Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in
the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice.
There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich,
distinguished, and well-bred, who tire--without their knowledge,
possibly--of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose own
nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom
grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but
who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own
superiority--if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste
found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers
thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great
men have played before our eyes the Saviour's part toward the woman
taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their
generation than they?

Calyste reached the hour of two o'clock living on one sentence only,
"I shall see her again!"--a poem which has often paid the costs of a
journey of two thousand miles. He now went with a light step to the
rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had
never before seen it. Once there, he stood--he, the son-in-law of the
Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons--at the foot of the
staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman:
"Monsieur's name?" Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her
freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited,
looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and
yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their
chain, had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she
could not beg from her tyrant. Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had
spared Beatrix all the petty worries of material life, and her mother
had frequently send her considerable sums of money. Finding herself
now on her own resources, she was forced to an economy that was rather
severe for a woman accustomed to every luxury. She had therefore gone
to the summit of the hill on which lies the Parc de Monceaux, and
there she had taken refuge in a "little house" formerly belonging to a
great seigneur, standing on the street, but possessed of a charming
garden, the rent of which did not exceed eighteen hundred francs.
Still served by an old footman, a maid, and a cook from Alencon, who
were faithful to her throughout her vicissitudes, her penury, as she
thought it, would have been opulence to many an ambitious bourgeoise.

Calyste went up a staircase the steps of which were well pumiced and
the landings filled with flowering plants. On the first floor the old
servant opened, in order to admit the baron into the apartment, a
double door of red velvet with lozenges of red silk studded with gilt
nails. Silk and velvet furnished the rooms through which Calyste
passed. Carpets in grave colors, curtains crossing each other before
the windows, portieres, in short all things within contrasted with the
mean external appearance of the house, which was ill-kept by the
proprietor. Calyste awaited Beatrix in a salon of sober character,
where all the luxury was simple in style. This room, hung with garnet
velvet heightened here and there with dead-gold silken trimmings, the
floor covered with a dark red carpet, the windows resembling
conservatories, with abundant flowers in the jardinieres, was lighted
so faintly that Calyste could scarcely see on a mantel-shelf two cases
of old celadon, between which gleamed a silver cup attributed to
Benvenuto Cellini, and brought from Italy by Beatrix. The furniture of
gilded wood with velvet coverings, the magnificent consoles, on one of
which was a curious clock, the table with its Persian cloth, all bore
testimony to former opulence, the remains of which had been well
applied. On a little table Calyste saw jewelled knick-knacks, a book
in course of reading, in which glittered the handle of a dagger used
as a paper-cutter--symbol of criticism! Finally, on the walls, ten
water-colors richly framed, each representing one of the diverse
bedrooms in which Madame de Rochefide's wandering life had led her to
sojourn, gave the measure of what was surely superior impertinence.

The rustle of a silk dress announced the poor unfortunate, who
appeared in a studied toilet which would certainly have told a /roue/
that his coming was awaited. The gown, made like a wrapper to show the
line of a white bosom, was of pearl-gray moire with large open
sleeves, from which issued the arms covered with a second sleeve of
puffed tulle, divided by straps and trimmed with lace at the wrists.
The beautiful hair, which the comb held insecurely, escaped from a cap
of lace and flowers.

"Already!" she said, smiling. "A lover could not have shown more
eagerness. You must have secrets to tell me, have you not?"

And she posed herself gracefully on a sofa, inviting Calyste by a
gesture to sit beside her. By chance (a selected chance, possibly, for
women have two memories, that of angels and that of devils) Beatrix
was redolent of the perfume which she used at Les Touches during her
first acquaintance with Calyste. The inhaling of this scent, contact
with that dress, the glance of those eyes, which in the semi-darkness
gathered the light and returned it, turned Calyste's brain. The
luckless man was again impelled to that violence which had once before
almost cost Beatrix her life; but this time the marquise was on the
edge of a sofa, not on that of a rock; she rose to ring the bell,
laying a finger on his lips. Calyste, recalled to order, controlled
himself, all the more because he saw that Beatrix had no inimical
intention.

"Antoine, I am not at home--for every one," she said. "Put some wood
on the fire. You see, Calyste, that I treat you as a friend," she
continued with dignity, when the old man had left the room; "therefore
do not treat me as you would a mistress. I have two remarks to make to
you. In the first place, I should not deny myself foolishly to any man
I really loved; and secondly, I am determined to belong to no other
man on earth, for I believed, Calyste, that I was loved by a species
of Rizzio, whom no engagement trammelled, a man absolutely free, and
you see to what that fatal confidence has led me. As for you, you are
now under the yoke of the most sacred of duties; you have a young,
amiable, delightful wife; moreover, you are a father. I should be, as
you are, without excuse--we should be two fools--"

"My dear Beatrix, all these reasons vanish before a single word--I
have never loved but you on earth, and I was married against my will."

