Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


Suddenly, at the turn of a path, Beatrix was seized with a horrible
trembling, with that contagious horror which is caused by the sight of
a snake, and which Calyste felt before he saw the cause of it. On a
bench, beneath the branches of a weeping ash, sat Conti, talking with
Camille Maupin.



XV

CONTI

The inward and convulsive trembling of the marquise was more apparent
than she wished it to be; a tragic drama developed at that moment in
the souls of all present.

"You did not expect me so soon, I fancy," said Conti, offering his arm
to Beatrix.

The marquise could not avoid dropping Calyste's arm and taking that of
Conti. This ignoble transit, imperiously demanded, so dishonoring to
the new love, overwhelmed Calyste who threw himself on the bench
beside Camille, after exchanging the coldest of salutations with his
rival. He was torn by conflicting emotions. Strong in the thought that
Beatrix loved him, he wanted at first to fling himself upon Conti and
tell him that Beatrix was his; but the violent trembling of the woman
betraying how she suffered--for she had really paid the penalty of her
faults in that one moment--affected him so deeply that he was dumb,
struck like her with a sense of some implacable necessity.

Madame de Rochefide and Conti passed in front of the seat where
Calyste had dropped beside Camille, and as she passed, the marquise
looked at Camille, giving her one of those terrible glances in which
women have the art of saying all things. She avoided the eyes of
Calyste and turned her attention to Conti, who appeared to be jesting
with her.

"What will they say to each other?" Calyste asked of Camille.

"Dear child, you don't know as yet the terrible rights which an
extinguished love still gives to a man over a woman. Beatrix could not
refuse to take his arm. He is, no doubt, joking her about her new
love; he must have guessed it from your attitudes and the manner in
which you approached us."

"Joking her!" cried the impetuous youth, starting up.

"Be calm," said Camille, "or you will lose the last chances that
remain to you. If he wounds her self-love, she will crush him like a
worm under her foot. But he is too astute for that; he will manage her
with greater cleverness. He will seem not even to suppose that the
proud Madame de Rochefide could betray him; /she/ could never be
guilty of such depravity as loving a man for the sake of his beauty.
He will represent you to her as a child ambitious to have a marquise
in love with him, and to make himself the arbiter of the fate of two
women. In short, he will fire a broadside of malicious insinuations.
Beatrix will then be forced to parry with false assertions and
denials, which he will simply make use of to become once more her
master."

"Ah!" cried Calyste, "he does not love her. I would leave her free.
True love means a choice made anew at every moment, confirmed from day
to day. The morrow justifies the past, and swells the treasury of our
pleasures. Ah! why did he not stay away a little longer? A few days
more and he would not have found her. What brought him back?"

"The jest of a journalist," replied Camille. "His opera, on the
success of which he counted, has fallen flat. Some journalist,
probably Claude Vignon, remarked in the foyer: 'It is hard to lose
fame and mistress at the same moment,' and the speech cut him in all
his vanities. Love based on petty sentiments is always pitiless. I
have questioned him; but who can fathom a nature so false and
deceiving? He appeared to be weary of his troubles and his love,--in
short, disgusted with life. He regrets having allied himself so
publicly with the marquise, and made me, in speaking of his past
happiness, a melancholy poem, which was somewhat too clever to be
true. I think he hoped to worm out of me the secret of your love, in
the midst of the joy he expected his flatteries to cause me."

"What else?" said Calyste, watching Beatrix and Conti, who were now
coming towards them; but he listened no longer to Camille's words.

In talking with Conti, Camille had held herself prudently on the
defensive; she had betrayed neither Calyste's secret nor that of
Beatrix. The great artist was capable of treachery to every one, and
Mademoiselle des Touches warned Calyste to distrust him.

"My dear friend," she said, "this is by far the most critical moment
for you. You need caution and a sort of cleverness you do not possess;
I am afraid you will let yourself be tricked by the most wily man I
have ever known, and I can do nothing to help you."

The bell announced dinner. Conti offered his arm to Camille; Calyste
gave his to Beatrix. Camille drew back to let the marquise pass, but
the latter had found a moment in which to look at Calyste, and impress
upon him, by putting her finger on her lips, the absolute necessity of
discretion.

