A Woman of Thirty

H >> Honore de Balzac >> A Woman of Thirty


"Perhaps, monsieur, you will find happiness, and happiness is worth
more than all the brilliant things, true and false, that are said
every evening in Paris."

Before Charles took leave, he asked permission to pay a farewell call
on the Marquise d'Aiglemont, and very lucky did he feel himself when
the form of words in which he expressed himself for once was used in
all sincerity; and that night, and all day long on the morrow, he
could not put the thought of the Marquise out of his mind.

At times he wondered why she had singled him out, what she had meant
when she asked him to come to see her, and thought supplied an
inexhaustible commentary. Again it seemed to him that he had
discovered the motives of her curiosity, and he grew intoxicated with
hope or frigidly sober with each new construction put upon that piece
of commonplace civility. Sometimes it meant everything, sometimes
nothing. He made up his mind at last that he would not yield to this
inclination, and--went to call on Mme. d'Aiglemont.

There are thoughts which determine our conduct, while we do not so
much as suspect their existence. If at first sight this assertion
appears to be less a truth than a paradox, let any candid inquirer
look into his own life and he shall find abundant confirmation
therein. Charles went to Mme. d'Aiglemont, and so obeyed one of these
latent, pre-existent germs of thought, of which our experience and our
intellectual gains and achievements are but later and tangible
developments.

For a young man a woman of thirty has irresistible attractions. There
is nothing more natural, nothing better established, no human tie of
stouter tissue than the heart-deep attachment between such a woman as
the Marquise d'Aiglemont and such a man as Charles de Vandenesse. You
can see examples of it every day in the world. A girl, as a matter of
fact, has too many young illusions, she is too inexperienced, the
instinct of sex counts for too much in her love for a young man to
feel flattered by it. A woman of thirty knows all that is involved in
the self-surrender to be made. Among the impulses of the first, put
curiosity and other motives than love; the second acts with integrity
of sentiment. The first yields; the second makes deliberate choice. Is
not that choice in itself an immense flattery? A woman armed with
experience, forewarned by knowledge, almost always dearly bought,
seems to give more than herself; while the inexperienced and credulous
girl, unable to draw comparisons for lack of knowledge, can appreciate
nothing at its just worth. She accepts love and ponders it. A woman is
a counselor and a guide at an age when we love to be guided and
obedience is delight; while a girl would fain learn all things,
meeting us with a girl's _naivete_ instead of a woman's tenderness.
She affords a single triumph; with a woman there is resistance upon
resistance to overcome; she has but joy and tears, a woman has rapture
and remorse.

A girl cannot play the part of a mistress unless she is so corrupt
that we turn from her with loathing; a woman has a thousand ways of
preserving her power and her dignity; she has risked so much for love,
that she must bid him pass through his myriad transformations, while
her too submissive rival gives a sense of too serene security which
palls. If the one sacrifices her maidenly pride, the other immolates
the honor of a whole family. A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she
thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's
coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she
satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to
one.

And there are terrors, fears, and hesitations--trouble and storm in
the love of a woman of thirty years, never to be found in a young
girl's love. At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back
the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her
thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids
him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself,
or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young
girl can only make moan. And with all the advantages of her position,
the woman of thirty can be a girl again, for she can play all parts,
assume a girl's bashfulness, and grow the fairer even for a mischance.

Between these two feminine types lies the immeasurable difference
which separates the foreseen from the unforeseen, strength from
weakness. The woman of thirty satisfies every requirement; the young
girl must satisfy none, under penalty of ceasing to be a young girl.
Such ideas as these, developing in a young man's mind, help to
strengthen the strongest of all passions, a passion in which all
spontaneous and natural feeling is blended with the artificial
sentiment created by conventional manners.

