Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


"Already, my dear!" said Camille, with cutting irony. The marquise
blushed. "Stay, Monsieur du Guenic," said Camille, in the tone of a
queen.

Beatrix became cold and hard, contradictory in tone, epigrammatic, and
almost rude to Calyste, whom Felicite sent home to play /mouche/ with
Charlotte de Kergarouet.

"/She/ is not dangerous at any rate," said Beatrix, sarcastically.

Young lovers are like hungry men; kitchen odors will not appease their
hunger; they think too much of what is coming to care for the means
that bring it. As Calyste walked back to Guerande, his soul was full
of Beatrix; he paid no heed to the profound feminine cleverness which
Felicite was displaying on his behalf. During this week the marquise
had only written once to Conti, a symptom of indifference which had
not escaped the watchful eyes of Camille, who imparted it to Calyste.
All Calyste's life was concentrated in the short moment of the day
during which he was allowed to see the marquise. This drop of water,
far from allaying his thirst, only redoubled it. The magic promise,
"Beatrix shall love you," made by Camille, was the talisman with which
he strove to restrain the fiery ardor of his passion. But he knew not
how to consume the time; he could not sleep, and spent the hours of
the night in reading; every evening he brought back with him, as
Mariotte remarked, cartloads of books.

His aunt called down maledictions on the head of Mademoiselle des
Touches; but his mother, who had gone on several occasions to his room
on seeing his light burning far into the night, knew by this time the
secret of his conduct. Though for her love was a sealed book, and she
was even unaware of her own ignorance, Fanny rose through maternal
tenderness into certain ideas of it; but the depths of such sentiment
being dark and obscured by clouds to her mind, she was shocked at the
state in which she saw him; the solitary uncomprehended desire of his
soul, which was evidently consuming him, simply terrified her. Calyste
had but one thought; Beatrix was always before him. In the evenings,
while cards were being played, his abstraction resembled his father's
somnolence. Finding him so different from what he was when he loved
Camille, the baroness became aware, with a sort of horror, of the
symptoms of real love,--a species of possession which had seized upon
her son,--a love unknown within the walls of that old mansion.

Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste
almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on
some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to
give up Les Touches, and leave the two women forever.

"Not go to Les Touches!" he cried.

"Oh! yes, yes, go! do not look so, my darling!" she cried, kissing him
on the eyes that had flashed such flames.

Under these circumstances Calyste often came near losing the fruit of
Camille's plot through the Breton fury of his love, of which he was
ceasing to be the master. Finally, he swore to himself, in spite of
his promise to Felicite, to see Beatrix, and speak to her. He wanted
to read her eyes, to bathe in their light, to examine every detail of
her dress, breathe its perfume, listen to the music of her voice,
watch the graceful composition of her movements, embrace at a glance
the whole figure, and study her as a general studies the field where
he means to win a decisive battle. He willed as lovers will; he was
grasped by desires which closed his ears and darkened his intellect,
and threw him into an unnatural state in which he was conscious of
neither obstacles, nor distances, nor the existence even of his own
body.

One morning he resolved to go to Les Touches at an earlier hour than
that agreed upon, and endeavor to meet Beatrix in the garden. He knew
she walked there daily before breakfast.

Mademoiselle des Touches and the marquise had gone, as it happened, to
see the marshes and the little bay with its margin of fine sand, where
the sea penetrates and lies like a lake in the midst of the dunes.
They had just returned, and were walking up a garden path beside the
lawn, conversing as they walked.

"If the scenery pleases you," said Camille, "we must take Calyste and
make a trip to Croisic. There are splendid rocks there, cascades of
granite, little bays with natural basins, charmingly unexpected and
capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble
fragments,--a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel
with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to
dry in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris."

"What! will you really risk Calyste?" cried the marquise, laughing, in
a tone which proved that Camille's ruse had answered its purpose.

