything, while they are our equals in things where we believe ourselves
superior.
“Still, monsieur, though I often make a jest of comparing China
with the present condition of European states, I am not a Chinaman,
I am a French gentleman. If you entertain any doubts as to the financial
side of this undertaking, I can prove to you that at this moment
we have two thousand five hundred subscribers to this work, which
is literary, iconographical, statistical, and religious; its importance has
been generally appreciated; our subscribers belong to every nation in
Europe, we have but twelve hundred in France. Our book will cost
about three hundred francs, and the Comte de Nouvion will derive
from it from six to seven thousand francs a year, for his comfort was
the real motive of the undertaking. For my part, I aimed only at the
possibility of affording my children some pleasures. The hundred
thousand francs I have made, quite in spite of myself, will pay for
their fencing lessons, horses, dress, and theatres, pay the masters who
teach them accomplishments, procure them canvases to spoil, the
books they may wish to buy, in short, all the little fancies which a
father finds so much pleasure in gratifying. If I had been compelled
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to refuse these indulgences to my poor boys, who are so good and
work so hard, the sacrifice I made to the honor of my name would
have been doubly painful.
“In point of fact, the twelve years I have spent in retirement from
the world to educate my children have led to my being completely
forgotten at Court. I have given up the career of politics; I have lost
my historical fortune, and all the distinctions which I might have acquired
and bequeathed to my children; but our house will have lost
nothing; my boys will be men of mark. Though I have missed the
senatorship, they will win it nobly by devoting themselves to the affairs
of the country, and doing such service as is not soon forgotten.
While purifying the past record of my family, I have insured it a glorious
future; and is not that to have achieved a noble task, though in
secret and without glory?—And now, monsieur, have you any other
explanations to ask me?”
At this instant the tramp of horses was heard in the courtyard.
“Here they are!” said the Marquis. In a moment the two lads, fashionably
but plainly dressed, came into the room, booted, spurred,
and gloved, and flourishing their riding-whips. Their beaming faces
brought in the freshness of the outer air; they were brilliant with
health. They both grasped their father’s hand, giving him a look, as
friends do, a glance of unspoken affection, and then they bowed
coldly to the lawyer. Popinot felt that it was quite unnecessary to
question the Marquis as to his relations towards his sons.
“Have you enjoyed yourselves?” asked the Marquis.
“Yes, father; I knocked down six dolls in twelve shots at the first
trial!” cried Camille.
“And where did you ride?”
“In the Bois; we saw my mother.”
“Did she stop?”
“We were riding so fast just then that I daresay she did not see us,”
replied the young Count.
“But, then, why did you not go to speak to her?”
“I fancy I have noticed, father, that she does not care that we should
speak to her in public,” said Clement in an undertone. “We are a
little too big.”
The judge’s hearing was keen enough to catch these words, which
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The Commission in Lunacy
brought a cloud to the Marquis’ brow. Popinot took pleasure in
contemplating the picture of the father and his boys. His eyes went
back with a sense of pathos to M. d’Espard’s face; his features, his
expression, and his manner all expressed honesty in its noblest aspect,
intellectual and chivalrous honesty, nobility in all its beauty.
“You—you see, monsieur,” said the Marquis, and his hesitation
had returned, “you see that Justice may look in—in here at any time—
yes, at any time—here. If there is anybody crazy, it can only be the
children—the children—who are a little crazy about their father, and
the father who is very crazy about his children—but that sort of
madness rings true.”
At this juncture Madame Jeanrenaud’s voice was heard in the anteroom,
and the good woman came bustling in, in spite of the manservant’s
remonstrances.
“I take no roundabout ways, I can tell you!” she exclaimed. “Yes,
Monsieur le Marquis, I want to speak to you, this very minute,” she
went on, with a comprehensive bow to the company. “By George, and
I am too late as it is, since Monsieur the criminal Judge is before me.”
“Criminal!” cried the two boys.
“Good reason why I did not find you at your own house, since you
are here. Well, well! the Law is always to the fore when there is mischief
brewing.—I came, Monsieur le Marquis, to tell you that my
son and I are of one mind to give you everything back, since our
honor is threatened. My son and I, we had rather give you back
everything than cause you the smallest trouble. My word, they must
be as stupid as pans without handles to call you a lunatic—”
“A lunatic! My father?” exclaimed the boys, clinging to the Marquis.
“What is this?”
“Silence, madame,” said Popinot.
“Children, leave us,” said the Marquis.
The two boys went into the garden without a word, but very much
alarmed.
“Madame,” said the judge, “the moneys paid to you by Monsieur
le Marquis were legally due, though given to you in virtue of a very
far-reaching theory of honesty. If all the people possessed of confiscated
goods, by whatever cause, even if acquired by treachery, were
compelled to make restitution every hundred and fifty years, there
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Balzac
would be few legitimate owners in France. The possessions of Jacques
Coeur enriched twenty noble families; the confiscations pronounced
by the English to the advantage of their adherents at the time when
they held a part of France made the fortune of several princely houses.
“Our law allows M. d’Espard to dispose of his income without accounting
for it, or suffering him to be accused of its misapplication. A
Commission in Lunacy can only be granted when a man’s actions are
devoid of reason; but in this case, the remittances made to you have a
reason based on the most sacred and most honorable motives. Hence
you may keep it all without remorse, and leave the world to misinterpret
a noble action. In Paris, the highest virtue is the object of the
foulest calumny. It is, unfortunately, the present condition of society
that makes the Marquis’ actions sublime. For the honor of my country,
I would that such deeds were regarded as a matter of course; but, as
things are, I am forced by comparison to look upon M. d’Espard as a
man to whom a crown should be awarded, rather than that he should
be threatened with a Commission in Lunacy.
“In the course of a long professional career, I have seen and heard
nothing that has touched me more deeply than that I have just seen
and heard. But it is not extraordinary that virtue should wear its
noblest aspect when it is practised by men of the highest class.
“Having heard me express myself in this way, I hope, Monsieur le
Marquis, that you feel certain of my silence, and that you will not
for a moment be uneasy as to the decision pronounced in the case—
if it comes before the Court.”
“There, now! Well said,” cried Madame Jeanrenaud. “That is something
like a judge! Look here, my dear sir, I would hug you if I were
not so ugly; you speak like a book.”
The Marquis held out his hand to Popinot, who gently pressed it
with a look full of sympathetic comprehension at this great man in
private life, and the Marquis responded with a pleasant smile. These
two natures, both so large and full—one commonplace but divinely
kind, the other lofty and sublime—had fallen into unison gently, without
a jar, without a flash of passion, as though two pure lights had been
merged into one. The father of a whole district felt himself worthy to
grasp the hand of this man who was doubly noble, and the Marquis
felt in the depths of his soul an instinct that told him that the judge’s
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The Commission in Lunacy
hand was one of those from which the treasures of inexhaustible beneficence
perennially flow.
“Monsieur le Marquis,” added Popinot, with a bow, “I am happy
to be able to tell you that, from the first words of this inquiry, I
regarded my clerk as quite unnecessary.”
He went close to M. d’Espard, led him into the window-bay, and
said: “It is time that you should return home, monsieur. I believe that
Madame la Marquise has acted in this matter under an influence which
you ought at once to counteract.”
Popinot withdrew. He looked back several times as he crossed the
courtyard, touched by the recollection of the scene. It was one of those
which take root in the memory to blossom again in certain hours
when the soul seeks consolation.
“Those rooms would just suit me,” said he to himself as he reached
home. “If M. d’Espard leaves them, I will take up his lease.”
The next day, at about ten in the morning, Popinot, who had written
out his report the previous evening, made his way to the Palais de
Justice, intending to have prompt and righteous justice done. As he
went to the robing-room to put on his gown and bands, the usher
told him that the President of his Court begged him to attend in his
private room, where he was waiting for him. Popinot forthwith
obeyed.
“Good-morning, my dear Popinot,” said the President, “I have
been waiting for you.”
“Why, Monsieur le President, is anything wrong?”
“A mere silly trifle,” said the President. “The Keeper of the Seals, with
whom I had the honor of dining yesterday, led me apart into a corner.
He had heard that you had been to tea with Madame d’Espard, in whose
case you were employed to make inquiries. He gave me to understand
that it would be as well that you should not sit on this case—”
“But, Monsieur le President, I can prove that I left Madame
d’Espard’s house at the moment when tea was brought in. And my
conscience—”
“Yes, yes; the whole Bench, the two Courts, all the profession know
you. I need not repeat what I said about you to his Eminence; but, you
know, ‘Caesar’s wife must not be suspected.’ So we shall not make this
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Balzac
foolish trifle a matter of discipline, but only of proprieties. Between
ourselves, it is not on your account, but on that of the Bench.”
“But, monsieur, if you only knew the kind of woman—” said the
judge, trying to pull his report out of his pocket.
“I am perfectly certain that you have proceeded in this matter with
the strictest independence of judgment. I myself, in the provinces,
have often taken more than a cup of tea with the people I had to try;
but the fact that the Keeper of the Seals should have mentioned it,
and that you might be talked about, is enough to make the Court
avoid any discussion of the matter. Any conflict with public opinion
must always be dangerous for a constitutional body, even when the
right is on its side against the public, because their weapons are not
equal. Journalism may say or suppose anything, and our dignity forbids
us even to reply. In fact, I have spoken of the matter to your
President, and M. Camusot has been appointed in your place on your
retirement, which you will signify. It is a family matter, so to speak.
And I now beg you to signify your retirement from the case as a personal
favor. To make up, you will get the Cross of the Legion of Honor,
which has so long been due to you. I make that my business.”
When he saw M. Camusot, a judge recently called to Paris from a
provincial Court of the same class, as he went forward bowing to the
Judge and the President, Popinot could not repress an ironical smile.
This pale, fair young man, full of covert ambition, looked ready to
hang and unhang, at the pleasure of any earthy king, the innocent
and the guilty alike, and to follow the example of a Laubardemont
rather than that of a Mole.
Popinot withdrew with a bow; he scorned to deny the lying accusation
that had been brought against him.
Paris, February 1836.
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The Commission in Lunacy
598
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Note: The Commission in Lunacy is also known as The Interdiction
and is referred to by that title in certain of the addendums.
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
The Atheist’s Mass
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche

Bordin
The Gondreville Mystery
The Seamy Side of History
Jealousies of a Country Town
Camusot de Marville
Cousin Pons
Jealousies of a Country Town
Scenes from a Cuortesan’s Life
Desroches (son)
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Colonel Chabert
A Start in Life
A Woman of Thirty
The Government Clerks
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Firm of Nucingen
A Man of Business
The Middle Classes
Balzac
Espard, Charles-Maurice-Marie-Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse,
Marquis d’
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Espard, Chevalier d’
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Secrets of a Princess
Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise d’
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Letters of Two Brides
Another Study of Woman
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
599

The Commission in Lunacy
A Daughter of Eve
Beatrix
Godeschal, Francois-Claude-Marie
Colonel Chabert
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Start in Life
The Middle Classes
Cousin Pons
Grozier, Abbe
Lost Illusions
Jeanrenaud
Albert Savarus
Mongenod, Frederic
The Seamy Side of History
Negrepelisse, De
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
Father Goriot
The Thirteen
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Melmoth Reconciled
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
600

Popinot, Jean-Jules
Cesar Birotteau
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Middle Classes
Rabourdin, Madame
The Government Clerks
Balzac
601

The Deserted Woman
Dedication
602
The Deserted
Woman
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
To Her Grace the Duchesse d’Abrantes, from her devoted servant,
Honore de Balzac. Paris, August 1835.
IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower
Normandy a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint,
brought on by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other
kind. His convalescence demanded complete rest, a light diet, bracing
air, and freedom from excitement of every kind, and the fat lands
of Bessin seemed to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux,
a picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient therefore
betook himself, and was received with the cordiality characteristic of
relatives who lead very retired lives, and regard a new arrival as a
godsend.
All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le
Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent
two or three evenings in his cousin’s house, or with the friends who

Balzac
made up Mme. de Sainte-Severe’s circle, he very soon had made the
acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered
to be “the whole town.” Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the
invariable stock characters which every observer finds in every one of
the many capitals of the little States which made up the France of an
older day.
First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded
as incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department,
though no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues
away. This species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The
head of the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman.
He has no manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal superiority,
tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the taxes, and
declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers created by the nineteenth
century, pointing out to you as a political monstrosity the fact
that the prime minister is a man of no birth. His wife takes a decided
tone, and talks in a loud voice. She has had adorers in her time, but
takes the sacrament regularly at Easter. She brings up her daughters
badly, and is of the opinion that they will always be rich enough with
their name.
Neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea of modern luxury.
They retain a livery only seen elsewhere on the stage, and cling to old
fashions in plate, furniture, and equipages, as in language and manner
of life. This is a kind of ancient state, moreover, that suits passably
well with provincial thrift. The good folk are, in fact, the lords
of the manor of a bygone age, minus the quitrents and heriots, the
pack of hounds and the laced coats; full of honor among themselves,
and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only see at a
distance. The historical house incognito is as quaint a survival as a
piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating somewhere among them there is
sure to be an uncle or a brother, a lieutenant-general, an old courtier
of the Kings’s, who wears the red ribbon of the order of Saint-Louis,
and went to Hanover with the Marechal de Richelieu: and here you
will find him like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet of the time
of Louis Quinze.
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The Deserted Woman
This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier, though
of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of months
of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous tone
and short-lived contemporary crazes. Madame is a woman of fashion,
though she looks rather conscious of her clothes, and is always
behind the mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected by
her neighbors. Her plate is of modern fashion; she has “grooms,”
Negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what-not. Her oldest son drives a
tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his younger
brother is auditor to a Council of State. The father is well posted up
in official scandals, and tells you anecdotes of Louis XVIII. and Madame
du Cayla. He invests his money in the five per cents, and is
careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known occasionally
to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the conjectural sums-total
of the various fortunes of the department. He is a member of the
Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris, and wears the Cross
of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country gentleman who has
fully grasped the significance of the Restoration, and is coining money
at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure than that of the rival
house; he takes the Gazette and the Debats, the other family only
read the Quotidienne.
His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at
times they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy
Lafontaine to the fable of the Ass laden with Relics. The good man’s
origin is distinctly plebeian.
Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten
or twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry regiments,
or nothing at all. Out on the roads, on horseback, they rank
half-way between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax collector
on his rounds. Pretty nearly all of them have been in the Pages or
in the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their days in
a faisance-valoir, more interested in felling timber and the cider prospects
than in the Monarchy.
Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the cards are
making, or over a game at backgammon, when they have exhausted
the usual stock of dots, and have married everybody off according to
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Balzac
the genealogies which they all know by heart. Their womenkind are
haughty dames, who assume the airs of Court ladies in their basket
chaises. They huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full
dress; and twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet
from Paris, brought as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives are they
for the most part, and garrulous.
These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, with a few
outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who have solved the
problem: given a human being, to remain absolutely stationary. They
might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and
their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the province
in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its quintessence,
the genius loci incarnate. There is something frigid and monumental
about these ladies; they know exactly when to laugh and when
to shake their heads, and every now and then give out some utterance
which passes current as a witticism.
A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Faubourg Saint-
Germain, thanks to their money or their aristocratic leanings. But despite
their forty years, the circle still say of them, “Young So-and-so has
sound opinions,” and of such do they make deputies. As a rule, the
elderly spinsters are their patronesses, not without comment.
Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three ecclesiastics,
admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit; for these great
nobles find their own society rather dull, and introduce the bourgeois
element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker puts leaven into
his dough.
The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists of a
certain quantity of antiquated notions; a few new inflections brewed
in company of an evening being added from time to time to the
common stock. Like sea-water in a little creek, the phrases which
represent these ideas surge up daily, punctually obeying the tidal laws
of conversation in their flow and ebb; you hear the hollow echo of
yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all
things here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make
up a body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse
one drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the
regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of
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The Deserted Woman
no more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious,
political, moral, or literary.
If a stranger is admitted to the cenacle, every member of it in turn
will say (not without a trace of irony), “You will not find the brilliancy
of your Parisian society here,” and proceed forthwith to criticise the life
led by his neighbors, as if he himself were an exception who had striven,
and vainly striven, to enlighten the rest. But any stranger so ill advised
as to concur in any of their freely expressed criticism of each other, is
pronounced at once to be an ill-natured person, a heathen, an outlaw,
a reprobate Parisian “as Parisians mostly are.”
Before Gaston de Nueil made his appearance in this little world of
strictly observed etiquette, where every detail of life is an integrant
part of a whole, and everything is known; where the values of personalty
and real estate is quoted like stocks on the vast sheet of the
newspaper—before his arrival he had been weighed in the unerring
scales of Bayeusaine judgment.
His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out the
amount of his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, had produced
the family tree, and expatiated on the talents, breeding, and
modesty of this particular branch. So he received the precise amount
of attentions to which he was entitled; he was accepted as a worthy
scion of a good stock; and, for he was but twenty-three, was made
welcome without ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers
of daughters looked not unkindly upon him.
He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land in the
valley of the Auge; and sooner or later his father, as in duty bound,
would leave him the chateau of Manerville, with the lands thereunto
belonging. As for his education, political career, personal qualities,
and qualifications—no one so much as thought of raising the questions.
His land was undeniable, his rentals steady; excellent plantations
had been made; the tenants paid for repairs, rates, and taxes; the
apple-trees were thirty-eight years old; and, to crown all, his father
was in treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just outside the
paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No hopes of
a political career, no fame on earth, can compare with such advantages
as these.
Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe omitted to
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Balzac
mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor did Gaston himself say
a word about him. But, at the same time, it is true that the brother was
consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
lamented and forgotten.
At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of the
circle. He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits
of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses,
their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
“Normanisms,” in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters.
For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel’s life of busy
gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and
grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it
had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a crisis, which is neither
spleen nor disgust, but combines all the symptoms of both. When a
human being is transplanted into an uncongenial soil, to lead a starved,
stunted existence, there is always a little discomfort over the transition.
