At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

H >> Honore de Balzac >> At the Sign of the Cat and Racket


One evening an idea flashed upon her that lighted up her dark grief
like a beam from heaven. Such an idea could never have smiled on a
heart less pure, less virtuous than hers. She determined to go to the
Duchesse de Carigliano, not to ask her to give her back her husband's
heart, but to learn the arts by which it had been captured; to engage
the interest of this haughty fine lady for the mother of her lover's
children; to appeal to her and make her the instrument of her future
happiness, since she was the cause of her present wretchedness.

So one day Augustine, timid as she was, but armed with supernatural
courage, got into her carriage at two in the afternoon to try for
admittance to the boudoir of the famous coquette, who was never
visible till that hour. Madame de Sommervieux had not yet seen any of
the ancient and magnificent mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As
she made her way through the stately corridors, the handsome
staircases, the vast drawing-rooms--full of flowers, though it was in
the depth of winter, and decorated with the taste peculiar to women
born to opulence or to the elegant habits of the aristocracy,
Augustine felt a terrible clutch at her heart; she coveted the secrets
of an elegance of which she had never had an idea; she breathed in an
air of grandeur which explained the attraction of the house for her
husband. When she reached the private rooms of the Duchess she was
filled with jealousy and a sort of despair, as she admired the
luxurious arrangement of the furniture, the draperies and the
hangings. Here disorder was a grace, here luxury affected a certain
contempt of splendor. The fragrance that floated in the warm air
flattered the sense of smell without offending it. The accessories of
the rooms were in harmony with a view, through plate-glass windows, of
the lawns in a garden planted with evergreen trees. It was all
bewitching, and the art of it was not perceptible. The whole spirit of
the mistress of these rooms pervaded the drawing-room where Augustine
awaited her. She tried to divine her rival's character from the aspect
of the scattered objects; but there was here something as impenetrable
in the disorder as in the symmetry, and to the simple-minded young
wife all was a sealed letter. All that she could discern was that, as
a woman, the Duchess was a superior person. Then a painful thought
came over her.

"Alas! And is it true," she wondered, "that a simple and loving heart
is not all-sufficient to an artist; that to balance the weight of
these powerful souls they need a union with feminine souls of a
strength equal to their own? If I had been brought up like this siren,
our weapons at least might have been equal in the hour of struggle."

"But I am not at home!" The sharp, harsh words, though spoken in an
undertone in the adjoining boudoir, were heard by Augustine, and her
heart beat violently.

"The lady is in there," replied the maid.

"You are an idiot! Show her in," replied the Duchess, whose voice was
sweeter, and had assumed the dulcet tones of politeness. She evidently
now meant to be heard.

Augustine shyly entered the room. At the end of the dainty boudoir she
saw the Duchess lounging luxuriously on an ottoman covered with brown
velvet and placed in the centre of a sort of apse outlined by soft
folds of white muslin over a yellow lining. Ornaments of gilt bronze,
arranged with exquisite taste, enhanced this sort of dais, under which
the Duchess reclined like a Greek statue. The dark hue of the velvet
gave relief to every fascinating charm. A subdued light, friendly to
her beauty, fell like a reflection rather than a direct illumination.
A few rare flowers raised their perfumed heads from costly Sevres
vases. At the moment when this picture was presented to Augustine's
astonished eyes, she was approaching so noiselessly that she caught a
glance from those of the enchantress. This look seemed to say to some
one whom Augustine did not at first perceive, "Stay; you will see a
pretty woman, and make her visit seem less of a bore."

On seeing Augustine, the Duchess rose and made her sit down by her.

"And to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, madame?" she said
with a most gracious smile.

"Why all the falseness?" thought Augustine, replying only with a bow.

Her silence was compulsory. The young woman saw before her a
superfluous witness of the scene. This personage was, of all the
Colonels in the army, the youngest, the most fashionable, and the
finest man. His face, full of life and youth, but already expressive,
was further enhanced by a small moustache twirled up into points, and
as black as jet, by a full imperial, by whiskers carefully combed, and
a forest of black hair in some disorder. He was whisking a riding whip
with an air of ease and freedom which suited his self-satisfied
expression and the elegance of his dress; the ribbons attached to his
button-hole were carelessly tied, and he seemed to pride himself much
more on his smart appearance than on his courage. Augustine looked at
the Duchesse de Carigliano, and indicated the Colonel by a sidelong
glance. All its mute appeal was understood.

"Good-bye, then, Monsieur d'Aiglemont, we shall meet in the Bois de
Boulogne."

