Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


"Well, good-bye, Sabine," said the duchess; "remember your promise;
write to me often. Calyste, I say nothing more to you, but you
understand me."

Clotilde, leaning on the youngest sister Athenais, who was smiling to
the Vicomte de Grandlieu, cast a reflecting look through her tears at
the bride, and followed the carriage with her eyes as it disappeared
to the clacking of four whips, more noisy than the shots of a pistol
gallery. In a few minutes the gay convoy had reached the esplanade of
the Invalides, the barrier of Passy by the quay of the Pont d'Iena,
and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.

Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and
Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and
all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage
ceremony? The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along;
the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods,
banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money
lasts. A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer
sense of modesty,--that which hides from the public eye and
inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy
burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and
exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers.
One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to
escape both the world and their family. The love which begins a
marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a
treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women
reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of
uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three
letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising
to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find
themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband's heart, do not,
as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage,
they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the
baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down
their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons
when they say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be
made;" "Never laugh at such things;" "No lady ever flings herself on a
sofa; she sits down quietly;" "Pray give up such detestable ways;" "My
dear, that is a thing which is never done," etc.

Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young
girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the
training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural
good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to
use their opera-glasses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was
also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the
fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as
interesting a young woman as the heroine of the "Memoirs of two young
Married Women." Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of
which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind
and temperament.

Guerande, April, 1838.

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:

Dear Mamma,--You will understand why I did not write to you during
the journey,--our wits are then like wheels. Here I am, for the
last two days, in the depths of Brittany, at the hotel du Guenic,
--a house as covered with carving as a sandal-wood box. In spite
of the affectionate devotion of Calyste's family, I feel a keen
desire to fly to you, to tell you many things which can only be
trusted to a mother.

Calyste married, dear mamma, with a great sorrow in his heart. We
all knew that, and you did not hide from me the difficulties of my
position; but alas! they are greater than you thought. Ah! my dear
mother, what experience we acquire in the short space of a few
days--I might even say a few hours! All your counsels have proved
fruitless; you will see why from one sentence: I love Calyste as
if he were not my husband,--that is to say, if I were married to
another, and were travelling with Calyste, I should love Calyste
and hate my husband.

Now think of a man beloved so completely, involuntarily,
absolutely, and all the other adverbs you may choose to employ,
and you will see that my servitude is established in spite of your
good advice. You told me to be grand, noble, dignified, and
self-respecting in order to obtain from Calyste the feelings that
are never subject to the chances and changes of life,--esteem, honor,
and the consideration which sanctifies a woman in the bosom of her
family. I remember how you blamed, I dare say justly, the young
women of the present day, who, under pretext of living happily
with their husbands, begin by compliance, flattery, familiarity,
an abandonment, you called it, a little too wanton (a word I did
not fully understand), all of which, if I must believe you, are
relays that lead rapidly to indifference and possibly to contempt.
"Remember that you are a Grandlieu!" yes, I remember that you told
me all that--

But oh! that advice, filled with the maternal eloquence of a
female Daedelus has had the fate of all things mythological. Dear,
beloved mother, could you ever have supposed it possible that I
should begin by the catastrophe which, according to you, ends the
honeymoon of the young women of the present day?

When Calyste and I were fairly alone in the travelling carriage,
we felt rather foolish in each other's company, understanding the
importance of the first word, the first look; and we both,
bewildered by the solemnity, looked out of our respective windows.
It became so ridiculous that when we reached the barrier monsieur
began, in a rather troubled tone of voice, a set discourse,
prepared, no doubt, like other improvisations, to which I listened
with a beating heart, and which I take the liberty of here
abridging.

"My dear Sabine," he said, "I want you to be happy, and, above
all, do I wish you to be happy in your own way. Therefore, in the
situation in which we are, instead of deceiving ourselves mutually
about our characters and our feelings by noble compliances, let us
endeavor to be to each other at once what we should be years
hence. Think always that you have a friend and a brother in me, as
I shall feel I have a sister and a friend in you."