Then, gradually, if nothing removes him from his surroundings,
he grows accustomed to them, and adapts himself to the vacuity
which grows upon him and renders him powerless. Even now,
Gaston’s lungs were accustomed to the air; and he was willing to
discern a kind of vegetable happiness in days that brought no mental
exertion and no responsibilities. The constant stirring of the sap of
life, the fertilizing influences of mind on mind, after which he had
sought so eagerly in Paris, were beginning to fade from his memory,
and he was in a fair way of becoming a fossil with these fossils, and
ending his days among them, content, like the companions of Ulysses,
in his gross envelope.
One evening Gaston de Nueil was seated between a dowager and
one of the vicars-general of the diocese, in a gray-paneled drawingroom,
floored with large white tiles. The family portraits which
adorned the walls looked down upon four card-tables, and some
sixteen persons gathered about them, chattering over their whist.
Gaston, thinking of nothing, digesting one of those exquisite dinners
to which the provincial looks forward all through the day, found
himself justifying the customs of the country.
He began to understand why these good folk continued to play
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The Deserted Woman
with yesterday’s pack of cards and shuffle them on a threadbare tablecloth,
and how it was that they had ceased to dress for themselves or
others. He saw the glimmerings of something like a philosophy in
the even tenor of their perpetual round, in the calm of their methodical
monotony, in their ignorance of the refinements of luxury.
Indeed, he almost came to think that luxury profited nothing; and
even now, the city of Paris, with its passions, storms, and pleasures,
was scarcely more than a memory of childhood.
He admired in all sincerity the red hands, and shy, bashful manner
of some young lady who at first struck him as an awkward simpleton,
unattractive to the last degree, and surprisingly ridiculous. His
doom was sealed. He had gone from the provinces to Paris; he had
led the feverish life of Paris; and now he would have sunk back into
the lifeless life of the provinces, but for a chance remark which reached
his ear—a few words that called up a swift rush of such emotion as
he might have felt when a strain of really good music mingles with
the accompaniment of some tedious opera.
“You went to call on Mme. de Beauseant yesterday, did you not?”
The speaker was an elderly lady, and she addressed the head of the
local royal family.
“I went this morning. She was so poorly and depressed, that I could
not persuade her to dine with us to-morrow.”
“With Mme. de Champignelles?” exclaimed the dowager with something
like astonishment in her manner.
“With my wife,” calmly assented the noble. “Mme. de Beauseant
is descended from the House of Burgundy, on the spindle side, ’tis
true, but the name atones for everything. My wife is very much attached
to the Vicomtesse, and the poor lady has lived alone for such
a long while, that—”
The Marquis de Champignelles looked round about him while he
spoke with an air of cool unconcern, so that it was almost impossible
to guess whether he made a concession to Mme. de Beauseant’s misfortunes,
or paid homage to her noble birth; whether he felt flattered
to receive her in his house, or, on the contrary, sheer pride was the
motive that led him to try to force the country families to meet the
Vicomtesse.
The women appeared to take counsel of each other by a glance;
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Balzac
there was a sudden silence in the room, and it was felt that their
attitude was one of disapproval.
“Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady whose adventure
with M. d’Ajuda-Pinto made so much noise?” asked Gaston
of his neighbor.
“The very same,” he was told. “She came to Courcelles after the
marriage of the Marquis d’Ajuda; nobody visits her. She has, besides,
too much sense not to see that she is in a false position, so she has
made no attempt to see any one. M. de Champignelles and a few
gentlemen went to call upon her, but she would see no one but M.
de Champignelles, perhaps because he is a connection of the family.
They are related through the Beauseants; the father of the present
Vicomte married a Mlle. de Champignelles of the older branch. But
though the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed to be a descendant
of the House of Burgundy, you can understand that we could not
admit a wife separated from her husband into our society here. We are
foolish enough still to cling to these old-fashioned ideas. There was the
less excuse for the Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred
man of the world, who would have been quite ready to listen to reason.
But his wife is quite mad—” and so forth and so forth.
M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker’s voice, gathered nothing
of the sense of the words; his brain was too full of thick-coming fancies.
Fancies? What other name can you give to the alluring charms of
an adventure that tempts the imagination and sets vague hopes springing
up in the soul; to the sense of coming events and mysterious felicity
and fear at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact on which
these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed? Over these fancies thought
hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in the germ all the joys
of love. Perhaps, indeed, all passion is contained in that thought-germ,
as the beauty, and fragrance, and rich color of the flower is all packed in
the seed.
M. de Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beauseant had taken
refuge in Normandy, after a notoriety which women for the most
part envy and condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some
sort excuse the transgression. Any sort of celebrity bestows an inconceivable
prestige. Apparently for women, as for families, the
glory of the crime effaces the stain; and if such and such a noble
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The Deserted Woman
house is proud of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a
young and pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious
renown of a happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more
she is to be pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are
only pitiless to the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes,
we are to all intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be
seen unless we raise ourselves above other people’s heads? The common
herd of humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person
who can rise above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by
which they rise.
It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston de
Nueil at unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some
interest in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses
which, for want of a better name, we are wont to call “fatality,” that
drew him to Mme. de Beauseant.
The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before
him with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world
for him, a world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to
conquer. Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the
human beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a
woman; what woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world,
where calculation replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a
cut-and-dried formality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming
to be received or to pass current? The sound of Mme. de Beauseant’s
name revived a young man’s dreams and wakened urgent desires that
had lain dormant for a little.
Gaston de Nueil was absent-minded and preoccupied for the rest
of the evening. He was pondering how he might gain access to
Mme. de Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy matter. She was
believed to be extremely clever. But if men and women of parts
may be captivated by something subtle or eccentric, they are also
exacting, and can read all that lies below the surface; and after the
first step has been taken, the chances of failure and success in the
difficult task of pleasing them are about even. In this particular
case, moreover, the Vicomtesse, besides the pride of her position,
had all the dignity of her name. Her utter seclusion was the least of
the barriers raised between her and the world. For which reasons it
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was well-nigh impossible that a stranger, however well born, could
hope for admittance; and yet, the next morning found M. de Nueil
taking his walks abroad in the direction of Courcelles, a dupe of
illusions natural at his age. Several times he made the circuit of the
garden walls, looking earnestly through every gap at the closed shutters
or open windows, hoping for some romantic chance, on which
he founded schemes for introducing himself into this unknown
lady’s presence, without a thought of their impracticability. Morning
after morning was spent in this way to mighty purpose; but
with each day’s walk, that vision of a woman living apart from the
world, of love’s martyr buried in solitude, loomed larger in his
thoughts, and was enshrined in his soul. So Gaston de Nueil walked
under the walls of Courcelles, and some gardener’s heavy footstep
would set his heart beating high with hope.
He thought of writing to Mme. de Beauseant, but on mature consideration,
what can you say to a woman whom you have never seen,
a complete stranger? And Gaston had little self-confidence. Like most
young persons with a plentiful crop of illusions still standing, he
dreaded the mortifying contempt of silence more than death itself,
and shuddered at the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth
to face so many chances of being thrown on the fire. He was distracted
by innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of inventing
chimeras, weaving romances, and cudgeling his brains, he hit at last
upon one of the hopeful stratagems that are sure to occur to your
mind if you persevere long enough, a stratagem which must make
clear to the most inexperienced woman that here was a man who
took a fervent interest in her. The caprice of social conventions puts
as many barriers between lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise
in the most delightfully fantastic tale; indeed, the most extravagant
pictures are seldom exaggerations. In real life, as in the fairy
tales, the woman belongs to him who can reach her and set her free
from the position in which she languishes. The poorest of calenders
that ever fell in love with the daughter of the Khalif is in truth scarcely
further from his lady than Gaston de Nueil from Mme. de Beauseant.
The Vicomtesse knew absolutely nothing of M. de Nueil’s wanderings
round her house; Gaston de Nueil’s love grew to the height of
the obstacles to overleap; and the distance set between him and his
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The Deserted Woman
extemporized lady-love produced the usual effect of distance, in lending
enchantment.
One day, confident in his inspiration, he hoped everything from
the love that must pour forth from his eyes. Spoken words, in his
opinion, were more eloquent than the most passionate letter; and,
besides, he would engage feminine curiosity to plead for him. He
went, therefore, to M. de Champignelles, proposing to employ that
gentleman for the better success of his enterprise. He informed the
Marquis that he had been entrusted with a delicate and important
commission which concerned the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, that he
felt doubtful whether she would read a letter written in an unknown
handwriting, or put confidence in a stranger. Would M. de
Champignelles, on his next visit, ask the Vicomtesse if she would
consent to receive him—Gaston de Nueil? While he asked the Marquis
to keep his secret in case of a refusal, he very ingeniously insinuated
sufficient reasons for his own admittance, to be duly passed on
to the Vicomtesse. Was not M. de Champignelles a man of honor, a
loyal gentleman incapable of lending himself to any transaction in
bad taste, nay, the merest suspicion of bad taste! Love lends a young
man all the self-possession and astute craft of an old ambassador; all
the Marquis’ harmless vanities were gratified, and the haughty grandee
was completely duped. He tried hard to fathom Gaston’s secret; but
the latter, who would have been greatly perplexed to tell it, turned
off M. de Champignelles’ adroit questioning with a Norman’s shrewdness,
till the Marquis, as a gallant Frenchman, complimented his
young visitor upon his discretion.
M. de Champignelles hurried off at once to Courcelles, with that
eagerness to serve a pretty woman which belongs to his time of life. In
the Vicomtesse de Beauseant’s position, such a message was likely to
arouse keen curiosity; so, although her memory supplied no reason at
all that could bring M. de Nueil to her house, she saw no objection to
his visit—after some prudent inquiries as to his family and condition.
At the same time, she began by a refusal. Then she discussed the propriety
of the matter with M. de Champignelles, directing her questions
so as to discover, if possible, whether he knew the motives for the
visit, and finally revoked her negative answer. The discussion and the
discretion shown perforce by the Marquis had piqued her curiosity.
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M. de Champignelles had no mind to cut a ridiculous figure. He
said, with the air of a man who can keep another’s counsel, that the
Vicomtesse must know the purpose of this visit perfectly well; while
the Vicomtesse, in all sincerity, had no notion what it could be. Mme.
de Beauseant, in perplexity, connected Gaston with people whom he
had never met, went astray after various wild conjectures, and asked
herself if she had seen this M. de Nueil before. In truth, no loveletter,
however sincere or skilfully indited, could have produced so
much effect as this riddle. Again and again Mme. de Beauseant puzzled
over it.
When Gaston heard that he might call upon the Vicomtesse, his
rapture at so soon obtaining the ardently longed-for good fortune
was mingled with singular embarrassment. How was he to contrive a
suitable sequel to this stratagem?
“Bah! I shall see her,” he said over and over again to himself as he
dressed. “See her, and that is everything!”
He fell to hoping that once across the threshold of Courcelles he
should find an expedient for unfastening this Gordian knot of his own
tying. There are believers in the omnipotence of necessity who never
turn back; the close presence of danger is an inspiration that calls out all
their powers for victory. Gaston de Nueil was one of these.
He took particular pains with his dress, imagining, as youth is apt to
imagine, that success or failure hangs on the position of a curl, and
ignorant of the fact that anything is charming in youth. And, in any
case, such women as Mme. de Beauseant are only attracted by the
charms of wit or character of an unusual order. Greatness of character
flatters their vanity, promises a great passion, seems to imply a comprehension
of the requirements of their hearts. Wit amuses them, responds
to the subtlety of their natures, and they think that they are understood.
And what do all women wish but to be amused, understood, or
adored? It is only after much reflection on the things of life that we
understand the consummate coquetry of neglect of dress and reserve at
a first interview; and by the time we have gained sufficient astuteness
for successful strategy, we are too old to profit by our experience.
While Gaston’s lack of confidence in his mental equipment drove
him to borrow charms from his clothes, Madame de Beauseant herself
was instinctively giving more attention to her toilette.
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The Deserted Woman
“I would rather not frighten people, at all events,” she said to herself
as she arranged her hair.
In M. de Nueil’s character, person, and manner there was that touch
of unconscious originality which gives a kind of flavor to things that
any one might say or do, and absolves everything that they may choose
to do or say. He was highly cultivated, he had a keen brain, and a
face, mobile as his own nature, which won the goodwill of others.
The promise of passion and tenderness in the bright eyes was fulfilled
by an essentially kindly heart. The resolution which he made as
he entered the house at Courcelles was in keeping with his frank
nature and ardent imagination. But, bold has he was with love, his
heart beat violently when he had crossed the great court, laid out like
an English garden, and the man-servant, who had taken his name to
the Vicomtesse, returned to say that she would receive him.
“M. le Baron de Nueil.”
Gaston came in slowly, but with sufficient ease of manner; and it is
a more difficult thing, be it said, to enter a room where there is but
one woman, than a room that holds a score.
A great fire was burning on the hearth in spite of the mild weather,
and by the soft light of the candles in the sconces he saw a young
woman sitting on a high-backed bergere in the angle by the hearth. The
seat was so low that she could move her head freely; every turn of it
was full of grace and delicate charm, whether she bent, leaning forward,
or raised and held it erect, slowly and languidly, as though it
were a heavy burden, so low that she could cross her feet and let them
appear, or draw them back under the folds of a long black dress.
The Vicomtesse made as if she would lay the book that she was
reading on a small, round stand; but as she did so, she turned towards
M. de Nueil, and the volume, insecurely laid upon the edge,
fell to the ground between the stand and the sofa. This did not seem
to disconcert her. She looked up, bowing almost imperceptibly in
response to his greeting, without rising from the depths of the low
chair in which she lay. Bending forwards, she stirred the fire briskly,
and stooped to pick up a fallen glove, drawing it mechanically over
her left hand, while her eyes wandered in search of its fellow. The
glance was instantly checked, however, for she stretched out a thin,
white, all-but-transparent right hand, with flawless ovals of rose-col-
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ored nail at the tips of the slender, ringless fingers, and pointed to a
chair as if to bid Gaston be seated. He sat down, and she turned her
face questioningly towards him. Words cannot describe the subtlety of
the winning charm and inquiry in that gesture; deliberate in its kindliness,
gracious yet accurate in expression, it was the outcome of early
education and of a constant use and wont of the graciousness of life.
These movements of hers, so swift, so deft, succeeded each other by
the blending of a pretty woman’s fastidious carelessness with the highbred
manner of a great lady.
Mme. de Beauseant stood out in such strong contrast against the
automatons among whom he had spent two months of exile in that
out-of-the-world district of Normandy, that he could not but find
in her the realization of his romantic dreams; and, on the other hand,
he could not compare her perfections with those of other women
whom he had formerly admired. Here in her presence, in a drawingroom
like some salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, full of costly
trifles lying about upon the tables, and flowers and books, he felt as
if he were back in Paris. It was a real Parisian carpet beneath his feet,
he saw once more the high-bred type of Parisienne, the fragile outlines
of her form, her exquisite charm, her disdain of the studied
effects which did so much to spoil provincial women.
Mme. de Beauseant had fair hair and dark eyes, and the pale complexion
that belongs to fair hair. She held up her brow nobly like
some fallen angel, grown proud through the fall, disdainful of pardon.
Her way of gathering her thick hair into a crown of plaits above
the broad, curving lines of the bandeaux upon her forehead, added to
the queenliness of her face. Imagination could discover the ducal
coronet of Burgundy in the spiral threads of her golden hair; all the
courage of her house seemed to gleam from the great lady’s brilliant
eyes, such courage as women use to repel audacity or scorn, for they
were full of tenderness for gentleness. The outline of that little head,
so admirably poised above the long, white throat, the delicate, fine
features, the subtle curves of the lips, the mobile face itself, wore an
expression of delicate discretion, a faint semblance of irony suggestive
of craft and insolence. Yet it would have been difficult to refuse
forgiveness to those two feminine failings in her; for the lines that
came out in her forehead whenever her face was not in repose, like
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The Deserted Woman
her upward glances (that pathetic trick of manner), told unmistakably
of unhappiness, of a passion that had all but cost her her life. A
woman, sitting in the great, silent salon, a woman cut off from the
rest of the world in this remote little valley, alone, with the memories
of her brilliant, happy, and impassioned youth, of continual gaiety
and homage paid on all sides, now replaced by the horrors of the
void—was there not something in the sight to strike awe that deepened
with reflection? Consciousness of her own value lurked in her
smile. She was neither wife nor mother, she was an outlaw; she had
lost the one heart that could set her pulses beating without shame;
she had nothing from without to support her reeling soul; she must
even look for strength from within, live her own life, cherish no
hope save that of forsaken love, which looks forward to Death’s coming,
and hastens his lagging footsteps. And this while life was in its
prime. Oh! to feel destined for happiness and to die—never having
given nor received it! A woman too! What pain was this! These
thoughts flashing across M. de Nueil’s mind like lightning, left him
very humble in the presence of the greatest charm with which woman
can be invested. The triple aureole of beauty, nobleness, and misfortune
dazzled him; he stood in dreamy, almost open-mouthed admiration
of the Vicomtesse. But he found nothing to say to her.
Mme. de Beauseant, by no means displeased, no doubt, by his
surprise, held out her hand with a kindly but imperious gesture; then,
summoning a smile to her pale lips, as if obeying, even yet, the
woman’s impulse to be gracious:
“I have heard from M. de Champignelles of a message which you
have kindly undertaken to deliver, monsieur,” she said. “Can it be
from—”
With that terrible phrase Gaston understood, even more clearly
than before, his own ridiculous position, the bad taste and bad faith
of his behavior towards a woman so noble and so unfortunate. He
reddened. The thoughts that crowded in upon him could be read in
his troubled eyes; but suddenly, with the courage which youth draws
from a sense of its own wrongdoing, he gained confidence, and very
humbly interrupted Mme. de Beauseant.
“Madame,” he faltered out, “I do not deserve the happiness of seeing
you. I have deceived you basely. However strong the motive may
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have been, it can never excuse the pitiful subterfuge which I used to
gain my end. But, madame, if your goodness will permit me to tell
you—”
The Vicomtesse glanced at M. de Nueil, haughty disdain in her
whole manner. She stretched her hand to the bell and rang it.
“Jacques,” she said, “light this gentleman to the door,” and she
looked with dignity at the visitor.
She rose proudly, bowed to Gaston, and then stooped for the fallen
volume. If all her movements on his entrance had been caressingly
dainty and gracious, her every gesture now was no less severely frigid.
M. de Nueil rose to his feet, but he stood waiting. Mme. de Beauseant
flung another glance at him. “Well, why do you not go?” she seemed
to say.