Conti was extremely gay during the dinner; perhaps this was only one
way of probing Madame de Rochefide, who played her part extremely ill.
If her conduct had been mere coquetry, she might have deceived even
Conti; but her new love was real, and it betrayed her. The wily
musician, far from adding to her embarrassment, pretended not to have
perceived it. At dessert, he brought the conversation round to women,
and lauded the nobility of their sentiments. Many a woman, he said,
who might have been willing to abandon a man in prosperity, would
sacrifice all to him in misfortune. Women had the advantage over men
in constancy; nothing ever detached them from their first lover, to
whom they clung as a matter of honor, unless he wounded them; they
felt that a second love was unworthy of them, and so forth. His ethics
were of the highest order; shedding incense on the altar where he knew
that one heart at least, pierced by many a blow, was bleeding. Camille
and Beatrix alone understood the bitterness of the sarcasms shot forth
in the guise of eulogy. At times they both flushed scarlet, but they
were forced to control themselves. When dinner was over, they took
each other by the arm to return to Camille's salon, and, as if by
mutual consent, they turned aside into the great salon, where they
could be alone for an instant in the darkness.

"It is dreadful to let Conti ride over me roughshod; and yet I can't
defend myself," said Beatrix, in a low voice. "The galley-slave is
always a slave to his chain-companion. I am lost; I must needs return
to my galleys! And it is you, Camille, who have cast me there! Ah! you
brought him back a day too soon, or a day too late. I recognize your
infernal talent as author. Well, your revenge is complete, the finale
perfect!"

"I may have told you that I would write to Conti, but to do it was
another matter," cried Camille. "I am incapable of such baseness. But
you are unhappy, and I will forgive the suspicion."

"What will become of Calyste?" said the marquise, with naive
self-conceit.

"Then Conti carries you off, does he?" asked Camille.

"Ah! you think you triumph!" cried Beatrix.

Anger distorted her handsome face as she said those bitter words to
Camille, who was trying to hide her satisfaction under a false
expression of sympathy. Unfortunately, the sparkle in her eyes belied
the sadness of her face, and Beatrix was learned in such deceptions.
When, a few moments later, the two women were seated under a strong
light on that divan where the first three weeks so many comedies had
been played, and where the secret tragedy of many thwarted passions
had begun, they examined each other for the last time, and felt they
were forever parted by an undying hatred.

"Calyste remains to you," said Beatrix, looking into Camille's eyes;
"but I am fixed in his heart, and no woman can ever drive me out of
it."

Camille replied, with an inimitable tone of irony that struck the
marquise to the heart, in the famous words of Mazarin's niece to Louis
XIV.,--

"You reign, you love, and you depart!"

Neither Camille nor Beatrix was conscious during this sharp and bitter
scene of the absence of Conti and Calyste. The composer had remained
at table with his rival, begging him to keep him company in finishing
a bottle of champagne.

"We have something to say to each other," added Conti, to prevent all
refusal on the part of Calyste.

Placed as they both were, it was impossible for the young Breton to
refuse this challenge.

"My dear friend," said the composer, in his most caressing voice, as
soon as the poor lad had drunk a couple of glasses of champagne, "we
are both good fellows, and we can speak to each other frankly. I have
not come here suspiciously. Beatrix loves me,"--this with a gesture of
the utmost self-conceit--"but the truth is, I have ceased to love her.
I am not here to carry her away with me, but to break off our
relations, and to leave her the honors of the rupture. You are young;
you don't yet know how useful it is to appear to be the victim when
you are really the executioner. Young men spit fire and flame; they
leave a woman with noise and fury; they often despise her, and they
make her hate them. But wise men do as I am doing; they get themselves
dismissed, assuming a mortified air, which leaves regret in the
woman's heart and also a sense of her superiority. You don't yet know,
luckily for you, how hampered men often are in their careers by the
rash promises which women are silly enough to accept when gallantry
obliges us to make nooses to catch our happiness. We swear eternal
faithfulness, and declare that we desire to pass our lives with them,
and seem to await a husband's death impatiently. Let him die, and
there are some provincial women obtuse or silly or malicious enough to
say: 'Here am I, free at last.' The spent ball suddenly comes to life
again, and falls plumb in the midst of our finest triumphs or our most
carefully planned happiness. I have seen that you love Beatrix. I
leave her therefore in a position where she loses nothing of her
precious majesty; she will certainly coquet with you, if only to tease
and annoy that angel of a Camille Maupin. Well, my dear fellow, take
her, love her, you'll do me a great service; I want her to turn
against me. I have been afraid of her pride and her virtue. Perhaps,
in spite of my approval of the matter, it may take some time to effect
this /chassez-croissez/. On such occasions the wisest plan is to take
no step at all. I did, just now, as we walked about the lawn, attempt
to let her see that I knew all, and was ready to congratulate her on
her new happiness. Well, she was furious! At this moment I am
desperately in love with the youngest and handsomest of our
prima-donnas, Mademoiselle Falcon of the Grand Opera. I think of
marrying her; yes, I have got as far as that. When you come to Paris
you will see that I have changed a marquise for a queen."

