Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


"Listen to me, Calyste; we must put an end to all this," said the
marquise, gazing down upon the sandy road. "Perhaps we have now
reached the only propitious place to say these things, for never in my
life did I see nature more in keeping with my thoughts. I have seen
Italy, where all things tell of love; I have seen Switzerland, where
all is cool and fresh, and tells of happiness,--the happiness of
labor; where the verdure, the tranquil waters, the smiling slopes, are
oppressed by the snow-topped Alps; but I have never seen anything that
so depicts the burning barrenness of my life as that little arid plain
down there, dried by the salt sea winds, corroded by the spray, where
a fruitless agriculture tries to struggle against the will of that
great ocean. There, Calyste, you have an image of this Beatrix. Don't
cling to it. I love you, but I will never be yours in any way
whatever, for I have the sense of my inward desolation. Ah! you do not
know how cruel I am to myself in speaking thus to you. No, you shall
never see your idol diminished; she shall never fall from the height
at which you have placed her. I now have a horror of any love which
disregards the world and religion. I shall remain in my present bonds;
I shall be that sandy plain we see before us, without fruit or flowers
or verdure."

"But if you are abandoned?" said Calyste.

"Then I should beg my pardon of the man I have offended. I will never
run the risk of taking a happiness I know would quickly end."

"End!" cried Calyste.

The marquise stopped the passionate speech into which her lover was
about to launch, by repeating the word "End!" in a tone that silenced
him.

This opposition roused in the young man one of those mute inward
furies known only to those who love without hope. They walked on
several hundred steps in total silence, looking neither at the sea,
nor the rocks, nor the plain of Croisic.

"I would make you happy," said Calyste.

"All men begin by promising that," she answered, "and they end by
abandonment and disgust. I have no reproach to cast on him to whom I
shall be faithful. He made me no promises; I went to him; but my only
means of lessening my fault is to make it eternal."

"Say rather, madame, that you feel no love for me. I, who love you, I
know that love cannot argue; it is itself; it sees nothing else. There
is no sacrifice I will not make to you; command it, and I will do the
impossible. He who despised his mistress for flinging her glove among
the lions, and ordering him to bring it back to her, did not /love!/
He denied your right to test our hearts, and to yield yourselves only
to our utmost devotion. I will sacrifice to you my family, my name, my
future."

"But what an insult in that word 'sacrifice'!" she said, in
reproachful tones, which made poor Calyste feel the folly of his
speech.

None but women who truly love, or inborn coquettes, know how to use a
word as a point from which to make a spring.

"You are right," said Calyste, letting fall a tear; "that word can
only be said of the cruel struggles which you ask of me."

"Hush!" said Beatrix, struck by an answer in which, for the first
time, Calyste had really made her feel his love. "I have done wrong
enough; tempt me no more."

At this moment they had reached the base of the rock on which grew the
plant of box. Calyste felt a thrill of delight as he helped the
marquise to climb the steep ascent to the summit, which she wished to
reach. To the poor lad it was a precious privilege to hold her up, to
make her lean upon him, to feel her tremble; she had need of him. This
unlooked-for pleasure turned his head; he saw nought else but Beatrix,
and he clasped her round the waist.

"What!" she said, with an imposing air.

"Will you never be mine?" he demanded, in a voice that was choked by
the tumult of his blood.

"Never, my friend," she replied. "I can only be to you a Beatrix,--a
dream. But is not that a sweet and tender thing? We shall have no
bitterness, no grief, no repentance."

"Will you return to Conti?"

"I must."

"You shall never belong to any man!" cried Calyste, pushing her from
him with frenzied violence.

He listened for her fall, intending to spring after her, but he heard
only a muffled sound, the tearing of some stuff, and then the thud of
a body falling on the ground. Instead of being flung head foremost
down the precipice, Beatrix had only slipped some eight or ten feet
into the cavity where the box-bush grew; but she might from there have
rolled down into the sea if her gown had not caught upon a point of
rock, and by tearing slowly lowered the weight of her body upon the
bush.

Mademoiselle des Touches, who saw the scene, was unable in her horror
to cry out, but she signed to Gasselin to come. Calyste was leaning
forward with an expression of savage curiosity; he saw the position in
which Beatrix lay, and he shuddered. Her lips moved,--she seemed to be
praying; in fact, she thought she was about to die, for she felt the
bush beginning to give way. With the agility which danger gives to
youth, Calyste slid down to the ledge below the bush, where he was
able to grasp the marquise and hold her, although at the risk of their
both sliding down into the sea. As he held her, he saw that she had
fainted; but in that aerial spot he could fancy her all his, and his
first emotion was that of pleasure.