Though it was all said with the utmost delicacy, I found nothing
in this first conjugal love-speech which responded to the feelings
in my soul, and I remained pensive after replying that I was
animated by the same sentiments. After this declaration of our
rights to mutual coldness, we talked of weather, relays, and
scenery in the most charming manner,--I with rather a forced
little laugh, he absent-mindedly.

At last, as we were leaving Versailles, I turned to Calyste--whom
I called my dear Calyste, and he called me my dear Sabine--and
asked him plainly to tell me the events which had led him to the
point of death, and to which I was aware that I owed the happiness
of being his wife. He hesitated long. In fact, my request gave
rise to a little argument between us, which lasted through three
relays,--I endeavoring to maintain the part of an obstinate girl,
and trying to sulk; he debating within himself the question which
the newspapers used to put to Charles X.: "Must the king yield or
not?" At last, after passing Verneuil, and exchanging oaths enough
to satisfy three dynasties never to reproach him for his folly,
and never to treat him coldly, etc., etc., he related to me his
love for Madame de Rochefide.

"I do not wish," he said, in conclusion, "to have any secrets
between us."

Poor, dear Calyste, it seems, was ignorant that his friend,
Mademoiselle des Touches, and you had thought it right to tell me
the truth. Well, mother,--for I can tell all to a mother as tender
as you,--I was deeply hurt by perceiving that he had yielded less
to my request than to his own desire to talk of that strange
passion. Do you blame me, darling mother, for having wished to
reconnoitre the extent of the grief, the open wound of the heart
of which you warned me?

So, eight hours after receiving the rector's blessing at
Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, your Sabine was in the rather false position of
a young wife listening to a confidence, from the very lips of her
husband, of his misplaced love for an unworthy rival. Yes, there I
was, in the drama of a young woman learning, officially, as it
were, that she owed her marriage to the disdainful rejection of an
old and faded beauty!

Still, I gained what I sought. "What was that?" you will ask. Ah!
mother dear, I have seen too much of love going on around me not
to know how to put a little of it into practice. Well, Calyste
ended the poem of his miseries with the warmest protestations of
an absolute forgetting of what he called his madness. All kinds of
affirmations have to be signed, you know. The happy unhappy one
took my hand, carried it to his lips, and, after that, he kept it
for a long time clasped in his own. A declaration followed. /That
one/ seemed to me more conformable than the first to the demands
of our new condition, though our lips never said a word. Perhaps I
owed it to the vigorous indignation I felt and showed at the bad
taste of a woman foolish enough not to love my beautiful, my
glorious Calyste.

They are calling me to play a game of cards, which I do not yet
understand. I will finish my letter to-morrow. To leave you at
this moment to make a fifth at /mouche/ (that is the name of the
game) can only be done in the depths of Brittany--Adieu.

Your Sabine.


Guerande, May, 1838.

I take up my Odyssey. On the third day your children no longer
used the ceremonious "you;" they thee'd and thou'd each other like
lovers. My mother-in-law, enchanted to see us so happy, is trying
to take your place to me, dear mother, and, as often happens when
people play a part to efface other memories, she has been so
charming that she is, /almost/, you to me.

I think she has guessed the heroism of my conduct, for at the
beginning of our journey she tried to hide her anxiety with such
care that it was visible from excessive precaution.

When I saw the towers of Guerande rising in the distance, I
whispered in the ear of your son-in-law, "Have you really
forgotten her?" My husband, now become /my angel/, can't know
anything, I think, about sincere and simple love, for the words
made him wild with happiness. Still, I think the desire to put
Madame de Rochefide forever out of his mind led me too far. But
how could I help it? I love, and I am half a Portuguese,--for I am
much more like you, mamma, than like my father.