There was such cutting irony in that glance that Gaston grew white
as if he were about to faint. Tears came into his eyes, but he would
not let them fall, and scorching shame and despair dried them. He
looked back at Madame de Beauseant, and a certain pride and consciousness
of his own worth was mingled with his humility; the
Vicomtesse had a right to punish him, but ought she to use her
right? Then he went out.
As he crossed the ante-chamber, a clear head, and wits sharpened by
passion, were not slow to grasp the danger of his situation.
“If I leave this house, I can never come back to it again,” he said to
himself. “The Vicomtesse will always think of me as a fool. It is
impossible that a woman, and such a woman, should not guess the
love that she has called forth. Perhaps she feels a little, vague, involuntary
regret for dismissing me so abruptly.—But she could not do
otherwise, and she cannot recall her sentence. It rests with me to
understand her.”
At that thought Gaston stopped short on the flight of steps with
an exclamation; he turned sharply, saying, “I have forgotten something,”
and went back to the salon. The lackey, all respect for a baron
and the rights of property, was completely deceived by the natural
utterance, and followed him. Gaston returned quietly and unannounced.
The Vicomtesse, thinking that the intruder was the servant,
looked up and beheld M. de Nueil.
“Jacques lighted me to the door,” he said, with a half-sad smile
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The Deserted Woman
which dispelled any suspicion of jest in those words, while the tone
in which they were spoken went to the heart. Mme. de Beauseant
was disarmed.
“Very well, take a seat,” she said.
Gaston eagerly took possession of a chair. His eyes were shining with
happiness; the Vicomtesse, unable to endure the brilliant light in them,
looked down at the book. She was enjoying a delicious, ever new sensation;
the sense of a man’s delight in her presence is an unfailing feminine
instinct. And then, besides, he had divined her, and a woman is so
grateful to the man who has mastered the apparently capricious, yet
logical, reasoning of her heart; who can track her thought through the
seemingly contradictory workings of her mind, and read the sensations,
shy or bold, written in fleeting red, a bewildering maze of coquetry
and self-revelation.
“Madame,” Gaston exclaimed in a low voice, “my blunder you
know, but you do not know how much I am to blame. If you only
knew what joy it was to—”
“Ah! take care,” she said, holding up one finger with an air of mystery,
as she put out her hand towards the bell.
The charming gesture, the gracious threat, no doubt called up some
sad thought, some memory of the old happy time when she could
be wholly charming and gentle without an afterthought; when the
gladness of her heart justified every caprice, and put charm into every
least movement. The lines in her forehead gathered between her brows,
and the expression of her face grew dark in the soft candle-light.
Then looking across at M. de Nueil gravely but not unkindly, she
spoke like a woman who deeply feels the meaning of every word.
“This is all very ridiculous! Once upon a time, monsieur, when
thoughtless high spirits were my privilege, I should have laughed fearlessly
over your visit with you. But now my life is very much changed.
I cannot do as I like, I am obliged to think. What brings you here? Is it
curiosity? In that case I am paying dearly for a little fleeting pleasure.
Have you fallen passionately in love already with a woman whom you
have never seen, a woman with whose name slander has, of course,
been busy? If so, your motive in making this visit is based on disrespect,
on an error which accident brought into notoriety.”
She flung her book down scornfully upon the table, then, with a
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Balzac
terrible look at Gaston, she went on: “Because I once was weak, must
it be supposed that I am always weak? This is horrible, degrading. Or
have you come here to pity me? You are very young to offer sympathy
with heart troubles. Understand this clearly, sir, that I would rather
have scorn than pity. I will not endure compassion from any one.”
There was a brief pause.
“Well, sir,” she continued (and the face that she turned to him was
gentle and sad), “whatever motive induced this rash intrusion upon my
solitude, it is very painful to me, you see. You are too young to be
totally without good feeling, so surely you will feel that this behavior
of yours is improper. I forgive you for it, and, as you see, I am speaking
of it to you without bitterness. You will not come here again, will you?
I am entreating when I might command. If you come to see me again,
neither you nor I can prevent the whole place from believing that you
are my lover, and you would cause me great additional annoyance. You
do not mean to do that, I think.”
She said no more, but looked at him with a great dignity which
abashed him.
“I have done wrong, madame,” he said, with deep feeling in his
voice, “but it was through enthusiasm and thoughtlessness and eager
desire of happiness, the qualities and defects of my age. Now, I understand
that I ought not to have tried to see you,” he added; “but, at
the same time, the desire was a very natural one”—and, making an
appeal to feeling rather than to the intellect, he described the weariness
of his enforced exile. He drew a portrait of a young man in
whom the fires of life were burning themselves out, conveying the
impression that here was a heart worthy of tender love, a heart which,
notwithstanding, had never known the joys of love for a young and
beautiful woman of refinement and taste. He explained, without
attempting to justify, his unusual conduct. He flattered Mme. de
Beauseant by showing that she had realized for him the ideal lady of
a young man’s dream, the ideal sought by so many, and so often
sought in vain. Then he touched upon his morning prowlings under
the walls of Courcelles, and his wild thoughts at the first sight of the
house, till he excited that vague feeling of indulgence which a woman
can find in her heart for the follies committed for her sake.
An impassioned voice was speaking in the chill solitude; the speaker
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The Deserted Woman
brought with him a warm breath of youth and the charms of a carefully
cultivated mind. It was so long since Mme. de Beauseant had
felt stirred by real feeling delicately expressed, that it affected her very
strongly now. In spite of herself, she watched M. de Nueil’s expressive
face, and admired the noble countenance of a soul, unbroken as
yet by the cruel discipline of the life of the world, unfretted by continual
scheming to gratify personal ambition and vanity. Gaston was
in the flower of his youth, he impressed her as a man with something
in him, unaware as yet of the great career that lay before him. So
both these two made reflections most dangerous for their peace of
mind, and both strove to conceal their thoughts. M. de Nueil saw in
the Vicomtesse a rare type of woman, always the victim of her perfections
and tenderness; her graceful beauty is the least of her charms
for those who are privileged to know the infinite of feeling and
thought and goodness in the soul within; a woman whose instinctive
feeling for beauty runs through all the most varied expressions of
love, purifying its transports, turning them to something almost holy;
wonderful secret of womanhood, the exquisite gift that Nature so
seldom bestows. And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the
ring of sincerity in Gaston’s voice, while he told of his youthful
troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five-andtwenty
suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept them alike
from corrupting influences and intercourse with men and women of
the world whose sophistical reasoning and experience destroys the
fair qualities of youth. Here was the ideal of a woman’s dreams, a
man unspoiled as yet by the egoism of family or success, or by that
narrow selfishness which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion,
self-sacrifice, and high demands of self; all the flowers so soon
wither that enrich at first the life of delicate but strong emotions,
and keep alive the loyalty of the heart.
But these two, once launched forth into the vast of sentiment,
went far indeed in theory, sounding the depths in either soul, testing
the sincerity of their expressions; only, whereas Gaston’s experiments
were made unconsciously, Mme. de Beauseant had a purpose in all
that she said. Bringing her natural and acquired subtlety to the work,
she sought to learn M. de Nueil’s opinions by advancing, as far as she
could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty and
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Balzac
so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, with whom
she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure that they should
never meet again, that, after some delicious epigram of hers, Gaston
exclaimed unthinkingly:
“Oh! madame, how could any man have left you?”
The Vicomtesse was silent. Gaston reddened, he thought that he
had offended her; but she was not angry. The first deep thrill of
delight since the day of her calamity had taken her by surprise. The
skill of the cleverest roue could not have made the impression that
M. de Nueil made with that cry from the heart. That verdict wrung
from a young man’s candor gave her back innocence in her own eyes,
condemned the world, laid the blame upon the lover who had left
her, and justified her subsequent solitary drooping life. The world’s
absolution, the heartfelt sympathy, the social esteem so longed for,
and so harshly refused, nay, all her secret desires were given her to the
full in that exclamation, made fairer yet by the heart’s sweetest flatteries
and the admiration that women always relish eagerly. He understood
her, understood all, and he had given her, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, the opportunity of rising higher
through her fall. She looked at the clock.
“Ah! madame, do not punish me for my heedlessness. If you grant
me but one evening, vouchsafe not to shorten it.”
She smiled at the pretty speech.
“Well, as we must never meet again,” she said, “what signifies a
moment more or less? If you were to care for me, it would be a pity.”
“It is too late now,” he said.
“Do not tell me that,” she answered gravely. “Under any other circumstances
I should be very glad to see you. I will speak frankly, and
you will understand how it is that I do not choose to see you again,
and ought not to do so. You have too much magnanimity not to feel
that if I were so much as suspected of a second trespass, every one
would think of me as a contemptible and vulgar woman; I should be
like other women. A pure and blameless life will bring my character
into relief. I am too proud not to endeavor to live like one apart in
the world, a victim of the law through my marriage, man’s victim
through my love. If I were not faithful to the position which I have
taken up, then I should deserve all the reproach that is heaped upon
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The Deserted Woman
me; I should be lowered in my own eyes. I had not enough lofty
social virtue to remain with a man whom I did not love. I have
snapped the bonds of marriage in spite of the law; it was wrong, it
was a crime, it was anything you like, but for me the bonds meant
death. I meant to live. Perhaps if I had been a mother I could have
endured the torture of a forced marriage of suitability. At eighteen
we scarcely know what is done with us, poor girls that we are! I have
broken the laws of the world, and the world has punished me; we
both did rightly. I sought happiness. Is it not a law of our nature to
seek for happiness? I was young, I was beautiful … I thought that I
had found a nature as loving, as apparently passionate. I was loved
indeed; for a little while …”
She paused.
“I used to think,” she said, “that no one could leave a woman in
such a position as mine. I have been forsaken; I must have offended
in some way. Yes, in some way, no doubt, I failed to keep some law
of our nature, was too loving, too devoted, too exacting—I do not
know. Evil days have brought light with them! For a long while I
blamed another, now I am content to bear the whole blame. At my
own expense, I have absolved that other of whom I once thought I
had a right to complain. I had not the art to keep him; fate has
punished me heavily for my lack of skill. I only knew how to love;
how can one keep oneself in mind when one loves? So I was a slave
when I should have sought to be a tyrant. Those who know me may
condemn me, but they will respect me too. Pain has taught me that
I must not lay myself open to this a second time. I cannot understand
how it is that I am living yet, after the anguish of that first
week of the most fearful crisis in a woman’s life. Only from three
years of loneliness would it be possible to draw strength to speak of
that time as I am speaking now. Such agony, monsieur, usually ends
in death; but this—well, it was the agony of death with no tomb to
end it. Oh! I have known pain indeed!”
The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling; and the
cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which a stranger might
not hear. When a woman is afraid to look at her interlocutor, there is
in truth no gentler, meeker, more accommodating confidant than
the cornice. The cornice is quite an institution in the boudoir; what
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is it but the confessional, minus the priest?
Mme. de Beauseant was eloquent and beautiful at that moment;
nay, “coquettish,” if the word were not too heavy. By justifying herself
and love, she was stimulating every sentiment in the man before
her; nay, more, the higher she set the goal, the more conspicuous it
grew. At last, when her eyes had lost the too eloquent expression
given to them by painful memories, she let them fall on Gaston.
“You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to lead a solitary,
self-contained life?” she said quietly.
So sublime was she in her reasoning and her madness, that M. de
Nueil felt a wild longing to throw himself at her feet; but he was
afraid of making himself ridiculous, so he held his enthusiasm and
his thoughts in check. He was afraid, too, that he might totally fail
to express them, and in no less terror of some awful rejection on her
part, or of her mockery, an apprehension which strikes like ice to the
most fervid soul. The revulsion which led him to crush down every
feeling as it sprang up in his heart cost him the intense pain that
diffident and ambitious natures experience in the frequent crises when
they are compelled to stifle their longings. And yet, in spite of himself,
he broke the silence to say in a faltering voice:
“Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest emotions
of my life, and own to all that you have made me feel. You set the
heart in me swelling high! I feel within me a longing to make you
forget your mortifications, to devote my life to this, to give you love
for all who ever have given you wounds or hate. But this is a very
sudden outpouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I
ought not—”
“Enough, monsieur,” said Mme. de Beauseant; “we have both of
us gone too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I
am compelled to give, I meant to soften it and not to elicit homage.
Coquetry only suits a happy woman. Believe me, we must remain
strangers to each other. At a later day you will know that ties which
must inevitably be broken ought not to be formed at all.”
She sighed lightly, and her brows contracted, but almost immediately
grew clear again.
“How painful it is for a woman to be powerless to follow the man
she loves through all the phases of his life! And if that man loves her
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truly, his heart must surely vibrate with pain to the deep trouble in
hers. Are they not twice unhappy?”
There was a short pause. Then she rose smiling.
“You little suspected, when you came to Courcelles, that you were
to hear a sermon, did you?”
Gaston felt even further than at first from this extraordinary woman.
Was the charm of that delightful hour due after all to the coquetry of
the mistress of the house? She had been anxious to display her wit.
He bowed stiffly to the Vicomtesse, and went away in desperation.
On the way home he tried to detect the real character of a creature
supple and hard as a steel spring; but he had seen her pass through so
many phases, that he could not make up his mind about her. The
tones of her voice, too, were ringing in his ears; her gestures, the little
movements of her head, and the varying expression of her eyes grew
more gracious in memory, more fascinating as he thought of them.
The Vicomtesse’s beauty shone out again for him in the darkness; his
reviving impressions called up yet others, and he was enthralled anew
by womanly charm and wit, which at first he had not perceived. He
fell to wandering musings, in which the most lucid thoughts grow
refractory and flatly contradict each other, and the soul passes through
a brief frenzy fit. Youth only can understand all that lies in the
dithyrambic outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege, of the
most frantic folly and coolest common-sense, the heart finally yields
to the assault of the latest comer, be it hope, or despair, as some
mysterious power determines.
At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man’s conduct;
he is perplexed with a young girl’s shyness, a girl’s trouble; he is
afraid lest he should express his love ill, sees nothing but difficulties,
and takes alarm at them; he would be bolder if he loved less, for he
has no confidence in himself, and with a growing sense of the cost of
happiness comes a conviction that the woman he loves cannot easily
be won; perhaps, too, he is giving himself up too entirely to his own
pleasure, and fears that he can give none; and when, for his misfortune,
his idol inspires him with awe, he worships in secret and afar,
and unless his love is guessed, it dies away. Then it often happens that
one of these dead early loves lingers on, bright with illusions in many
a young heart. What man is there but keeps within him these virgin
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memories that grow fairer every time they rise before him, memories
that hold up to him the ideal of perfect bliss? Such recollections are
like children who die in the flower of childhood, before their parents
have known anything of them but their smiles.
So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a mood
fraught with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt that Mme. de
Beauseant was one of the conditions of his existence, and that death
would be preferable to life without her. He was still young enough
to feel the tyrannous fascination which fully-developed womanhood
exerts over immature and impassioned natures; and, consequently,
he was to spend one of those stormy nights when a young man’s
thoughts travel from happiness to suicide and back again—nights in
which youth rushes through a lifetime of bliss and falls asleep from
sheer exhaustion. Fateful nights are they, and the worst misfortune
that can happen is to awake a philosopher afterwards. M. de Nueil
was far too deeply in love to sleep; he rose and betook to inditing
letters, but none of them were satisfactory, and he burned them all.
THE NEXT DAY he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of her garden
walls, but he waited till nightfall; he was afraid that she might
see him. The instinct that led him to act in this way arose out of so
obscure a mood of the soul, that none but a young man, or a man in
like case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries, matter
to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in its
matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful hesitation,
Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter, which
may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to lovers, a
performance which, like the drawings prepared with great secrecy by
children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found insufferable
by every mortal except the recipients:—
“Madame,—Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. Do not throw this
letter into the fire; be so kind as to read it through. Perhaps you may
pardon the opening sentence when you see that it is no commonplace,
selfish declaration, but that it expresses a simple fact. Perhaps you may
feel moved, because I ask for so little, by the submission of one who
feels himself so much beneath you, by the influence that your decision
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The Deserted Woman
will exercise upon my life. At my age, madame, I only know how to
love, I am utterly ignorant of ways of attracting and winning a woman’s
love, but in my own heart I know raptures of adoration of her. I am
irresistibly drawn to you by the great happiness that I feel through
you; my thoughts turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us
draw nearer to the fire of life when we find it. I do not imagine that I
am worthy of you; it seems impossible that I, young, ignorant, and
shy, could bring you one-thousandth part of the happiness that I drink
in at the sound of your voice and the sight of you. For me you are the
only woman in the world. I cannot imagine life without you, so I have
made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my life till I lose it in
some desperate enterprise, in the Indies, in Africa, I care not where.
How can I quell a love that knows no limits save by opposing to it
something as infinite? Yet, if you will allow me to hope, not to be
yours, but to win your friendship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very
often, if you require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those
stolen hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness to
be cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will suffice to
enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. Have I presumed
too much upon your generosity by this entreaty to suffer an
intercourse in which all the gain is mine alone? You could find ways
of showing the world, to which you sacrifice so much, that I am
nothing to you; you are so clever and so proud! What have you to
fear? If I could only lay bare my heart to you at this moment, to
convince you that it is with no lurking afterthought that I make this
humble request! Should I have told you that my love was boundless,
while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I had any hope of your
sharing this feeling in the depths of my soul? No, while I am with
you, I will be whatever you will, if only I may be with you. If you
refuse (as you have the power to refuse), I will not utter one murmur,
I will go. And if, at a later day, any other woman should enter into
my life, you will have proof that you were right; but if I am faithful
till death, you may feel some regret perhaps. The hope of causing
you a regret will soothe my agony, and that thought shall be the sole
revenge of a slighted heart ….”
Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribulations
of youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two white pinions,
the nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid imagination,
can realize the horrors that seized upon Gaston de Nueil when he
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had reason to suppose that his ultimatum was in Mme. de Beauseant’s
hands. He saw the Vicomtesse, wholly untouched, laughing at his
letter and his love, as those can laugh who have ceased to believe in
love. He could have wished to have his letter back again. It was an
absurd letter. There were a thousand and one things, now that he
came to think of it, that he might have said, things infinitely better
and more moving than those stilted phrases of his, those accursed,
sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the
punctuation had been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked.