"Open your eyes," he said, "and forgive me; we will die together."

"Die?" she said, opening her eyes and unclosing her pallid lips.

Calyste welcomed that word with a kiss, and felt the marquise tremble
under it convulsively, with passionate joy. At that instant Gasselin's
hob-nailed shoes sounded on the rock above them. The old Breton was
followed by Camille, and together they sought for some means of saving
the lovers.

"There's but one way, mademoiselle," said Gasselin. "I must slide down
there, and they can climb on my shoulders, and you must pull them up."

"And you?" said Camille.

The man seemed surprised that he should be considered in presence of
the danger to his young master.

"You must go to Croisic and fetch a ladder," said Camille.

Beatrix asked in a feeble voice to be laid down, and Calyste placed
her on the narrow space between the bush and its background of rock.

"I saw you, Calyste," said Camille from above. "Whether Beatrix lives
or dies, remember that this must be an accident."

"She will hate me," he said, with moistened eyes.

"She will adore you," replied Camille. "But this puts an end to our
excursion. We must get her back to Les Touches. Had she been killed,
Calyste, what would have become of you?"

"I should have followed her."

"And your mother?" Then, after a pause, she added, feebly, "and me?"

Calyste was deadly pale; he stood with his back against the granite
motionless and silent. Gasselin soon returned from one of the little
farms scattered through the neighborhood, bearing a ladder which he
had borrowed. By this time Beatrix had recovered a little strength.
The ladder being placed, she was able, by the help of Gasselin, who
lowered Camille's red shawl till he could grasp it, to reach the round
top of the rock, where the Breton took her in his arms and carried her
to the shore as though she were an infant.

"I should not have said no to death--but suffering!" she murmured to
Felicite, in a feeble voice.

The weakness, in fact the complete prostration, of the marquise
obliged Camille to have her taken to the farmhouse from which the
ladder had been borrowed. Calyste, Gasselin, and Camille took off what
clothes they could spare and laid them on the ladder, making a sort of
litter on which they carried Beatrix. The farmers gave her a bed.
Gasselin then went to the place where the carriage was awaiting them,
and, taking one of the horses, rode to Croisic to obtain a doctor,
telling the boatman to row to the landing-place that was nearest to
the farmhouse.

Calyste, sitting on a stool, answered only by motions of the head, and
rare monosyllables when spoken to; Camille's uneasiness, roused for
Beatrix, was still further excited by Calyste's unnatural condition.
When the physician arrived, and Beatrix was bled, she felt better,
began to talk, and consented to embark; so that by five o'clock they
reached the jetty at Guerande, whence she was carried to Les Touches.
The news of the accident had already spread through that lonely and
almost uninhabited region with incredible rapidity.

Calyste passed the night at Les Touches, sitting at the foot of
Beatrix's bed, in company with Camille. The doctor from Guerande had
assured them that on the following day a little stiffness would be all
that remained of the accident. Across the despair of Calyste's heart
there came a gleam of joy. He was there, at her feet; he could watch
her sleeping or waking; he might study her pallid face and all its
expressions. Camille smiled bitterly as her keen mind recognized in
Calyste the symptoms of a passion such as man can feel but once,--a
passion which dyes his soul and his faculties by mingling with the
fountain of his life at a period when neither thoughts nor cares
distract or oppose the inward working of this emotion. She saw that
Calyste would never, could never see the real woman that was in
Beatrix.

And with what guileless innocence the young Breton allowed his
thoughts to be read! When he saw the beautiful green eyes of the sick
woman turned to him, expressing a mixture of love, confusion, and even
mischief, he colored, and turned away his head.

"Did I not say truly, Calyste, that you men promised happiness, and
ended by flinging us down a precipice?"

When he heard this little jest, said in sweet, caressing tones which
betrayed a change of heart in Beatrix, Calyste knelt down, took her
moist hand which she yielded to him, and kissed it humbly.

"You have the right to reject my love forever," he said, "and I, I
have no right to say one word to you."