Calyste accepts all from me as spoilt children accept things, they
think it their right; he is an only child, I remember that. But,
between ourselves, I will not give my daughter (if I have any
daughters) to an only son. I see a variety of tyrants in an only
son. So, mamma, we have rather inverted our parts, and I am the
devoted half of the pair. There are dangers, I know, in devotion,
though we profit by it; we lose our dignity, for one thing. I feel
bound to tell you of the wreck of that semi-virtue. Dignity, after
all, is only a screen set up before pride, behind which we rage as
we please; but how could I help it? you were not here, and I saw a
gulf opening before me. Had I remained upon my dignity, I should
have won only the cold joys (or pains) of a sort of brotherhood
which would soon have drifted into indifference. What sort of
future might that have led to? My devotion has, I know, made me
Calyste's slave; but shall I regret it? We shall see.

As for the present, I am delighted with it. I love Calyste; I love
him absolutely, with the folly of a mother, who thinks that all
her son may do is right, even if he tyrannizes a trifle over her.

Guerande, May 15th.

Up to the present moment, dear mamma, I find marriage a delightful
affair, I can spend all my tenderness on the noblest of men whom a
foolish woman disdained for a fiddler,--for that woman evidently
was a fool, and a cold fool, the worst kind! I, in my legitimate
love, am charitable; I am curing his wounds while I lay my heart
open to incurable ones. Yes, the more I love Calyste, the more I
feel that I should die of grief if our present happiness ever
ceased.

I must tell you how the whole family and the circle which meets at
the hotel de Guenic adore me. They are all personages born under
tapestries of the highest warp; in fact, they seem to have stepped
from those old tapestries as if to prove that the impossible may
exist. Some day, when we are alone together, I will describe to
you my Aunt Zephirine, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel, the Chevalier du
Halga, the Demoiselles de Kergarouet, and others. They all, even
to the two servants, Gasselin and Mariotte (whom I wish they would
let me take to Paris), regard me as an angel sent from heaven;
they tremble when I speak. Dear people! they ought to be preserved
under glass.

My mother-in-law has solemnly installed us in the apartments
formerly occupied by herself and her late husband. The scene was
touching. She said to us,--

"I spent my whole married life, a happy woman, in these rooms; may
the omen be a happy one for you, my children."

She has taken Calyste's former room for hers. Saintly soul! she
seems intent on laying off her memories and all her conjugal
dignities to invest us with them. The province of Brittany, this
town, this family of ancient morals and ancient customs has, in
spite of certain absurdities which strike the eye of a frivolous
Parisian girl, something inexplicable, something grandiose even in
its trifles, which can only be defined by the word /sacred/.

All the tenants of the vast domains of the house of Guenic, bought
back, as you know, by Mademoiselle des Touches (whom we are going
to visit in her convent), have been in a body to pay their
respects to us. These worthy people, in their holiday costumes,
expressing their genuine joy in the fact that Calyste has now
become really and truly their master, made me understand Brittany,
the feudal system and /old/ France. The whole scene was a festival
I can't describe to you in writing, but I will tell you about it
when we meet. The terms of the leases have been proposed by the
/gars/ themselves. We shall sign them, after making a tour of
inspection round the estates, which have been mortgaged away from
us for one hundred and fifty years! Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel told
me that the /gars/ have reckoned up the revenues and estimated the
rentals with a veracity and justice Parisians would never believe.

We start in three days on horseback for this trip. I will write
you on my return, dear mother. I shall have nothing more to tell
you about myself, for my happiness is at its height--and how can
that be told? I shall write you only what you know already, and
that is, how I love you.

Nantes, June, 1838.