He tried not to think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, and was
wretched. If he had been thirty years old, he might have got drunk,
but the innocence of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources
of opium nor of the expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he
at hand one of those good friends of the Parisian pattern who understand
so well how to say Poete, non dolet! by producing a bottle of
champagne, or alleviate the agony of suspense by carrying you off
somewhere to make a night of it. Capital fellows are they, always in
low water when you are in funds, always off to some watering-place
when you go to look them up, always with some bad bargain in
horse-flesh to sell you; it is true, that when you want to borrow of
them, they have always just lost their last louis at play; but in all
other respects they are the best fellows on earth, always ready to embark
with you on one of the steep down-grades where you lose your
time, your soul, and your life!
At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instrumentality
of Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy on the
scented seal, a letter written on vellum notepaper.
He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and re-read her
letter:—
“You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for the friendliness
of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the attraction which
intellect always has for me. I put confidence in the generosity of youth,
and you have disappointed me. And yet, if I did not speak unreservedly
(which would have been perfectly ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly
of my position, so that you might imagine that I was not to be touched
by a young soul. My distress is the keener for my interest in you. I am
naturally tender-hearted and kindly, but circumstances force me to act
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The Deserted Woman
unkindly. Another woman would have flung your letter, unread, into
the fire; I read it, and I am answering it. My answer will make it clear to
you that while I am not untouched by the expression of this feeling
which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am still far from sharing it,
and the step which I am about to take will show you still more plainly
that I mean what I say. I wish besides, to use, for your welfare, that
authority, as it were, which you give me over your life; and I desire to
exercise it this once to draw aside the veil from your eyes.
“I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely two-andtwenty.
You yourself cannot know what your thoughts will be at my
age. The vows that you make so lightly to-day may seem a very heavy
burden to you then. I am quite willing to believe that at this moment
you would give me your whole life without a regret, you would even
be ready to die for a little brief happiness; but at the age of thirty
experience will take from you the very power of making daily sacrifices
for my sake, and I myself should feel deeply humiliated if I accepted
them. A day would come when everything, even Nature, would bid
you leave me, and I have already told you that death is preferable to
desertion. Misfortune has taught me to calculate; as you see, I am
arguing perfectly dispassionately. You force me to tell you that I have
no love for you; I ought not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too
late to yield, as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the
heart, too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations
spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the melancholy
insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too clearly to accept
your proffered friendship. It is only instinct. I forgive the boyish ruse,
for which you are not responsible as yet. In the name of this passing
fancy of yours, for the sake of your career and my own peace of mind,
I bid you stay in your own country; you must not spoil a fair and
honorable life for an illusion which, by its very nature, cannot last. At
a later day, when you have accomplished your real destiny, in the fully
developed manhood that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer of
mine, though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You will
turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will certainly be
sweet and precious to you then; a friendship untried by the extremes
of passion and the disenchanting processes of life; a friendship which
noble thoughts and thoughts of religion will keep pure and sacred.
Farewell; do my bidding with the thought that your success will bring
a gleam of pleasure into my solitude, and only think of me as we think
of absent friends.”
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Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following lines:—
“Madame,—If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of becoming
an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit that
I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as you bid me;
the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only be absolved by
death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse
all through your own—”
When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked him
with whom he left the note?
“I gave it to Mme. la Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in her carriage
and just about to start.”
“For the town?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post-horses.”
“Ah! then she is going away,” said the Baron.
“Yes, sir,” the man answered.
Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. de Beauseant.
She led the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion that he followed.
And he? Amid the many thoughts that assailed him during that journey,
one all-absorbing problem filled his mind—”Why did she go
away?” Theories grew thickly on such ground for supposition, and
naturally he inclined to the one that flattered his hopes—”If the
Vicomtesse cares for me, a clever woman would, of course, choose
Switzerland, where nobody knows either of us, in preference to France,
where she would find censorious critics.”
An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel attracted to
a woman clever enough to choose her own ground; such women are
too clever. However, there is nothing to prove that there was any truth
in Gaston’s supposition.
The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. As soon
as she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer evening in the
twilight. Jacques, that flunkey in grain, showed no sign of surprise,
and announced M. le Baron de Nueil like a discreet domestic well
acquainted with good society. At the sound of the name, at the sight
of its owner, Mme. de Beauseant let her book fall from her hands;
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The Deserted Woman
her surprise gave him time to come close to her, and to say in tones
that sounded like music in her ears:
“What a joy it was to me to take the horses that brought you on
this journey!”
To have the inmost desires of the heart so fulfilled! Where is the
woman who could resist such happiness as this? An Italian woman,
one of those divine creatures who, psychologically, are as far removed
from the Parisian as if they lived at the Antipodes, a being who would
be regarded as profoundly immoral on this side of the Alps, an Italian
(to resume) made the following comment on some French novels
which she had been reading. “I cannot see,” she remarked, “why
these poor lovers take such a time over coming to an arrangement
which ought to be the affair of a single morning.” Why should not
the novelist take a hint from this worthy lady, and refrain from exhausting
the theme and the reader? Some few passages of coquetry it
would certainly be pleasant to give in outline; the story of Mme. de
Beauseant’s demurs and sweet delayings, that, like the vestal virgins
of antiquity, she might fall gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent
raptures of first love draw from it its utmost strength and sweetness.
M. de Nueil was at an age when a man is the dupe of these
caprices, of the fence which women delight to prolong; either to
dictate their own terms, or to enjoy the sense of their power yet
longer, knowing instinctively as they do that it must soon grow less.
But, after all, these little boudoir protocols, less numerous than those
of the Congress of London, are too small to be worth mention in
the history of this passion.
For three years Mme. de Beauseant and M. de Nueil lived in the
villa on the lake of Geneva. They lived quite alone, received no visitors,
caused no talk, rose late, went out together upon the lake, knew,
in short, the happiness of which we all of us dream. It was a simple
little house, with green shutters, and broad balconies shaded with
awnings, a house contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white
couches, soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it
reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new view of
the lake; in the far distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of
changing color and evanescent cloud; above them spread the sunny
sky, before them stretched the broad sheet of water, never the same
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Balzac
in its fitful changes. All their surroundings seemed to dream for them,
all things smiled upon them.
Then weighty matters recalled M. de Nueil to France. His father
and brother died, and he was obliged to leave Geneva. The lovers
bought the house; and if they could have had their way, they would
have removed the hills piecemeal, drawn off the lake with a siphon,
and taken everything away with them.
Mme. de Beauseant followed M. de Nueil. She realized her property,
and bought a considerable estate near Manerville, adjoining
Gaston’s lands, and here they lived together; Gaston very graciously
giving up Manerville to his mother for the present in consideration
of the bachelor freedom in which she left him.
Mme. de Beauseant’s estate was close to a little town in one of the
most picturesque spots in the valley of the Auge. Here the lovers
raised barriers between themselves and social intercourse, barriers which
no creature could overleap, and here the happy days of Switzerland
were lived over again. For nine whole years they knew happiness
which it serves no purpose to describe; happiness which may be divined
from the outcome of the story by those whose souls can comprehend
poetry and prayer in their infinite manifestations.
All this time Mme. de Beauseant’s husband, the present Marquis
(his father and elder brother having died), enjoyed the soundest health.
There is no better aid to life than a certain knowledge that our demise
would confer a benefit on some fellow-creature. M. de Beauseant
was one of those ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of
life-annuities, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning
to a consciousness of good health. For the rest, he was a man of the
world, somewhat methodical and ceremonious, and a calculator of
consequences, who could make a declaration of love as quietly as a
lackey announces that “Madame is served.”
This brief biographical notice of his lordship the Marquis de
Beauseant is given to explain the reasons why it was impossible for
the Marquise to marry M. de Nueil.
So, after a nine years’ lease of happiness, the sweetest agreement to
which a woman ever put her hand, M. de Nueil and Mme. de
Beauseant were still in a position quite as natural and quite as false as
at the beginning of their adventure. And yet they had reached a fatal
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The Deserted Woman
crisis, which may be stated as clearly as any problem in mathematics.
Mme. la Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston’s mother, a strait-laced and
virtuous person, who had made the late Baron happy in strictly legal
fashion would never consent to meet Mme. de Beauseant. Mme. de
Beauseant quite understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity
be her enemy, and that she would try to draw Gaston from his
unhallowed and immoral way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant
would willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva,
but she could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she
distrusted M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this
very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and improvements.
She would not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routinework,
such as women always wish for their husbands, and even for
their lovers.
A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a
rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the neighborhood.
Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was obliged
to go thither. These various personages being to each other as the
terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light on
the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying
for the past month to solve:—
“My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to write to
you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a caress so often
takes the place of words, and words too are caresses? Ah, well, no, love.
There are some things that a woman cannot say when she is face to face
with the man she loves; at the bare thought of them her voice fails her,
and the blood goes back to her heart; she has no strength, no intelligence
left. It hurts me to feel like this when you are near me, and it
happens often. I feel that my heart should be wholly sincere for you;
that I should disguise no thought, however transient, in my heart; and
I love the sweet carelessness, which suits me so well, too much to
endure this embarrassment and constraint any longer. So I will tell
you about my anguish—yes, it is anguish. Listen to me! do not begin
with the little ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ that you use to silence me, an impertinence
that I love, because anything from you pleases me. Dear soul
from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell you that you have effaced
all memory of the pain that once was crushing the life out of me.
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I did not know what love was before I knew you. Only the candor of
your beautiful young life, only the purity of that great soul of yours,
could satisfy the requirements of an exacting woman’s heart. Dear love,
how very often I have thrilled with joy to think that in these nine long,
swift years, my jealousy has not been once awakened. All the flowers of
your soul have been mine, all your thoughts. There has not been the
faintest cloud in our heaven; we have not known what sacrifice is; we
have always acted on the impulses of our hearts. I have known happiness,
infinite for a woman. Will the tears that drench this sheet tell
you all my gratitude? I could wish that I had knelt to write the words!—
Well, out of this felicity has arisen torture more terrible than the pain
of desertion. Dear, there are very deep recesses in a woman’s heart; how
deep in my own heart, I did not know myself until to-day, as I did not
know the whole extent of love. The greatest misery which could overwhelm
us is a light burden compared with the mere thought of harm
for him whom we love. And how if we cause the harm, is it not enough
to make one die? … This is the thought that is weighing upon me. But
it brings in its train another thought that is heavier far, a thought that
tarnishes the glory of love, and slays it, and turns it into a humiliation
which sullies life as long as it lasts. You are thirty years old; I am forty.
What dread this difference in age calls up in a woman who loves! It is
possible that, first of all unconsciously, afterwards in earnest, you have
felt the sacrifices that you have made by renouncing all in the world
for me. Perhaps you have thought of your future from the social point
of view, of the marriage which would, of course, increase your fortune,
and give you avowed happiness and children who would inherit your
wealth; perhaps you have thought of reappearing in the world, and
filling your place there honorably. And then, if so, you must have
repressed those thoughts, and felt glad to sacrifice heiress and fortune
and a fair future to me without my knowledge. In your young man’s
generosity, you must have resolved to be faithful to the vows which
bind us each to each in the sight of God. My past pain has risen up
before your mind, and the misery from which you rescued me has
been my protection. To owe your love to your pity! The thought is
even more painful to me than the fear of spoiling your life for you. The
man who can bring himself to stab his mistress is very charitable if he
gives her her deathblow while she is happy and ignorant of evil, while
illusions are in full blossom …. Yes, death is preferable to the two
thoughts which have secretly saddened the hours for several days. Today,
when you asked ‘What ails you?’ so tenderly, the sound of your
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The Deserted Woman
voice made me shiver. I thought that, after your wont, you were reading
my very soul, and I waited for your confidence to come, thinking
that my presentiments had come true, and that I had guessed all that
was going on in your mind. Then I began to think over certain little
things that you always do for me, and I thought I could see in you the
sort of affection by which a man betrays a consciousness that his loyalty
is becoming a burden. And in that moment I paid very dear for
my happiness. I felt that Nature always demands the price for the
treasure called love. Briefly, has not fate separated us? Can you have
said, ‘Sooner or later I must leave poor Claire; why not separate in
time?’ I read that thought in the depths of your eyes, and went away
to cry by myself. Hiding my tears from you! the first tears that I have
shed for sorrow for these ten years; I am too proud to let you see them,
but I did not reproach you in the least.
“Yes, you are right. I ought not to be so selfish as to bind your long
and brilliant career to my so-soon out-worn life …. And yet—how if I
have been mistaken? How if I have taken your love melancholy for a
deliberation? Oh, my love, do not leave me in suspense; punish this
jealous wife of yours, but give her back the sense of her love and yours;
the whole woman lies in that—that consciousness sanctifies everything.
“Since your mother came, since you paid a visit to Mlle. de Rodiere,
I have been gnawed by doubts dishonoring to us both. Make me suffer
for this, but do not deceive me; I want to know everything that your
mother said and that you think! If you have hesitated between some
alternative and me, I give you back your liberty …. I will not let you
know what happens to me; I will not shed tears for you to see; only—
I will not see you again …. Ah! I cannot go on, my heart is breaking
…. I have been sitting benumbed and stupid for some moments. Dear
love, I do not find that any feeling of pride rises against you; you are so
kind-hearted, so open; you would find it impossible to hurt me or to
deceive me; and you will tell me the truth, however cruel it may be.
Do you wish me to encourage your confession? Well, then, heart of
mine, I shall find comfort in a woman’s thought. Has not the youth of
your being been mine, your sensitive, wholly gracious, beautiful, and
delicate youth? No woman shall find henceforth the Gaston whom I
have known, nor the delicious happiness that he has given me …. No;
you will never love again as you have loved, as you love me now; no, I
shall never have a rival, it is impossible. There will be no bitterness in
my memories of our love, and I shall think of nothing else. It is out of
your power to enchant any woman henceforth by the childish provo-
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cations, the charming ways of a young heart, the soul’s winning charm,
the body’s grace, the swift communion of rapture, the whole divine
cortege of young love, in fine.
“Oh, you are a man now, you will obey your destiny, weighing and
considering all things. You will have cares, and anxieties, and ambitions,
and concerns that will rob her of the unchanging smile that
made your lips fair for me. The tones that were always so sweet for me
will be troubled at times; and your eyes that lighted up with radiance
from heaven at the sight of me, will often be lustreless for her. And
besides, as it is impossible to love you as I love you, you will never care
for that woman as you have cared for me. She will never keep a constant
watch over herself as I have done; she will never study your happiness
at every moment with an intuition which has never failed me.
Ah, yes, the man, the heart and soul, which I shall have known will
exist no longer. I shall bury him deep in my memory, that I may have
the joy of him still; I shall live happy in that fair past life of ours, a life
hidden from all but our inmost selves.
“Dear treasure of mine, if all the while no least thought of liberty has
risen in your mind, if my love is no burden on you, if my fears are
chimerical, if I am still your Eve—the one woman in the world for
you—come to me as soon as you have read this letter, come quickly!
Ah, in one moment I will love you more than I have ever loved you, I
think, in these nine years. After enduring the needless torture of these
doubts of which I am accusing myself, every added day of love, yes,
every single day, will be a whole lifetime of bliss. So speak, and speak
openly; do not deceive me, it would be a crime. Tell me, do you wish
for your liberty? Have you thought of all that a man’s life means? Is
there any regret in your mind? That I should cause you a regret! I
should die of it. I have said it: I love you enough to set your happiness
above mine, your life before my own. Leave on one side, if you can, the
wealth of memories of our nine years’ happiness, that they may not
influence your decision, but speak! I submit myself to you as to God,
the one Consoler who remains if you forsake me.”
When Mme. de Beauseant knew that her letter was in M. de Nueil’s
hands, she sank in such utter prostration, the over-pressure of many
thoughts so numbed her faculties, that she seemed almost drowsy. At
any rate, she was suffering from a pain not always proportioned in its
intensity to a woman’s strength; pain which women alone know. And
while the unhappy Marquise awaited her doom, M. de Nueil, reading
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The Deserted Woman
her letter, felt that he was “in a very difficult position,” to use the
expression that young men apply to a crisis of this kind.
By this time he had all but yielded to his mother’s importunities
and to the attractions of Mlle. de la Rodiere, a somewhat insignificant,
pink-and-white young person, as straight as a poplar. It is true
that, in accordance with the rules laid down for marriageable young
ladies, she scarcely opened her mouth, but her rent-roll of forty thousand
livres spoke quite sufficiently for her. Mme. de Nueil, with a
mother’s sincere affection, tried to entangle her son in virtuous courses.
She called his attention to the fact that it was a flattering distinction to
be preferred by Mlle. de la Rodiere, who had refused so many great
matches; it was quite time, she urged, that he should think of his
future, such a good opportunity might not repeat itself, some day he
would have eighty thousand livres of income from land; money made
everything bearable; if Mme. de Beauseant loved him for his own sake,
she ought to be the first to urge him to marry. In short, the wellintentioned
mother forgot no arguments which the feminine intellect
can bring to bear upon the masculine mind, and by these means she
had brought her son into a wavering condition.
Mme. de Beauseant’s letter arrived just as Gaston’s love of her was
holding out against the temptations of a settled life conformable to
received ideas. That letter decided the day. He made up his mind to
break off with the Marquise and to marry.
“One must live a man’s life,” said he to himself.
Then followed some inkling of the pain that this decision would
give to Mme. de Beauseant. The man’s vanity and the lover’s conscience
further exaggerated this pain, and a sincere pity for her seized
upon him. All at once the immensity of the misery became apparent
to him, and he thought it necessary and charitable to deaden the
deadly blow. He hoped to bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame
of mind by gradually reconciling her to the idea of separation; while
Mlle. de la Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, should
be sacrificed to her at first, only to be imposed upon her later. His
marriage should take place later, in obedience to Mme. de Beauseant’s
expressed wish. He went so far as to enlist the Marquise’s nobleness
and pride and all the great qualities of her nature to help him to
succeed in this compassionate design. He would write a letter at once
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to allay her suspicions. A letter! For a woman with the most exquisite
feminine perception, as well as the intuition of passionate love, a
letter in itself was a sentence of death.
