A Drama on the Seashore

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A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Madame la Princesse Caroline Galitzin de Genthod, nee Comtesse
Walewska. Homage and remembrances of

The Author.




A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE

Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in
measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the
angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon
of the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which
for all men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of
great thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense
desires. After that age, short as the seed-time, comes that of
execution. There are, as it were, two youths,--the youth of belief,
the youth of action; these are often commingled in men whom Nature has
favored and who, like Caesar, like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the
greatest among great men.

I was measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop.
Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the
ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed
my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on
vacant ground a palace or a fort.

The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaited
Pauline, who was also bathing, in a granite cove floored with fine
sand, the most coquettish bath-room that Nature ever devised for her
water-fairies. The spot was at the farther end of Croisic, a dainty
little peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so
inaccessible that the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass
that way. To float in ether after floating on the wave!--ah! who would
not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence
comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads
without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more
imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like
fortune, by the hair when it comes.

Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was
galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I
looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild
imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a
woman issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur
of the rippling fringes as their flux and reflux marked a white line
along the shore. Hearing that note as it gushed from a soul, I fancied
I saw among the rocks the foot of an angel, who with outspread wings
cried out to me, "Thou shalt succeed!" I came down radiant,
light-hearted; I bounded like a pebble rolling down a rapid slope.
When she saw me, she said,--

"What is it?"

I did not answer; my eyes were moist. The night before, Pauline had
understood my sorrows, as she now understood my joy, with the magical
sensitiveness of a harp that obeys the variations of the atmosphere.
Human life has glorious moments. Together we walked in silence along
the beach. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a ripple; others
might have thought them merely two blue surfaces, the one above the
other, but we--we who heard without the need of words, we who could
evoke between these two infinitudes the illusions that nourish youth,
--we pressed each other's hands at every change in the sheet of water
or the sheets of air, for we took those slight phenomena as the
visible translation of our double thought. Who has never tasted in
wedded love that moment of illimitable joy when the soul seems freed
from the trammels of flesh, and finds itself restored, as it were, to
the world whence it came? Are there not hours when feelings clasp each
other and fly upward, like children taking hands and running, they
scarce know why? It was thus we went along.

At the moment when the village roofs began to show like a faint gray
line on the horizon, we met a fisherman, a poor man returning to
Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousers ragged round the
bottom; his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This
abject poverty pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmonies. We
looked at each other, grieving mutually that we had not at that moment
the power to dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a
splendid lobster and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman
was dangling in his right hand, while with the left he held his tackle
and his net.

We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which
came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was
one of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place
where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments
when life sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery
is that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not
remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,
sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope
descended to the soul! At this moment, the sun, sympathizing with
these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon
the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were
visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,
--really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath
its scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with
their velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations;
oh, happy exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne
had spoken to me thus. The rock of Croisic may be perhaps the last of
these my joys. If so, what will become of Pauline?

"Have you had a good catch to-day, my man?" I said to the fisherman.

"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping and turning toward us the
swarthy face of those who spend whole days exposed to the reflection
of the sun upon the water.

That face was an emblem of long resignation, of the patience of a
fisherman and his quiet ways. The man had a voice without harshness,
kind lips, evidently no ambition, and something frail and puny about
him. Any other sort of countenance would, at that moment, have jarred
upon us.

"Where shall you sell your fish?"

"In the town."

"How much will they pay you for that lobster?"

"Fifteen sous."

"And the crab?"

"Twenty sous."

"Why so much difference between a lobster and a crab?"

"Monsieur, the crab is much more delicate eating. Besides, it's as
malicious as a monkey, and it seldom lets you catch it."

"Will you let us buy the two for a hundred sous?" asked Pauline.

The man seemed petrified.

"You shall not have it!" I said to her, laughing. "I'll pay ten
francs; we should count the emotions in."

"Very well," she said, "then I'll pay ten francs, two sous."

"Ten francs, ten sous."

"Twelve francs."

"Fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs, fifty centimes," she said.

"One hundred francs."

"One hundred and fifty francs."

I yielded. We were not rich enough at that moment to bid higher. Our
poor fisherman did not know whether to be angry at a hoax, or to go
mad with joy; we drew him from his quandary by giving him the name of
our landlady and telling him to take the lobster and the crab to her
house.

"Do you earn enough to live on?" I asked the man, in order to discover
the cause of his evident penury.

"With great hardships, and always poorly," he replied. "Fishing on the
coast, when one hasn't a boat or deep-sea nets, nothing but pole and
line, is a very uncertain business. You see we have to wait for the
fish, or the shell-fish; whereas a real fisherman puts out to sea for
them. It is so hard to earn a living this way that I'm the only man in
these parts who fishes along-shore. I spend whole days without getting
anything. To catch a crab, it must go to sleep, as this one did, and a
lobster must be silly enough to stay among the rocks. Sometimes after
a high tide the mussels come in and I grab them."