Calyste, whose candid face revealed his satisfaction, admitted his
love for Beatrix, which was all that Conti wanted to discover. There
is no man in the world, however /blase/ or depraved he may be, whose
love will not flame up again the moment he sees it threatened by a
rival. He may wish to leave a woman, but he will never willingly let
her leave him. When a pair of lovers get to this extremity, both the
man and the woman strive for priority of action, so deep is the wound
to their vanity. Questioned by the composer, Calyste related all that
had happened during the last three weeks at Les Touches, delighted to
find that Conti, who concealed his fury under an appearance of
charming good-humor, took it all in good part.

"Come, let us go upstairs," said the latter. "Women are so
distrustful; those two will wonder how we can sit here together
without tearing each other's hair out; they are even capable of coming
down to listen. I'll serve you faithfully, my dear boy. You'll see me
rough and jealous with the marquise; I shall seem to suspect her;
there's no better way to drive a woman to betray you. You will be
happy, and I shall be free. Seem to pity that angel for belonging to a
man without delicacy; show her a tear--for you can weep, you are still
young. I, alas! can weep no more; and that's a great advantage lost."

Calyste and Conti went up to Camille's salon. The composer, begged by
his young rival to sing, gave them that greatest of musical
masterpieces viewed as execution, the famous "/Pria che spunti
l'aurora/," which Rubini himself never attempted without trembling,
and which had often been Conti's triumph. Never was his singing more
extraordinary than on this occasion, when so many feelings were
contending in his breast. Calyste was in ecstasy. As Conti sang the
first words of the cavatina, he looked intently at the marquise,
giving to those words a cruel signification which was fully
understood. Camille, who accompanied him, guessed the order thus
conveyed, which bowed the head of the luckless Beatrix. She looked at
Calyste, and felt sure that the youth had fallen into some trap in
spite of her advice. This conviction became certainty when the
evidently happy Breton came up to bid Beatrix good-night, kissing her
hand, and pressing it with a little air of happy confidence.

By the time Calyste had reached Guerande, the servants were packing
Conti's travelling-carriage, and "by dawn," as the song had said, the
composer was carrying Beatrix away with Camille's horses to the first
relay. The morning twilight enabled Madame de Rochefide to see
Guerande, its towers, whitened by the dawn, shining out upon the still
dark sky. Melancholy thoughts possessed her; she was leaving there one
of the sweetest flowers of all her life,--a pure love, such as a young
girl dreams of; the only true love she had ever known or was ever to
conceive of. The woman of the world obeyed the laws of the world; she
sacrificed love to their demands just as many women sacrifice it to
religion or to duty. Sometimes mere pride can rise in acts as high as
virtue. Read thus, this history is that of many women.

The next morning Calyste went to Les Touches about mid-day. When he
reached the spot from which, the day before, he had seen Beatrix
watching for him at the window, he saw Camille, who instantly ran down
to him. She met him at the foot of the staircase and told the cruel
truth in one word,--

"Gone!"

"Beatrix?" asked Calyste, thunderstruck.

"You have been duped by Conti; you told me nothing, and I could do
nothing for you."

She led the poor fellow to her little salon, where he flung himself on
the divan where he had so often seen the marquise, and burst into
tears. Felicite smoked her hookah and said nothing, knowing well that
no words or thoughts are capable of arresting the first anguish of
such pain, which is always deaf and dumb. Calyste, unable even to
think, much less to choose a course, sat there all day in a state of
complete torpidity. Just before dinner was served, Camille tried to
say a few words, after begging him, very earnestly, to listen to her.