"Ah!" cried Camille, seeing the expression on Beatrix's face and
comparing it with that obtained by her diplomacy, "love has a
wit of its own, wiser than that of all the world! Take your
composing-draught, my dear friend, and go to sleep."

That night, spent by Calyste beside Mademoiselle des Touches, who read
a book of theological mysticism while Calyste read "Indiana,"--the
first work of Camille's celebrated rival, in which is the captivating
image of a young man loving with idolatry and devotion, with
mysterious tranquillity and for all his life, a woman placed in the
same false position as Beatrix (a book which had a fatal influence
upon him),--that night left ineffaceable marks upon the heart of the
poor young fellow, whom Felicite soothed with the assurance that
unless a woman were a monster she must be flattered in all her
vanities by being the object of such a crime.

"You would never have flung /me/ into the water," said Camille,
brushing away a tear.

Toward morning, Calyste, worn-out with emotion, fell asleep in his
arm-chair; and the marquise in her turn, watched his charming face,
paled by his feelings and his vigil of love. She heard him murmur her
name as he slept.

"He loves while sleeping," she said to Camille.

"We must send him home," said Felicite, waking him.

No one was anxious at the hotel du Guenic, for Mademoiselle des
Touches had written a line to the baroness telling her of the
accident.

Calyste returned to dinner at Les Touches and found Beatrix up and
dressed, but pale, feeble, and languid. No longer was there any
harshness in her words or any coldness in her looks. After this
evening, filled with music by Camille, who went to her piano to leave
Calyste free to take and press the hands of Beatrix (though both were
unable to speak), no storms occurred at Les Touches. Felicite
completely effaced herself.

Cold, fragile, thin, hard women like Madame de Rochefide, women whose
necks turn in a manner to give them a vague resemblance to the feline
race, have souls of the same pale tint as their light eyes, green or
gray; and to melt them, to fuse those blocks of stone it needs a
thunderbolt. To Beatrix, Calyste's fury of love and his mad action
came as the thunderbolt that nought resists, which changes all
natures, even the most stubborn. She felt herself inwardly humbled; a
true, pure love bathed her heart with its soft and limpid warmth. She
breathed a sweet and genial atmosphere of feelings hitherto unknown to
her, by which she felt herself magnified, elevated; in fact, she rose
into that heaven where Bretons throughout all time have placed the
Woman. She relished with delight the respectful adoration of the
youth, whose happiness cost her little, for a gesture, a look, a word
was enough to satisfy him. The value which Calyste's heart gave to
these trifles touched her exceedingly; to hold her gloved hand was
more to that young angel than the possession of her whole person to
the man who ought to have been faithful to her. What a contrast
between them!

Few women could resist such constant deification. Beatrix felt herself
sure of being obeyed and understood. She might have asked Calyste to
risk his life for the slightest of her caprices, and he would never
have reflected for a moment. This consciousness gave her a certain
noble and imposing air. She saw love on the side of its grandeur; and
her heart sought for some foothold on which she might remain forever
the loftiest of women in the eyes of her young lover, over whom she
now wished her power to be eternal.

Her coquetries became the more persistent because she felt within
herself a certain weakness. She played the invalid for a whole week
with charming hypocrisy. Again and again she walked about the velvet
turf which lay between the house and garden leaning on Calyste's arm
in languid dependence.

"Ah! my dear, you are taking him a long journey in a small space,"
said Mademoiselle des Touches one day.

Before the excursion to Croisic, the two women were discoursing one
evening about love, and laughing at the different ways that men
adopted to declare it; admitting to themselves that the cleverest men,
and naturally the least loving, did not like to wander in the
labyrinths of sentimentality and went straight to the point,--in which
perhaps they were right; for the result was that those who loved most
deeply and reservedly were, for a time at least, ill-treated.

"They go to work like La Fontaine, when he wanted to enter the
Academy," said Camille.

Madame de Rochefide had unbounded power to restrain Calyste within the
limits where she meant to keep him; it sufficed her to remind him by a
look or gesture of his horrible violence on the rocks. The eyes of her
poor victim would fill with tears, he was silent, swallowing down his
prayers, his arguments, his sufferings with a heroism that would
certainly have touched any other woman. She finally brought him by her
infernal coquetry to such a pass that he went one day to Camille
imploring her advice.