"Well, taking one day with another, how much do you earn?"

"Oh, eleven or twelve sous. I could do with that if I were alone; but
I have got my old father to keep, and he can't do anything, the good
man, because he's blind."

At these words, said simply, Pauline and I looked at each other
without a word; then I asked,--

"Haven't you a wife, or some good friend?"

He cast upon us one of the most lamentable glances that I ever saw as
he answered,--

"If I had a wife I must abandon my father; I could not feed him and a
wife and children too."

"Well, my poor lad, why don't you try to earn more at the salt
marshes, or by carrying the salt to the harbor?"

"Ah, monsieur, I couldn't do that work three months. I am not strong
enough, and if I died my father would have to beg. I am forced to take
a business which only needs a little knack and a great deal of
patience."

"But how can two persons live on twelve sous a day?"

"Oh, monsieur, we eat cakes made of buckwheat, and barnacles which I
get off the rocks."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-seven."

"Did you ever leave Croisic?"

"I went once to Guerande to draw for the conscription; and I went to
Savenay to the messieurs who measure for the army. If I had been half
an inch taller they'd have made me a soldier. I should have died of my
first march, and my poor father would to-day be begging his bread."

I had thought out many dramas; Pauline was accustomed to great
emotions beside a man so suffering as myself; well, never had either
of us listened to words so moving as these. We walked on in silence,
measuring, each of us, the silent depths of that obscure life,
admiring the nobility of a devotion which was ignorant of itself. The
strength of that feebleness amazed us; the man's unconscious
generosity belittled us. I saw that poor being of instinct chained to
that rock like a galley-slave to his ball; watching through twenty
years for shell-fish to earn a living, and sustained in his patience
by a single sentiment. How many hours wasted on a lonely shore! How
many hopes defeated by a change of weather! He was hanging there to a
granite rock, his arm extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his
father, sitting in their hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a
meal of the coarsest bread and shell-fish, if the sea permitted.

"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked.

"Three or four times a year," he replied.

"Well, you shall drink it to-day,--you and your father; and we will
send you some white bread."

"You are very kind, monsieur."

"We will give you your dinner if you will show us the way along the
shore to Batz, where we wish to see the tower which overlooks the bay
between Batz and Croisic."

"With pleasure," he said. "Go straight before you, along the path you
are now on, and I will follow you when I have put away my tackle."

We nodded consent, and he ran off joyfully toward the town. This
meeting maintained us in our previous mental condition; but it
lessened our gay lightheartedness.

"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which removes from the
compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we
not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"

"Nothing is so cruelly painful as to have powerless desires," I
answered. "Those two poor creatures, the father and son, will never
know how keen our sympathy for them is, any more than the world will
know how beautiful are their lives; they are laying up their treasures
in heaven."

"Oh, how poor this country is!" she said, pointing to a field enclosed
by a dry stone wall, which was covered with droppings of cow's dung
applied symmetrically. "I asked a peasant-woman who was busy sticking
them on, why it was done; she answered that she was making fuel. Could
you have imagined that when those patches of dung have dried, human
beings would collect them, store them, and use them for fuel? During
the winter, they are even sold as peat is sold. And what do you
suppose the best dressmaker in the place can earn?--five sous a day!"
adding, after a pause, "and her food."

"But see," I said, "how the winds from the sea bend or destroy
everything. There are no trees. Fragments of wreckage or old vessels
that are broken up are sold to those who can afford to buy; for costs
of transportation are too heavy to allow them to use the firewood with
which Brittany abounds. This region is fine for none but noble souls;
persons without sentiments could never live here; poets and barnacles
alone should inhabit it. All that ever brought a population to this
rock were the salt-marshes and the factory which prepares the salt. On
one side the sea; on the other, sand; above, illimitable space."

We had now passed the town, and had reached the species of desert
which separates Croisic from the village of Batz. Imagine, my dear
uncle, a barren track of miles covered with the glittering sand of the
seashore. Here and there a few rocks lifted their heads; you might
have thought them gigantic animals couchant on the dunes. Along the
coast were reefs, around which the water foamed and sparkled, giving
them the appearance of great white roses, floating on the liquid
surface or resting on the shore. Seeing this barren tract with the
ocean on one side, and on the other the arm of the sea which runs up
between Croisic and the rocky shore of Guerande, at the base of which
lay the salt marshes, denuded of vegetation, I looked at Pauline and
asked her if she felt the courage to face the burning sun and the
strength to walk through sand.

