A Daughter of Eve

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A DAUGHTER OF EVE

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By

Katharine Prescott Wormeley



DEDICATION

To Madame la Comtesse Bolognini, nee Vimercati.

If you remember, madame, the pleasure your conversation gave to a
traveller by recalling Paris to his memory in Milan, you will not
be surprised to find him testifying his gratitude for many
pleasant evenings passed beside you by laying one of his works at
your feet, and begging you to protect it with your name, as in
former days that name protected the tales of an ancient writer
dear to the Milanese.

You have an Eugenie, already beautiful, whose intelligent smile
gives promise that she has inherited from you the most precious
gifts of womanhood, and who will certainly enjoy during her
childhood and youth all those happinesses which a rigid mother
denied to the Eugenie of these pages. Though Frenchmen are taxed
with inconstancy, you will find me Italian in faithfulness and
memory. While writing the name of "Eugenie," my thoughts have
often led me back to that cool stuccoed salon and little garden in
the Vicolo dei Cappucini, which echoed to the laughter of that
dear child, to our sportive quarrels and our chatter. But you have
left the Corso for the Tre Monasteri, and I know not how you are
placed there; consequently, I am forced to think of you, not among
the charming things with which no doubt you have surrounded
yourself, but like one of those fine figures due to Raffaelle,
Titian, Correggio, Allori, which seem abstractions, so distant are
they from our daily lives.

If this book should wing its way across the Alps, it will prove to
you the lively gratitude and respectful friendship of

Your devoted servant,
De Balzac.




A DAUGHTER OF EVE



CHAPTER I

THE TWO MARIES

In one of the finest houses of the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at
half-past eleven at night, two young women were sitting before the
fireplace of a boudoir hung with blue velvet of that tender shade,
with shimmering reflections, which French industry has lately learned
to fabricate. Over the doors and windows were draped soft folds of
blue cashmere, the tint of the hangings, the work of one of those
upholsterers who have just missed being artists. A silver lamp studded
with turquoise, and suspended by chains of beautiful workmanship, hung
from the centre of the ceiling. The same system of decoration was
followed in the smallest details, and even to the ceiling of fluted
blue silk, with long bands of white cashmere falling at equal
distances on the hangings, where they were caught back by ropes of
pearl. A warm Belgian carpet, thick as turf, of a gray ground with
blue posies, covered the floor. The furniture, of carved ebony, after
a fine model of the old school, gave substance and richness to the
rather too decorative quality, as a painter might call it, of the rest
of the room. On either side of a large window, two etageres displayed
a hundred precious trifles, flowers of mechanical art brought into
bloom by the fire of thought. On a chimney-piece of slate-blue marble
were figures in old Dresden, shepherds in bridal garb, with delicate
bouquets in their hands, German fantasticalities surrounding a
platinum clock, inlaid with arabesques. Above it sparkled the
brilliant facets of a Venice mirror framed in ebony, with figures
carved in relief, evidently obtained from some former royal residence.
Two jardinieres were filled with the exotic product of a hot-house,
pale, but divine flowers, the treasures of botany.

In this cold, orderly boudoir, where all things were in place as if
for sale, no sign existed of the gay and capricious disorder of a
happy home. At the present moment, the two young women were weeping.
Pain seemed to predominate. The name of the owner, Ferdinand du
Tillet, one of the richest bankers in Paris, is enough to explain the
luxury of the whole house, of which this boudoir is but a sample.

Though without either rank or station, having pushed himself forward,
heaven knows how, du Tillet had married, in 1831, the daughter of the
Comte de Granville, one of the greatest names in the French
magistracy,--a man who became peer of France after the revolution of
July. This marriage of ambition on du Tillet's part was brought about
by his agreeing to sign an acknowledgment in the marriage contract of
a dowry not received, equal to that of her elder sister, who was
married to Comte Felix de Vandenesse. On the other hand, the
Granvilles obtained the alliance with de Vandenesse by the largeness
of the "dot." Thus the bank repaired the breach made in the pocket of
the magistracy by rank. Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen
himself, three years later, the brother-in-law of a Sieur Ferdinand DU
Tillet, so-called, he might not have married his wife; but what man of
rank in 1828 foresaw the strange upheavals which the year 1830 was
destined to produce in the political condition, the fortunes, and the
customs of France? Had any one predicted to Comte Felix de Vandenesse
that his head would lose the coronet of a peer, and that of his
father-in-law acquire one, he would have thought his informant a
lunatic.

