The Duchesse de Langeais

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BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Ellen Marriage




PREPARER'S NOTE:

The Duchesse of Langeais is the second part of a trilogy. Part
one is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with the
Golden Eyes. The three stories are frequently combined under the
title The Thirteen.




To Franz Liszt



In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands
a convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule
instituted by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first
rigor of the reformation brought about by that illustrious
woman. Extraordinary as this may seem, it is none the less true.
Almost every religious house in the Peninsula, or in Europe for
that matter, was either destroyed or disorganized by the outbreak
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but as this
island was protected through those times by the English fleet,
its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure from
the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds
which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century
spent their force before they reached those cliffs at so short a
distance from the coast of Andalusia.

If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore
of the island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in
the cloisters grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of
glory, or the majesty that blazed in flame across kingdom after
kingdom during his meteor life.

In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out
pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the
purity of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest
parts of Europe, women deprived of all human ties, sighing after
the long suicide accomplished in the breast of God. No convent,
indeed, was so well fitted for that complete detachment of the
soul from all earthly things, which is demanded by the religious
life, albeit on the continent of Europe there are many convents
magnificently adapted to the purpose of their existence. Buried
away in the loneliest valleys, hanging in mid-air on the steepest
mountainsides, set down on the brink of precipices, in every
place man has sought for the poetry of the Infinite, the solemn
awe of Silence; in every place man has striven to draw closer to
God, seeking Him on mountain peaks, in the depths below the
crags, at the cliff's edge; and everywhere man has found God.
But nowhere, save on this half-European, half-African ledge of
rock could you find so many different harmonies, combining so to
raise the soul, that the sharpest pain comes to be like other
memories; the strongest impressions are dulled, till the sorrows
of life are laid to rest in the depths.

The convent stands on the highest point of the crags at the
uttermost end of the island. On the side towards the sea the
rock was once rent sheer away in some globe-cataclysm; it rises
up a straight wall from the base where the waves gnaw at the
stone below high-water mark. Any assault is made impossible by
the dangerous reefs that stretch far out to sea, with the
sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them. So, only
from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent built
conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape,
height, doors, and windows of monastic buildings. From the side
of the town, the church completely hides the solid structure of
the cloisters and their roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone
impervious to sun or storm or gales of wind.

The church itself, built by the munificence of a Spanish family,
is the crowning edifice of the town. Its fine, bold front gives
an imposing and picturesque look to the little city in the sea.
The sight of such a city, with its close-huddled roofs, arranged
for the most part amphitheatre-wise above a picturesque harbour,
and crowned by a glorious cathedral front with triple-arched
Gothic doorways, belfry towers, and filigree spires, is a
spectacle surely in every way the sublimest on earth. Religion
towering above daily life, to put men continually in mind of the
End and the way, is in truth a thoroughly Spanish conception.
But now surround this picture by the Mediterranean, and a burning
sky, imagine a few palms here and there, a few stunted evergreen
trees mingling their waving leaves with the motionless flowers
and foliage of carved stone; look out over the reef with its
white fringes of foam in contrast to the sapphire sea; and then
turn to the city, with its galleries and terraces whither the
townsfolk come to take the air among their flowers of an evening,
above the houses and the tops of the trees in their little
gardens; add a few sails down in the harbour; and lastly, in the
stillness of falling night, listen to the organ music, the
chanting of the services, the wonderful sound of bells pealing
out over the open sea. There is sound and silence everywhere;
oftener still there is silence over all.

The church is divided within into a sombre mysterious nave and
narrow aisles. For some reason, probably because the winds are
so high, the architect was unable to build the flying buttresses
and intervening chapels which adorn almost all cathedrals, nor
are there openings of any kind in the walls which support the
weight of the roof. Outside there is simply the heavy wall
structure, a solid mass of grey stone further strengthened by
huge piers placed at intervals. Inside, the nave and its little
side galleries are lighted entirely by the great stained-glass
rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre
doorway; for upon that side the exposure permits of the display
of lacework in stone and of other beauties peculiar to the style
improperly called Gothic.

The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the
townsfolk, who came and went and heard mass there. The choir was
shut off from the rest of the church by a grating and thick folds
of brown curtain, left slightly apart in the middle in such a way
that nothing of the choir could be seen from the church except
the high altar and the officiating priest. The grating itself
was divided up by the pillars which supported the organ loft; and
this part of the structure, with its carved wooden columns,
completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by the
shafts in the nave. If any inquisitive person, therefore, had
been bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the
gallery to look down into the choir, he could have seen nothing
but the tall eight-sided windows of stained glass beyond the high
altar.