These words were spoken by the siren as though they were the result of
an agreement made before Augustine's arrival, and she winged them with
a threatening look that the officer deserved perhaps for the
admiration he showed in gazing at the modest flower, which contrasted
so well with the haughty Duchess. The young fop bowed in silence,
turned on the heels of his boots, and gracefully quitted the boudoir.
At this instant, Augustine, watching her rival, whose eyes seemed to
follow the brilliant officer, detected in that glance a sentiment of
which the transient expression is known to every woman. She perceived
with the deepest anguish that her visit would be useless; this lady,
full of artifice, was too greedy of homage not to have a ruthless
heart.

"Madame," said Augustine in a broken voice, "the step I am about to
take will seem to you very strange; but there is a madness of despair
which ought to excuse anything. I understand only too well why
Theodore prefers your house to any other, and why your mind has so
much power over his. Alas! I have only to look into myself to find
more than ample reasons. But I am devoted to my husband, madame. Two
years of tears have not effaced his image from my heart, though I have
lost his. In my folly I dared to dream of a contest with you; and I
have come to you to ask you by what means I may triumph over yourself.
Oh, madame," cried the young wife, ardently seizing the hand which her
rival allowed her to hold, "I will never pray to God for my own
happiness with so much fervor as I will beseech Him for yours, if you
will help me to win back Sommervieux's regard--I will not say his
love. I have no hope but in you. Ah! tell me how you could please him,
and make him forget the first days----" At these words Augustine broke
down, suffocated with sobs she could not suppress. Ashamed of her
weakness, she hid her face in her handkerchief, which she bathed with
tears.

"What a child you are, my dear little beauty!" said the Duchess,
carried away by the novelty of such a scene, and touched, in spite of
herself, at receiving such homage from the most perfect virtue perhaps
in Paris. She took the young wife's handkerchief, and herself wiped
the tears from her eyes, soothing her by a few monosyllables murmured
with gracious compassion. After a moment's silence the Duchess,
grasping poor Augustine's hands in both her own--hands that had a rare
character of dignity and powerful beauty--said in a gentle and
friendly voice: "My first warning is to advise you not to weep so
bitterly; tears are disfiguring. We must learn to deal firmly with the
sorrows that make us ill, for love does not linger long by a sick-bed.
Melancholy, at first, no doubt, lends a certain attractive grace, but
it ends by dragging the features and blighting the loveliest face. And
besides, our tyrants are so vain as to insist that their slaves should
be always cheerful."

"But, madame, it is not in my power not to feel. How is it possible,
without suffering a thousand deaths, to see the face which once beamed
with love and gladness turn chill, colorless, and indifferent? I
cannot control my heart!"

"So much the worse, sweet child. But I fancy I know all your story. In
the first place, if your husband is unfaithful to you, understand
clearly that I am not his accomplice. If I was anxious to have him in
my drawing-room, it was, I own, out of vanity; he was famous, and he
went nowhere. I like you too much already to tell you all the mad
things he has done for my sake. I will only reveal one, because it may
perhaps help us to bring him back to you, and to punish him for the
audacity of his behavior to me. He will end by compromising me. I know
the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion of a
too superior man. You should know that one may allow them to court
one, but marry them--that is a mistake! We women ought to admire men
of genius, and delight in them as a spectacle, but as to living with
them? Never.--No, no. It is like wanting to find pleasure in
inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to
enjoy its brilliant illusions. But this misfortune has fallen on you,
my poor child, has it not? Well, then, you must try to arm yourself
against tyranny."

"Ah, madame, before coming in here, only seeing you as I came in, I
already detected some arts of which I had no suspicion."

"Well, come and see me sometimes, and it will not be long before you
have mastered the knowledge of these trifles, important, too, in their
way. Outward things are, to fools, half of life; and in that matter
more than one clever man is a fool, in spite of all his talent. But I
dare wager you never could refuse your Theodore anything!"

"How refuse anything, madame, if one loves a man?"

"Poor innocent, I could adore you for your simplicity. You should know
that the more we love the less we should allow a man, above all, a
husband, to see the whole extent of our passion. The one who loves
most is tyrannized over, and, which is worse, is sooner or later
neglected. The one who wishes to rule should----"

"What, madame, must I then dissimulate, calculate, become false, form
an artificial character, and live in it? How is it possible to live in
such a way? Can you----" she hesitated; the Duchess smiled.