Bending forward on one of those low chairs then called "chaffeuses,"
in the attitude of a listener, Madame du Tillet was pressing to her
bosom with maternal tenderness, and occasionally kissing, the hand of
her sister, Madame Felix de Vandenesse. Society added the baptismal
name to the surname, in order to distinguish the countess from her
sister-in-law, the Marquise Charles de Vandenesse, wife of the former
ambassador, who had married the widow of the Comte de Kergarouet,
Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine.

Half lying on a sofa, her handkerchief in the other hand, her
breathing choked by repressed sobs, and with tearful eyes, the
countess had been making confidences such as are made only from sister
to sister when two sisters love each other; and these two sisters did
love each other tenderly. We live in days when sisters married into
such antagonist spheres can very well not love each other, and
therefore the historian is bound to relate the reasons of this tender
affection, preserved without spot or jar in spite of their husbands'
contempt for each other and their own social disunion. A rapid glance
at their childhood will explain the situation.

Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind,
a "devote" who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!),
had fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and
Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the
first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever
leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled
them. Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of
Paris were their theatre. Their education in their mother's house had
been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent. From infancy they
had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the
door of which stood always open. The time not occupied by the care of
their persons, their religious duties and the studies considered
necessary for well-bred young ladies, was spent in needlework done for
the poor, or in walks like those an Englishwoman allows herself on
Sunday, saying, apparently, "Not so fast, or we shall seem to be
amusing ourselves."

Their education did not go beyond the limits imposed by confessors,
who were chosen by their mother from the strictest and least tolerant
of the Jansenist priests. Never were girls delivered over to their
husbands more absolutely pure and virgin than they; their mother
seemed to consider that point, essential as indeed it is, the
accomplishment of all her duties toward earth and heaven. These two
poor creatures had never, before their marriage, read a tale, or heard
of a romance; their very drawings were of figures whose anatomy would
have been masterpieces of the impossible to Cuvier, designed to
feminize the Farnese Hercules himself. An old maid taught them
drawing. A worthy priest instructed them in grammar, the French
language, history, geography, and the very little arithmetic it was
thought necessary in their rank for women to know. Their reading,
selected from authorized books, such as the "Lettres Edifiantes," and
Noel's "Lecons de Litterature," was done aloud in the evening; but
always in presence of their mother's confessor, for even in those
books there did sometimes occur passages which, without wise comments,
might have roused their imagination. Fenelon's "Telemaque" was thought
dangerous.

The Comtesse de Granville loved her daughters sufficiently to wish to
make them angels after the pattern of Marie Alacoque, but the poor
girls themselves would have preferred a less virtuous and more amiable
mother. This education bore its natural fruits. Religion, imposed as a
yoke and presented under its sternest aspect, wearied with formal
practice these innocent young hearts, treated as sinful. It repressed
their feelings, and was never precious to them, although it struck its
roots deep down into their natures. Under such training the two Maries
would either have become mere imbeciles, or they must necessarily have
longed for independence. Thus it came to pass that they looked to
marriage as soon as they saw anything of life and were able to compare
a few ideas. Of their own tender graces and their personal value they
were absolutely ignorant. They were ignorant, too, of their own
innocence; how, then, could they know life? Without weapons to meet
misfortune, without experience to appreciate happiness, they found no
comfort in the maternal jail, all their joys were in each other. Their
tender confidences at night in whispers, or a few short sentences
exchanged if their mother left them for a moment, contained more ideas
than the words themselves expressed. Often a glance, concealed from
other eyes, by which they conveyed to each other their emotions, was
like a poem of bitter melancholy. The sight of a cloudless sky, the
fragrance of flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were
their joys. The finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a
source of enjoyment.