At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish
Ferdinand VII once more on the throne, a French general came to
the island after the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the
recognition of the King's Government, really to see the convent
and to find some means of entering it. The undertaking was
certainly a delicate one; but a man of passionate temper, whose
life had been, as it were, but one series of poems in action, a
man who all his life long had lived romances instead of writing
them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
deed which seemed to be impossible.

To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The
metropolitan or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And
as for force or stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him
his position, his whole career as a soldier, and the end in view
to boot? The Duc d'Angouleme was still in Spain; and of all the
crimes which a man in favour with the Commander-in-Chief might
commit, this one alone was certain to find him inexorable. The
General had asked for the mission to gratify private motives of
curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This final
attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his
search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he
felt a presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and
afterwards, when as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but
its walls, and of the nuns not so much as their robes; while he
had merely heard the chanting of the service, there were dim
auguries under the walls and in the sound of the voices to
justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those so
unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion
more vehemently excited than the General's curiosity at that
moment. There are no small events for the heart; the heart
exaggerates everything; the heart weighs the fall of a
fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of a woman's glove in
the same scales, and the glove is nearly always the heavier of
the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic simplicity.
The facts first, the emotions will follow.

An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal
authority was re-established there. Some few Constitutional
Spaniards who had found their way thither after the fall of Cadiz
were allowed to charter a vessel and sail for London. So there
was neither resistance nor reaction. But the change of
government could not be effected in the little town without a
mass, at which the two divisions under the General's command were
obliged to be present. Now, it was upon this mass that the
General had built his hopes of gaining some information as to the
sisters in the convent; he was quite unaware how absolutely the
Carmelites were cut off from the world; but he knew that there
might be among them one whom he held dearer than life, dearer
than honour.

His hopes were cruelly dashed at once. Mass, it is true, was
celebrated in state. In honour of such a solemnity, the curtains
which always hid the choir were drawn back to display its riches,
its valuable paintings and shrines so bright with gems that they
eclipsed the glories of the ex-votos of gold and silver hung up
by sailors of the port on the columns in the nave. But all the
nuns had taken refuge in the organ-loft. And yet, in spite of
this first check, during this very mass of thanksgiving, the most
intimately thrilling drama that ever set a man's heart beating
opened out widely before him.

The sister who played the organ aroused such intense enthusiasm,
that not a single man regretted that he had come to the service.
Even the men in the ranks were delighted, and the officers were
in ecstasy. As for the General, he was seemingly calm and
indifferent. The sensations stirred in him as the sister played
one piece after another belong to the small number of things
which it is not lawful to utter; words are powerless to express
them; like death, God, eternity, they can only be realised
through their one point of contact with humanity. Strangely
enough, the organ music seemed to belong to the school of
Rossini, the musician who brings most human passion into his art.

Some day his works, by their number and extent, will receive the
reverence due to the Homer of music. From among all the scores
that we owe to his great genius, the nun seemed to have chosen
_Moses in Egypt_ for special study, doubtless because the spirit of
sacred music finds therein its supreme expression. Perhaps the
soul of the great musician, so gloriously known to Europe, and
the soul of this unknown executant had met in the intuitive
apprehension of the same poetry. So at least thought two
dilettanti officers who must have missed the Theatre Favart in
Spain.

At last in the _Te Deum_ no one could fail to discern a French soul
in the sudden change that came over the music. Joy for the
victory of the Most Christian King evidently stirred this nun's
heart to the depths. She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake. Soon
the love of country shone out, breaking forth like shafts of
light from the fugue, as the sister introduced variations with
all a Parisienne's fastidious taste, and blended vague
suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music. A
Spaniard's fingers would not have brought this warmth into a
graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France. The
musician's nationality was revealed.

"We find France everywhere, it seems," said one of the men.

The General had left the church during the _Te Deum_; he could
not listen any longer. The nun's music had been a revelation of
a woman loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the
world's eyes, so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that
hitherto the most ingenious and persistent efforts made by men
who brought great influence and unusual powers to bear upon the
search had failed to find her. The suspicion aroused in the
General's heart became all but a certainty with the vague
reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve du
Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in
a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the
song to express an exile's longing, amid the joy of those that
triumphed. Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of
a lost love, to find her only to know that she was lost, to catch
a mysterious glimpse of her after five years--five years, in
which the pent-up passion, chafing in an empty life, had grown
the mightier for every fruitless effort to satisfy it!

Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose
some precious thing; and after hunting through his papers,
ransacking his memory, and turning his house upside down; after
one or two days spent in vain search, and hope, and despair;
after a prodigious expenditure of the liveliest irritation of
soul, who has not known the ineffable pleasure of finding that
all-important nothing which had come to be a king of monomania?
Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five years; put
a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;
transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and,
furthermore, let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a
lion's heart and a leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe
and fear in those who come in contact with him--realise this, and
you may, perhaps, understand why the General walked abruptly out
of the church when the first notes of a ballad, which he used to
hear with a rapture of delight in a gilt-paneled boudoir, began
to vibrate along the aisles of the church in the sea.