"I have boots," she said. "Let us go," and she pointed to the tower of
Batz, which arrested the eye by its immense pile placed there like a
pyramid; but a slender, delicately outlined pyramid, a pyramid so
poetically ornate that the imagination figured in it the earliest ruin
of a great Asiatic city.

We advanced a few steps and sat down upon the portion of a large rock
which was still in the shade. But it was now eleven o'clock, and the
shadow, which ceased at our feet, was disappearing rapidly.

"How beautiful this silence!" she said to me; "and how the depth of it
is deepened by the rhythmic quiver of the wave upon the shore."

"If you will give your understanding to the three immensities which
surround us, the water, the air, and the sands, and listen exclusively
to the repeating sounds of flux and reflux," I answered her, "you will
not be able to endure their speech; you will think it is uttering a
thought which will annihilate you. Last evening, at sunset, I had that
sensation; and it exhausted me."

"Oh! let us talk, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "I
understand it. No orator was ever more terrible. I think," she
continued, presently, "that I perceive the causes of the harmonies
which surround us. This landscape, which has but three marked colors,
--the brilliant yellow of the sands, the blue of the sky, the even
green of the sea,--is grand without being savage; it is immense, yet
not a desert; it is monotonous, but it does not weary; it has only
three elements, and yet it is varied."

"Women alone know how to render such impressions," I said. "You would
be the despair of a poet, dear soul that I divine so well!"

"The extreme heat of mid-day casts into those three expressions of the
infinite an all-powerful color," said Pauline, smiling. "I can here
conceive the poesy and the passion of the East."

"And I can perceive its despair."

"Yes," she said, "this dune is a cloister,--a sublime cloister."

We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's
hands that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,
we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like
children, we held each other's hands; in fact, we could hardly have
made a dozen steps had we walked arm in arm. The path which led to
Batz was not so much as traced. A gust of wind was enough to efface
all tracks left by the hoofs of horses or the wheels of carts; but the
practised eye of our guide could recognize by scraps of mud or the
dung of cattle the road that crossed that desert, now descending
towards the sea, then rising landward according to either the fall of
the ground or the necessity of rounding some breastwork of rock. By
mid-day, we were only half way.

"We will stop to rest over there," I said, pointing to a promontory of
rocks sufficiently high to make it probable we should find a grotto.

The fisherman, who heard me and saw the direction in which I pointed,
shook his head, and said,--

"Some one is there. All those who come from the village of Batz to
Croisic, or from Croisic to Batz, go round that place; they never pass
it."

These words were said in a low voice, and seemed to indicate a
mystery.

"Who is he,--a robber, a murderer?"

Our guide answered only by drawing a deep breath, which redoubled our
curiosity.

"But if we pass that way, would any harm happen to us?"

"Oh, no!"

"Will you go with us?"

"No, monsieur."

"We will go, if you assure us there is no danger."

"I do not say so," replied the fisherman, hastily. "I only say that he
who is there will say nothing to you, and do you no harm. He never so
much as moves from his place."

"Who is it?"

"A man."

Never were two syllables pronounced in so tragic a manner. At this
moment we were about fifty feet from the rocky eminence, which
extended a long reef into the sea. Our guide took a path which led him
round the base of the rock. We ourselves continued our way over it;
but Pauline took my arm. Our guide hastened his steps in order to meet
us on the other side, where the two paths came together again.

This circumstance excited our curiosity, which soon became so keen
that our hearts were beating as if with a sense of fear. In spite of
the heat of the day, and the fatigue caused by toiling through the
sand, our souls were still surrendered to the softness unspeakable of
our exquisite ecstasy. They were filled with that pure pleasure which
cannot be described unless we liken it to the joy of listening to
enchanting music, Mozart's "Audiamo mio ben," for instance. When two
pure sentiments blend together, what is that but two sweet voices
singing? To be able to appreciate properly the emotion that held us,
it would be necessary to share the state of half sensuous delight into
which the events of the morning had plunged us. Admire for a long time
some pretty dove with iridescent colors, perched on a swaying branch
above a spring, and you will give a cry of pain when you see a hawk
swooping down upon her, driving its steel claws into her breast, and
bearing her away with murderous rapidity. When we had advanced a step
or two into an open space which lay before what seemed to be a grotto,
a sort of esplanade placed a hundred feet above the ocean, and
protected from its fury by buttresses of rock, we suddenly experienced
an electrical shudder, something resembling the shock of a sudden
noise awaking us in the dead of night.

