The Hated Son

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THE HATED SON

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Madame la Baronne James Rothschild.




THE HATED SON




PART I

HOW THE MOTHER LIVED



CHAPTER I

A BEDROOM OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

On a winter's night, about two in the morning, the Comtesse Jeanne
d'Herouville felt such violent pains that in spite of her
inexperience, she was conscious of an approaching confinement; and the
instinct which makes us hope for ease in a change of posture induced
her to sit up in her bed, either to study the nature of these new
sufferings, or to reflect on her situation. She was a prey to cruel
fears,--caused less by the dread of a first lying-in, which terrifies
most women, than by certain dangers which awaited her child.

In order not to awaken her husband who was sleeping beside her, the
poor woman moved with precautions which her intense terror made as
minute as those of a prisoner endeavoring to escape. Though the pains
became more and more severe, she ceased to feel them, so completely
did she concentrate her own strength on the painful effort of resting
her two moist hands on the pillow and so turning her suffering body
from a posture in which she could find no ease. At the slightest
rustling of the huge green silk coverlet, under which she had slept
but little since her marriage, she stopped as though she had rung a
bell. Forced to watch the count, she divided her attention between the
folds of the rustling stuff and a large swarthy face, the moustache of
which was brushing her shoulder. When some noisier breath than usual
left her husband's lips, she was filled with a sudden terror that
revived the color driven from her cheeks by her double anguish.

The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying
to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly
bold.

When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without
awakening her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which
revealed the touching naivete of her nature. But the half-formed smile
on her burning lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken
that pure brow, and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression.
She gave a sigh and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on
the fatal conjugal pillow. Then--as if for the first time since her
marriage she found herself free in thought and action--she looked at
the things around her, stretching out her neck with little darting
motions like those of a bird in its cage. Seeing her thus, it was easy
to divine that she had once been all gaiety and light-heartedness, but
that fate had suddenly mown down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous
gaiety to sadness.

The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters
of old chateaus point out to visitors as "the state bedroom where
Louis XIII. once slept." Fine pictures, mostly brown in tone, were
framed in walnut, the delicate carvings of which were blackened by
time. The rafters of the ceiling formed compartments adorned with
arabesques in the style of the preceding century, which preserved the
colors of the chestnut wood. These decorations, severe in tone,
reflected the light so little that it was difficult to see their
designs, even when the sun shone full into that long and wide and
lofty chamber. The silver lamp, placed upon the mantel of the vast
fireplace, lighted the room so feebly that its quivering gleam could
be compared only to the nebulous stars which appear at moments through
the dun gray clouds of an autumn night. The fantastic figures crowded
on the marble of the fireplace, which was opposite to the bed, were so
grotesquely hideous that she dared not fix her eyes upon them, fearing
to see them move, or to hear a startling laugh from their gaping and
twisted mouths.

At this moment a tempest was growling in the chimney, giving to every
puff of wind a lugubrious meaning,--the vast size of the flute putting
the hearth into such close communication with the skies above that the
embers upon it had a sort of respiration; they sparkled and went out
at the will of the wind. The arms of the family of Herouville, carved
in white marble with their mantle and supporters, gave the appearance
of a tomb to this species of edifice, which formed a pendant to the
bed, another erection raised to the glory of Hymen. Modern architects
would have been puzzled to decide whether the room had been built for
the bed or the bed for the room. Two cupids playing on the walnut
headboard, wreathed with garlands, might have passed for angels; and
columns of the same wood, supporting the tester were carved with
mythological allegories, the explanation of which could have been
found either in the Bible or Ovid's Metamorphoses. Take away the bed,
and the same tester would have served in a church for the canopy of
the pulpit or the seats of the wardens. The married pair mounted by
three steps to this sumptuous couch, which stood upon a platform and
was hung with curtains of green silk covered with brilliant designs
called "ramages"--possibly because the birds of gay plumage there
depicted were supposed to sing. The folds of these immense curtains
were so stiff that in the semi-darkness they might have been taken for
some metal fabric. On the green velvet hanging, adorned with gold
fringes, which covered the foot of this lordly couch the superstition
of the Comtes d'Herouville had affixed a large crucifix, on which
their chaplain placed a fresh branch of sacred box when he renewed at
Easter the holy water in the basin at the foot of the cross.

On one side of the fireplace stood a large box or wardrobe of choice
woods magnificently carved, such as brides receive even now in the
provinces on their wedding day. These old chests, now so much in
request by antiquaries, were the arsenals from which women drew the
rich and elegant treasures of their personal adornment,--laces,
bodices, high collars and ruffs, gowns of price, alms-purses, masks,
gloves, veils,--in fact all the inventions of coquetry in the
sixteenth century.

