An Old Maid

H >> Honore de Balzac >> An Old Maid


One month passed away in the strangest uncertainties respecting the
marriage of Mademoiselle Cormon. A party of unbelievers denied the
marriage altogether; the believers, on the other hand, affirmed it. At
the end of two weeks, the faction of unbelief received a vigorous blow
in the sale of du Bousquier's house to the Marquis de Troisville, who
only wanted a simple establishment in Alencon, intending to go to
Paris after the death of the Princess Scherbellof; he proposed to
await that inheritance in retirement, and then to reconstitute his
estates. This seemed positive. The unbelievers, however, were not
crushed. They declared that du Bousquier, married or not, had made an
excellent sale, for the house had only cost him twenty-seven thousand
francs. The believers were depressed by this practical observation of
the incredulous. Choisnel, Mademoiselle Cormon's notary, asserted the
latter, had heard nothing about the marriage contract; but the
believers, still firm in their faith, carried off, on the twentieth
day, a signal victory: Monsieur Lepressoir, the notary of the
liberals, went to Mademoiselle Cormon's house, and the contract was
signed.

This was the first of the numerous sacrifices which Mademoiselle
Cormon was destined to make to her husband. Du Bousquier bore the
deepest hatred to Choisnel; to him he owed the refusal of the hand of
Mademoiselle Armande,--a refusal which, as he believed, had influenced
that of Mademoiselle Cormon. This circumstance alone made the marriage
drag along. Mademoiselle received several anonymous letters. She
learned, to her great astonishment, that Suzanne was as truly a virgin
as herself so far as du Bousquier was concerned, for that seducer with
the false toupet could never be the hero of any such adventure.
Mademoiselle Cormon disdained anonymous letters; but she wrote to
Suzanne herself, on the ground of enlightening the Maternity Society.
Suzanne, who had no doubt heard of du Bousquier's proposed marriage,
acknowledged her trick, sent a thousand francs to the society, and did
all the harm she could to the old purveyor. Mademoiselle Cormon
convoked the Maternity Society, which held a special meeting at which
it was voted that the association would not in future assist any
misfortunes about to happen, but solely those that had happened.

In spite of all these various events which kept the town in the
choicest gossip, the banns were published in the churches and at the
mayor's office. Athanase prepared the deeds. As a matter of propriety
and public decency, the bride retired to Prebaudet, where du
Bousquier, bearing sumptuous and horrible bouquets, betook himself
every morning, returning home for dinner.

At last, on a dull and rainy morning in June, the marriage of
Mademoiselle Cormon and the Sieur du Bousquier took place at noon in
the parish church of Alencon, in sight of the whole town. The bridal
pair went from their own house to the mayor's office, and from the
mayor's office to the church in an open caleche, a magnificent vehicle
for Alencon, which du Bousquier had sent for secretly to Paris. The
loss of the old carriole was a species of calamity in the eyes of the
community. The harness-maker of the Porte de Seez bemoaned it, for he
lost the fifty francs a year which it cost in repairs. Alencon saw
with alarm the possibility of luxury being thus introduced into the
town. Every one feared a rise in the price of rents and provisions,
and a coming invasion of Parisian furniture. Some persons were
sufficiently pricked by curiosity to give ten sous to Jacquelin to
allow them a close inspection of the vehicle which threatened to upset
the whole economy of the region. A pair of horses, bought in
Normandie, were also most alarming.

"If we bought our own horses," said the Ronceret circle, "we couldn't
sell them to those who come to buy."

Stupid as it was, this reasoning seemed sound; for surely such a
course would prevent the region from grasping the money of foreigners.
In the eyes of the provinces wealth consisted less in the rapid
turning over of money than in sterile accumulation. It may be
mentioned here that Penelope succumbed to a pleurisy which she
acquired about six weeks before the marriage; nothing could save her.

Madame Granson, Mariette, Madame du Coudrai, Madame du Ronceret, and
through them the whole town, remarked that Madame du Bousquier entered
the church /with her left foot/,--an omen all the more dreadful because
the term Left was beginning to acquire a political meaning. The priest
whose duty it was to read the opening formula opened his book by
chance at the De Profundis. Thus the marriage was accompanied by
circumstances so fateful, so alarming, so annihilating that no one
dared to augur well of it. Matters, in fact, went from bad to worse.
There was no wedding party; the married pair departed immediately for
Prebaudet. Parisian customs, said the community, were about to triumph
over time-honored provincial ways.