The most important and decisive step in a woman's life is the very one
that she invariably regards as the most insignificant. After her
marriage she is no longer her own mistress, she is the queen and the
bond-slave of the domestic hearth. The sanctity of womanhood is
incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman
emancipation means corruption. If you give a stranger the right of
entry into the sanctuary of home, do you not put yourself at his
mercy? How then if she herself bids him enter it? Is not this an
offence, or, to speak more accurately, a first step towards an
offence? You must either accept this theory with all its consequences,
or absolve illicit passion. French society hitherto has chosen the
third and middle course of looking on and laughing when offences come,
apparently upon the Spartan principle of condoning the theft and
punishing clumsiness. And this system, it may be, is a very wise one.
'Tis a most appalling punishment to have all your neighbors pointing
the finger of scorn at you, a punishment that a woman feels in her
very heart. Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious
of respect; without esteem they cannot exist, esteem is the first
demand that they make of love. The most corrupt among them feels that
she must, in the first place, pledge the future to buy absolution for
the past, and strives to make her lover understand that only for
irresistible bliss can she barter the respect which the world
henceforth will refuse to her.

Some such reflections cross the mind of any woman who for the first
time and alone receives a visit from a young man; and this especially
when, like Charles de Vandenesse, the visitor is handsome or clever.
And similarly there are not many young men who would fail to base some
secret wish on one of the thousand and one ideas which justify the
instinct that attracts them to a beautiful, witty, and unhappy woman
like the Marquise d'Aiglemont.

Mme. d'Aiglemont, therefore, felt troubled when M. de Vandenesse was
announced; and as for him, he was almost confused in spite of the
assurance which is like a matter of costume for a diplomatist. But not
for long. The Marquise took refuge at once in the friendliness of
manner which women use as a defence against the misinterpretations of
fatuity, a manner which admits of no afterthought, while it paves the
way to sentiment (to make use of a figure of speech), tempering the
transition through the ordinary forms of politeness. In this ambiguous
position, where the four roads leading respectively to Indifference,
Respect, Wonder, and Passion meet, a woman may stay as long as she
pleases, but only at thirty years does she understand all the
possibilities of the situation. Laughter, tenderness, and jest are all
permitted to her at the crossing of the ways; she has acquired the
tact by which she finds all the responsive chords in a man's nature,
and skill in judging the sounds which she draws forth. Her silence is
as dangerous as her speech. You will never read her at that age, nor
discover if she is frank or false, nor how far she is serious in her
admissions or merely laughing at you. She gives you the right to
engage in a game of fence with her, and suddenly by a glance, a
gesture of proved potency, she closes the combat and turns from you
with your secret in her keeping, free to offer you up in a jest, free
to interest herself in you, safe alike in her weakness and your
strength.

Although the Marquise d'Aiglemont took up her position upon this
neutral ground during the first interview, she knew how to preserve a
high womanly dignity. The sorrows of which she never spoke seemed to
hang over her assumed gaiety like a light cloud obscuring the sun.
When Vandenesse went out, after a conversation which he had enjoyed
more than he had thought possible, he carried with him the conviction
that this was like to be too costly a conquest for his aspirations.

"It would mean sentiment from here to yonder," he thought, "and
correspondence enough to wear out a deputy second-clerk on his
promotion. And yet if I really cared----"

Luckless phrase that has been the ruin of many an infatuated mortal.
In France the way to love lies through self-love. Charles went back to
Mme. d'Aiglemont, and imagined that she showed symptoms of pleasure in
his conversion. And then, instead of giving himself up like a boy to
the joy of falling in love, he tried to play a double role. He did his
best to act passion and to keep cool enough to analyze the progress of
this flirtation, to be lover and diplomatist at once; but youth and
hot blood and analysis could only end in one way, over head and ears
in love; for, natural or artificial, the Marquise was more than his
match. Each time he went out from Mme. d'Aiglemont, he strenuously
held himself to his distrust, and submitted the progressive situations
of his case to a rigorous scrutiny fatal to his own emotions.

"To-day she gave me to understand that she has been very unhappy and
lonely," said he to himself, after the third visit, "and that but for
her little girl she would have longed for death. She was perfectly
resigned. Now as I am neither her brother nor her spiritual director,
why should she confide her troubles to _me_? She loves me."

Two days later he came away apostrophizing modern manners.