On the other side, by way of symmetry, was another piece of furniture,
somewhat similar in shape, where the countess kept her books, papers,
and jewels. Antique chairs covered with damask, a large and greenish
mirror, made in Venice, and richly framed in a sort of rolling
toilet-table, completed the furnishings of the room. The floor was
covered with a Persian carpet, the richness of which proved the
gallantry of the count; on the upper step of the bed stood a little
table, on which the waiting-woman served every night in a gold or
silver cup a drink prepared with spices.

After we have gone some way in life we know the secret influence
exerted by places on the condition of the soul. Who has not had his
darksome moments, when fresh hope has come into his heart from things
that surrounded him? The fortunate, or the unfortunate man, attributes
an intelligent countenance to the things among which he lives; he
listens to them, he consults them--so naturally superstitious is he.
At this moment the countess turned her eyes upon all these articles of
furniture, as if they were living beings whose help and protection she
implored; but the answer of that sombre luxury seemed to her
inexorable.

Suddenly the tempest redoubled. The poor young woman could augur
nothing favorable as she listened to the threatening heavens, the
changes of which were interpreted in those credulous days according to
the ideas or the habits of individuals. Suddenly she turned her eyes
to the two arched windows at the end of the room; but the smallness of
their panes and the multiplicity of the leaden lines did not allow her
to see the sky and judge if the world were coming to an end, as
certain monks, eager for donations, affirmed. She might easily have
believed in such predictions, for the noise of the angry sea, the
waves of which beat against the castle wall, combined with the mighty
voice of the tempest, so that even the rocks appeared to shake. Though
her sufferings were now becoming keener and less endurable, the
countess dared not awaken her husband; but she turned and examined his
features, as if despair were urging her to find a consolation there
against so many sinister forebodings.

If matters were sad around the poor young woman, that face,
notwithstanding the tranquillity of sleep, seemed sadder still. The
light from the lamp, flickering in the draught, scarcely reached
beyond the foot of the bed and illumined the count's head
capriciously; so that the fitful movements of its flash upon those
features in repose produced the effect of a struggle with angry
thought. The countess was scarcely reassured by perceiving the cause
of that phenomenon. Each time that a gust of wind projected the light
upon the count's large face, casting shadows among its bony outlines,
she fancied that her husband was about to fix upon her his two
insupportably stern eyes.

Implacable as the war then going on between the Church and Calvinism,
the count's forehead was threatening even while he slept. Many
furrows, produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague
resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of
that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray
before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where
religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of
the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the
black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a
hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in
the lower lip, were all expressive of ambition, despotism, and power,
the more to be feared because the narrowness of the skull betrayed an
almost total absence of intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid
of generosity. The face was horribly disfigured by a large transversal
scar which had the appearance of a second mouth on the right cheek.

At the age of thirty-three the count, anxious to distinguish himself
in that unhappy religious war the signal for which was given on
Saint-Bartholomew's day, had been grievously wounded at the siege of
Rochelle. The misfortune of this wound increased his hatred against
the partisans of what the language of that day called "the Religion,"
but, by a not unnatural turn of mind, he included in that antipathy
all handsome men. Before the catastrophe, however, he was so
repulsively ugly that no lady had ever been willing to receive him as
a suitor. The only passion of his youth was for a celebrated woman
called La Belle Romaine. The distrust resulting from this new
misfortune made him suspicious to the point of not believing himself
capable of inspiring a true passion; and his character became so
savage that when he did have some successes in gallantry he owed them
to the terror inspired by his cruelty. The left hand of this terrible
Catholic, which lay on the outside of the bed, will complete this
sketch of his character. Stretched out as if to guard the countess, as
a miser guards his hoard, that enormous hand was covered with hair so
thick, it presented such a network of veins and projecting muscles,
that it gave the idea of a branch of birch clasped with a growth of
yellowing ivy.

Children looking at the count's face would have thought him an ogre,
terrible tales of whom they knew by heart. It was enough to see the
width and length of the space occupied by the count in the bed, to
imagine his gigantic proportions. When awake, his gray eyebrows hid
his eyelids in a way to heighten the light of his eye, which glittered
with the luminous ferocity of a wolf skulking on the watch in a
forest. Under his lion nose, with its flaring nostrils, a large and
ill-kept moustache (for he despised all toilet niceties) completely
concealed the upper lip. Happily for the countess, her husband's wide
mouth was silent at this moment, for the softest sounds of that harsh
voice made her tremble. Though the Comte d'Herouville was barely fifty
years of age, he appeared at first sight to be sixty, so much had the
toils of war, without injuring his robust constitution, dilapidated
him physically.

The countess, who was now in her nineteenth year, made a painful
contrast to that large, repulsive figure. She was fair and slim. Her
chestnut locks, threaded with gold, played upon her neck like russet
shadows, and defined a face such as Carlo Dolce has painted for his
ivory-toned madonnas,--a face which now seemed ready to expire under
the increasing attacks of physical pain. You might have thought her
the apparition of an angel sent from heaven to soften the iron will of
the terrible count.