"Ah, my dear," she replied, "if you did but know the angelic soul of
that dear child, you would understand me. In him, mere beauty is
nothing; one must enter that pure heart, which is amazed at every step
it takes into the kingdom of love. What faith! what grace! what
innocence! The ancients were right enough in the worship they paid to
sacred beauty. Some traveller, I forget who, relates that when wild
horses lose their leader they choose the handsomest horse in the herd
for his successor. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of things; it is the
ensign which Nature hoists over her most precious creations; it is the
trust of symbols as it is the greatest of accidents. Did any one ever
suppose that angels could be deformed? are they not necessarily a
combination of grace and strength? What is it that makes us stand for
hours before some picture in Italy, where genius has striven through
years of toil to realize but one of those accidents of Nature? Come,
call up your sense of the truth of things and answer me; is it not the
Idea of Beauty which our souls associate with moral grandeur? Well,
Calyste is one of those dreams, those visions, realized. He has the
regal power of a lion, tranquilly unsuspicious of its royalty. When he
feels at his ease, he is witty; and I love his girlish timidity. My
soul rests in his heart away from all corruptions, all ideas of
knowledge, literature, the world, society, politics,--those useless
accessories under which we stifle happiness. I am what I have never
been,--a child! I am sure of him, but I like to play at jealousy; he
likes it too. Besides, that is part of my secret."

Beatrix walked on pensively, in silence. Camille endured unspeakable
martyrdom, and she cast a sidelong look at her companion which looked
like flame.

"Ah, my dear; but /you/ are happy," said Beatrix presently, laying her
hand on Camille's arm like a woman wearied out with some inward
struggle.

"Yes, happy indeed!" replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.

The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No
creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more
Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.

"Yes, you are happy, but I!" she said,--"to know of Conti's
infidelities, and have to bear them!"

"Why not leave him?" said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike
a decisive blow.

"Can I?"

"Oh! poor boy!"

Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.

Camille rose.

"I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite,"
she said.

"Our conversation has taken away mine," remarked Beatrix.

The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the
dark greens of the foliage. Calyste, who had slipped through the salon
into the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he
were meeting her by accident. Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as
he approached her.

"Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?" he said, after
the first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.

"But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me," she said, in a
gentle voice.

The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words
encouraged Calyste.

"Am I so indifferent to you?" he said in a troubled voice, as the
tears came into his eyes.

"Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?" replied the marquise.
"Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?"

"Oh!" cried Calyste, "if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love
her no longer."

"Then why are you shut up together every morning?" she said, with a
treacherous smile. "I don't suppose that Camille, in spite of her
passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your
admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their
romances."

"So then you know--" began the guileless young Breton, his face
glowing with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.

"Calyste!" cried Camille, angrily, suddenly appearing and interrupting
him. She took his arm and drew him away to some distance. "Calyste, is
this what you promised me?"

Beatrix heard these words of reproach as Mademoiselle des Touches
disappeared toward the house, taking Calyste with her. She was
stupefied by the young man's assertion, and could not comprehend it;
she was not as strong as Claude Vignon. In truth, the part being
played by Camille Maupin, as shocking as it was grand, is one of those
wicked grandeurs which women only practise when driven to extremity.
By it their hearts are broken; in it the feelings of their sex are
lost to them; it begins an abnegation which ends by either plunging
them to hell, or lifting them to heaven.

During breakfast, which Calyste was invited to share, the marquise,
whose sentiments could be noble and generous, made a sudden return
upon herself, resolving to stifle the germs of love which were rising
in her heart. She was neither cold nor hard to Calyste, but gently
indifferent,--a course which tortured him. Felicite brought forward a
proposition that they should make, on the next day but one, an
excursion into the curious and interesting country lying between Les
Touches, Croisic, and the village of Batz. She begged Calyste to
employ himself on the morrow in hiring a boat and sailors to take them
across the little bay, undertaking herself to provide horses and
provisions, and all else that was necessary for a party of pleasure,
in which there was to be no fatigue. Beatrix stopped the matter short,
however, by saying that she did not wish to make excursions round the
country. Calyste's face, which had beamed with delight at the
prospect, was suddenly overclouded.

"What are you afraid of, my dear?" asked Camille.