"Friend," she said, "you caused me the bitterest suffering, and I had
not, like you, a beautiful young life before me in which to heal
myself. For me, life has no longer any spring, nor my soul a love. So,
to find consolation, I have had to look above. Here, in this room, the
day before Beatrix came here, I drew you her portrait; I did not do
her injustice, or you might have thought me jealous. I wanted you to
know her as she is, for that would have kept you safe. Listen now to
the full truth. Madame de Rochefide is wholly unworthy of you. The
scandal of her fall was not necessary; she did the thing deliberately
in order to play a part in the eyes of society. She is one of those
women who prefer the celebrity of a scandal to tranquil happiness;
they fly in the face of society to obtain the fatal alms of a rebuke;
they desire to be talked about at any cost. Beatrix was eaten up with
vanity. Her fortune and her wit had not given her the feminine royalty
that she craved; they had not enabled her to reign supreme over a
salon. She then bethought herself of seeking the celebrity of the
Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. But the world,
after all, is just; it gives the homage of its interest to real
feelings only. Beatrix playing comedy was judged to be a second-rate
actress. There was no reason whatever for her flight; the sword of
Damocles was not suspended over her head; she is neither sincere, nor
loving, nor tender; if she were, would she have gone away with Conti
this morning?"

Camille talked long and eloquently; but this last effort to open
Calyste's eyes was useless, and she said no more when he expressed to
her by a gesture his absolute belief in Beatrix.

She forced him to come down into the dining-room and sit there while
she dined; though he himself was unable to swallow food. It is only
during extreme youth that these contractions of the bodily functions
occur. Later, the organs have acquired, as it were, fixed habits, and
are hardened. The reaction of the mental and moral system upon the
physical is not enough to produce a mortal illness unless the physical
system retains its primitive purity. A man resists the violent grief
that kills a youth, less by the greater weakness of his affection than
by the greater strength of his organs.

Therefore Mademoiselle des Touches was greatly alarmed by the calm,
resigned attitude which Calyste took after his burst of tears had
subsided. Before he left her, he asked permission to go into Beatrix's
bedroom, where he had seen her on the night of her illness, and there
he laid his head on the pillow where hers had lain.

"I am committing follies," he said, grasping Camille's hand, and
bidding her good-night in deep dejection.

He returned home, found the usual company at /mouche/, and passed the
remainder of the evening sitting beside his mother. The rector, the
Chevalier du Halga, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel all knew of Madame de
Rochefide's departure, and were rejoicing in it. Calyste would now
return to them; and all three watched him cautiously. No one in that
old manor-house was capable of imagining the result of a first love,
the love of youth in a heart so simple and so true as that of Calyste.



XVI

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

For several days Calyste went regularly to Les Touches. He paced round
and round the lawn, where he had sometimes walked with Beatrix on his
arm. He often went to Croisic to stand upon that fateful rock, or lie
for hours in the bush of box; for, by studying the footholds on the
sides of the fissure, he had found a means of getting up and down.

These solitary trips, his silence, his gravity, made his mother very
anxious. After about two weeks, during which time this conduct, like
that of a caged animal, lasted, this poor lover, caged in his despair,
ceased to cross the bay; he had scarcely strength to drag himself
along the road from Guerande to the spot where he had seen Beatrix
watching from her window. The family, delighted at the departure of
"those Parisians," to use a term of the provinces, saw nothing fatal
or diseased about the lad. The two old maids and the rector, pursuing
their scheme, had kept Charlotte de Kergarouet, who nightly played off
her little coquetries on Calyste, obtaining in return nothing better
than advice in playing /mouche/. During these long evenings, Calyste
sat between his mother and the little Breton girl, observed by the
rector and Charlotte's aunt, who discussed his greater or less
depression as they walked home together. Their simple minds mistook
the lethargic indifference of the hapless youth for submission to
their plans. One evening when Calyste, wearied out, went off suddenly
to bed, the players dropped their cards upon the table and looked at
each other as the young man closed the door of his chamber. One and
all had listened to the sound of his receding steps with anxiety.

"Something is the matter with Calyste," said the baroness, wiping her
eyes.

"Nothing is the matter," replied Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel; "but you
should marry him at once."

"Do you believe that marriage would divert his mind?" asked the
chevalier.

Charlotte looked reprovingly at Monsieur du Halga, whom she now began
to think ill-mannered, depraved, immoral, without religion, and very
ridiculous about his dog,--opinions which her aunt, defending the old
sailor, combated.

"I shall lecture Calyste to-morrow morning," said the baron, whom the
others had thought asleep. "I do not wish to go out of this world
without seeing my grandson, a little pink and white Guenic with a
Breton cap on his head."

"Calyste doesn't say a word," said old Zephirine, "and there's no
making out what's the matter with him. He doesn't eat; I don't see
what he lives on. If he gets his meals at Les Touches, the devil's
kitchen doesn't nourish him."