"No, he will not kill us!" she cried to herself mentally, after
contemplating her husband for a long time. "He is frank, courageous,
faithful to his word--faithful to his word!"

Repeating that last sentence in her thoughts, she trembled violently,
and remained as if stupefied.

To understand the horror of her present situation, we must add that
this nocturnal scene took place in 1591, a period when civil war raged
throughout France, and the laws had no vigor. The excesses of the
League, opposed to the accession of Henri IV., surpassed the
calamities of the religious wars. License was so universal that no one
was surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day. When a
military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of
the King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it.
It was thus that Blagny, a soldier, came near becoming a sovereign
prince at the gates of France. Sometime before Henri III.'s death, a
court lady murdered a nobleman who made offensive remarks about her.
One of the king's minions remarked to him:--

"Hey! vive Dieu! sire, she daggered him finely!"

The Comte d'Herouville, one of the most rabid royalists in Normandy,
kept the part of that province which adjoins Brittany under subjection
to Henri IV. by the rigor of his executions. The head of one of the
richest families in France, he had considerably increased the revenues
of his great estates by marrying seven months before the night on
which this history begins, Jeanne de Saint-Savin, a young lady who, by
a not uncommon chance in days when people were killed off like flies,
had suddenly become the representative of both branches of the
Saint-Savin family. Necessity and terror were the causes which led to
this union. At a banquet given, two months after the marriage, to the
Comte and Comtesse d'Herouville, a discussion arose on a topic which in
those days of ignorance was thought amusing: namely, the legitimacy of
children coming into the world ten months after the death of their
fathers, or seven months after the wedding day.

"Madame," said the count brutally, turning to his wife, "if you give
me a child ten months after my death, I cannot help it; but be careful
that you are not brought to bed in seven months!"

"What would you do then, old bear?" asked the young Marquis de
Verneuil, thinking that the count was joking.

"I should wring the necks of mother and child!"

An answer so peremptory closed the discussion, imprudently started by
a seigneur from Lower Normandy. The guests were silent, looking with a
sort of terror at the pretty Comtesse d'Herouville. All were convinced
that if such an event occurred, her savage lord would execute his
threat.

The words of the count echoed in the bosom of the young wife, then
pregnant; one of those presentiments which furrow a track like
lightning through the soul, told her that her child would be born at
seven months. An inward heat overflowed her from head to foot, sending
the life's blood to her heart with such violence that the surface of
her body felt bathed in ice. From that hour not a day had passed that
the sense of secret terror did not check every impulse of her innocent
gaiety. The memory of the look, of the inflections of voice with which
the count accompanied his words, still froze her blood, and silenced
her sufferings, as she leaned over that sleeping head, and strove to
see some sign of a pity she had vainly sought there when awake.

The child, threatened with death before its life began, made so
vigorous a movement that she cried aloud, in a voice that seemed like
a sigh, "Poor babe!"

She said no more; there are ideas that a mother cannot bear. Incapable
of reasoning at this moment, the countess was almost choked with the
intensity of a suffering as yet unknown to her. Two tears, escaping
from her eyes, rolled slowly down her cheeks, and traced two shining
lines, remaining suspended at the bottom of that white face, like
dewdrops on a lily. What learned man would take upon himself to say
that the child unborn is on some neutral ground, where the emotions of
its mother do not penetrate during those hours when soul clasps body
and communicates its impressions, when thought permeates blood with
healing balm or poisonous fluids? The terror that shakes the tree, will
it not hurt the fruit? Those words, "Poor babe!" were they dictated by
a vision of the future? The shuddering of this mother was violent; her
look piercing.

The bloody answer given by the count at the banquet was a link
mysteriously connecting the past with this premature confinement. That
odious suspicion, thus publicly expressed, had cast into the memories
of the countess a dread which echoed to the future. Since that fatal
gala, she had driven from her mind, with as much fear as another woman
would have found pleasure in evoking them, a thousand scattered scenes
of her past existence. She refused even to think of the happy days
when her heart was free to love. Like as the melodies of their native
land make exiles weep, so these memories revived sensations so
delightful that her young conscience thought them crimes, and sued
them to enforce still further the savage threat of the count. There
lay the secret of the horror which was now oppressing her soul.

Sleeping figures possess a sort of suavity, due to the absolute repose
of both body and mind; but though that species of calmness softened
but slightly the harsh expression of the count's features, all
illusion granted to the unhappy is so persuasive that the poor wife
ended by finding hope in that tranquillity. The roar of the tempest,
now descending in torrents of rain, seemed to her no more than a
melancholy moan; her fears and her pains both yielded her a momentary
respite. Contemplating the man to whom her life was bound, the
countess allowed herself to float into a reverie, the sweetness of
which was so intoxicating that she had no strength to break its charm.
For a moment, by one of those visions which in some way share the
divine power, there passed before her rapid images of a happiness lost
beyond recall.