"My position is so delicate I do not wish to compromise--I will not
say my reputation, but my happiness," she said, meaningly, with a
glance at the young Breton. "You know very well how suspicious Conti
can be; if he knew--"

"Who will tell him?"

"He is coming back here to fetch me," said Beatrix.

Calyste turned pale. In spite of all that Camille could urge, in spite
of Calyste's entreaties, Madame de Rochefide remained inflexible, and
showed what Camille had called her obstinacy. Calyste left Les Touches
the victim of one of those depressions of love which threaten, in
certain men, to turn into madness. He began to revolve in his mind
some decided means of coming to an explanation with Beatrix.



XII

CORRESPONDENCE

When Calyste reached home, he did not leave his room until dinner
time; and after dinner he went back to it. At ten o'clock his mother,
uneasy at his absence, went to look for him, and found him writing in
the midst of a pile of blotted and half-torn paper. He was writing to
Beatrix, for distrust of Camille had come into his mind. The air and
manner of the marquise during their brief interview in the garden had
singularly encouraged him.

No first love-letter ever was or ever will be, as may readily be
supposed, a brilliant effort of the mind. In all young men not tainted
by corruption such a letter is written with gushings from the heart,
too overflowing, too multifarious not to be the essence, the elixir of
many other letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.

Here is the one that Calyste finally composed and which he read aloud
to his poor, astonished mother. To her the old mansion seemed to have
taken fire; this love of her son flamed up in it like the glare of a
conflagration.

Calyste to Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.

Madame,--I loved you when you were to me but a dream; judge,
therefore, of the force my love acquired when I saw you. The dream
was far surpassed by the reality. It is my grief and my misfortune
to have nothing to say to you that you do not know already of your
beauty and your charms; and yet, perhaps, they have awakened in no
other heart so deep a sentiment as they have in me.

In so many ways you are beautiful; I have studied you so much
while thinking of you day and night that I have penetrated the
mysteries of your being, the secrets of your heart, and your
delicacy, so little appreciated. Have you ever been loved,
understood, adored as you deserve to be?

Let me tell you now that there is not a trait in your nature which
my heart does not interpret; your pride is understood by mine; the
grandeur of your glance, the grace of your bearing, the
distinction of your movements,--all things about your person are
in harmony with the thoughts, the hopes, the desires hidden in the
depths of your soul; it is because I have divined them all that I
think myself worthy of your notice. If I had not become, within
the last few days, another yourself, I could not speak to you of
myself; this letter, indeed, relates far more to you than it does
to me.

Beatrix, in order to write to you, I have silenced my youth, I
have laid aside myself, I have aged my thoughts,--or, rather, it
is you who have aged them, by this week of dreadful sufferings
caused, innocently indeed, by you.

Do not think me one of those common lovers at whom I have heard
you laugh so justly. What merit is there in loving a young and
beautiful and wise and noble woman. Alas! I have no merit! What
can I be to you? A child, attracted by effulgence of beauty and by
moral grandeur, as the insects are attracted to the light. You
cannot do otherwise than tread upon the flowers of my soul; they
are there at your feet, and all my happiness consists in your
stepping on them.

Absolute devotion, unbounded faith, love unquenchable,--all these
treasures of a true and tender heart are nothing, nothing! they
serve only to love with, they cannot win the love we crave.
Sometimes I do not understand why a worship so ardent does not
warm its idol; and when I meet your eye, so cold, so stern, I turn
to ice within me. Your disdain, /that/ is the acting force between
us, not my worship. Why? You cannot hate me as much as I love you;
why, then, does the weaker feeling rule the stronger? I loved
Felicite with all the powers of my heart; yet I forgot her in a
day, in a moment, when I saw you. She was my error; you are my
truth.