"My dear child," the great lady went on in a serious tone, "conjugal
happiness has in all times been a speculation, a business demanding
particular attention. If you persist in talking passion while I am
talking marriage, we shall soon cease to understand each other. Listen
to me," she went on, assuming a confidential tone. "I have been in the
way of seeing some of the superior men of our day. Those who have
married have for the most part chosen quite insignificant wives. Well,
those wives governed them, as the Emperor governs us; and if they were
not loved, they were at least respected. I like secrets--especially
those which concern women--well enough to have amused myself by
seeking the clue to the riddle. Well, my sweet child, those worthy
women had the gift of analyzing their husbands' nature; instead of
taking fright, like you, at their superiority, they very acutely noted
the qualities they lacked, and either by possessing those qualities,
or by feigning to possess them, they found means of making such a
handsome display of them in their husbands' eyes that in the end they
impressed them. Also, I must tell you, all these souls which appear so
lofty have just a speck of madness in them, which we ought to know how
to take advantage of. By firmly resolving to have the upper hand and
never deviating from that aim, by bringing all our actions to bear on
it, all our ideas, our cajolery, we subjugate these eminently
capricious natures, which, by the very mutability of their thoughts,
lend us the means of influencing them."

"Good heavens!" cried the young wife in dismay. "And this is life. It
is a warfare----"

"In which we must always threaten," said the Duchess, laughing. "Our
power is wholly factitious. And we must never allow a man to despise
us; it is impossible to recover from such a descent but by odious
manoeuvring. Come," she added, "I will give you a means of bringing
your husband to his senses."

She rose with a smile to guide the young and guileless apprentice to
conjugal arts through the labyrinth of her palace. They came to a
back-staircase, which led up to the reception rooms. As Madame de
Carigliano pressed the secret springlock of the door she stopped,
looking at Augustine with an inimitable gleam of shrewdness and grace.
"The Duc de Carigliano adores me," said she. "Well, he dare not enter
by this door without my leave. And he is a man in the habit of
commanding thousands of soldiers. He knows how to face a battery, but
before me,--he is afraid!"

Augustine sighed. They entered a sumptuous gallery, where the
painter's wife was led by the Duchess up to the portrait painted by
Theodore of Mademoiselle Guillaume. On seeing it, Augustine uttered a
cry.

"I knew it was no longer in my house," she said, "but--here!----"

"My dear child, I asked for it merely to see what pitch of idiocy a
man of genius may attain to. Sooner or later I should have returned it
to you, for I never expected the pleasure of seeing the original here
face to face with the copy. While we finish our conversation I will
have it carried down to your carriage. And if, armed with such a
talisman, you are not your husband's mistress for a hundred years, you
are not a woman, and you deserve your fate."

Augustine kissed the Duchess' hand, and the lady clasped her to her
heart, with all the more tenderness because she would forget her by
the morrow. This scene might perhaps have destroyed for ever the
candor and purity of a less virtuous woman than Augustine, for the
astute politics of the higher social spheres were no more consonant to
Augustine than the narrow reasoning of Joseph Lebas, or Madame
Guillaume's vapid morality. Strange are the results of the false
positions into which we may be brought by the slightest mistake in the
conduct of life! Augustine was like an Alpine cowherd surprised by an
avalanche; if he hesitates, if he listens to the shouts of his
comrades, he is almost certainly lost. In such a crisis the heart
steels itself or breaks.

Madame de Sommervieux returned home a prey to such agitation as it is
difficult to describe. Her conversation with the Duchesse de
Carigliano had roused in her mind a crowd of contradictory thoughts.
Like the sheep in the fable, full of courage in the wolf's absence,
she preached to herself, and laid down admirable plans of conduct; she
devised a thousand coquettish stratagems; she even talked to her
husband, finding, away from him, all the springs of true eloquence
which never desert a woman; then, as she pictured to herself
Theodore's clear and steadfast gaze, she began to quake. When she
asked whether monsieur were at home her voice shook. On learning that
he would not be in to dinner, she felt an unaccountable thrill of joy.
Like a criminal who has appealed against sentence of death, a respite,
however short, seemed to her a lifetime. She placed the portrait in
her room, and waited for her husband in all the agonies of hope. That
this venture must decide her future life, she felt too keenly not to
shiver at every sound, even the low ticking of the clock, which seemed
to aggravate her terrors by doling them out to her. She tried to cheat
time by various devices. The idea struck her of dressing in a way
which would make her exactly like the portrait. Then, knowing her
husband's restless temper, she had her room lighted up with unusual
brightness, feeling sure that when he came in curiosity would bring
him there at once. Midnight had struck when, at the call of the groom,
the street gate was opened, and the artist's carriage rumbled in over
the stones of the silent courtyard.