So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant a sheet of
paper folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor woman, like a snared
swallow. A mysterious sensation of physical cold spread from head
to foot, wrapping her about in an icy winding sheet. If he did not
rush to her feet, if he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like
a lover, she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are there
in the heart of a woman who loves, that she is only slain by stab after
stab, and loves on till the last drop of life-blood drains away.
“Does madame need anything?” Jacques asked gently, as he went
away.
“No,” she said.
“Poor fellow!” she thought, brushing a tear from her eyes, “he guesses
my feelings, servant though he is!”
She read: “My beloved, you are inventing idle terrors for yourself
…” The Marquise gazed at the words, and a thick mist spread before
her eyes. A voice in her heart cried, “He lies!”—Then she glanced
down the page with the clairvoyant eagerness of passion, and read
these words at the foot, “Nothing has been decided as yet …” Turning
to the other side with convulsive quickness, she saw the mind of the
writer distinctly through the intricacies of the wording; this was no
spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in her fingers, twisted
it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the fire, and cried aloud, “Ah!
base that he is! I was his, and he had ceased to love me!”
She sank half dead upon the couch.
M. DE NUEIL WENT out as soon as he had written his letter. When he
came back, Jacques met him on the threshold with a note. “Madame
la Marquise has left the chateau,” said the man.
M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read:—
“Madame,—If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of becoming
an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit that
I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as you bid me;
the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only be absolved by
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The Deserted Woman
death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse
all through your own …”
It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out for
Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de Bourgogne had
written, “Monsieur, you are free.”
M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less than three
weeks he married Mlle. Stephanie de la Rodiere.
IF THIS COMMONPLACE STORY of real life ended here, it would be to
some extent a sort of mystification. The first man you meet can tell
you a better. But the widespread fame of the catastrophe (for, unhappily,
this is a true tale), and all the memories which it may arouse in
those who have known the divine delights of infinite passion, and
lost them by their own deed, or through the cruelty of fate,—these
things may perhaps shelter the story from criticism.
Mme. la Marquise de Beauseant never left Valleroy after her parting
from M. de Nueil. After his marriage she still continued to live
there, for some inscrutable woman’s reason; any woman is at liberty
to assign the one which most appeals to her. Claire de Bourgogne
lived in such complete retirement that none of the servants, save
Jacques and her own woman, ever saw their mistress. She required
absolute silence all about her, and only left her room to go to the
chapel on the Valleroy estate, whither a neighboring priest came to
say mass every morning.
The Comte de Nueil sank a few days after his marriage into something
like conjugal apathy, which might be interpreted to mean happiness
or unhappiness equally easily.
“My son is perfectly happy,” his mother said everywhere.
Mme. Gaston de Nueil, like a great many young women, was a
rather colorless character, sweet and passive. A month after her marriage
she had expectations of becoming a mother. All this was quite in
accordance with ordinary views. M. de Nueil was very nice to her; but
two months after his separation from the Marquise, he grew notably
thoughtful and abstracted. But then he always had been serious, his
mother said.
After seven months of this tepid happiness, a little thing occurred,
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Balzac
one of those seemingly small matters which imply such great development
of thought and such widespread trouble of the soul, that
only the bare fact can be recorded; the interpretation of it must be
left to the fancy of each individual mind. One day, when M. de
Nueil had been shooting over the lands of Manerville and Valleroy,
he crossed Mme. de Beauseant’s park on his way home, summoned
Jacques, and when the man came, asked him, “Whether the Marquise
was as fond of game as ever?”
Jacques answering in the affirmative, Gaston offered him a good
round sum (accompanied by plenty of specious reasoning) for a very
little service. Would he set aside for the Marquise the game that the
Count would bring? It seemed to Jacques to be a matter of no great
importance whether the partridge on which his mistress dined had
been shot by her keeper or by M. de Nueil, especially since the latter
particularly wished that the Marquise should know nothing about it.
“It was killed on her land,” said the Count, and for some days
Jacques lent himself to the harmless deceit. Day after day M. de
Nueil went shooting, and came back at dinner-time with an empty
bag. A whole week went by in this way. Gaston grew bold enough to
write a long letter to the Marquise, and had it conveyed to her. It was
returned to him unopened. The Marquise’s servant brought it back
about nightfall. The Count, sitting in the drawing-room listening,
while his wife at the piano mangled a /Caprice/ of Herold’s, suddenly
sprang up and rushed out to the Marquise, as if he were flying
to an assignation. He dashed through a well-known gap into the
park, and went slowly along the avenues, stopping now and again for
a little to still the loud beating of his heart. Smothered sounds as he
came nearer the chateau told him that the servants must be at supper,
and he went straight to Mme. de Beauseant’s room.
Mme. de Beauseant never left her bedroom. M. de Nueil could
gain the doorway without making the slightest sound. There, by the
light of two wax candles, he saw the thin, white Marquise in a great
armchair; her head was bowed, her hands hung listlessly, her eyes gazing
fixedly at some object which she did not seem to see. Her whole
attitude spoke of hopeless pain. There was a vague something like
hope in her bearing, but it was impossible to say whither Claire de
Bourgogne was looking—forwards to the tomb or backwards into the
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The Deserted Woman
past. Perhaps M. de Nueil’s tears glittered in the deep shadows; perhaps
his breathing sounded faintly; perhaps unconsciously he trembled,
or again it may have been impossible that he should stand there, his
presence unfelt by that quick sense which grows to be an instinct, the
glory, the delight, the proof of perfect love. However it was, Mme. de
Beauseant slowly turned her face towards the doorway, and beheld her
lover of bygone days. Then Gaston de Nueil came forward a few paces.
“If you come any further, sir,” exclaimed the Marquise, growing
paler, “I shall fling myself out of the window!”
She sprang to the window, flung it open, and stood with one foot
on the ledge, her hand upon the iron balustrade, her face turned
towards Gaston.
“Go out! go out!” she cried, “or I will throw myself over.”
At that dreadful cry the servants began to stir, and M. de Nueil fled
like a criminal.
When he reached his home again he wrote a few lines and gave
them to his own man, telling him to give the letter himself into
Mme. de Beauseant’s hands, and to say that it was a matter of life
and death for his master. The messenger went. M. de Nueil went
back to the drawing-room where his wife was still murdering the
Caprice, and sat down to wait till the answer came. An hour later,
when the Caprice had come to an end, and the husband and wife sat
in silence on opposite sides of the hearth, the man came back from
Valleroy and gave his master his own letter, unopened.
M. de Nueil went into a small room beyond the drawing-room,
where he had left his rifle, and shot himself.
The swift and fatal ending of the drama, contrary as it is to all the
habits of young France, is only what might have been expected. Those
who have closely observed, or known for themselves by delicious
experience, all that is meant by the perfect union of two beings, will
understand Gaston de Nueil’s suicide perfectly well. A woman does
not bend and form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The
pleasure of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful ingenuity
of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to each, can
discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and delicate
delights for which we are steeped in a thousand superstitions,
imagining them to be inherent in the heart that lavishes them upon
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Balzac
us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to another, this religious
belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or excessive happiness
in the presence of one we love, that accounts in part for perdurable
attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman possesses the genius
of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of use and wont. She
brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her tenderness in forms
so varied, there is such art in her most natural moments, or so much
nature in her art, that in absence her memory is almost as potent as
her presence. All other women are as shadows compared with her.
Not until we have lost or known the dread of losing a love so vast
and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who has
once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his own act and
deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some incident, hidden
in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom he hoped
to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never be revived
for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has
dealt a deadly wound to her, his wife in truth, whom he forsook for
a social chimera,—then he must either die or take refuge in a materialistic,
selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which impassioned souls
shrink in horror.
AS FOR MME. DE BEAUSEANT, she doubtless did not imagine that her
friend’s despair could drive him to suicide, when he had drunk deep
of love for nine years. Possibly she may have thought that she alone
was to suffer. At any rate, she did quite rightly to refuse the most
humiliating of all positions; a wife may stoop for weighty social
reasons to a kind of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold
in abhorrence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its justification.
Angouleme, September 1832.
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The Deserted Woman
642
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Beauseant, Marquis and Comte de
Father Goriot
An Episode under the Terror
Beauseant, Marquise de
Letters of Two Brides
Beauseant, Vicomte de
Father Goriot
Beauseant, Vicomtesse de
Father Goriot
Albert Savarus
Champignelles, De
The Seamy Side of History
Jacques (M. de Beauseant’s butler)
Father Goriot
Nueil, Gaston de
The Deserted Woman
Albert Savarus

Domestic Peace
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
Dedicated to my dear niece Valentine Surville.
Balzac
THE INCIDENT RECORDED in this sketch took place towards the end
of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon’s
fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpetblasts
of Wagram were still sounding an echo in the heart of the
Austrian monarchy. Peace was being signed between France and the
Coalition. Kings and princes came to perform their orbits, like stars,
round Napoleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe
in his train—a magnificent experiment in the power he afterwards
displayed at Dresden. Never, as contemporaries tell us, did
Paris see entertainments more superb than those which preceded and
followed the sovereign’s marriage with an Austrian archduchess. Never,
in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many crowned
heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the French aristocracy
been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered
over the women’s dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on the
uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic,
that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms
of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains of
this Empire of a day. All the military, not excepting their chief, rev-
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Domestic Peace
eled like parvenus in the treasure conquered for them by a million
men with worsted epaulettes, whose demands were satisfied by a few
yards of red ribbon.
At this time most women affected that lightness of conduct and
facility of morals which distinguished the reign of Louis XV. Whether
it were in imitation of the tone of the fallen monarchy, or because
certain members of the Imperial family had set the example—as certain
malcontents of the Faubourg Saint-Germain chose to say—it is
certain that men and women alike flung themselves into a life of
pleasure with an intrepidity which seemed to forbode the end of the
world. But there was at that time another cause for such license. The
infatuation of women for the military became a frenzy, and was too
consonant to the Emperor’s views for him to try to check it. The
frequent calls to arms, which gave every treaty concluded between
Napoleon and the rest of Europe the character of an armistice, left
every passion open to a termination as sudden as the decisions of the
Commander-in-chief of all these busbys, pelisses, and aiguillettes,
which so fascinated the fair sex. Hearts were as nomadic as the regiments.
Between the first and fifth bulletins from the Grand armee a
woman might be in succession mistress, wife, mother, and widow.
Was it the prospect of early widowhood, the hope of a jointure, or
that of bearing a name promised to history, which made the soldiers
so attractive? Were women drawn to them by the certainty that the
secret of their passions would be buried on the field of battle? or may
we find the reason of this gentle fanaticism in the noble charm that
courage has for a woman? Perhaps all these reasons, which the future
historian of the manners of the Empire will no doubt amuse himself
by weighing, counted for something in their facile readiness to abandon
themselves to love intrigues. Be that as it may, it must here be
confessed that at that time laurels hid many errors, women showed
an ardent preference for the brave adventurers, whom they regarded
as the true fount of honor, wealth, or pleasure; and in the eyes of
young girls, an epaulette—the hieroglyphic of a future—signified
happiness and liberty.
One feature, and a characteristic one, of this unique period in our
history was an unbridled mania for everything glittering. Never were
fireworks so much in vogue, never were diamonds so highly prized. The
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Balzac
men, as greedy as the women of these translucent pebbles, displayed
them no less lavishly. Possibly the necessity for carrying plunder in the
most portable form made gems the fashion in the army. A man was not
ridiculous then, as he would be now, if his shirt-frill or his fingers blazed
with large diamonds. Murat, an Oriental by nature, set the example of
preposterous luxury to modern soldiers.
The Comte de Gondreville, formerly known as Citizen Malin,
whose elevation had made him famous, having become a Lucullus
of the Conservative Senate, which “conserved” nothing, had postponed
an entertainment in honor of the peace only that he might the
better pay his court to Napoleon by his efforts to eclipse those flatterers
who had been before-hand with him. The ambassadors from
all the Powers friendly with France, with an eye to favors to come,
the most important personages of the Empire, and even a few princes,
were at this hour assembled in the wealthy senator’s drawing-rooms.
Dancing flagged; every one was watching for the Emperor, whose
presence the Count had promised his guests. And Napoleon would
have kept his word but for the scene which had broken out that very
evening between him and Josephine—the scene which portended
the impending divorce of the august pair. The report of this incident,
at the time kept very secret, but recorded by history, did not reach
the ears of the courtiers, and had no effect on the gaiety of Comte de
Gondreville’s party beyond keeping Napoleon away.
The prettiest women in Paris, eager to be at the Count’s on the
strength of mere hearsay, at this moment were a besieging force of
luxury, coquettishness, elegance, and beauty. The financial world,
proud of its riches, challenged the splendor of the generals and high
officials of the Empire, so recently gorged with orders, titles, and
honors. These grand balls were always an opportunity seized upon
by wealthy families for introducing their heiresses to Napoleon’s
Praetorian Guard, in the foolish hope of exchanging their splendid
fortunes for uncertain favors. The women who believed themselves
strong enough in their beauty alone came to test their power. There,
as elsewhere, amusement was but a blind. Calm and smiling faces
and placid brows covered sordid interests, expressions of friendship
were a lie, and more than one man was less distrustful of his enemies
than of his friends.
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Domestic Peace
These remarks are necessary to explain the incidents of the little
imbroglio which is the subject of this study, and the picture, softened
as it is, of the tone then dominant in Paris drawing-rooms.
“Turn your eyes a little towards the pedestal supporting that candelabrum—do
you see a young lady with her hair drawn back a la
Chinoise!—There, in the corner to the left; she has bluebells in the
knot of chestnut curls which fall in clusters on her head. Do not you
see her? She is so pale you might fancy she was ill, delicate-looking,
and very small; there—now she is turning her head this way; her
almond-shaped blue eyes, so delightfully soft, look as if they were
made expressly for tears. Look, look! She is bending forward to see
Madame de Vaudremont below the crowd of heads in constant
motion; the high head-dresses prevent her having a clear view.”
“I see her now, my dear fellow. You had only to say that she had the
whitest skin of all the women here; I should have known whom you
meant. I had noticed her before; she has the loveliest complexion I
ever admired. From hence I defy you to see against her throat the
pearls between the sapphires of her necklace. But she is a prude or a
coquette, for the tucker of her bodice scarcely lets one suspect the
beauty of her bust. What shoulders! what lily-whiteness!”
“Who is she?” asked the first speaker.
“Ah! that I do not know.”
“Aristocrat!—Do you want to keep them all to yourself,
Montcornet?”
“You of all men to banter me!” replied Montcornet, with a smile.
“Do you think you have a right to insult a poor general like me
because, being a happy rival of Soulanges, you cannot even turn on
your heel without alarming Madame de Vaudremont? Or is it because
I came only a month ago into the Promised Land? How insolent
you can be, you men in office, who sit glued to your chairs while
we are dodging shot and shell! Come, Monsieur le Maitre des
Requetes, allow us to glean in the field of which you can only have
precarious possession from the moment when we evacuate it. The
deuce is in it! We have a right to live! My good friend, if you knew
the German women, you would, I believe, do me a good turn with
the Parisian you love best.”
“Well, General, since you have vouchsafed to turn your attention
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Balzac
to that lady, whom I never saw till now, have the charity to tell me if
you have seen her dance.”
“Why, my dear Martial, where have you dropped from? If you are
ever sent with an embassy, I have small hopes of your success. Do not
you see a triple rank of the most undaunted coquettes of Paris between
her and the swarm of dancing men that buzz under the chandelier?
And was it not only by the help of your eyeglass that you were
able to discover her at all in the corner by that pillar, where she seems
buried in the gloom, in spite of the candles blazing above her head?
Between her and us there is such a sparkle of diamonds and glances,
so many floating plumes, such a flutter of lace, of flowers and curls,
that it would be a real miracle if any dancer could detect her among
those stars. Why, Martial, how is it that you have not understood her
to be the wife of some sous-prefet from Lippe or Dyle, who has
come to try to get her husband promoted?”
“Oh, he will be!” exclaimed the Master of Appeals quickly.
“I doubt it,” replied the Colonel of Cuirassiers, laughing. “She seems
as raw in intrigue as you are in diplomacy. I dare bet, Martial, that
you do not know how she got into that place.”
The lawyer looked at the Colonel of Cuirassiers with an expression
as much of contempt as of curiosity.
“Well,” proceeded Montcornet, “she arrived, I have no doubt, punctually
at nine, the first of the company perhaps, and probably she greatly
embarrassed the Comtesse de Gondreville, who cannot put two ideas
together. Repulsed by the mistress of the house, routed from chair to
chair by each newcomer, and driven into the darkness of this little
corner, she allowed herself to be walled in, the victim of the jealousy of
the other ladies, who would gladly have buried that dangerous beauty.
She had, of course, no friend to encourage her to maintain the place
she first held in the front rank; then each of those treacherous fair ones
would have enjoined on the men of her circle on no account to take
out our poor friend, under pain of the severest punishment. That, my
dear fellow, is the way in which those sweet faces, in appearance so
tender and so artless, would have formed a coalition against the stranger,
and that without a word beyond the question, ‘Tell me, dear, do you
know that little woman in blue?’—Look here, Martial, if you care to
run the gauntlet of more flattering glances and inviting questions than
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Domestic Peace
you will ever again meet in the whole of your life, just try to get through
the triple rampart which defends that Queen of Dyle, or Lippe, or
Charente. You will see whether the dullest woman of them all will not
be equal to inventing some wile that would hinder the most determined
man from bringing the plaintive stranger to the light. Does it
not strike you that she looks like an elegy?”
“Do you think so, Montcornet? Then she must be a married
woman?”
“Why not a widow?”
“She would be less passive,” said the lawyer, laughing.
“She is perhaps the widow of a man who is gambling,” replied the
handsome Colonel.
“To be sure; since the peace there are so many widows of that class!”
said Martial. “But my dear Montcornet, we are a couple of simpletons.
That face is still too ingenuous, there is too much youth and
freshness on the brow and temples for her to be married. What splendid
flesh-tints! Nothing has sunk in the modeling of the nose. Lips,
chin, everything in her face is as fresh as a white rosebud, though the
expression is veiled, as it were, by the clouds of sadness. Who can it
be that makes that young creature weep?”
“Women cry for so little,” said the Colonel.
“I do not know,” replied Martial; “but she does not cry because she is
left there without a partner; her grief is not of to-day. It is evident that
she has beautified herself for this evening with intention. I would wager
that she is in love already.”