The General walked away down the steep street which led to the
port, and only stopped when he could not hear the deep notes of
the organ. Unable to think of anything but the love which broke
out in volcanic eruption, filling his heart with fire, he only
knew that the _Te Deum_ was over when the Spanish congregation
came pouring out of the church. Feeling that his behaviour and
attitude might seem ridiculous, he went back to head the
procession, telling the alcalde and the governor that, feeling
suddenly faint, he had gone out into the air. Casting about for
a plea for prolonging his stay, it at once occurred to him to
make the most of this excuse, framed on the spur of the moment.
He declined, on a plea of increasing indisposition, to preside at
the banquet given by the town to the French officers, betook
himself to his bed, and sent a message to the Major-General, to
the effect that temporary illness obliged him to leave the
Colonel in command of the troops for the time being. This
commonplace but very plausible stratagem relieved him of all
responsibility for the time necessary to carry out his plans.
The General, nothing if not "catholic and monarchical," took
occasion to inform himself of the hours of the services, and
manifested the greatest zeal for the performance of his religious
duties, piety which caused no remark in Spain.

The very next day, while the division was marching out of the
town, the General went to the convent to be present at vespers.
He found an empty church. The townsfolk, devout though they
were, had all gone down to the quay to watch the embarkation of
the troops. He felt glad to be the only man there. He tramped
noisily up the nave, clanking his spurs till the vaulted roof
rang with the sound; he coughed, he talked aloud to himself to
let the nuns know, and more particularly to let the organist know
that if the troops were gone, one Frenchman was left behind. Was
this singular warning heard and understood? He thought so. It
seemed to him that in the _Magnificat_ the organ made response
which was borne to him on the vibrating air. The nun's spirit
found wings in music and fled towards him, throbbing with the
rhythmical pulse of the sounds. Then, in all its might, the
music burst forth and filled the church with warmth. The Song of
Joy set apart in the sublime liturgy of Latin Christianity to
express the exaltation of the soul in the presence of the glory
of the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart almost
terrified by its gladness in the presence of the glory of a
mortal love; a love that yet lived, a love that had risen to
trouble her even beyond the grave in which the nun is laid, that
she may rise again as the bride of Christ.

The organ is in truth the grandest, the most daring, the most
magnificent of all instruments invented by human genius. It is a
whole orchestra in itself. It can express anything in response
to a skilled touch. Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on
which the soul poises for a flight forth into space, essaying on
her course to draw picture after picture in an endless series, to
paint human life, to cross the Infinite that separates heaven
from earth? And the longer a dreamer listens to those giant
harmonies, the better he realizes that nothing save this
hundred-voiced choir on earth can fill all the space between
kneeling men, and a God hidden by the blinding light of the
Sanctuary. The music is the one interpreter strong enough to
bear up the prayers of humanity to heaven, prayer in its
omnipotent moods, prayer tinged by the melancholy of many
different natures, coloured by meditative ecstasy, upspringing
with the impulse of repentance--blended with the myriad fancies
of every creed. Yes. In those long vaulted aisles the melodies
inspired by the sense of things divine are blended with a grandeur
unknown before, are decked with new glory and might. Out of the
dim daylight, and the deep silence broken by the chanting of the
choir in response to the thunder of the organ, a veil is woven
for God, and the brightness of His attributes shines through it.

And this wealth of holy things seemed to be flung down like a
grain of incense upon the fragile altar raised to Love beneath
the eternal throne of a jealous and avenging God. Indeed, in the
joy of the nun there was little of that awe and gravity which
should harmonize with the solemnities of the _Magnificat_. She
had enriched the music with graceful variations, earthly
gladness throbbing through the rhythm of each. In such brilliant
quivering notes some great singer might strive to find a voice
for her love, her melodies fluttered as a bird flutters about her
mate. There were moments when she seemed to leap back into the
past, to dally there now with laughter, now with tears. Her
changing moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman
excited and happy over her lover's return.