You have, unknowingly, destroyed my happiness, and yet you owe me
nothing in return. I loved Camille without hope, and I have no
hope from you; nothing is changed but my divinity. I was a pagan;
I am now a Christian, that is all--

Except this: you have taught me that to love is the greatest of
all joys; the joy of being loved comes later. According to
Camille, it is not loving to love for a short time only; the love
that does not grow from day to day, from hour to hour, is a mere
wretched passion. In order to grow, love must not see its end; and
she saw the end of ours, the setting of our sun of love. When I
beheld you, I understood her words, which, until then, I had
disputed with all my youth, with all the ardor of my desires, with
the despotic sternness of twenty years. That grand and noble
Camille mingled her tears with mine, and yet she firmly rejected
the love she saw must end. Therefore I am free to love you here on
earth and in the heaven above us, as we love God. If you loved me,
you would have no such arguments as Camille used to overthrow my
love. We are both young; we could fly on equal wing across our
sunny heaven, not fearing storms as that grand eagle feared them.

But ha! what am I saying? my thoughts have carried me beyond the
humility of my real hopes. Believe me, believe in the submission,
the patience, the mute adoration which I only ask you not to wound
uselessly. I know, Beatrix, that you cannot love me without the
loss of your self-esteem; therefore I ask for no return. Camille
once said there was some hidden fatality in names, /a propos/ of
hers. That fatality I felt for myself on the jetty of Guerande,
when I read on the shores of the ocean your name. Yes, you will
pass through my life as Beatrice passed through that of Dante. My
heart will be a pedestal for that white statue, cold, distant,
jealous, and oppressive.

It is forbidden to you to love me; I know that. You will suffer a
thousand deaths, you will be betrayed, humiliated, unhappy; but
you have in you a devil's pride, which binds you to that column
you have once embraced,--you are like Samson, you will perish by
holding to it. But this I have not divined; my love is too blind
for that; Camille has told it to me. It is not my mind that speaks
to you of this, it is hers. I have no mind with which to reason
when I think of you; blood gushes from my heart, and its hot wave
darkens my intellect, weakens my strength, paralyzes my tongue,
and bends my knees. I can only adore you, whatever you may do to
me.

Camille calls your resolution obstinacy; I defend you, and I call
it virtue. You are only the more beautiful because of it. I know
my destiny, and the pride of a Breton can rise to the height of
the woman who makes her pride a virtue.

Therefore, dear Beatrix, be kind, be consoling to me. When victims
were selected, they crowned them with flowers; so do you to me;
you owe me the flowers of pity, the music of my sacrifice. Am I
not a proof of your grandeur? Will you not rise to the level of my
disdained love,--disdained in spite of its sincerity, in spite of
its immortal passion?

Ask Camille how I behaved to her after the day she told me, on her
return to Les Touches, that she loved Claude Vignon. I was mute; I
suffered in silence. Well, for you I will show even greater
strength,--I will bury my feelings in my heart, if you will not
drive me to despair, if you will only understand my heroism. A
single word of praise from you is enough to make me bear the pains
of martyrdom.

But if you persist in this cold silence, this deadly disdain, you
will make me think you fear me. Ah, Beatrix, be with me what you
are,--charming, witty, gay, and tender. Talk to me of Conti, as
Camille has talked to me of Claude. I have no other spirit in my
soul, no other genius but that of love; nothing is there that can
make you fear me; I will be in your presence as if I loved you
not.

Can you reject so humble a prayer?--the prayer of a child who only
asks that his Light shall lighten him, that his Sun may warm him.

He whom you love can be with you at all times, but I, poor
Calyste! have so few days in which to see you; you will soon be
freed from me. Therefore I may return to Les Touches to-morrow,
may I not? You will not refuse my arm for that excursion? We shall
go together to Croisic and to Batz? If you do not go I shall take
it for an answer,--Calyste will understand it!

There were four more pages of the same sort in close, fine writing,
wherein Calyste explained the sort of threat conveyed in the last
words, and related his youth and life; but the tale was chiefly told
in exclamatory phrases, with many of those points and dashes of which
modern literature is so prodigal when it comes to crucial passages,
--as though they were planks offered to the reader's imagination, to
help him across crevasses. The rest of this artless letter was merely
repetition. But if it was not likely to touch Madame de Rochefide, and
would very slightly interest the admirers of strong emotions, it made
the mother weep, as she said to her son, in her tender voice,--

"My child, you are not happy."