“Bah! She is perhaps the daughter of some German princeling; no
one talks to her,” said Montcornet.
“Dear! how unhappy a poor child may be!” Martial went on. “Can
there be anything more graceful and refined than our little stranger? Well,
not one of those furies who stand round her, and who believe that they
can feel, will say a word to her. If she would but speak, we should see if
she has fine teeth.
“Bless me, you boil over like milk at the least increase of temperature!”
cried the Colonel, a little nettled at so soon finding a rival in
his friend.
“What!” exclaimed the lawyer, without heeding the Colonel’s question.
“Can nobody here tell us the name of this exotic flower?”
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“Some lady companion!” said Montcornet.
“What next? A companion! wearing sapphires fit for a queen, and a
dress of Malines lace? Tell that to the marines, General. You, too,
would not shine in diplomacy if, in the course of your conjectures,
you jump in a breath from a German princess to a lady companion.”
Montcornet stopped a man by taking his arm—a fat little man, whose
iron-gray hair and clever eyes were to be seen at the lintel of every doorway,
and who mingled unceremoniously with the various groups which
welcomed him respectfully.
“Gondreville, my friend,” said Montcornet, “who is that quite
charming little woman sitting out there under that huge candelabrum?”
“The candelabrum? Ravrio’s work; Isabey made the design.”
“Oh, I recognized your lavishness and taste; but the lady?”
“Ah! I do not know. Some friend of my wife’s, no doubt.”
“Or your mistress, you old rascal.”
“No, on my honor. The Comtesse de Gondreville is the only person
capable of inviting people whom no one knows.”
In spite of this very acrimonious comment, the fat little man’s lips
did not lose the smile which the Colonel’s suggestion had brought to
them. Montcornet returned to the lawyer, who had rejoined a neighboring
group, intent on asking, but in vain, for information as to the
fair unknown. He grasped Martial’s arm, and said in his ear:
“My dear Martial, mind what you are about. Madame de
Vaudremont has been watching you for some minutes with ominous
attentiveness; she is a woman who can guess by the mere movement
of your lips what you say to me; our eyes have already told her
too much; she has perceived and followed their direction, and I suspect
that at this moment she is thinking even more than we are of
the little blue lady.”
“That is too old a trick in warfare, my dear Montcornet! However,
what do I care? Like the Emperor, when I have made a conquest, I
keep it.”
“Martial, your fatuity cries out for a lesson. What! you, a civilian,
and so lucky as to be the husband-designate of Madame de
Vaudremont, a widow of two-and-twenty, burdened with four thousand
napoleons a year —a woman who slips such a diamond as this
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Domestic Peace
on your finger,” he added, taking the lawyer’s left hand, which the
young man complacently allowed; “and, to crown all, you affect the
Lovelace, just as if you were a colonel and obliged to keep up the
reputation of the military in home quarters! Fie, fie! Only think of
all you may lose.”
“At any rate, I shall not lose my liberty,” replied Martial, with a
forced laugh.
He cast a passionate glance at Madame de Vaudremont, who responded
only by a smile of some uneasiness, for she had seen the
Colonel examining the lawyer’s ring.
“Listen to me, Martial. If you flutter round my young stranger, I
shall set to work to win Madame de Vaudremont.”
“You have my full permission, my dear Cuirassier, but you will not
gain this much,” and the young Maitre des Requetes put his polished
thumb-nail under an upper tooth with a little mocking click.
“Remember that I am unmarried,” said the Colonel; “that my sword
is my whole fortune; and that such a challenge is setting Tantalus
down to a banquet which he will devour.”
“Prrr.”
This defiant roll of consonants was the only reply to the Colonel’s
declaration, as Martial looked him from head to foot before turning
away.
The fashion of the time required men to wear at a ball white
kerseymere breeches and silk stockings. This pretty costume showed
to great advantage the perfection of Montcornet’s fine shape. He was
five-and-thirty, and attracted attention by his stalwart height, insisted
on for the Cuirassiers of the Imperial Guard whose handsome uniform
enhanced the dignity of his figure, still youthful in spite of the
stoutness occasioned by living on horseback. A black moustache emphasized
the frank expression of a thoroughly soldierly countenance,
with a broad, high forehead, an aquiline nose, and bright red lips.
Montcornet’s manner, stamped with a certain superiority due to the
habit of command, might please a woman sensible enough not to
aim at making a slave of her husband. The Colonel smiled as he
looked at the lawyer, one of his favorite college friends, whose small
figure made it necessary for Montcornet to look down a little as he
answered his raillery with a friendly glance.
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Baron Martial de la Roche-Hugon was a young Provencal patronized
by Napoleon; his fate might probably be some splendid embassy.
He had won the Emperor by his Italian suppleness and a genius
for intrigue, a drawing-room eloquence, and a knowledge of
manners, which are so good a substitute for the higher qualities of a
sterling man. Through young and eager, his face had already acquired
the rigid brilliancy of tinned iron, one of the indispensable characteristics
of diplomatists, which allows them to conceal their emotions
and disguise their feelings, unless, indeed, this impassibility indicates
an absence of all emotion and the death of every feeling. The heart of
a diplomate may be regarded as an insoluble problem, for the three
most illustrious ambassadors of the time have been distinguished by
perdurable hatreds and most romantic attachments.
Martial, however, was one of those men who are capable of reckoning
on the future in the midst of their intensest enjoyment; he had
already learned to judge the world, and hid his ambition under the
fatuity of a lady-killer, cloaking his talent under the commonplace of
mediocrity as soon as he observed the rapid advancement of those
men who gave the master little umbrage.
The two friends now had to part with a cordial grasp of hands.
The introductory tune, warning the ladies to form in squares for a
fresh quadrille, cleared the men away from the space they had filled
while talking in the middle of the large room. This hurried dialogue
had taken place during the usual interval between two dances, in
front of the fireplace of the great drawing-room of Gondreville’s
mansion. The questions and answers of this very ordinary ballroom
gossip had been almost whispered by each of the speakers into his
neighbor’s ear. At the same time, the chandeliers and the flambeaux
on the chimney-shelf shed such a flood of light on the two friends
that their faces, strongly illuminated, failed, in spite of their diplomatic
discretion, to conceal the faint expression of their feelings either
from the keen-sighted countess or the artless stranger. This espionage
of people’s thoughts is perhaps to idle persons one of the
pleasures they find in society, while numbers of disappointed numskulls
are bored there without daring to own it.
Fully to appreciate the interest of this conversation, it is necessary to
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relate an incident which would presently serve as an invisible bond,
drawing together the actors in this little drama, who were at present
scattered through the rooms.
At about eleven o’clock, just as the dancers were returning to their
seats, the company had observed the entrance of the handsomest
woman in Paris, the queen of fashion, the only person wanting to
the brilliant assembly. She made it a rule never to appear till the
moment when a party had reached that pitch of excited movement
which does not allow the women to preserve much longer the freshness
of their faces or of their dress. This brief hour is, as it were, the
springtime of a ball. An hour after, when pleasure falls flat and fatigue
is encroaching, everything is spoilt. Madame de Vaudremont
never committed the blunder of remaining at a party to be seen with
drooping flowers, hair out of curl, tumbled frills, and a face like every
other that sleep is courting—not always without success. She took
good care not to let her beauty be seen drowsy, as her rivals did; she was
so clever as to keep up her reputation for smartness by always leaving a
ballroom in brilliant order, as she had entered it. Women whispered to
each other with a feeling of envy that she planned and wore as many
different dresses as the parties she went to in one evening.
On the present occasion Madame de Vaudremont was not destined
to be free to leave when she would the ballroom she had entered
in triumph. Pausing for a moment on the threshold, she shot
swift but observant glances on the women present, hastily scrutinizing
their dresses to assure herself that her own eclipsed them all.
The illustrious beauty presented herself to the admiration of the
crowd at the same moment with one of the bravest colonels of the
Guards’ Artillery and the Emperor’s favorite, the Comte de Soulanges.
The transient and fortuitous association of these two had about it a
certain air of mystery. On hearing the names announced of Monsieur
de Soulanges and the Comtesse de Vaudremont, a few women sitting
by the wall rose, and men, hurrying in from the side-rooms, pressed
forward to the principal doorway. One of the jesters who are always to
be found in any large assembly said, as the Countess and her escort
came in, that “women had quite as much curiosity about seeing a man
who was faithful to his passion as men had in studying a woman who
was difficult to enthrall.”
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Though the Comte de Soulanges, a young man of about two-andthirty,
was endowed with the nervous temperament which in a man
gives rise to fine qualities, his slender build and pale complexion
were not at first sight attractive; his black eyes betrayed great vivacity,
but he was taciturn in company, and there was nothing in his appearance
to reveal the gift for oratory which subsequently distinguished
him, on the Right, in the legislative assembly under the Restoration.
The Comtesse de Vaudremont, a tall woman, rather fat, with a
skin of dazzling whiteness, a small head that she carried well, and the
immense advantage of inspiring love by the graciousness of her manner,
was one of those beings who keep all the promise of their beauty.
The pair, who for a few minutes were the centre of general observation,
did not for long give curiosity an opportunity of exercising
itself about them. The Colonel and the Countess seemed perfectly
to understand that accident had placed them in an awkward position.
Martial, as they came forward, had hastened to join the group
of men by the fireplace, that he might watch Madame de Vaudremont
with the jealous anxiety of the first flame of passion, from behind
the heads which formed a sort of rampart; a secret voice seemed to
warn him that the success on which he prided himself might perhaps
be precarious. But the coldly polite smile with which the Countess
thanked Monsieur de Soulanges, and her little bow of dismissal as
she sat down by Madame de Gondreville, relaxed the muscles of his
face which jealousy had made rigid. Seeing Soulanges, however, still
standing quite near the sofa on which Madame de Vaudremont was
seated, not apparently having understood the glance by which the
lady had conveyed to him that they were both playing a ridiculous
part, the volcanic Provencal again knit the black brows that overshadowed
his blue eyes, smoothed his chestnut curls to keep himself
in countenance, and without betraying the agitation which made his
heart beat, watched the faces of the Countess and of M. de Soulanges
while still chatting with his neighbors. He then took the hand of
Colonel Montcornet, who had just renewed their old acquaintance,
but he listened to him without hearing him; his mind was elsewhere.
Soulanges was gazing calmly at the women, sitting four ranks deep
all round the immense ballroom, admiring this dado of diamonds,
rubies, masses of gold and shining hair, of which the lustre almost
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outshone the blaze of waxlights, the cutglass of the chandeliers, and the
gilding. His rival’s stolid indifference put the lawyer out of countenance.
Quite incapable of controlling his secret transports of impatience,
Martial went towards Madame de Vaudremont with a bow.
On seeing the Provencal, Soulanges gave him a covert glance, and impertinently
turned away his head. Solemn silence now reigned in the
room, where curiosity was at the highest pitch. All these eager faces
wore the strangest mixed expressions; every one apprehended one of
those outbreaks which men of breeding carefully avoid. Suddenly the
Count’s pale face turned as red as the scarlet facings of his coat, and he
fixed his gaze on the floor that the cause of his agitation might not be
guessed. On catching sight of the unknown lady humbly seated by the
pedestal of the candelabrum, he moved away with a melancholy air,
passing in front of the lawyer, and took refuge in one of the cardrooms.
Martial and all the company thought that Soulanges had publicly surrendered
the post, out of fear of the ridicule which invariably attaches
to a discarded lover. The lawyer proudly raised his head and looked at
the strange lady; then, as he took his seat at his ease near Madame de
Vaudremont, he listened to her so inattentively that he did not catch
these words spoken behind her fan:
“Martial, you will oblige me this evening by not wearing that ring
that you snatched from me. I have my reasons, and will explain them
to you in a moment when we go away. You must give me your arm
to go to the Princess de Wagram’s.”
“Why did you come in with the Colonel?” asked the Baron.
“I met him in the hall,” she replied. “But leave me now; everybody
is looking at us.”
Martial returned to the Colonel of Cuirassiers. Then it was that
the little blue lady had become the object of the curiosity which
agitated in such various ways the Colonel, Soulanges, Martial, and
Madame de Vaudremont.
When the friends parted, after the challenge which closed their
conversation, the Baron flew to Madame de Vaudremont, and led
her to a place in the most brilliant quadrille. Favored by the sort of
intoxication which dancing always produces in a woman, and by the
turmoil of a ball, where men appear in all the trickery of dress, which
adds no less to their attractions than it does to those of women,
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Martial thought he might yield with impunity to the charm that
attracted his gaze to the fair stranger. Though he succeeded in hiding
his first glances towards the lady in blue from the anxious activity of
the Countess’ eyes, he was ere long caught in the fact; and though he
managed to excuse himself once for his absence of mind, he could
not justify the unseemly silence with which he presently heard the
most insinuating question which a woman can put to a man:
“Do you like me very much this evening?”
And the more dreamy he became, the more the Countess pressed
and teased him.
While Martial was dancing, the Colonel moved from group to
group, seeking information about the unknown lady. After exhausting
the good-humor even of the most indifferent, he had resolved to
take advantage of a moment when the Comtesse de Gondreville
seemed to be at liberty, to ask her the name of the mysterious lady,
when he perceived a little space left clear between the pedestal of the
candelabrum and the two sofas, which ended in that corner. The
dance had left several of the chairs vacant, which formed rows of
fortifications held by mothers or women of middle age; and the
Colonel seized the opportunity to make his way through this palisade
hung with shawls and wraps. He began by making himself agreeable
to the dowagers, and so from one to another, and from compliment
to compliment, he at last reached the empty space next the
stranger. At the risk of catching on to the gryphons and chimaeras of
the huge candelabrum, he stood there, braving the glare and dropping
of the wax candles, to Martial’s extreme annoyance.
The Colonel, far too tactful to speak suddenly to the little blue
lady on his right, began by saying to a plain woman who was seated
on the left:
“This is a splendid ball, madame! What luxury! What life! On my
word, every woman here is pretty! You are not dancing—because
you do not care for it, no doubt.”
This vapid conversation was solely intended to induce his righthand
neighbor to speak; but she, silent and absent-minded, paid not
the least attention. The officer had in store a number of phrases which
he intended should lead up to: “And you, madame?”—a question
from which he hoped great things. But he was strangely surprised to
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see tears in the strange lady’s eyes, which seemed wholly absorbed in
gazing on Madame de Vaudremont.
“You are married, no doubt, madame?” he asked her at length, in
hesitating tones.
“Yes, monsieur,” replied the lady.
“And your husband is here, of course?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“And why, madame, do you remain in this spot? Is it to attract
attention?”
The mournful lady smiled sadly.
“Allow me the honor, madame, of being your partner in the next
quadrille, and I will take care not to bring you back here. I see a
vacant settee near the fire; come and take it. When so many people
are ready to ascend the throne, and Royalty is the mania of the day, I
cannot imagine that you will refuse the title of Queen of the Ball
which your beauty may claim.”
“I do not intend to dance, monsieur.”
The curt tone of the lady’s replies was so discouraging that the
Colonel found himself compelled to raise the siege. Martial, who
guessed what the officer’s last request had been, and the refusal he
had met with, began to smile, and stroked his chin, making the diamond
sparkle which he wore on his finger.
“What are you laughing at?” said the Comtesse de Vaudremont.
“At the failure of the poor Colonel, who has just put his foot in it—”
“I begged you to take your ring off,” said the Countess, interrupting
him.
“I did not hear you.”
“If you can hear nothing this evening, at any rate you see everything,
Monsieur le Baron,” said Madame de Vaudremont, with an
air of vexation.
“That young man is displaying a very fine diamond,” the stranger
remarked to the Colonel.
“Splendid,” he replied. “The man is the Baron Martial de la Roche-
Hugon, one of my most intimate friends.”
“I have to thank you for telling me his name,” she went on; “he
seems an agreeable man.”
“Yes, but he is rather fickle.”
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“He seems to be on the best terms with the Comtesse de
Vaudremont?” said the lady, with an inquiring look at the Colonel.
“On the very best.”
The unknown turned pale.
“Hallo!” thought the soldier, “she is in love with that lucky devil
Martial.”
“I fancied that Madame de Vaudremont had long been devoted to
M. de Soulanges,” said the lady, recovering a little from the suppressed
grief which had clouded the fairness of her face.
“For a week past the Countess has been faithless,” replied the Colonel.
“But you must have seen poor Soulanges when he came in; he is
till trying to disbelieve in his disaster.”
“Yes, I saw him,” said the lady. Then she added, “Thank you very
much, monsieur,” in a tone which signified a dismissal.
At this moment the quadrille was coming to an end. Montcornet
had only time to withdraw, saying to himself by way of consolation,
“She is married.”
“Well, valiant Cuirassier,” exclaimed the Baron, drawing the Colonel
aside into a window-bay to breathe the fresh air from the garden,
“how are you getting on?”
“She is a married woman, my dear fellow.”
“What does that matter?”
“Oh, deuce take it! I am a decent sort of man,” replied the Colonel.
“I have no idea of paying my addresses to a woman I cannot
marry. Besides, Martial, she expressly told me that she did not intend
to dance.”
“Colonel, I will bet a hundred napoleons to your gray horse that
she will dance with me this evening.”
“Done!” said the Colonel, putting his hand in the coxcomb’s.
“Meanwhile I am going to look for Soulanges; he perhaps knows the
lady, as she seems interested in him.”
“You have lost, my good fellow,” cried Martial, laughing. “My eyes
have met hers, and I know what they mean. My dear friend, you owe
me no grudge for dancing with her after she has refused you?”
“No, no. Those who laugh last, laugh longest. But I am an honest
gambler and a generous enemy, Martial, and I warn you, she is fond
of diamonds.”
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With these words the friends parted; General Montcornet made
his way to the cardroom, where he saw the Comte de Soulanges
sitting at a bouillotte table. Though there was no friendship between
the two soldiers, beyond the superficial comradeship arising from
the perils of war and the duties of the service, the Colonel of Cuirassiers
was painfully struck by seeing the Colonel of Artillery, whom
he knew to be a prudent man, playing at a game which might bring
him to ruin. The heaps of gold and notes piled on the fateful cards
showed the frenzy of play. A circle of silent men stood round the
players at the table. Now and then a few words were spoken—pass,
play, I stop, a thousand Louis, taken—but, looking at the five motionless
men, it seemed as though they talked only with their eyes.