Jeanne in her vision saw faintly, and as if in a distant gleam of
dawn, the modest castle where her careless childhood had glided on;
there were the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber,
the scenes of her happy play. She saw herself gathering flowers and
planting them, unknowing why they wilted and would not grow, despite
her constancy in watering them. Next, she saw confusedly the vast town
and the vast house blackened by age, to which her mother took her when
she was seven years old. Her lively memory showed her the old gray
heads of the masters who taught and tormented her. She remembered the
person of her father; she saw him getting off his mule at the door of
the manor-house, and taking her by the hand to lead her up the stairs;
she recalled how her prattle drove from his brow the judicial cares he
did not always lay aside with his black or his red robes, the white
fur of which fell one day by chance under the snipping of her
mischievous scissors. She cast but one glance at the confessor of her
aunt, the mother-superior of a convent of Poor Clares, a rigid and
fanatical old man, whose duty it was to initiate her into the
mysteries of religion. Hardened by the severities necessary against
heretics, the old priest never ceased to jangle the chains of hell; he
told her of nothing but the vengeance of Heaven, and made her tremble
with the assurance that God's eye was on her. Rendered timid, she
dared not raise her eyes in the priest's presence, and ceased to have
any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she had
made a sharer in all her frolics. When she saw that beloved mother
turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a
religious terror took possession of the girl's heart.

Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her
childhood, when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life.
She thought with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her
happiness was to work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to
pray in the church, to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a
romance of chivalry, to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what
gift her father would make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John,
and find out the meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing
thus from her childish joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood,
the grace of those softly flowing years when she knew no pain was
eclipsed by the brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated. The
joyous peace of her childhood was far less sweet to her than a single
one of the troubles scattered upon the last two years of her
childhood,--years that were rich in treasures now buried forever in
her heart.

The vision brought her suddenly to that morning, that ravishing
morning, when in the grand old parlor panelled and carved in oak,
which served the family as a dining-room, she saw her handsome cousin
for the first time. Alarmed by the seditions in Paris, her mother's
family had sent the young courtier to Rouen, hoping that he could
there be trained to the duties of the magistracy by his uncle, whose
office might some day devolve upon him. The countess smiled
involuntarily as she remembered the haste with which she retired on
seeing this relation whom she did not know. But, in spite of the
rapidity with which she opened and shut the door, a single glance had
put into her soul so vigorous an impression of the scene that even at
this moment she seemed to see it still occurring. Her eye again
wandered from the violet velvet mantle embroidered with gold and lined
with satin to the spurs on the boots, the pretty lozenges slashed into
the doublet, the trunk-hose, and the rich collaret which gave to view
a throat as white as the lace around it. She stroked with her hand the
handsome face with its tiny pointed moustache, and "royale" as small
as the ermine tips upon her father's hood.

In the silence of the night, with her eyes fixed on the green silk
curtains which she no longer saw, the countess, forgetting the storm,
her husband, and her fears, recalled the days which seemed to her
longer than years, so full were they,--days when she loved, and was
beloved!--and the moment when, fearing her mother's sternness, she had
slipped one morning into her father's study to whisper her girlish
confidences on his knee, waiting for his smile at her caresses to say
in his ear, "Will you scold me if I tell you something?" Once more she
heard her father say, after a few questions in reply to which she
spoke for the first time of her love, "Well, well, my child, we will
think of it. If he studies well, if he fits himself to succeed me, if
he continues to please you, I will be on your side."

After that she had listened no longer; she had kissed her father, and,
knocking over his papers as she ran from the room, she flew to the
great linden-tree where, daily, before her formidable mother rose, she
met that charming cousin, Georges de Chaverny.

Faithfully the youth promised to study law and customs. He laid aside
the splendid trappings of the nobility of the sword to wear the
sterner costume of the magistracy.

"I like you better in black," she said.

It was a falsehood, but by that falsehood she comforted her lover for
having thrown his dagger to the winds. The memory of the little
schemes employed to deceive her mother, whose severity seemed great,
brought back to her the soulful joys of that innocent and mutual and
sanctioned love; sometimes a rendezvous beneath the linden, where
speech could be freer than before witnesses; sometimes a furtive
clasp, or a stolen kiss,--in short, all the naive instalments of a
passion that did not pass the bounds of modesty. Reliving in her
vision those delightful days when she seemed to have too much
happiness, she fancied that she kissed, in the void, that fine young
face with the glowing eyes, that rosy mouth that spoke so well of
love. Yes, she had loved Chaverny, poor apparently; but what treasures
had she not discovered in that soul as tender as it was strong!