The marriage of Jacquelin and Josette now took place: it was gay; and
they were the only two persons in Alencon who refuted the sinister
prophecies relating to the marriage of their mistress.

Du Bousquier determined to use the proceeds of the sale of his late
residence in restoring and modernizing the hotel Cormon. He decided to
remain through two seasons at Prebaudet, and took the Abbe de Sponde
with them. This news spread terror through the town, where every
individual felt that du Bousquier was about to drag the community into
the fatal path of "comfort." This fear increased when the inhabitants
of Alencon saw the bridegroom driving in from Prebaudet one morning to
inspect his works, in a fine tilbury drawn by a new horse, having Rene
at his side in livery. The first act of his administration had been to
place his wife's savings on the Grand-Livre, which was then quoted at
67 fr. 50 cent. In the space of one year, during which he played
constantly for a rise, he made himself a personal fortune almost as
considerable as that of his wife.

But all these foreboding prophecies, these perturbing innovations,
were superseded and surpassed by an event connected with this marriage
which gave a still more fatal aspect to it.

On the very evening of the ceremony, Athanase and his mother were
sitting, after their dinner, over a little fire of fagots, which the
servant lighted usually at dessert.

"Well, we will go this evening to the du Roncerets', inasmuch as we
have lost Mademoiselle Cormon," said Madame Granson. "Heavens! how
shall I ever accustom myself to call her Madame du Bousquier! that
name burns my lips."

Athanase looked at his mother with a constrained and melancholy air;
he could not smile; but he seemed to wish to welcome that naive
sentiment which soothed his wound, though it could not cure his
anguish.

"Mamma," he said, in the voice of his childhood, so tender was it, and
using the name he had abandoned for several years,--"my dear mamma, do
not let us go out just yet; it is so pleasant here before the fire."

The mother heard, without comprehending, that supreme prayer of a
mortal sorrow.

"Yes, let us stay, my child," she said. "I like much better to talk
with you and listen to your projects than to play at boston and lose
my money."

"You are so handsome to-night I love to look at you. Besides, I am in
a current of ideas which harmonize with this poor little salon where
we have suffered so much."

"And where we shall still suffer, my poor Athanase, until your works
succeed. For myself, I am trained to poverty; but you, my treasure! to
see your youth go by without a joy! nothing but toil for my poor boy
in life! That thought is like an illness to a mother; it tortures me
at night; it wakes me in the morning. O God! what have I done? for
what crime dost thou punish me thus?"

She left her sofa, took a little chair, and sat close to Athanase, so
as to lay her head on the bosom of her child. There is always the
grace of love in true motherhood. Athanase kissed her on the eyes, on
her gray hair, on her forehead, with the sacred desire of laying his
soul wherever he applied his lips.

"I shall never succeed," he said, trying to deceive his mother as to
the fatal resolution he was revolving in his mind.

"Pooh! don't get discouraged. As you often say, thought can do all
things. With ten bottles of ink, ten reams of paper, and his powerful
will, Luther upset all Europe. Well, you'll make yourself famous; you
will do good things by the same means which he used to do evil things.
Haven't you said so yourself? For my part, I listen to you; I
understand you a great deal more than you think I do,--for I still
bear you in my bosom, and your every thought still stirs me as your
slightest motion did in other days."

"I shall never succeed here, mamma; and I don't want you to witness
the sight of my struggles, my misery, my anguish. Oh, mother, let me
leave Alencon! I want to suffer away from you."

"And I wish to be at your side," replied his mother, proudly. "Suffer
without your mother!--that poor mother who would be your servant if
necessary; who will efface herself rather than injure you; your
mother, who will never shame you. No, no, Athanase; we must not part."

Athanase clung to his mother with the ardor of a dying man who clings
to life.

"But I wish it, nevertheless. If not, you will lose me; this double
grief, yours and mine, is killing me. You would rather I lived than
died?"

Madame Granson looked at her son with a haggard eye.

"So this is what you have been brooding?" she said. "They told me
right. Do you really mean to go?"

"Yes."

"You will not go without telling me; without warning me? You must have
an outfit and money. I have some louis sewn into my petticoat; I shall
give them to you."