Their mother's social circle, far from opening resources to their
hearts or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and
depressed them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and
graceless, whose conversation turned on the differences which
distinguished various preachers and confessors, on their own petty
indispositions, on religious events insignificant even to the
"Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de la Religion." As for the men who appeared
in the Comtesse de Granville's salon, they extinguished any possible
torch of love, so cold and sadly resigned were their faces. They were
all of an age when mankind is sulky and fretful, and natural
sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table and on the things
relating to personal comfort. Religious egotism had long dried up
those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched behind pious
practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole evening, and the
two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim enforced by maternal
severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages about them with
their hollow eyes and scowling faces.

On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a
music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that
music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed
within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A
spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a
neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest
girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the
importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the
value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of
a devote's character to make a merit of doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem
all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his
brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and
artless in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes,
and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair,
falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his
ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to
his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with
the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to
which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too
high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities.
This great unknown artist belonged to the kindly class of the
self-forgetting, who give their time and their soul to others, just as
they leave their gloves on every table and their umbrella at all doors.
His hands were of the kind that are dirty as soon as washed. In short,
his old body, badly poised on its knotted old legs, proving to what
degree a man can make it the mere accessory of his soul, belonged to
those strange creations which have been properly depicted only by a
German,--by Hoffman, the poet of that which seems not to exist but yet
has life.

Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach;
a musical genius, who was now examined by a council of devotes, and
asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer,
"Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and
Jansenist confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in
the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand
and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere
comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave
him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed
to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred francs a
year and his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never found courage
to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two
adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of
maternal rigor and the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke
and the girlhood of the two Maries.

No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered
the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as
mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a
music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and
address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This
tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were
lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen.
His artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty,
reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches
in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said
with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a
laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy
had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully
ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within
their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for
reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of
protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to
overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home,
they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and
spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three
daughters of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk
with music, were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials;
they made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives.
Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain
secondary geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion
which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts,
though it permeated that other creation through which, in spirit, they
winged their flight. When they had executed some great work in a
manner that their master declared was almost faultless, they embraced
each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years
of age, and then only four times a year in special houses. They were
not allowed to leave their mother's side without instructions as to
their behavior with their partners; and so severe were those
instructions that they dared say only yes or no during a dance. The
eye of the countess never left them, and she seemed to know from the
mere movement of their lips the words they uttered. Even the
ball-dresses of these poor little things were piously irreproachable;
their muslin gowns came up to their chins with an endless number of
thick ruches, and the sleeves came down to their wrists. Swathing in
this way their natural charms, this costume gave them a vague
resemblance to Egyptian hermae; though from these blocks of muslin
rose enchanting little heads of tender melancholy. They felt
themselves the objects of pity, and inwardly resented it. What woman,
however innocent, does not desire to excite envy?

No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp
of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly
red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from
the hands of God than these two girls from their mother's home when
they went to the mayor's office and the church to be married, after
receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two
men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by
night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses
where they were to go than the maternal convent.

Why did the father of these poor girls, the Comte de Granville, a wise
and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics),
refrain from protecting the helpless little creatures from such
crushing despotism? Alas! by mutual understanding, about ten years
after marriage, he and his wife were separated while living under one
roof. The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons,
leaving that of the daughters to his wife. He saw less danger for
women than for men in the application of his wife's oppressive system.
The two Maries, destined as women to endure tyranny, either of love or
marriage, would be, he thought, less injured than boys, whose minds
ought to have freer play, and whose manly qualities would deteriorate
under the powerful compression of religious ideas pushed to their
utmost consequences. Of four victims the count saved two.