Having now played the role of a chatelaine, adored by her vassals
as if the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had lowered no banners; and
after rides through forests, and halts at farmhouses, dinners on
oaken tables, covered with centenary linen, bending under Homeric
viands served on antediluvian dishes; after drinking the choicest
wines in goblets to volleys of musketry, accompanied by cries of
"Long live the Guenics!" till I was deafened; after balls, where
the only orchestra was a bagpipe, blown by a man for ten hours;
and after bouquets, and young brides who wanted us to bless them,
and downright weariness, which made me find in my bed a sleep I
never knew before, with delightful awakenings when love shone
radiant as the sun pouring in upon me, and scintillating with a
million of flies, all buzzing in the Breton dialect!--in short,
after a most grotesque residence in the Chateau du Guenic, where
the windows are gates and the cows grace peacefully on the grass
in the halls (which castle we have sworn to repair and to inhabit
for a while very year to the wild acclamations of the clan du
Guenic, a /gars/ of which bore high our banner)--ouf! I am at
Nantes.

But oh! what a day was that when we arrived at the old castle! The
rector came out, mother, with all his clergy, crowned with
flowers, to receive us and bless us, expressing such joy,--the
tears are in my eyes as I think of it. And my noble Calyste! who
played his part of seigneur like a personage in Walter Scott! My
lord received his tenants' homage as if he were back in the
thirteenth century. I heard the girls and the women saying to each
other, "Oh, what a beautiful seigneur we have!" for all the world
like an opera chorus. The old men talked of Calyste's resemblance
to the former Guenics whom they had known in their youth. Ah!
noble, sublime Brittany! land of belief and faith! But progress
has got its eye upon it; bridges are being built, roads made,
ideas are coming, and then farewell to the sublime! The peasants
will certainly not be as free and proud as I have now seen them,
when progress has proved to them that they are Calyste's equals
--if, indeed, they could ever be got to believe it.

After this poem of our pacific Restoration had been sung, and the
contracts and leases signed, we left that ravishing land, all
flowery, gay, solemn, lonely by turns, and came here to kneel with
our happiness at the feet of her who gave it to us.

Calyste and I both felt the need of thanking the sister of the
Visitation. In memory of her he has quartered his own arms with
those of Des Touches, which are: party couped, tranche and taille
or and sinople, on the latter two eagles argent. He means to take
one of the eagles argent for his own supporter and put this motto
in its beak: /Souviegne-vous/.

Yesterday we went to the convent of the ladies of the Visitation,
to which we were taken by the Abbe Grimont, a friend of the du
Guenic family, who told us that your dear Felicite, mamma, was
indeed a saint. She could not very well be anything else to him,
for her conversion, which was thought to be his doing, has led to
his appointment as vicar-general of the diocese. Mademoiselle des
Touches declined to receive Calyste, and would only see me. I
found her slightly changed, thinner and paler; but she seemed much
pleased at my visit.

"Tell Calyste," she said, in a low voice, "that it is a matter of
conscience with me not to see him, for I am permitted to do so. I
prefer not to buy that happiness by months of suffering. Ah, you
do not know what it costs me to reply to the question, 'Of what
are you thinking?' Certainly the mother of the novices has no
conception of the number and extent of the ideas which are rushing
through my mind when she asks that question. Sometimes I am seeing
Italy or Paris, with all its sights; always thinking, however, of
Calyste, who is"--she said this in that poetic way you know and
admire so much--"who is the sun of memory to me. I found," she
continued, "that I was too old to be received among the
Carmelites, and I have entered the order of Saint-Francois de
Sales solely because he said, 'I will bare your heads instead of
your feet,'--objecting, as he did, to austerities which mortified
the body only. It is, in truth, the head that sins. The saintly
bishop was right to make his rule austere toward the intellect,
and terrible against the will. That is what I sought; for my head
was the guilty part of me. It deceived me as to my heart until I
reached that fatal age of forty, when, for a few brief moments, we
are forty times happier than young women, and then, speedily,
fifty times more unhappy. But, my child, tell me," she asked,
ceasing with visible satisfaction to speak of herself, "are you
happy?"

"You see me under all the enchantments of love and happiness," I
answered.