"Love takes on the hue of every age. In 1822 love is a doctrinaire.
Instead of proving love by deeds, as in times past, we have taken to
argument and rhetoric and debate. Women's tactics are reduced to three
shifts. In the first place, they declare that we cannot love as they
love. (Coquetry! the Marquise simply threw it at me, like a challenge,
this evening!) Next they grow pathetic, to appeal to our natural
generosity or self-love; for does it not flatter a young man's vanity
to console a woman for a great calamity? And lastly, they have a craze
for virginity. She must have thought that I thought her very innocent.
My good faith is like to become an excellent speculation."

But a day came when every suspicious idea was exhausted. He asked
himself whether the Marquise was not sincere; whether so much
suffering could be feigned, and why she should act the part of
resignation? She lived in complete seclusion; she drank in silence of
a cup of sorrow scarcely to be guessed unless from the accent of some
chance exclamation in a voice always well under control. From that
moment Charles felt a keen interest in Mme. d'Aiglemont. And yet,
though his visits had come to be a recognized thing, and in some sort
a necessity to them both, and though the hour was kept free by tacit
agreement, Vandenesse still thought that this woman with whom he was
in love was more clever than sincere. "Decidedly, she is an uncommonly
clever woman," he used to say to himself as he went away.

When he came into the room, there was the Marquise in her favorite
attitude, melancholy expressed in her whole form. She made no movement
when he entered, only raised her eyes and looked full at him, but the
glance that she gave him was like a smile. Mme. d'Aiglemont's manner
meant confidence and sincere friendship, but of love there was no
trace. Charles sat down and found nothing to say. A sensation for
which no language exists troubled him.

"What is the matter with you?" she asked in a softened voice.

"Nothing. . . . Yes; I am thinking of something of which, as yet, you
have not thought at all."

"What is it?"

"Why--the Congress is over."

"Well," she said, "and ought you to have been at the Congress?"

A direct answer would have been the most eloquent and delicate
declaration of love; but Charles did not make it. Before the candid
friendship in Mme. d'Aiglemont's face all the calculations of vanity,
the hopes of love, and the diplomatist's doubts died away. She did not
suspect, or she seemed not to suspect, his love for her; and Charles,
in utter confusion turning upon himself, was forced to admit that he
had said and done nothing which could warrant such a belief on her
part. For M. de Vandenesse that evening, the Marquise was, as she had
always been, simple and friendly, sincere in her sorrow, glad to have
a friend, proud to find a nature responsive to her own--nothing more.
It had not entered her mind that a woman could yield twice; she had
known love--love lay bleeding still in the depths of her heart, but
she did not imagine that bliss could bring her its rapture twice, for
she believed not merely in the intellect, but in the soul; and for her
love was no simple attraction; it drew her with all noble attractions.

In a moment Charles became a young man again, enthralled by the
splendor of a nature so lofty. He wished for a fuller initiation into
the secret history of a life blighted rather by fate than by her own
fault. Mme. d'Aiglemont heard him ask the cause of the overwhelming
sorrow which had blended all the harmonies of sadness with her beauty;
she gave him one glance, but that searching look was like a seal set
upon some solemn compact.

"Ask no more such questions of me," she said. "Four years ago, on this
very day, the man who loved me, for whom I would have given up
everything, even my own self-respect, died, and died to save my name.
That love was still young and pure and full of illusions when it came
to an end. Before I gave way to passion--and never was a woman so
urged by fate--I had been drawn into the mistake that ruins many a
girl's life, a marriage with a man whose agreeable manners concealed
his emptiness. Marriage plucked my hopes away one by one. And now,
to-day, I have forfeited happiness through marriage, as well as the
happiness styled criminal, and I have known no happiness. Nothing is
left to me. If I could not die, at least I ought to be faithful to my
memories."