Beatrix, armed with Calyste's own letter, quoted the passage in which
he said that to love was the first happiness, that of being loved came
later; and she used that axiom to restrain his passion to the limits
of respectful idolatry, which pleased her well. She liked to feel her
soul caressed by those sweet hymns of praise and adoration which
nature suggests to youth; in them is so much artless art; such
innocent seduction is in their cries, their prayers, their
exclamations, their pledges of themselves in the promissory notes
which they offer on the future; to all of which Beatrix was very
careful to give no definite answer. Yes, she heard him; but she
doubted! Love was not yet the question; what he asked of her was
permission to love. In fact, that was all the poor lad really asked
for; his mind still clung to the strongest side of love, the spiritual
side. But the woman who is firmest in words is often the feeblest in
action. It is strange that Calyste, having seen the progress his suit
had made by pushing Beatrix into the sea, did not continue to urge it
violently. But love in young men is so ecstatic and religious that
their inmost desire is to win its fruition through moral conviction.
In that is the sublimity of their love.

Nevertheless the day came when the Breton, driven to desperation,
complained to Camille of Beatrix's conduct.

"I meant to cure you by making you quickly understand her," replied
Mademoiselle des Touches; "but you have spoiled all. Ten days ago you
were her master; to-day, my poor boy, you are her slave. You will
never have the strength now to do as I advise."

"What ought I to do?"

"Quarrel with her on the ground of her hardness. A woman is always
over-excited when she discusses; let her be angry and ill-treat you,
and then stay away; do not return to Les Touches till she herself
recalls you."

In all extreme illness there is a moment when the patient is willing
to accept the cruellest remedy and submits to the most horrible
operation. Calyste had reached that point. He listened to Camille's
advice and stayed at home two whole days; but on the third he was
scratching at Beatrix's door to let her know that he and Camille were
waiting breakfast for her.

"Another chance lost!" Camille said to him when she saw him re-appear
so weakly.

During his two days' absence, Beatrix had frequently looked through
the window which opens on the road to Guerande. When Camille found her
doing so, she talked of the effect produced by the gorse along the
roadway, the golden blooms of which were dazzling in the September
sunshine.

The marquise kept Camille and Calyste waiting long for breakfast; and
the delay would have been significant to any eyes but those of
Calyste, for when she did appear, her dress showed an evident
intention to fascinate him and prevent another absence. After
breakfast she went to walk with him in the garden and filled his
simple heart with joy by expressing a wish to go again to that rock
where she had so nearly perished.

"Will you go with me alone?" asked Calyste, in a troubled voice.

"If I refused to do so," she replied, "I should give you reason to
suppose I thought you dangerous. Alas! as I have told you again and
again I belong to another, and I must be his only; I chose him knowing
nothing of love. The fault was great, and bitter is my punishment."

When she talked thus, her eyes moist with the scanty tears shed by
that class of woman, Calyste was filled with a compassion that reduced
his fiery ardor; he adored her then as he did a Madonna. We have no
more right to require different characters to be alike in the
expression of feelings than we have to expect the same fruits from
different trees. Beatrix was at this moment undergoing an inward
struggle; she hesitated between herself and Calyste,--between the
world she still hoped to re-enter, and the young happiness offered to
her; between a second and an unpardonable love, and social
rehabilitation. She began, therefore, to listen, without even acted
displeasure, to the talk of the youth's blind passion; she allowed his
soft pity to soothe her. Several times she had been moved to tears as
she listened to Calyste's promises; and she suffered him to
commiserate her for being bound to an evil genius, a man as false as
Conti. More than once she related to him the misery and anguish she
had gone through in Italy, when she first became aware that she was
not alone in Conti's heart. On this subject Camille had fully informed
Calyste and given him several lectures on it, by which he profited.

"I," he said, "will love you only, you absolutely. I have no triumphs
of art, no applause of crowds stirred by my genius to offer you; my
only talent is to love you; my honor, my pride are in your
perfections. No other woman can have merit in my eyes; you have no
odious rivalry to fear. You are misconceived and wronged, but I know
you, and for every misconception, for every wrong, I will make you
feel my comprehension day by day."

She listened to such speeches with bowed head, allowing him to kiss
her hands, and admitting silently but gracefully that she was indeed
an angel misunderstood.

"I am too humiliated," she would say; "my past has robbed the future
of all security."