But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the
marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept
over the soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift
transition from the major to the minor, the organist told her
hearer of her present lot. She gave the story of long melancholy
broodings, of the slow course of her moral malady. How day by
day she deadened the senses, how every night cut off one more
thought, how her heart was slowly reduced to ashes. The sadness
deepened shade after shade through languid modulations, and in a
little while the echoes were pouring out a torrent of grief.
Then on a sudden, high notes rang out like the voices of angels
singing together, as if to tell the lost but not forgotten lover
that their spirits now could only meet in heaven. Pathetic hope!
Then followed the _Amen_. No more joy, no more tears in the air,
no sadness, no regrets. The _Amen_ was the return to God. The
final chord was deep, solemn, even terrible; for the last
rumblings of the bass sent a shiver through the audience that
raised the hair on their heads; the nun shook out her veiling of
crepe, and seemed to sink again into the grave from which she had
risen for a moment. Slowly the reverberations died away; it
seemed as if the church, but now so full of light, had returned
to thick darkness.

The General had been caught up and borne swiftly away by this
strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight
from beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the
imagery of that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep
and far. For him, as for the sister, the poem meant future,
present, and past. Is not music, and even opera music, a sort of
text, which a susceptible or poetic temper, or a sore and
stricken heart, may expand as memories shall determine? If a
musician must needs have the heart of a poet, must not the
listener too be in a manner a poet and a lover to hear all that
lies in great music? Religion, love, and music--what are they
but a threefold expression of the same fact, of that craving for
expansion which stirs in every noble soul. And these three forms
of poetry ascend to God, in whom all passion on earth finds its
end. Wherefore the holy human trinity finds a place amid the
infinite glories of God; of God, whom we always represent
surrounded with the fires of love and seistrons of gold--music
and light and harmony. Is not He the Cause and the End of all
our strivings?

The French General guessed rightly that here in the desert, on
this bare rock in the sea, the nun had seized upon music as an
outpouring of the passion that still consumed her. Was this her
manner of offering up her love as a sacrifice to God? Or was it
Love exultant in triumph over God? The questions were hard to
answer. But one thing at least the General could not mistake--in
this heart, dead to the world, the fire of passion burned as
fiercely as in his own.

Vespers over, he went back to the alcalde with whom he was
staying. In the all-absorbing joy which comes in such full
measure when a satisfaction sought long and painfully is attained
at last, he could see nothing beyond this--he was still loved!
In her heart love had grown in loneliness, even as his love had
grown stronger as he surmounted one barrier after another which
this woman had set between them! The glow of soul came to its
natural end. There followed a longing to see her again, to
contend with God for her, to snatch her away--a rash scheme,
which appealed to a daring nature. He went to bed, when the meal
was over, to avoid questions; to be alone and think at his ease;
and he lay absorbed by deep thought till day broke.

He rose only to go to mass. He went to the church and knelt
close to the screen, with his forehead touching the curtain; he
would have torn a hole in it if he had been alone, but his host
had come with him out of politeness, and the least imprudence
might compromise the whole future of his love, and ruin the new
hopes.

The organ sounded, but it was another player, and not the nun of
the last two days whose hands touched the keys. It was all
colorless and cold for the General. Was the woman he loved
prostrated by emotion which well-nigh overcame a strong man's
heart? Had she so fully realised and shared an unchanged,
longed-for love, that now she lay dying on her bed in her cell?
While innumerable thoughts of this kind perplexed his mind, the
voice of the woman he worshipped rang out close beside him; he
knew its clear resonant soprano. It was her voice, with that
faint tremor in it which gave it all the charm that shyness and
diffidence gives to a young girl; her voice, distinct from the
mass of singing as a _prima donna's_ in the chorus of a finale.
It was like a golden or silver thread in dark frieze.

It was she! There could be no mistake. Parisienne now as ever,
she had not laid coquetry aside when she threw off worldly
adornments for the veil and the Carmelite's coarse serge. She
who had affirmed her love last evening in the praise sent up to
God, seemed now to say to her lover, "Yes, it is I. I am here.
My love is unchanged, but I am beyond the reach of love. You
will hear my voice, my soul shall enfold you, and I shall abide
here under the brown shroud in the choir from which no power on
earth can tear me. You shall never see me more!"

"It is she indeed!" the General said to himself, raising his
head. He had leant his face on his hands, unable at first to
bear the intolerable emotion that surged like a whirlpool in his
heart, when that well-known voice vibrated under the arcading,
with the sound of the sea for accompaniment.

Storm was without, and calm within the sanctuary. Still that
rich voice poured out all its caressing notes; it fell like balm
on the lover's burning heart; it blossomed upon the air--the air
that a man would fain breathe more deeply to receive the
effluence of a soul breathed forth with love in the words of the
prayer. The alcalde coming to join his guest found him in tears
during the elevation, while the nun was singing, and brought him
back to his house. Surprised to find so much piety in a French
military man, the worthy magistrate invited the confessor of the
convent to meet his guest. Never had news given the General more
pleasure; he paid the ecclesiastic a good deal of attention at
supper, and confirmed his Spanish hosts in the high opinion they
had formed of his piety by a not wholly disinterested respect.