No tears came with the words. Her eyes fell, and there was a slight
twisting of the fingers interclasped, according to her wont. It was
simply said, but in her voice there was a note of despair, deep as her
love seemed to have been, which left Charles without a hope. The
dreadful story of a life told in three sentences, with that twisting
of the fingers for all comment, the might of anguish in a fragile
woman, the dark depths masked by a fair face, the tears of four years
of mourning fascinated Vandenesse; he sat silent and diminished in the
presence of her woman's greatness and nobleness, seeing not the
physical beauty so exquisite, so perfectly complete, but the soul so
great in its power to feel. He had found, at last, the ideal of his
fantastic imaginings, the ideal so vigorously invoked by all who look
on life as the raw material of a passion for which many a one seeks
ardently, and dies before he has grasped the whole of the dreamed-of
treasure.

With those words of hers in his ears, in the presence of her sublime
beauty, his own thoughts seemed poor and narrow. Powerless as he felt
himself to find words of his own, simple enough and lofty enough to
scale the heights of this exaltation, he took refuge in platitudes as
to the destiny of women.

"Madame, we must either forget our pain, or hollow out a tomb for
ourselves."

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being
essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the
other is infinite. To set to work to reason where you are required to
feel, is the mark of a limited nature. Vandenesse therefore held his
peace, sat awhile with his eyes fixed upon her, then came away. A prey
to novel thoughts which exalted woman for him, he was in something the
same position as a painter who has taken the vulgar studio model for a
type of womanhood, and suddenly confronts the _Mnemosyne_ of the Musee
--that noblest and least appreciated of antique statues.

Charles de Vandenesse was deeply in love. He loved Mme. d'Aiglemont
with the loyalty of youth, with the fervor that communicates such
ineffable charm to a first passion, with a simplicity of heart of
which a man only recovers some fragments when he loves again at a
later day. Delicious first passion of youth, almost always deliciously
savored by the woman who calls it forth; for at the golden prime of
thirty, from the poetic summit of a woman's life, she can look out
over the whole course of love--backwards into the past, forwards into
the future--and, knowing all the price to be paid for love, enjoys her
bliss with the dread of losing it ever present with her. Her soul is
still fair with her waning youth, and passion daily gathers strength
from the dismaying prospect of the coming days.

"This is love," Vandenesse said to himself this time as he left the
Marquise, "and for my misfortune I love a woman wedded to her
memories. It is hard work to struggle against a dead rival, never
present to make blunders and fall out of favor, nothing of him left
but his better qualities. What is it but a sort of high treason
against the Ideal to attempt to break the charm of memory, to destroy
the hopes that survive a lost lover, precisely because he only
awakened longings, and all that is loveliest and most enchanting in
love?"

These sober reflections, due to the discouragement and dread of
failure with which love begins in earnest, were the last expiring
effort of diplomatic reasoning. Thenceforward he knew no
afterthoughts, he was the plaything of his love, and lost himself in
the nothings of that strange inexplicable happiness which is full fed
by a chance word, by silence, or a vague hope. He tried to love
Platonically, came daily to breathe the air that she breathed, became
almost a part of her house, and went everywhere with her, slave as he
was of a tyrannous passion compounded of egoism and devotion of the
completest. Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart,
as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which
nothing can dismay or turn aside. If feeling is sincere, its destiny
is not doubtful. Let a woman begin to think that her life depends on
the sincerity or fervor or earnestness which her lover shall put into
his longings, and is there not sufficient in the thought to put her
through all the tortures of dread? It is impossible for a woman, be
she wife or mother, to be secure from a young man's love. One thing it
is within her power to do--to refuse to see him as soon as she learns
a secret which she never fails to guess. But this is too decided a
step to take at an age when marriage has become a prosaic and tiresome
yoke, and conjugal affection is something less than tepid (if indeed
her husband has not already begun to neglect her). Is a woman plain?
she is flattered by a love which gives her fairness. Is she young and
charming? She is only to be won by a fascination as great as her own
power to charm, that is to say, a fascination well-nigh irresistible.
Is she virtuous? There is a love sublime in its earthliness which
leads her to find something like absolution in the very greatness of
the surrender and glory in a hard struggle. Everything is a snare. No
lesson, therefore, is too severe where the temptation is so strong.
The seclusion in which the Greeks and Orientals kept and keep their
women, an example more and more followed in modern England, is the
only safeguard of domestic morality; but under this system there is an
end of all the charm of social intercourse; and society, and good
breeding, and refinement of manners become impossible. The nations
must take their choice.