"Calyste is as good and simple as he is noble and beautiful," she
said, gravely. "I have made you my heiress in more things than
property; you now possess the double ideal of which I dreamed. I
rejoice in what I have done," she continued, after a pause. "But,
my child, make no mistake; do yourself no wrong. You have easily
won happiness; you have only to stretch out your hand to take it,
and it is yours; but be careful to preserve it. If you had come
here solely to carry away with you the counsels that my knowledge
of your husband alone can give you, the journey would be well
repaid. Calyste is moved at this moment by a communicated passion,
but you have not inspired it. To make your happiness lasting, try,
my dear child, to give him something of his former emotions. In
the interests of both of you, be capricious, be coquettish; to
tell you the truth, you /must/ be. I am not advising any odious
scheming, or petty tyranny; this that I tell you is the science of
a woman's life. Between usury and prodigality, my child, is
economy. Study, therefore, to acquire honorably a certain empire
over Calyste. These are the last words on earthly interests that I
shall ever utter, and I have kept them to say as we part; for
there are times when I tremble in my conscience lest to save
Calyste I may have sacrificed you. Bind him to you, firmly, give
him children, let him respect their mother in you--and," she
added, in a low and trembling voice, "manage, if you can, that he
shall never again see Beatrix."

That name plunged us both into a sort of stupor; we looked into
each other's eyes, exchanging a vague uneasiness.

"Do you return to Guerande?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Never go to Les Touches. I did wrong to give him that property."

"Why?" I asked.

"Child!" she answered, "Les Touches for you is Bluebeard's
chamber. There is nothing so dangerous as to wake a sleeping
passion."

I have given you, dear mamma, the substance, or at any rate, the
meaning of our conversation. If Mademoiselle des Touches made me
talk to her freely, she also gave me much to think of; and all the
more because, in the delight of this trip, and the charm of these
relations with my Calyste, I had well-nigh forgotten the serious
situation of which I spoke to you in my first letter, and about
which you warned me.

But oh! mother, it is impossible for me to follow these counsels.
I cannot put an appearance of opposition or caprice into my love;
it would falsify it. Calyste will do with me what he pleases.
According to your theory, the more I am a woman the more I make
myself his toy; for I am, and I know it, horribly weak in my
happiness; I cannot resist a single glance of my lord. But no! I
do not abandon myself to love; I only cling to it, as a mother
presses her infant to her breast, fearing some evil.

Note.--When "Beatrix" was first published, in 1839, the volume ended
with the following paragraph: "Calyste, rich and married to the
most beautiful woman in Paris, retains a sadness in his soul which
nothing dissipates,--not even the birth of a son at Guerande, in
1839, to the great joy of Zephirine du Guenic. Beatrix lives still
in the depths of his heart, and it is impossible to foresee what
disasters might result should he again meet with Madame de
Rochefide." In 1842 this concluding paragraph was suppressed and
the story continued as here follows.--TR.



XVIII

THE END OF A HONEY-MOON

Guerande, July, 1838.

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:

Ah, my dear mamma! at the end of three months to know what it is
to be jealous! My heart completes its experience; I now feel the
deepest hatred and the deepest love! I am more than betrayed,--I
am not loved. How fortunate for me to have a mother, a heart on
which to cry out as I will!

It is enough to say to wives who are still half girls: "Here's a
key rusty with memories among those of your palace; go everywhere,
enjoy everything, but keep away from Les Touches!" to make us
eager to go there hot-foot, our eyes shining with the curiosity of
Eve. What a root of bitterness Mademoiselle des Touches planted in
my love! Why did she forbid me to go to Les Touches? What sort of
happiness is mine if it depends on an excursion, on a visit to a
paltry house in Brittany? Why should I fear? Is there anything to
fear? Add to this reasoning of Mrs. Blue-Beard the desire that
nips all women to know if their power is solid or precarious, and
you'll understand how it was that I said one day, with an
unconcerned little air:--