Athanase wept.

"That's all I wanted to tell you," he said. "Now I'll take you to the
du Roncerets'. Come."

The mother and the son went out. Athanase left his mother at the door
of the house where she intended to pass the evening. He looked long at
the light which came through the shutters; he clung closely to the
wall, and a frenzied joy came over him when he presently heard his
mother say, "He has great independence of heart."

"Poor mother! I have deceived her," he cried, as he made his way to
the Sarthe.

He reached the noble poplar beneath which he had meditated so much for
the last forty days, and where he had placed two heavy stones on which
he now sat down. He contemplated that beautiful nature lighted by the
moon; he reviewed once more the glorious future he had longed for; he
passed through towns that were stirred by his name; he heard the
applauding crowds; he breathed the incense of his fame; he adored that
life long dreamed of; radiant, he sprang to radiant triumphs; he
raised his stature; he evoked his illusions to bid them farewell in a
last Olympic feast. The magic had been potent for a moment; but now it
vanished forever. In that awful hour he clung to the beautiful tree to
which, as to a friend, he had attached himself; then he put the two
stones into the pockets of his overcoat, which he buttoned across his
breast. He had come intentionally without a hat. He now went to the
deep pool he had long selected, and glided into it resolutely, trying
to make as little noise as possible, and, in fact, making scarcely
any.

When, at half-past nine o'clock, Madame Granson returned home, her
servant said nothing of Athanase, but gave her a letter. She opened it
and read these few words,--

"My good mother, I have departed; don't be angry with me."

"A pretty trick he has played me!" she thought. "And his linen! and
the money! Well, he will write to me, and then I'll follow him. These
poor children think they are so much cleverer than their fathers and
mothers."

And she went to bed in peace.

During the preceding morning the Sarthe had risen to a height foreseen
by the fisherman. These sudden rises of muddy water brought eels from
their various runlets. It so happened that a fisherman had spread his
net at the very place where poor Athanase had flung himself, believing
that no one would ever find him. About six o'clock in the morning the
man drew in his net, and with it the young body. The few friends of
the poor mother took every precaution in preparing her to receive the
dreadful remains. The news of this suicide made, as may well be
supposed, a great excitement in Alencon. The poor young man of genius
had no protector the night before, but on the morrow of his death a
thousand voices cried aloud, "I would have helped him." It is so easy
and convenient to be charitable gratis!

The suicide was explained by the Chevalier de Valois. He revealed, in
a spirit of revenge, the artless, sincere, and genuine love of
Athanase for Mademoiselle Cormon. Madame Granson, enlightened by the
chevalier, remembered a thousand little circumstances which confirmed
the chevalier's statement. The story then became touching, and many
women wept over it. Madame Granson's grief was silent, concentrated,
and little understood. There are two forms of mourning for mothers.
Often the world can enter fully into the nature of their loss: their
son, admired, appreciated, young, perhaps handsome, with a noble path
before him, leading to fortune, possibly to fame, excites universal
regret; society joins in the grief, and alleviates while it magnifies
it. But there is another sorrow of mothers who alone know what their
child was really; who alone have received his smiles and observed the
treasures of a life too soon cut short. That sorrow hides its woe, the
blackness of which surpasses all other mourning; it cannot be
described; happily there are but few women whose heart-strings are
thus severed.

Before Madame du Bousquier returned to town, Madame du Ronceret, one
of her good friends, had driven out to Prebaudet to fling this corpse
upon the roses of her joy, to show her the love she had ignored, and
sweetly shed a thousand drops of wormwood into the honey of her bridal
month. As Madame du Bousquier drove back to Alencon, she chanced to
meet Madame Granson at the corner of the rue Val-Noble. The glance of
the mother, dying of her grief, struck to the heart of the poor woman.
A thousand maledictions, a thousand flaming reproaches, were in that
look: Madame du Bousquier was horror-struck; that glance predicted and
called down evil upon her head.