So a few months went by, and Mme. d'Aiglemont discovered that her life
was closely bound with this young man's life, without overmuch
confusion in her surprise, and felt with something almost like
pleasure that she shared his tastes and his thoughts. Had she adopted
Vandenesse's ideas? Or was it Vandenesse who had made her lightest
whims his own? She was not careful to inquire. She had been swept out
already into the current of passion, and yet this adorable woman told
herself with the confident reiteration of misgiving;

"Ah! no. I will be faithful to him who died for me."

Pascal said that "the doubt of God implies belief in God." And
similarly it may be said that a woman only parleys when she has
surrendered. A day came when the Marquise admitted to herself that she
was loved, and with that admission came a time of wavering among
countless conflicting thoughts and feelings. The superstitions of
experience spoke their language. Should she be happy? Was it possible
that she should find happiness outside the limits of the laws which
society rightly or wrongly has set up for humanity to live by?
Hitherto her cup of life had been full of bitterness. Was there any
happy issue possible for the ties which united two human beings held
apart by social conventions? And might not happiness be bought too
dear? Still, this so ardently desired happiness, for which it is so
natural to seek, might perhaps be found after all. Curiosity is always
retained on the lover's side in the suit. The secret tribunal was
still sitting when Vandenesse appeared, and his presence put the
metaphysical spectre, reason, to flight.

If such are the successive transformations through which a sentiment,
transient though it be, passes in a young man and a woman of thirty,
there comes a moment of time when the shades of difference blend into
each other, when all reasonings end in a single and final reflection
which is lost and absorbed in the desire which it confirms. Then the
longer the resistance, the mightier the voice of love. And here endeth
this lesson, or rather this study made from the _ecorche_, to borrow a
most graphic term from the studio, for in this history it is not so
much intended to portray love as to lay bare its mechanism and its
dangers. From this moment every day adds color to these dry bones,
clothes them again with living flesh and blood and the charm of youth,
and puts vitality into their movements; till they glow once more with
the beauty, the persuasive grace of sentiment, the loveliness of life.



Charles found Mme. d'Aiglemont absorbed in thought, and to his "What
is it?" spoken in thrilling tones grown persuasive with the heart's
soft magic, she was careful not to reply. The delicious question bore
witness to the perfect unity of their spirits; and the Marquise felt,
with a woman's wonderful intuition, that to give any expression to the
sorrow in her heart would be to make an advance. If, even now, each
one of those words was fraught with significance for them both, in
what fathomless depths might she not plunge at the first step? She
read herself with a clear and lucid glance. She was silent, and
Vandenesse followed her example.

"I am not feeling well," she said at last, taking alarm at the pause
fraught with such great moment for them both, when the language of the
eyes completely filled the blank left by the helplessness of speech.

"Madame," said Charles, and his voice was tender but unsteady with
strong feeling, "soul and body are both dependent on each other. If
you were happy, you would be young and fresh. Why do you refuse to ask
of love all that love has taken from you? You think that your life is
over when it is only just beginning. Trust yourself to a friend's
care. It is so sweet to be loved."

"I am old already," she said; "there is no reason why I should not
continue to suffer as in the past. And 'one must love,' do you say?
Well, I must not, and I cannot. Your friendship has put some sweetness
into my life, but beside you I care for no one, no one could efface my
memories. A friend I accept; I should fly from a lover. Besides, would
it be a very generous thing to do, to exchange a withered heart for a
young heart; to smile upon illusions which now I cannot share, to
cause happiness in which I should either have no belief, or tremble to
lose? I should perhaps respond to his devotion with egoism, should
weigh and deliberate while he felt; my memory would resent the
poignancy of his happiness. No, if you love once, that love is never
replaced, you see. Indeed, who would have my heart at this price?"

There was a tinge of heartless coquetry in the words, the last effort
of discretion.

"If he loses courage, well and good, I shall live alone and faithful."
The thought came from the very depths of the woman, for her it was the
too slender willow twig caught in vain by a swimmer swept out by the
current.