The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the
slightest intimacy with their sisters. All communication between the
poor children was therefore strictly watched. When the boys came home
from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house. The
boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after that
the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or, during
the summer season, into the country. Except on the solemn days of some
family festival, such as the countess's birthday or New Year's day, or
the day of the distribution of prizes, when the boys remained in their
father's house and slept there, the sisters saw so little of their
brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them. On those days
the countess never left them for an instant alone together. Calls of
"Where is Angelique?"--"What is Eugenie about?"--"Where are my
daughters?" resounded all day. As for the mother's sentiments towards
her sons, the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes,
as if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.

Her exclamations, and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,
were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah, and completely
deceived the sisters, who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed
to perdition.

When the boys were eighteen years of age, the count gave them rooms in
his own part of the house, and sent them to study law under the
supervision of a solicitor, his former secretary. The two Maries knew
nothing therefore of fraternity, except by theory. At the time of the
marriage of the sisters, both brothers were practising in provincial
courts, and both were detained by important cases. Domestic life in
many families which might be expected to be intimate, united, and
homogeneous, is really spent in this way. Brothers are sent to a
distance, busy with their own careers, their own advancement,
occupied, perhaps, about the good of the country; the sisters are
engrossed in a round of other interests. All the members of such a
family live disunited, forgetting one another, bound together only by
some feeble tie of memory, until, perhaps, a sentiment of pride or
self-interest either joins them or separates them in heart as they
already are in fact. Modern laws, by multiplying the family by the
family, has created a great evil,--namely, individualism.

In the depths of this solitude where their girlhood was spent,
Angelique and Eugenie seldom saw their father, and when he did enter
the grand apartment of his wife on the first floor, he brought with
him a saddened face. In his own home he always wore the grave and
solemn look of a magistrate on the bench. When the little girls had
passed the age of dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to
use their minds (an epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke)
they divined the secret of the cares that lined their father's
forehead, and they recognized beneath that mask of sternness the
relics of a kind heart and a fine character. They vaguely perceived
how he had yielded to the forces of religion in his household,
disappointed as he was in his hopes of a husband, and wounded in the
tenderest fibres of paternity,--the love of a father for his
daughters. Such griefs were singularly moving to the hearts of the two
young girls, who were themselves deprived of all tenderness.
Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters, with an arm
round each little waist, and stepping with their own short steps, the
father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight of the
house, and kiss them on their foreheads; his eyes, his lips, his whole
countenance expressing the deepest commiseration.

"You are not very happy, my dear little girls," he said one day; "but
I shall marry you early. It will comfort me to have you leave home."

"Papa," said Eugenie, "we have decided to take the first man who
offers."

"Ah!" he cried, "that is the bitter fruit of such a system. They want
to make saints, and they make--" he stopped without ending his
sentence.

Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father's
"Adieu," or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home. They
pitied that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.

This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the
two sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the
hand of Nature. Many men, driven to marriage, prefer a girl taken from
a convent, and saturated with piety, to a girl brought up to worldly
ideas. There seems to be no middle course. A man must marry either an
educated girl, who reads the newspapers and comments upon them, who
waltzes with a dozen young men, goes to the theatre, devours novels,
cares nothing for religion, and makes her own ethics, or an ignorant
and innocent young girl, like either of the two Maries. Perhaps there
may be as much danger with the one kind as with the other. Yet the
vast majority of men who are not so old as Arnolphe, prefer a
religious Agnes to a budding Celimene.

The two Maries, who were small and slender, had the same figure, the
same foot, the same hand. Eugenie, the younger, was fair-haired, like
her mother, Angelique was dark-haired, like the father. But they both
had the same complexion,--a skin of the pearly whiteness which shows
the richness and purity of the blood, where the color rises through a
tissue like that of the jasmine, soft, smooth, and tender to the
touch. Eugenie's blue eyes and the brown eyes of Angelique had an
expression of artless indifference, of ingenuous surprise, which was
rendered by the vague manner with which the pupils floated on the
fluid whiteness of the eyeball. They were both well-made; the rather
thin shoulders would develop later. Their throats, long veiled,
delighted the eye when their husbands requested them to wear low
dresses to a ball, on which occasion they both felt a pleasing shame,
which made them first blush behind closed doors, and afterwards,
through a whole evening in company.