We saw, sitting on a vast granite boulder, a man who looked at us. His
glance, like that of the flash of a cannon, came from two bloodshot
eyes, and his stoical immobility could be compared only to the
immutable granite masses that surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly,
his body remaining rigid as though he were petrified. Then, having
cast upon us that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes
once more to the limitless ocean, and gazed upon it, in spite of its
dazzling light, as eagles gaze at the sun, without lowering his
eyelids. Try to remember, dear uncle, one of those old oaks, whose
knotty trunks, from which the branches have been lopped, rise with
weird power in some lonely place, and you will have an image of this
man. Here was a ruined Herculean frame, the face of an Olympian Jove,
destroyed by age, by hard sea toil, by grief, by common food, and
blackened as it were by lightning. Looking at his hard and hairy
hands, I saw that the sinews stood out like cords of iron. Everything
about him denoted strength of constitution. I noticed in a corner of
the grotto a quantity of moss, and on a sort of ledge carved by nature
on the granite, a loaf of bread, which covered the mouth of an
earthenware jug. Never had my imagination, when it carried me to the
deserts where early Christian anchorites spent their lives, depicted
to my mind a form more grandly religious nor more horribly repentant
than that of this man. You, who have a life-long experience of the
confessional, dear uncle, you may never, perhaps, have seen so awful a
remorse,--remorse sunk in the waves of prayer, the ceaseless
supplication of a mute despair. This fisherman, this mariner, this
hard, coarse Breton, was sublime through some hidden emotion. Had
those eyes wept? That hand, moulded for an unwrought statue, had it
struck? That ragged brow, where savage honor was imprinted, and on
which strength had left vestiges of the gentleness which is an
attribute of all true strength, that forehead furrowed with wrinkles,
was it in harmony with the heart within? Why was this man in the
granite? Why was the granite in the man? Which was the man, which was
the granite? A world of fancies came into our minds. As our guide had
prophesied, we passed in silence, rapidly; when he met us he saw our
emotion of mingled terror and astonishment, but he made no boast of
the truth of his prediction; he merely said,--

"You have seen him."

"Who is that man?"

"They call him the Man of the Vow."

You can imagine the movement with which our two heads turned at once
to our guide. He was a simple-hearted fellow; he understood at once
our mute inquiry, and here follows what he told us; I shall try to
give it as best I can in his own language, retaining his popular
parlance.

"Madame, folks from Croisic and those from Batz think this man is
guilty of something, and is doing a penance ordered by a famous rector
to whom he confessed his sin somewhere beyond Nantes. Others think
that Cambremer, that's his name, casts an evil fate on those who come
within his air, and so they always look which way the wind is before
they pass this rock. If it's nor'-westerly they wouldn't go by, no,
not if their errand was to get a bit of the true cross; they'd go
back, frightened. Others--they are the rich folks of Croisic--they say
that Cambremer has made a vow, and that's why people call him the Man
of the Vow. He is there night and day, he never leaves the place. All
these sayings have some truth in them. See there," he continued,
turning round to show us a thing we had not remarked, "look at that
wooden cross he has set up there, to the left, to show that he has put
himself under the protection of God and the holy Virgin and the
saints. But the fear that people have of him keeps him as safe as if
he were guarded by a troop of soldiers. He has never said one word
since he locked himself up in the open air in this way; he lives on
bread and water, which is brought to him every morning by his
brother's daughter, a little lass about twelve years old to whom he
has left his property, a pretty creature, gentle as a lamb, a nice
little girl, so pleasant. She has such blue eyes, long as _that_," he
added, marking a line on his thumb, "and hair like the cherubim. When
you ask her: 'Tell me, Perotte' (That's how we say Pierette in these
parts," he remarked, interrupting himself; "she is vowed to Saint
Pierre; Cambremer is named Pierre, and he was her godfather)--'Tell
me, Perotte, what does your uncle say to you?'--'He says nothing to
me, nothing.'--'Well, then, what does he do to you?' 'He kisses me on
the forehead, Sundays.'--'Are you afraid of him?'--'Ah, no, no; isn't
he my godfather? he wouldn't have anybody but me bring him his food.'
Perotte declares that he smiles when she comes; but you might as well
say the sun shines in a fog; he's as gloomy as a cloudy day."

"But," I said to him, "you excite our curiosity without satisfying it.
Do you know what brought him there? Was it grief, or repentance; is it
a mania; is it crime, is it--"

"Eh, monsieur, there's no one but my father and I who know the real
truth. My late mother was servant in the family of a lawyer to whom
Cambremer told all by order of the priest, who wouldn't give him
absolution until he had done so--at least, that's what the folks of
the port say. My poor mother overheard Cambremer without trying to;
the lawyer's kitchen was close to the office, and that's how she
heard. She's dead, and so is the lawyer. My mother made us promise, my
father and I, not to talk about the matter to the folks of the
neighborhood; but I can tell you my hair stood on end the night she
told us the tale."