As the Colonel, alarmed by Soulanges’ pallor, went up to him, the
Count was winning. Field-Marshal the Duc d’Isemberg, Keller, and
a famous banker rose from the table completely cleaned out of considerable
sums. Soulanges looked gloomier than ever as he swept up
a quantity of gold and notes; he did not even count it; his lips curled
with bitter scorn, he seemed to defy fortune rather than be grateful
for her favors.
“Courage,” said the Colonel. “Courage, Soulanges!” Then, believing
he would do him a service by dragging him from play, he added: “Come
with me. I have some good news for you, but on one condition.”
“What is that?” asked Soulanges.
“That you will answer a question I will ask you.”
The Comte de Soulanges rose abruptly, placing his winnings with
reckless indifference in his handkerchief, which he had been twisting
with convulsive nervousness, and his expression was so savage that
none of the players took exception to his walking off with their
money. Indeed, every face seemed to dilate with relief when his morose
and crabbed countenance was no longer to be seen under the
circle of light which a shaded lamp casts on a gaming-table.
“Those fiends of soldiers are always as thick as thieves at a fair!”
said a diplomate who had been looking on, as he took Soulanges’
place. One single pallid and fatigued face turned to the newcomer,
and said with a glance that flashed and died out like the sparkle of a
diamond: “When we say military men, we do not mean civil, Monsieur
le Ministre.”
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Balzac
“My dear fellow,” said Montcornet to Soulanges, leading him into
a corner, “the Emperor spoke warmly in your praise this morning,
and your promotion to be field-marshal is a certainty.”
“The Master does not love the Artillery.”
“No, but he adores the nobility, and you are an aristocrat. The
Master said,” added Montcornet, “that the men who had married in
Paris during the campaign were not therefore to be considered in
disgrace. Well then?”
The Comte de Soulanges looked as if he understood nothing of
this speech.
“And now I hope,” the Colonel went on, “that you will tell me if
you know a charming little woman who is sitting under a huge candelabrum—”
At these words the Count’s face lighted up; he violently seized the
Colonel’s hand: “My dear General,” said he, in a perceptibly altered
voice, “if any man but you had asked me such a question, I would
have cracked his skull with this mass of gold. Leave me, I entreat
you. I feel more like blowing out my brains this evening, I assure
you, than—I hate everything I see. And, in fact, I am going. This
gaiety, this music, these stupid faces, all laughing, are killing me!”
“My poor friend!” replied Montcornet gently, and giving the Count’s
hand a friendly pressure, “you are too vehement. What would you
say if I told you that Martial is thinking so little of Madame de
Vaudremont that he is quite smitten with that little lady?”
“If he says a word to her,” cried Soulanges, stammering with rage,
“I will thrash him as flat as his own portfolio, even if the coxcomb
were in the Emperor’s lap!”
And he sank quite overcome on an easy-chair to which Montcornet
had led him. The colonel slowly went away, for he perceived that
Soulanges was in a state of fury far too violent for the pleasantries or
the attentions of superficial friendship to soothe him.
When Montcornet returned to the ballroom, Madame de
Vaudremont was the first person on whom his eyes fell, and he observed
on her face, usually so calm, some symptoms of ill-disguised
agitation. A chair was vacant near hers, and the Colonel seated himself.
“I dare wager something has vexed you?” said he.
“A mere trifle, General. I want to be gone, for I have promised to
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go to a ball at the Grand Duchess of Berg’s, and I must look in first
at the Princesse de Wagram’s. Monsieur de la Roche-Hugon, who
knows this, is amusing himself by flirting with the dowagers.”
“That is not the whole secret of your disturbance, and I will bet a
hundred louis that you will remain here the whole evening.”
“Impertinent man!”
“Then I have hit the truth?”
“Well, tell me, what am I thinking of?” said the Countess, tapping
the Colonel’s fingers with her fan. “I might even reward you if you
guess rightly.”
“I will not accept the challenge; I have too much the advantage of
you.”
“You are presumptuous.”
“You are afraid of seeing Martial at the feet—”
“Of whom?” cried the Countess, affecting surprise.
“Of that candelabrum,” replied the Colonel, glancing at the fair
stranger, and then looking at the Countess with embarrassing scrutiny.
“You have guessed it,” replied the coquette, hiding her face behind
her fan, which she began to play with. “Old Madame de Lansac,
who is, you know, as malicious as an old monkey,” she went on,
after a pause, “has just told me that Monsieur de la Roche-Hugon is
running into danger by flirting with that stranger, who sits here this
evening like a skeleton at a feast. I would rather see a death’s head
than that face, so cruelly beautiful, and as pale as a ghost. She is my
evil genius.—Madame de Lansac,” she added, after a flash and gesture
of annoyance, “who only goes to a ball to watch everything
while pretending to sleep, has made me miserably anxious. Martial
shall pay dearly for playing me such a trick. Urge him, meanwhile,
since he is your friend, not to make me so unhappy.”
“I have just been with a man who promises to blow his brains out,
and nothing less, if he speaks to that little lady. And he is a man,
madame, to keep his word. But then I know Martial; such threats
are to him an encouragement. And, besides, we have wagered——”
Here the Colonel lowered his voice.
“Can it be true?” said the Countess.
“On my word of honor.”
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Balzac
“Thank you, my dear Colonel,” replied Madame de Vaudremont,
with a glance full of invitation.
“Will you do me the honor of dancing with me?”
“Yes; but the next quadrille. During this one I want to find out
what will come of this little intrigue, and to ascertain who the little
blue lady may be; she looks intelligent.”
The Colonel, understanding that Madame de Vaudremont wished
to be alone, retired, well content to have begun his attack so well.
At most entertainments women are to be met who are there, like
Madame de Lansac, as old sailors gather on the seashore to watch
younger mariners struggling with the tempest. At this moment Madame
de Lansac, who seemed to be interested in the personages of
this drama, could easily guess the agitation which the Countess was
going through. The lady might fan herself gracefully, smile on the
young men who bowed to her, and bring into play all the arts by
which a woman hides her emotion,—the Dowager, one of the most
clear-sighted and mischief-loving duchesses bequeathed by the eighteenth
century to the nineteenth, could read her heart and mind
through it all.
The old lady seemed to detect the slightest movement that revealed
the impressions of the soul. The imperceptible frown that
furrowed that calm, pure forehead, the faintest quiver of the cheeks,
the curve of the eyebrows, the least curl of the lips, whose living coral
could conceal nothing from her,—all these were to the Duchess like
the print of a book. From the depths of her large arm-chair, completely
filled by the flow of her dress, the coquette of the past, while
talking to a diplomate who had sought her out to hear the anecdotes
she told so cleverly, was admiring herself in the younger coquette;
she felt kindly to her, seeing how bravely she disguised her annoyance
and grief of heart. Madame de Vaudremont, in fact, felt as much
sorrow as she feigned cheerfulness; she had believed that she had found
in Martial a man of talent on whose support she could count for
adorning her life with all the enchantment of power; and at this
moment she perceived her mistake, as injurious to her reputation as
to her good opinion of herself. In her, as in other women of that
time, the suddenness of their passions increased their vehemence.
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Souls which love much and love often, suffer no less than those
which burn themselves out in one affection. Her liking for Martial
was but of yesterday, it is true, but the least experienced surgeon
knows that the pain caused by the amputation of a healthy limb is
more acute than the removal of a diseased one. There was a future
before Madame de Vaudremont’s passion for Martial, while her previous
love had been hopeless, and poisoned by Soulanges’ remorse.
The old Duchess, who was watching for an opportunity of speaking
to the Countess, hastened to dismiss her Ambassador; for in comparison
with a lover’s quarrel every interest pales, even with an old
woman. To engage battle, Madame de Lansac shot at the younger
lady a sardonic glance which made the Countess fear lest her fate was
in the dowager’s hands. There are looks between woman and woman
which are like the torches brought on at the climax of a tragedy. No
one who had not known that Duchess could appreciate the terror
which the expression of her countenance inspired in the Countess.
Madame de Lansac was tall, and her features led people to say,
“That must have been a handsome woman!” She coated her cheeks
so thickly with rouge that the wrinkles were scarcely visible; but her
eyes, far from gaining a factitious brilliancy from this strong carmine,
looked all the more dim. She wore a vast quantity of diamonds,
and dressed with sufficient taste not to make herself ridiculous.
Her sharp nose promised epigram. A well-fitted set of teeth
preserved a smile of such irony as recalled that of Voltaire. At the
same time, the exquisite politeness of her manners so effectually softened
the mischievous twist in her mind, that it was impossible to
accuse her of spitefulness.
The old woman’s eyes lighted up, and a triumphant glance, seconded
by a smile, which said, “I promised you as much!” shot across
the room, and brought a blush of hope to the pale cheeks of the
young creature languishing under the great chandelier. The alliance
between Madame de Lansac and the stranger could not escape the
practised eye of the Comtesse de Vaudremont, who scented a mystery,
and was determined to penetrate it.
At this instant the Baron de la Roche-Hugon, after questioning all
the dowagers without success as to the blue lady’s name, applied in
despair to the Comtesse de Gondreville, from whom he reached only
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this unsatisfactory reply, “A lady whom the ‘ancient’ Duchesse de
Lansac introduced to me.”
Turning by chance towards the armchair occupied by the old lady,
the lawyer intercepted the glance of intelligence she sent to the
stranger; and although he had for some time been on bad terms
with her, he determined to speak to her. The “ancient” Duchess,
seeing the jaunty Baron prowling round her chair, smiled with sardonic
irony, and looked at Madame de Vaudremont with an expression
that made Montcornet laugh.
“If the old witch affects to be friendly,” thought the Baron, “she
is certainly going to play me some spiteful trick.—Madame,” he
said, “you have, I am told, undertaken the charge of a very precious
treasure.”
“Do you take me for a dragon?” said the old lady. “But of whom
are you speaking?” she added, with a sweetness which revived Martial’s
hopes.
“Of that little lady, unknown to all, whom the jealousy of all these
coquettes has imprisoned in that corner. You, no doubt, know her
family?”
“Yes,” said the Duchess. “But what concern have you with a provincial
heiress, married some time since, a woman of good birth,
whom you none of you know, you men; she goes nowhere.”
“Why does not she dance, she is such a pretty creature?—May we
conclude a treaty of peace? If you will vouchsafe to tell me all I want to
know, I promise you that a petition for the restitution of the woods of
Navarreins by the Commissioners of Crown Lands shall be strongly
urged on the Emperor.”
The younger branch of the house of Navarreins bears quarterly
with the arms of Navarreins those of Lansac, namely, azure, and argent
party per pale raguly, between six spear-heads in pale, and the
old lady’s liaison with Louis XV. had earned her husband the title of
duke by royal patent. Now, as the Navarreins had not yet resettled in
France, it was sheer trickery that the young lawyer thus proposed to
the old lady by suggesting to her that she should petition for an
estate belonging to the elder branch of the family.
“Monsieur,” said the old woman with deceptive gravity, “bring the
Comtesse de Vaudremont across to me. I promise you that I will
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reveal to her the mystery of the interesting unknown. You see, every
man in the room has reached as great a curiosity as your own. All eyes
are involuntarily turned towards the corner where my protegee has
so modestly placed herself; she is reaping all the homage the women
wished to deprive her of. Happy the man she chooses for her partner!”
She interrupted herself, fixing her eyes on Madame de
Vaudremont with one of those looks which plainly say, “We are talking
of you.”—Then she added, “I imagine you would rather learn
the stranger’s name from the lips of your handsome Countess than
from mine.”
There was such marked defiance in the Duchess’ attitude that Madame
de Vaudremont rose, came up to her, and took the chair Martial
placed for her; then without noticing him she said, “I can guess,
madame, that you are talking of me; but I admit my want of perspicacity;
I do not know whether it is for good or evil.”
Madame de Lansac pressed the young woman’s pretty hand in her
own dry and wrinkled fingers, and answered in a low, compassionate
tone, “Poor child!”
The women looked at each other. Madame de Vaudremont understood
that Martial was in the way, and dismissed him, saying
with an imperious expression, “Leave us.”
The Baron, ill-pleased at seeing the Countess under the spell of the
dangerous sibyl who had drawn her to her side gave one of those
looks which a man can give—potent over a blinded heart, but simply
ridiculous in the eyes of a woman who is beginning to criticise
the man who has attracted her.
“Do you think you can play the Emperor?” said Madame de
Vaudremont, turning three-quarters of her face to fix an ironical sidelong
gaze on the lawyer.
Martial was too much a man of the world, and had too much wit and
acumen, to risk breaking with a woman who was in favor at Court, and
whom the Emperor wished to see married. He counted, too, on the
jealousy he intended to provoke in her as the surest means of discovering
the secret of her coolness, and withdrew all the more willingly, because at
this moment a new quadrille was putting everybody in motion.
With an air of making room for the dancing, the Baron leaned
back against the marble slab of a console, folded his arms, and stood
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absorbed in watching the two ladies talking. From time to time he
followed the glances which both frequently directed to the stranger.
Then, comparing the Countess with the new beauty, made so attractive
by a touch of mystery, the Baron fell a prey to the detestable selfinterest
common to adventurous lady-killers; he hesitated between a
fortune within his grasp and the indulgence of his caprice. The blaze
of light gave such strong relief to his anxious and sullen face, against
the hangings of white silk moreen brushed by his black hair, that he
might have been compared to an evil genius. Even from a distance
more than one observer no doubt said to himself, “There is another
poor wretch who seems to be enjoying himself!”
The Colonel, meanwhile, with one shoulder leaning lightly against
the side-post of the doorway between the ballroom and the cardroom,
could laugh undetected under his ample moustache; it amused
him to look on at the turmoil of the dance; he could see a hundred
pretty heads turning about in obedience to the figures; he could read
in some faces, as in those of the Countess and his friend Martial, the
secrets of their agitation; and then, looking round, he wondered what
connection there could be between the gloomy looks of the Comte
de Soulanges, still seated on the sofa, and the plaintive expression of
the fair unknown, on whose features the joys of hope and the anguish
of involuntary dread were alternately legible. Montcornet stood
like the king of the feast. In this moving picture he saw a complete
presentment of the world, and he laughed at it as he found himself
the object of inviting smiles from a hundred beautiful and elegant
women. A Colonel of the Imperial Guard, a position equal to that
of a Brigadier-General, was undoubtedly one of the best matches in
the army.
It was now nearly midnight. The conversation, the gambling, the
dancing, the flirtations, interests, petty rivalries, and scheming had
all reached the pitch of ardor which makes a young man exclaim
involuntarily, “A fine ball!”
“My sweet little angel,” said Madame de Lansac to the Countess,
“you are now at an age when in my day I made many mistakes.
Seeing you are just now enduring a thousand deaths, it occurred to
me that I might give you some charitable advice. To go wrong at
two-and-twenty means spoiling your future; is it not tearing the gown
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you must wear? My dear, it is not much later that we learn to go
about in it without crumpling it. Go on, sweetheart, making clever
enemies, and friends who have no sense of conduct, and you will see
what a pleasant life you will some day be leading!”
“Oh, madame, it is very hard for a woman to be happy, do not you
think?” the Countess eagerly exclaimed.
“My child, at your age you must learn to choose between pleasure
and happiness. You want to marry Martial, who is not fool enough
to make a good husband, nor passionate enough to remain a lover.
He is in debt, my dear; he is the man to run through your fortune;
still, that would be nothing if he could make you happy.—Do not
you see how aged he is? The man must have been ill; he is making the
most of what is left him. In three years he will be a wreck. Then he
will be ambitious; perhaps he may succeed. I do not think so.—
What is he? A man of intrigue, who may have the business faculty to
perfection, and be able to gossip agreeably; but he is too presumptuous
to have any sterling merit; he will not go far. Besides—only look
at him. Is it not written on his brow that, at this very moment, what
he sees in you is not a young and pretty woman, but the two million
francs you possess? He does not love you, my dear; he is reckoning
you up as if you were an investment. If you are bent on marrying,
find an older man who has an assured position and is half-way on his
career. A widow’s marriage ought not to be a trivial love affair. Is a
mouse to be caught a second time in the same trap? A new alliance
ought now to be a good speculation on your part, and in marrying
again you ought at least to have a hope of being some day addressed
as Madame la Marechale!”
As she spoke, both women naturally fixed their eyes on Colonel
Montcornet’s handsome face.
“If you would rather play the delicate part of a flirt and not marry
again,” the Duchess went on, with blunt good-nature; “well! my poor
child, you, better than any woman, will know how to raise the stormclouds
and disperse them again. But, I beseech you, never make it
your pleasure to disturb the peace of families, to destroy unions, and
ruin the happiness of happy wives. I, my dear, have played that perilous
game. Dear heaven! for a triumph of vanity some poor virtuous
soul is murdered—for there really are virtuous women, child,—and
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we may make ourselves mortally hated. I learned, a little too late,
that, as the Duc d’Albe once said, one salmon is worth a thousand
frogs! A genuine affection certainly brings a thousand times more
happiness than the transient passions we may inspire.—Well, I came
here on purpose to preach to you; yes, you are the cause of my appearance
in this house, which stinks of the lower class. Have I not
just seen actors here? Formerly, my dear, we received them in our
boudoir; but in the drawing-room—never!—Why do you look at
me with so much amazement? Listen to me. If you want to play
with men, do not try to wring the hearts of any but those whose life
is not yet settled, who have no duties to fulfil; the others do not
forgive us for the errors that have made them happy. Profit by this
maxim, founded on my long experience.—That luckless Soulanges,
for instance, whose head you have turned, whom you have intoxicated
for these fifteen months past, God knows how! Do you know
at what you have struck?—At his whole life. He has been married
these two years; he is worshiped by a charming wife, whom he loves,
but neglects; she lives in tears and embittered silence. Soulanges has
had hours of remorse more terrible than his pleasure has been sweet.
And you, you artful little thing, have deserted him.—Well, come
and see your work.”
The old lady took Madame de Vaudremont’s hand, and they rose.
“There,” said Madame de Lansac, and her eyes showed her the
stranger, sitting pale and tremulous under the glare of the candles,
“that is my grandniece, the Comtesse de Soulanges; to-day she yielded
at last to my persuasion, and consented to leave the sorrowful room,
where the sight of her child gives her but little consolation. You see
her? You think her charming? Then imagine, dear Beauty, what she
must have been when happiness and love shed their glory on that
face now blighted.”