This tumultuous poem of sentiments which had arisen like a storm in
Calyste's heart, terrified the baroness; for the first time in her
life she read a love-letter.

Calyste was standing in deep perplexity; how could he send that
letter? He followed his mother back into the salon with the letter in
his pocket and burning in his heart like fire. The Chevalier du Halga
was still there, and the last deal of a lively /mouche/ was going on.
Charlotte de Kergarouet, in despair at Calyste's indifference, was
paying attention to his father as a means of promoting her marriage.
Calyste wandered hither and thither like a butterfly which had flown
into the room by mistake. At last, when /mouche/ was over, he drew the
Chevalier du Halga into the great salon, from which he sent away
Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel's page and Mariotte.

"What does he want of the chevalier?" said old Zephirine, addressing
her friend Jacqueline.

"Calyste strikes me as half-crazy," replied Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.
"He pays Charlotte no more attention than if she were a /paludiere/."

Remembering that the Chevalier du Halga had the reputation of having
navigated in his youth the waters of gallantry, it came into Calyste's
head to consult him.

"What is the best way to send a letter secretly to one's mistress," he
said to the old gentleman in a whisper.

"Well, you can slip it into the hand of her maid with a louis or two
underneath it; for sooner or later the maid will find out the secret,
and it is just as well to let her into it at once," replied the
chevalier, on whose face was the gleam of a smile. "But, on the whole,
it is best to give the letter yourself."

"A louis or two!" exclaimed Calyste.

He snatched up his hat and ran to Les Touches, where he appeared like
an apparition in the little salon, guided thither by the voices of
Camille and Beatrix. They were sitting on the sofa together,
apparently on the best of terms. Calyste, with the headlong impulse of
love, flung himself heedlessly on the sofa beside the marquise, took
her hand, and slipped the letter within it. He did this so rapidly
that Felicite, watchful as she was, did not perceive it. Calyste's
heart was tingling with an emotion half sweet, half painful, as he
felt the hand of Beatrix press his own, and saw her, without
interrupting her words, or seeming in the least disconcerted, slip the
letter into her glove.

"You fling yourself on a woman's dress without mercy," she said,
laughing.

"Calyste is a boy who is wanting in common-sense," said Felicite, not
sparing him an open rebuke.

Calyste rose, took Camille's hand, and kissed it. Then he went to the
piano and ran his finger-nail over the notes, making them all sound at
once, like a rapid scale. This exuberance of joy surprised Camille,
and made her thoughtful; she signed to Calyste to come to her.

"What is the matter with you?" she whispered in his ear.

"Nothing," he replied.

"There is something between them," thought Mademoiselle des Touches.

The marquise was impenetrable. Camille tried to make Calyste talk,
hoping that his artless mind would betray itself; but the youth
excused himself on the ground that his mother expected him, and he
left Les Touches at eleven o'clock,--not, however, without having
faced the fire of a piercing glance from Camille, to whom that excuse
was made for the first time.

After the agitations of a wakeful night filled with visions of
Beatrix, and after going a score of times through the chief street of
Guerande for the purpose of meeting the answer to his letter, which
did not come, Calyste finally received the following reply, which the
marquise's waiting-woman, entering the hotel du Guenic, presented to
him. He carried it to the garden, and there, in the grotto, he read as
follows:--

Madame de Rochefide to Calyste.

You are a noble child, but you are only a child. You are bound to
Camille, who adores you. You would not find in me either the
perfections that distinguish her or the happiness that she can
give you. Whatever you may think, she is young and I am old; her
heart is full of treasures, mine is empty; she has for you a
devotion you ill appreciate; she is unselfish; she lives only for
you and in you. I, on the other hand, am full of doubts; I should
drag you down to a wearisome life, without grandeur of any kind,
--a life ruined by my own conduct. Camille is free; she can go and
come as she will; I am a slave.

You forget that I love and am beloved. The situation in which I
have placed myself forbids my accepting homage. That a man should
love me, or say he loves me, is an insult. To turn to another
would be to place myself at the level of the lowest of my sex.

You, who are young and full of delicacy, how can you oblige me to
say these things, which rend my heart as they issue from it?