It was a glorious day for Calyste when, arriving at Les Touches at
seven in the morning, he saw from afar Beatrix at a window watching
for him, and wearing the same straw hat she had worn on the memorable
day of their first excursion. For a moment he was dazzled and giddy.
These little things of passion magnify the world itself. It may be
that only Frenchwomen possess the art of such scenic effects; they owe
it to the grace of their minds; they know how to put into sentiment as
much of the picturesque as the particular sentiment can bear without a
loss of vigor or of force.

Ah! how lightly she rested on Calyste's arm! Together they left Les
Touches by the garden-gate which opens on the dunes. Beatrix thought
the sands delightful; she spied the hardy little plants with
rose-colored flowers that grew there, and she gathered a quantity to
mix with the Chartreux pansies which also grow in that arid desert,
dividing them significantly with Calyste, to whom those flowers and
their foliage were to be henceforth an eternal and dreadful relic.

"We'll add a bit of box," she said smiling.

They sat some time together on the jetty, and Calyste, while waiting
for the boat to come over, told her of his juvenile act on the day of
her arrival.

"I knew of your little escapade," she said, "and it was the cause of
my sternness to you that first night."

During their walk Madame de Rochefide had the lightly jesting tone of
a woman who loves, together with a certain tenderness and abandonment
of manner. Calyste had reason to think himself beloved. But when,
wandering along the shore beneath the rocks, they came upon one of
those charming creeks where the waves deposit the most extraordinary
mosaic of brilliant pebbles, and they played there like children
gathering the prettiest, when Calyste at the summit of happiness asked
her plainly to fly with him to Ireland, she resumed her dignified and
distant air, asked for his arm, and continued their walk in silence to
what she called her Tarpeian rock.

"My friend," she said, mounting with slow steps the magnificent block
of granite of which she was making for herself a pedestal, "I have not
the courage to conceal what you are to me. For ten years I have had no
happiness comparable to that which we have just enjoyed together,
searching for shells among those rocks, exchanging pebbles of which I
shall make a necklace more precious far to me than if it were made of
the finest diamonds. I have been once more a little girl, a child,
such as I was at fourteen or sixteen--when I was worthy of you. The
love I have had the happiness to inspire in your heart has raised me
in my own eyes. Understand these words to their magical extent. You
have made me the proudest and happiest of my sex, and you will live
longer in my remembrance, perhaps, than I in yours."

At this moment they reached the summit of the rock, whence they saw
the vast ocean on one side and Brittany on the other, with its golden
isles, its feudal towers, and its gorse. Never did any woman stand on
a finer scene to make a great avowal.

"But," she continued, "I do not belong to myself; I am more bound by
my own will than I was by the law. You must be punished for my
misdeed, but be satisfied to know that we suffer together. Dante never
saw his Beatrice again; Petrarch never possessed his Laura. Such
disasters fall on none but noble souls. But, if I should be abandoned,
if I fall lower yet into shame and ignominy, if your Beatrix is
cruelly misjudged by the world she loathes, if indeed she is the
lowest of women,--then, my child, my adored child," she said, taking
his hand, "to you she will still be first of all; you will know that
she rises to heaven as she leans on you; but then, my friend," she
added, giving him an intoxicating look, "then if you wish to cast her
down do not fail of your blow; after your love, death!"

Calyste clasped her round the waist and pressed her to his heart. As
if to confirm her words Madame de Rochefide laid a tender, timid kiss
upon his brow. When they turned and walked slowly back; talking
together like those who have a perfect comprehension of each other,
--she, thinking she had gained a truce, he not doubting of his
happiness; and both deceived. Calyste, from what Camille had told him,
was confident that Conti would be enchanted to find an opportunity to
part from Beatrix; Beatrix, yielding herself up to the vagueness of
her position, looked to chance to arrange the future.

They reached Les Touches in the most delightful of all states of mind,
entering by the garden gate, the key of which Calyste had taken with
him. It was nearly six o'clock. The luscious odors, the warm
atmosphere, the burnished rays of the evening sun were all in harmony
with their feelings and their tender talk. Their steps were taken in
unison,--the gait of all lovers,--their movements told of the union of
their thoughts. The silence that reigned about Les Touches was so
profound that the noise which Calyste made in opening and shutting the
gate must have echoed through the garden. As the two had said all to
each other that could be said, and as their day's excursion, so filled
with emotion, had physically tired them, they walked slowly, saying
nothing.