The Countess looked away in silence, and seemed lost in sad reflections.
The Duchess led her to the door into the card-room; then, after
looking round the room as if in search of some one—”And there is
Soulanges!” she said in deep tones.
The Countess shuddered as she saw, in the least brilliantly lighted
corner, the pale, set face of Soulanges stretched in an easy-chair. The
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indifference of his attitude and the rigidity of his brow betrayed his
suffering. The players passed him to and fro, without paying any
more attention to him than if he had been dead. The picture of the
wife in tears, and the dejected, morose husband, separated in the
midst of this festivity like the two halves of a tree blasted by lightning,
had perhaps a prophetic significance for the Countess. She
dreaded lest she here saw an image of the revenges the future might
have in store for her. Her heart was not yet so dried up that the
feeling and generosity were entirely excluded, and she pressed the
Duchess’ hand, while thanking her by one of those smiles which
have a certain childlike grace.
“My dear child,” the old lady said in her ear, “remember henceforth
that we are just as capable of repelling a man’s attentions as of attracting
them.”
“She is yours if you are not a simpleton.” These words were whispered
into Colonel Montcornet’s ear by Madame de Lansac, while
the handsome Countess was still absorbed in compassion at the sight
of Soulanges, for she still loved him truly enough to wish to restore
him to happiness, and was promising herself in her own mind that
she would exert the irresistible power her charms still had over him
to make him return to his wife.
“Oh! I will talk to him!” said she to Madame de Lansac.
“Do nothing of the kind, my dear!” cried the old lady, as she went
back to her armchair. “Choose a good husband, and shut your door
to my nephew. Believe me, my child, a wife cannot accept her
husband’s heart as the gift of another woman; she is a hundred times
happier in the belief that she has reconquered it. By bringing my
niece here I believe I have given her an excellent chance of regaining
her husband’s affection. All the assistance I need of you is to play the
Colonel.” She pointed to the Baron’s friend, and the Countess smiled.
“Well, madame, do you at last know the name of the unknown?”
asked Martial, with an air of pique, to the Countess when he saw her
alone.
“Yes,” said Madame de Vaudremont, looking him in the face.
Her features expressed as much roguery as fun. The smile which
gave life to her lips and cheeks, the liquid brightness of her eyes, were
like the will-o’-the-wisp which leads travelers astray. Martial, who
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believed that she still loved him, assumed the coquetting graces in
which a man is so ready to lull himself in the presence of the woman
he loves. He said with a fatuous air:
“And will you be annoyed with me if I seem to attach great importance
to your telling me that name?”
“Will you be annoyed with me,” answered Madame de
Vaudremont, “if a remnant of affection prevents my telling you; and
if I forbid you to make the smallest advances to that young lady? It
would be at the risk of your life perhaps.”
“To lose your good graces, madame, would be worse than to lose
my life.”
“Martial,” said the Countess severely, “she is Madame de Soulanges. Her
husband would blow your brains out—if, indeed, you have any—”
“Ha! ha!” laughed the coxcomb. “What! the Colonel can leave the
man in peace who has robbed him of your love, and then would
fight for his wife! What a subversion of principles!—I beg of you to
allow me to dance with the little lady. You will then be able to judge
how little love that heart of ice could feel for you; for, if the Colonel
disapproves of my dancing with his wife after allowing me to—”
“But she loves her husband.”
“A still further obstacle that I shall have the pleasure of conquering.”
“But she is married.”
“A whimsical objection!”
“Ah!” said the Countess, with a bitter smile, “you punish us alike
for our faults and our repentance!”
“Do not be angry!” exclaimed Martial eagerly. “Oh, forgive me, I
beseech you. There, I will think no more of Madame de Soulanges.”
“You deserve that I should send you to her.”
“I am off then,” said the Baron, laughing, “and I shall return more
devoted to you than ever. You will see that the prettiest woman in
the world cannot capture the heart that is yours.”
“That is to say, that you want to win Colonel Montcornet’s horse?”
“Ah! Traitor!” said he, threatening his friend with his finger. The
Colonel smiled and joined them; the Baron gave him the seat near
the Countess, saying to her with a sardonic accent:
“Here, madame, is a man who boasted that he could win your
good graces in one evening.”
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He went away, thinking himself clever to have piqued the Countess’
pride and done Montcornet an ill turn; but, in spite of his habitual
keenness, he had not appreciated the irony underlying Madame
de Vaudremont’s speech, and did not perceive that she had
come as far to meet his friend as his friend towards her, though both
were unconscious of it.
At that moment when the lawyer went fluttering up to the candelabrum
by which Madame de Soulanges sat, pale, timid, and apparently
alive only in her eyes, her husband came to the door of the
ballroom, his eyes flashing with anger. The old Duchess, watchful of
everything, flew to her nephew, begged him to give her his arm and
find her carriage, affecting to be mortally bored, and hoping thus to
prevent a vexatious outbreak. Before going she fired a singular glance
of intelligence at her niece, indicating the enterprising knight who
was about to address her, and this signal seemed to say, “There he is,
avenge yourself!”
Madame de Vaudremont caught these looks of the aunt and niece;
a sudden light dawned on her mind; she was frightened lest she was
the dupe of this old woman, so cunning and so practised in intrigue.
“That perfidious Duchess,” said she to herself, “has perhaps been
amusing herself by preaching morality to me while playing me some
spiteful trick of her own.”
At this thought Madame de Vaudremont’s pride was perhaps more
roused than her curiosity to disentangle the thread of this intrigue.
In the absorption of mind to which she was a prey she was no
longer mistress of herself. The Colonel, interpreting to his own
advantage the embarrassment evident in the Countess’ manner and
speech, became more ardent and pressing. The old blase diplomates,
amusing themselves by watching the play of faces, had never found
so many intrigues at once to watch or guess at. The passions agitating
the two couples were to be seen with variations at every step in
the crowded rooms, and reflected with different shades in other
countenances. The spectacle of so many vivid passions, of all these
lovers’ quarrels, these pleasing revenges, these cruel favors, these
flaming glances, of all this ardent life diffused around them, only
made them feel their impotence more keenly.
At last the Baron had found a seat by Madame de Soulanges. His
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eyes stole a long look at her neck, as fresh as dew and as fragrant as field
flowers. He admired close at hand the beauty which had amazed him
from afar. He could see a small, well-shod foot, and measure with his
eye a slender and graceful shape. At that time women wore their sash
tied close under the bosom, in imitation of Greek statues, a pitiless
fashion for those whose bust was faulty. As he cast furtive glances at the
Countess’ figure, Martial was enchanted with its perfection.
“You have not danced once this evening, madame,” said he in soft
and flattering tones. “Not, I should suppose, for lack of a partner?”
“I never go to parties; I am quite unknown,” replied Madame de
Soulanges coldly, not having understood the look by which her aunt
had just conveyed to her that she was to attract the Baron.
Martial, to give himself countenance, twisted the diamond he
wore on his left hand; the rainbow fires of the gem seemed to flash
a sudden light on the young Countess’ mind; she blushed and looked
at the Baron with an undefinable expression.
“Do you like dancing?” asked the Provencal, to reopen the conversation.
“Yes, very much, monsieur.”
At this strange reply their eyes met. The young man, surprised by
the earnest accent, which aroused a vague hope in his heart, had suddenly
questioned the lady’s eyes.
“Then, madame, am I not overbold in offering myself to be your
partner for the next quadrille?’
Artless confusion colored the Countess’ white cheeks.
“But, monsieur, I have already refused one partner—a military
man—”
“Was it that tall cavalry colonel whom you see over there?”
“Precisely so.”
“Oh! he is a friend of mine; feel no alarm. Will you grant me the
favor I dare hope for?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
Her tone betrayed an emotion so new and so deep that the lawyer’s
world-worn soul was touched. He was overcome by shyness like a
schoolboy’s, lost his confidence, and his southern brain caught fire;
he tried to talk, but his phrases struck him as graceless in comparison
with Madame de Soulanges’ bright and subtle replies. It was lucky
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for him that the quadrille was forming. Standing by his beautiful
partner, he felt more at ease. To many men dancing is a phase of
being; they think that they can more powerfully influence the heart
of woman by displaying the graces of their bodies than by their intellect.
Martial wished, no doubt, at this moment to put forth all his
most effective seductions, to judge by the pretentiousness of his movements
and gestures.
He led his conquest to the quadrille in which the most brilliant
women in the room made it a point of chimerical importance to
dance in preference to any other. While the orchestra played the introductory
bars to the first figure, the Baron felt it an incredible
gratification to his pride to perceive, as he reviewed the ladies forming
the lines of that formidable square, that Madame de Soulanges’
dress might challenge that even of Madame de Vaudremont, who,
by a chance not perhaps unsought, was standing with Montcornet
vis-a-vis to himself and the lady in blue. All eyes were for a moment
turned on Madame de Soulanges; a flattering murmur showed that
she was the subject of every man’s conversation with his partner. Looks
of admiration and envy centered on her, with so much eagerness that
the young creature, abashed by a triumph she seemed to disclaim,
modestly looked down, blushed, and was all the more charming.
When she raised her white eyelids it was to look at her ravished partner
as though she wished to transfer the glory of this admiration to
him, and to say that she cared more for his than for all the rest. She
threw her innocence into her vanity; or rather she seemed to give
herself up to the guileless admiration which is the beginning of love,
with the good faith found only in youthful hearts. As she danced,
the lookers-on might easily believe that she displayed her grace for
Martial alone; and though she was modest, and new to the trickery
of the ballroom, she knew as well as the most accomplished coquette
how to raise her eyes to his at the right moment and drop their lids
with assumed modesty.
When the movement of a new figure, invented by a dancer named
Trenis, and named after him, brought Martial face to face with the
Colonel—”I have won your horse,” said he, laughing.
“Yes, but you have lost eighty thousand francs a year!” retorted
Montcornet, glancing at Madame de Vaudremont.
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“What do I care?” replied Martial. “Madame de Soulanges is worth
millions!”
At the end of the quadrille more than one whisper was poured into
more than one ear. The less pretty women made moral speeches to
their partners, commenting on the budding liaison between Martial
and the Comtesse de Soulanges. The handsomest wondered at her easy
surrender. The men could not understand such luck as the Baron’s, not
regarding him as particularly fascinating. A few indulgent women said
it was not fair to judge the Countess too hastily; young wives would
be in a very hapless plight if an expressive look or a few graceful dancing
steps were enough to compromise a woman.
Martial alone knew the extent of his happiness. During the last
figure, when the ladies had to form the moulinet, his fingers clasped
those of the Countess, and he fancied that, through the thin perfumed
kid of her gloves, the young wife’s grasp responded to his
amorous appeal.
“Madame,” said he, as the quadrille ended, “do not go back to the
odious corner where you have been burying your face and your dress
until now. Is admiration the only benefit you can obtain from the
jewels that adorn your white neck and beautifully dressed hair? Come
and take a turn through the rooms to enjoy the scene and yourself.”
Madame de Soulanges yielded to her seducer, who thought she
would be his all the more surely if he could only show her off. Side
by side they walked two or three times amid the groups who crowded
the rooms. The Comtesse de Soulanges, evidently uneasy, paused for
an instant at each door before entering, only doing so after stretching
her neck to look at all the men there. This alarm, which crowned the
Baron’s satisfaction, did not seem to be removed till he said to her,
“Make yourself easy; HE is not here.”
They thus made their way to an immense picture gallery in a wing
of the mansion, where their eyes could feast in anticipation on the
splendid display of a collation prepared for three hundred persons.
As supper was about to begin, Martial led the Countess to an oval
boudoir looking on to the garden, where the rarest flowers and a few
shrubs made a scented bower under bright blue hangings. The murmurs
of the festivity here died away. The Countess, at first startled,
refused firmly to follow the young man; but, glancing in a mirror,
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she no doubt assured herself that they could be seen, for she seated
herself on an ottoman with a fairly good grace.
“This room is charming,” said she, admiring the sky-blue hangings
looped with pearls.
“All here is love and delight!” said the Baron, with deep emotion.
In the mysterious light which prevailed he looked at the Countess,
and detected on her gently agitated face an expression of uneasiness,
modesty, and eagerness which enchanted him. The young lady smiled,
and this smile seemed to put an end to the struggle of feeling surging in
her heart; in the most insinuating way she took her adorer’s left hand,
and drew from his finger the ring on which she had fixed her eyes.
“What a fine diamond!” she exclaimed in the artless tone of a young
girl betraying the incitement of a first temptation.
Martial, troubled by the Countess’ involuntary but intoxicating
touch, like a caress, as she drew off the ring, looked at her with eyes
as glittering as the gem.
“Wear it,” he said, “in memory of this hour, and for the love of—”
She was looking at him with such rapture that he did not end the
sentence; he kissed her hand.
“You give it me?” she said, looking much astonished.
“I wish I had the whole world to offer you!”
“You are not joking?” she went on, in a voice husky with too great
satisfaction.
“Will you accept only my diamond?”
“You will never take it back?” she insisted.
“Never.”
She put the ring on her finger. Martial, confident of coming happiness,
was about to put his hand round her waist, but she suddenly
rose, and said in a clear voice, without any agitation:
“I accept the diamond, monsieur, with the less scruple because it
belongs to me.”
The Baron was speechless.
“Monsieur de Soulanges took it lately from my dressing-table, and
told me he had lost it.”
“You are mistaken, madame,” said Martial, nettled. “It was given
me by Madame de Vaudremont.”
“Precisely so,” she said with a smile. “My husband borrowed this
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ring of me, he gave it to her, she made it a present to you; my ring has
made a little journey, that is all. This ring will perhaps tell me all I do
not know, and teach me the secret of always pleasing.—Monsieur,”
she went on, “if it had not been my own, you may be sure I should
not have risked paying so dear for it; for a young woman, it is said, is
in danger with you. But, you see,” and she touched a spring within
the ring, “here is M. de Soulanges’ hair.”
She fled into the crowded rooms so swiftly, that it seemed useless to
try to follow her; besides, Martial, utterly confounded, was in no mood
to carry the adventure further. The Countess’ laugh found an echo in the
boudoir, where the young coxcomb now perceived, between two shrubs,
the Colonel and Madame de Vaudremont, both laughing heartily.
“Will you have my horse, to ride after your prize?” said the Colonel.
The Baron took the banter poured upon him by Madame de
Vaudremont and Montcornet with a good grace, which secured their
silence as to the events of the evening, when his friend exchanged his
charger for a rich and pretty young wife.
As the Comtesse de Soulanges drove across Paris from the Chausee
d’Antin to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where she lived, her soul
was prey to many alarms. Before leaving the Hotel Gondreville she
went through all the rooms, but found neither her aunt nor her husband,
who had gone away without her. Frightful suspicions then
tortured her ingenuous mind. A silent witness of her husbands’ torments
since the day when Madame de Vaudremont had chained him
to her car, she had confidently hoped that repentance would ere long
restore her husband to her. It was with unspeakable repugnance that
she had consented to the scheme plotted by her aunt, Madame de
Lansac, and at this moment she feared she had made a mistake.
The evening’s experience had saddened her innocent soul. Alarmed
at first by the Count’s look of suffering and dejection, she had become
more so on seeing her rival’s beauty, and the corruption of
society had gripped her heart. As she crossed the Pont Royal she threw
away the desecrated hair at the back of the diamond, given to her
once as a token of the purest affection. She wept as she remembered
the bitter grief to which she had so long been a victim, and shuddered
more than once as she reflected that the duty of a woman, who
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wishes for peace in her home, compels her to bury sufferings so keen
as hers at the bottom of her heart, and without a complaint.
“Alas!” thought she, “what can women do when they do not love?
What is the fount of their indulgence? I cannot believe that, as my
aunt tells me, reason is all-sufficient to maintain them in such devotion.”
She was still sighing when her man-servant let down the handsome
carriage-step down which she flew into the hall of her house. She
rushed precipitately upstairs, and when she reached her room was
startled by seeing her husband sitting by the fire.
“How long is it, my dear, since you have gone to balls without
telling me beforehand?” he asked in a broken voice. “You must
know that a woman is always out of place without her husband.
You compromised yourself strangely by remaining in the dark corner
where you had ensconced yourself.”
“Oh, my dear, good Leon,” said she in a coaxing tone, “I could not
resist the happiness of seeing you without your seeing me. My aunt
took me to this ball, and I was very happy there!”
This speech disarmed the Count’s looks of their assumed severity,
for he had been blaming himself while dreading his wife’s return, no
doubt fully informed at the ball of an infidelity he had hoped to hide
from her; and, as is the way of lovers conscious of their guilt, he
tried, by being the first to find fault, to escape her just anger. Happy
in seeing her husband smile, and in finding him at this hour in a
room whither of late he had come more rarely, the Countess looked
at him so tenderly that she blushed and cast down her eyes. Her
clemency enraptured Soulanges all the more, because this scene followed
on the misery he had endured at the ball. He seized his wife’s
hand and kissed it gratefully. Is not gratitude often a part of love?
“Hortense, what is that on your finger that has hurt my lip so
much?” asked he, laughing.
“It is my diamond which you said you had lost, and which I have
found.
General Montcornet did not marry Madame de Vaudremont, in
spite of the mutual understanding in which they had lived for a
few minutes, for she was one of the victims of the terrible fire
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which sealed the fame of the ball given by the Austrian ambassador
on the occasion of Napoleon’s marriage with the daughter of the
Emperor Joseph II.
July 1829.
Addendum
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bonaparte, Napoleon
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Colonel Chabert
The Seamy Side of History
A Woman of Thirty
Gondreville, Malin, Comte de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Start in Life
The Member for Arcis
Keller, Francois
Cesar Birotteau
Eugenie Grandet
The Government Clerks
The Member for Arcis
Keller, Madame Francois
The Member for Arcis
The Thirteen
677

Domestic Peace
La Roche-Hugon, Martial de
The Peasantry
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
Montcornet, Marechal, Comte de
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Peasantry
A Man of Business
Cousin Betty
Murat, Joachim, Prince
The Vendetta
The Gondreville Mystery
Colonel Chabert
The Country Doctor
Soulanges, Comte Leon de
The Peasantry
Soulanges, Comtesse Hortense de
The Thirteen
The Peasantry
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