"He is in love," said the chevalier, risking that opinion very
timidly.

"Come, come, old gray-beard, you've forgotten to put in your stake!"
cried Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel. "When you begin to think of your young
days you forget everything."

"Come to breakfast to-morrow," said old Zephirine to her friend
Jacqueline; "my brother will have had a talk with his son, and we can
settle the matter finally. One nail, you know, drives out another."

"Not among Bretons," said the chevalier.

The next day Calyste saw Charlotte, as she arrived dressed with
unusual care, just after the baron had given him, in the dining-room,
a discourse on matrimony, to which he could make no answer. He now
knew the ignorance of his father and mother and all their friends; he
had gathered the fruits of the tree of knowledge, and knew himself to
be as much isolated as if he did not speak the family language. He
merely requested his father to give him a few days' grace. The old
baron rubbed his hands with joy, and gave fresh life to the baroness
by whispering in her ear what he called the good news.

Breakfast was gay; Charlotte, to whom the baron had given a hint, was
sparkling. After the meal was over, Calyste went out upon the portico
leading to the garden, followed by Charlotte; he gave her his arm and
led her to the grotto. Their parents and friends were at the window,
looking at them with a species of tenderness. Presently Charlotte,
uneasy at her suitor's silence, looked back and saw them, which gave
her an opportunity of beginning the conversation by saying to
Calyste,--

"They are watching us."

"They cannot hear us," he replied.

"True; but they see us."

"Let us sit down, Charlotte," replied Calyste, gently taking her hand.

"Is it true that your banner used formerly to float from that twisted
column?" asked Charlotte, with a sense that the house was already
hers; how comfortable she should be there! what a happy sort of life!
"You will make some changes inside the house, won't you, Calyste?" she
said.

"I shall not have time, my dear Charlotte," said the young man, taking
her hands and kissing them. "I am going now to tell you my secret. I
love too well a person whom you have seen, and who loves me, to be
able to make the happiness of any other woman; though I know that from
our childhood you and I have been destined for each other by our
friends."

"But she is married, Calyste."

"I shall wait," replied the young man.

"And I, too," said Charlotte, her eyes filling with tears. "You cannot
long love a woman like that, who, they say, has gone off with a
singer--"

"Marry, my dear Charlotte," said Calyste, interrupting her. "With the
fortune your aunt intends to give you, which is enormous for Brittany,
you can choose some better man than I. You could marry a titled man. I
have brought you here, not to tell you what you already knew, but to
entreat you, in the name of our childish friendship, to take this
rupture upon yourself, and say that you have rejected me. Say that you
do not wish to marry a man whose heart is not free; and thus I shall
be spared at least the sense that I have done you public wrong. You do
not know, Charlotte, how heavy a burden life now is to me. I cannot
bear the slightest struggle; I am weakened like a man whose vital
spark is gone, whose soul has left him. If it were not for the grief I
should cause my mother, I would have flung myself before now into the
sea; I have not returned to the rocks at Croisic since the day that
temptation became almost irresistible. Do not speak of this to any
one. Good-bye, Charlotte."

He took the young girl's head and kissed her hair; then he left the
garden by the postern-gate and fled to Les Touches, where he stayed
near Camille till past midnight. On returning home, at one in the
morning, he found his mother awaiting him with her worsted-work. He
entered softly, clasped her hand in his, and said,--

"Is Charlotte gone?"

"She goes to-morrow, with her aunt, in despair, both of them,"
answered the baroness. "Come to Ireland with me, my Calyste."

"Many a time I have thought of flying there--"

"Ah!" cried the baroness.

"With Beatrix," he added.

Some days after Charlotte's departure, Calyste joined the Chevalier du
Halga in his daily promenade on the mall with his little dog. They sat
down in the sunshine on a bench, where the young man's eyes could
wander from the vanes of Les Touches to the rocks of Croisic, against
which the waves were playing and dashing their white foam. Calyste was
thin and pale; his strength was diminishing, and he was conscious at
times of little shudders at regular intervals, denoting fever. His
eyes, surrounded by dark circles, had that singular brilliancy which a
fixed idea gives to the eyes of hermits and solitary souls, or the
ardor of contest to those of the strong fighters of our present
civilization. The chevalier was the only person with whom he could
exchange a few ideas. He had divined in that old man an apostle of his
own religion; he recognized in his soul the vestiges of an eternal
love.