The evening after the catastrophe, Madame Granson, one of the persons
most opposed to the rector of the town, and who had hitherto supported
the minister of Saint-Leonard, began to tremble as she thought of the
inflexible Catholic doctrines professed by her own party. After
placing her son's body in its shroud with her own hands, thinking of
the mother of the Saviour, she went, with a soul convulsed by anguish,
to the house of the hated rector. There she found the modest priest in
an outer room, engaged in putting away the flax and yarns with which
he supplied poor women, in order that they might never be wholly out
of work,--a form of charity which saved many who were incapable of
begging from actual penury. The rector left his yarns and hastened to
take Madame Granson into his dining-room, where the wretched mother
noticed, as she looked at his supper, the frugal method of his own
living.

"Monsieur l'abbe," she said, "I have come to implore you--" She burst
into tears, unable to continue.

"I know what brings you," replied the saintly man. "I must trust to
you, madame, and to your relation, Madame du Bousquier, to pacify
Monseigneur the Bishop at Seez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy
child; yes, I will say the masses. But we must avoid all scandal, and
give no opportunity for evil-judging persons to assemble in the
church. I alone, without other clergy, at night--"

"Yes, yes, as you think best; if only he may lie in consecrated
ground," said the poor mother, taking the priest's hand and kissing
it.

Toward midnight a coffin was clandestinely borne to the parish church
by four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best. A few
friends of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were
present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat
intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin,
which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet
choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was
noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden
cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter
to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised
to blame the rector; the bishop kept silence. The piety of the mother
redeemed the impiety of the son's last act.

Some months later, the poor woman, half beside herself with grief, and
moved by one of those inexplicable thirsts which misery feels to steep
its lips in the bitter chalice, determined to see the spot where her
son was drowned. Her instinct may have told her that thoughts of his
could be recovered beneath that poplar; perhaps, too, she desired to
see what his eyes had seen for the last time. Some mothers would die
of the sight; others give themselves up to it in saintly adoration.
Patient anatomists of human nature cannot too often enunciate the
truths before which all educations, laws, and philosophical systems
must give way. Let us repeat continually: it is absurd to force
sentiments into one formula: appearing as they do, in each individual
man, they combine with the elements that form his nature and take his
own physiognomy.

Madame Granson, as she stood on that fatal spot, saw a woman approach
it, who exclaimed,--

"Was it here?"

That woman wept as the mother wept. It was Suzanne. Arriving that
morning at the hotel du More, she had been told of the catastrophe. If
poor Athanase had been living, she meant to do as many noble souls,
who are moneyless, dream of doing, and as the rich never think of
doing,--she meant to have sent him several thousand francs, writing up
the envelope the words: "Money due to your father from a comrade who
makes restitution to you." This tender scheme had been arranged by
Suzanne during her journey.

The courtesan caught sight of Madame Granson and moved rapidly away,
whispering as she passed her, "I loved him!"

Suzanne, faithful to her nature, did not leave Alencon on this
occasion without changing the orange-blossoms of the bride to rue. She
was the first to declare that Madame du Bousquier would never be
anything but Mademoiselle Cormon. With one stab of her tongue she
revenged poor Athanase and her dear chevalier.

Alencon now witnessed a suicide that was slower and quite differently
pitiful from that of poor Athanase, who was quickly forgotten by
society, which always makes haste to forget its dead. The poor
Chevalier de Valois died in life; his suicide was a daily occurrence
for fourteen years. Three months after the du Bousquier marriage
society remarked, not without astonishment, that the linen of the
chevalier was frayed and rusty, that his hair was irregularly combed
and brushed. With a frowsy head the Chevalier de Valois could no
longer be said to exist! A few of his ivory teeth deserted, though the
keenest observers of human life were unable to discover to what body
they had hitherto belonged, whether to a foreign legion or whether
they were indigenous, vegetable or animal; whether age had pulled them
from the chevalier's mouth, or whether they were left forgotten in the
drawer of his dressing-table. The cravat was crooked, indifferent to
elegance. The negroes' heads grew pale with dust and grease. The
wrinkles of the face were blackened and puckered; the skin became
parchment. The nails, neglected, were often seen, alas! with a black
velvet edging. The waistcoat was tracked and stained with droppings
which spread upon its surface like autumn leaves. The cotton in the
ears was seldom changed. Sadness reigned upon that brow, and slipped
its yellowing tints into the depths of each furrow. In short, the
ruins, hitherto so cleverly hidden, now showed through the cracks and
crevices of that fine edifice, and proved the power of the soul over
the body; for the fair and dainty man, the cavalier, the young blood,
died when hope deserted him. Until then the nose of the chevalier was
ever delicate and nice; never had a damp black blotch, nor an amber
drop fall from it; but now that nose, smeared with tobacco around the
nostrils, degraded by the driblets which took advantage of the natural
gutter placed between itself and the upper lip,--that nose, which no
longer cared to seem agreeable, revealed the infinite pains which the
chevalier had formerly taken with his person, and made observers
comprehend, by the extent of its degradation, the greatness and
persistence of the man's designs upon Mademoiselle Cormon.