"What is the meaning of this illumination?" asked Theodore in glad
tones, as he came into her room.

Augustine skilfully seized the auspicious moment; she threw herself
into her husband's arms, and pointed to the portrait. The artist stood
rigid as a rock, and his eyes turned alternately on Augustine, on the
accusing dress. The frightened wife, half-dead, as she watched her
husband's changeful brow--that terrible brow--saw the expressive
furrows gathering like clouds; then she felt her blood curdling in her
veins when, with a glaring look, and in a deep hollow voice, he began
to question her:

"Where did you find that picture?"

"The Duchess de Carigliano returned it to me."

"You asked her for it?"

"I did not know that she had it."

The gentleness, or rather the exquisite sweetness of this angel's
voice, might have touched a cannibal, but not an artist in the
clutches of wounded vanity.

"It is worthy of her!" exclaimed the painter in a voice of thunder. "I
will be avenged!" he cried, striding up and down the room. "She shall
die of shame; I will paint her! Yes, I will paint her as Messalina
stealing out at night from the palace of Claudius."

"Theodore!" said a faint voice.

"I will kill her!"

"My dear----"

"She is in love with that little cavalry colonel, because he rides
well----"

"Theodore!"

"Let me be!" said the painter in a tone almost like a roar.

It would be odious to describe the whole scene. In the end the frenzy
of passion prompted the artist to acts and words which any woman not
so young as Augustine would have ascribed to madness.

At eight o'clock next morning Madame Guillaume, surprising her
daughter, found her pale, with red eyes, her hair in disorder, holding
a handkerchief soaked with tears, while she gazed at the floor strewn
with the torn fragments of a dress and the broken fragments of a large
gilt picture-frame. Augustine, almost senseless with grief, pointed to
the wreck with a gesture of deep despair.

"I don't know that the loss is very great!" cried the old mistress of
the Cat and Racket. "It was like you, no doubt; but I am told that
there is a man on the boulevard who paints lovely portraits for fifty
crowns."

"Oh, mother!"

"Poor child, you are quite right," replied Madame Guillaume, who
misinterpreted the expression of her daughter's glance at her. "True,
my child, no one ever can love you as fondly as a mother. My darling,
I guess it all; but confide your sorrows to me, and I will comfort
you. Did I not tell you long ago that the man was mad! Your maid has
told me pretty stories. Why, he must be a perfect monster!"

Augustine laid a finger on her white lips, as if to implore a moment's
silence. During this dreadful night misery had led her to that patient
resignation which in mothers and loving wives transcends in its
effects all human energy, and perhaps reveals in the heart of women
the existence of certain chords which God has withheld from men.



An inscription engraved on a broken column in the cemetery at
Montmartre states that Madame de Sommervieux died at the age of
twenty-seven. In the simple words of this epitaph one of the timid
creature's friends can read the last scene of a tragedy. Every year,
on the second of November, the solemn day of the dead, he never passes
this youthful monument without wondering whether it does not need a
stronger woman than Augustine to endure the violent embrace of genius?

"The humble and modest flowers that bloom in the valley," he reflects,
"perish perhaps when they are transplanted too near the skies, to the
region where storms gather and the sun is scorching."




ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Aiglemont, General, Marquis Victor d'
The Firm of Nucingen
A Woman of Thirty

Birotteau, Cesar
Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor's Establishment

Camusot
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor's Establishment
Cousin Pons
The Muse of the Department
Cesar Birotteau

Cardot, Jean-Jerome-Severin
A Start in Life
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor's Establishment
Cesar Birotteau

Carigliano, Marechal, Duc de
Father Goriot
Sarrasine

Carigliano, Duchesse de
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Peasantry
The Member for Arcis

Guillaume
Cesar Birotteau

Lebas, Joseph
Cesar Birotteau
Cousin Betty

Lebas, Madame Joseph (Virginie)
Cesar Birotteau
Cousin Betty

Lourdois
Cesar Birotteau

Rabourdin, Xavier
The Government Clerks
Cesar Birotteau
The Middle Classes

Roguin, Madame
Cesar Birotteau
Pierrette
A Second Home
A Daughter of Eve

Sommervieux, Theodore de
The Government Clerks
Modeste Mignon

Sommervieux, Madame Theodore de (Augustine)
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Cesar Birotteau