Alas, too, the anecdotes went the way of the teeth; the clever sayings
grew rare. The appetite, however, remained; the old nobleman saved
nothing but his stomach from the wreck of his hopes; though he
languidly prepared his pinches of snuff, he ate alarming dinners.
Perhaps you will more fully understand the disaster that this marriage
was to the mind and heart of the chevalier when you learn that his
intercourse with the Princess Goritza became less frequent.

One day he appeared in Mademoiselle Armande's salon with the calf of
his leg on the shin-bone. This bankruptcy of the graces was, I do
assure you, terrible, and struck all Alencon with horror. The late
young man had become an old one; this human being, who, by the
breaking-down of his spirit, had passed at once from fifty to ninety
years of age, frightened society. Besides, his secret was betrayed; he
had waited and watched for Mademoiselle Cormon; he had, like a patient
hunter, adjusted his aim for ten whole years, and finally had missed
the game! In short, the impotent Republic had won the day from Valiant
Chivalry, and that, too, under the Restoration! Form triumphed; mind
was vanquished by matter, diplomacy by insurrection. And, O final
blow! a mortified grisette revealed the secret of the chevalier's
mornings, and he now passed for a libertine. The liberals cast at his
door all the foundlings hitherto attributed to du Bousquier. But the
faubourg Saint-Germain of Alencon accepted them proudly: it even said,
"That poor chevalier, what else could he do?" The faubourg pitied him,
gathered him closer to their circle, and brought back a few rare
smiles to his face; but frightful enmity was piled upon the head of du
Bousquier. Eleven persons deserted the Cormon salon, and passed to
that of the d'Esgrignons.

The old maid's marriage had a signal effect in defining the two
parties in Alencon. The salon d'Esgrignon represented the upper
aristocracy (the returning Troisvilles attached themselves to it); the
Cormon salon represented, under the clever influence of du Bousquier,
that fatal class of opinions which, without being truly liberal or
resolutely royalist, gave birth to the 221 on that famous day when the
struggle openly began between the most august, grandest, and only true
power, /royalty/, and the most false, most changeful, most oppressive of
all powers,--the power called /parliamentary/, which elective assemblies
exercise. The salon du Ronceret, secretly allied to the Cormon salon,
was boldly liberal.

The Abbe de Sponde, after his return from Prebaudet, bore many and
continual sufferings, which he kept within his breast, saying no word
of them to his niece. But to Mademoiselle Armande he opened his heart,
admitting that, folly for folly, he would much have preferred the
Chevalier de Valois to Monsieur du Bousquier. Never would the dear
chevalier have had the bad taste to contradict and oppose a poor old
man who had but a few days more to live; du Bousquier had destroyed
everything in the good old home. The abbe said, with scanty tears
moistening his aged eyes,--

"Mademoiselle, I haven't even the little grove where I have walked for
fifty years. My beloved lindens are all cut down! At the moment of my
death the Republic appears to me more than ever under the form of a
horrible destruction of the Home."

"You must pardon your niece," said the Chevalier de Valois.
"Republican ideas are the first error of youth which seeks for
liberty; later it finds it the worst of despotisms,--that of an
impotent canaille. Your poor niece is punished where she sinned."

"What will become of me in a house where naked women are painted on
the walls?" said the poor abbe. "Where shall I find other lindens
beneath which to read my breviary?"

Like Kant, who was unable to collect his thoughts after the fir-tree
at which he was accustomed to gaze while meditating was cut down, so
the poor abbe could never attain the ardor of his former prayers while
walking up and down the shadeless paths. Du Bousquier had planted an
English garden.

"It was best," said Madame du Bousquier, without thinking so; but the
Abbe Couterier had authorized her to commit many wrongs to please her
husband.