"Ah! a trick played upon us by Mademoiselle des Touches," she said,
smiling.

Three hours passed, during which Madame de Rochefide held Calyste to
the consideration of conjugal faith, pointing out to him the horrible
alternative of an utter renunciation of Sabine. Nothing else could
reassure her, she said, in the dreadful situation to which Calyste's
love would reduce her. Then she affected to regard the sacrifice of
Sabine as a small matter, she knew her so well!

"My dear child," she said, "that's a woman who fulfils all the
promises of her girlhood. She is a Grandlieu, to be sure, but she's as
brown as her mother the Portuguese, not to say yellow, and as dry and
stiff as her father. To tell the truth, your wife will never go wrong;
she's a big boy who can take care of herself. Poor Calyste! is that
the sort of woman you needed? She has fine eyes, but such eyes are
very common in Italy and in Spain and Portugal. Can any woman be
tender with bones like hers. Eve was fair; brown women descend from
Adam, blondes come from the hand of God, which left upon Eve his last
thought after he had created her."

About six o'clock Calyste, driven to desperation, took his hat to
depart.

"Yes, go, my poor friend," she said; "don't give her the annoyance of
dining without you."

Calyste stayed. At his age it was so easy to snare him on his worst
side.

"What! you dare to dine with me?" said Beatrix, playing a provocative
amazement. "My poor food does not alarm you? Have you enough
independence of soul to crown me with joy by this little proof of your
affection?"

"Let me write a note to Sabine; otherwise she will wait dinner for me
till nine o'clock."

"Here," said Beatrix, "this is the table at which I write."

She lighted the candles herself, and took one to the table to look
over what he was writing.

"/My dear Sabine--/"

"'My dear'?--can you really say that your wife is still dear to you?"
she asked, looking at him with a cold eye that froze the very marrow
of his bones. "Go,--you had better go and dine with her."

"/I dine at a restaurant with some friends./"

"A lie. Oh, fy! you are not worthy to be loved either by her or by me.
Men are all cowards in their treatment of women. Go, monsieur, go and
dine with your dear Sabine."

Calyste flung himself back in his arm-chair and became as pale as
death. Bretons possess a courage of nature which makes them obstinate
under difficulties. Presently the young baron sat up, put his elbow on
the table, his chin in his hand, and looked at the implacable Beatrix
with a flashing eye. He was so superb that a Northern or a Southern
woman would have fallen at his feet saying, "Take me!" But Beatrix,
born on the borders of Normandy and Brittany, belonged to the race of
Casterans; desertion had developed in her the ferocity of the Frank,
the spitefulness of the Norman; she wanted some terrible notoriety as
a vengeance, and she yielded to no weakness.

"Dictate what I ought to write," said the luckless man. "But, in that
case--"

"Well, yes!" she said, "you shall love me then as you loved me at
Guerande. Write: /I dine out; do not expect me./"

"What next?" said Calyste, thinking something more would follow.

"Nothing; sign it. Good," she said, darting on the note with
restrained joy. "I will send it by a messenger."

"And now," cried Calyste, rising like a happy man.

"Ah! I have kept, I believe, my freedom of action," she said, turning
away from him and going to the fireplace, where she rang the bell.
"Here, Antoine," she said, when the old footman entered, "send this
note to its address. Monsieur dines here."



XIX

THE FIRST LIE OF A PIOUS DUCHESS

Calyste returned to his own house about two in the morning. After
waiting for him till half-past twelve, Sabine had gone to bed
overwhelmed with fatigue. She slept, although she was keenly
distressed by the laconic wording of her husband's note. Still, she
explained it. The true love of a woman invariably begins by explaining
all things to the advantage of the man beloved. Calyste was pressed
for time, she said.

The next morning the child was better; the mother's uneasiness
subsided, and Sabine came with a smiling face, and little Calyste on
her arm, to present him to his father before breakfast with the pretty
fooleries and senseless words which gay young mothers do and say. This
little scene gave Calyste the chance to maintain a countenance. He was
charming to his wife, thinking in his heart that he was a monster, and
he played like a child with Monsieur le chevalier; in fact he played
too well,--he overdid the part; but Sabine had not reached the stage
at which a woman recognizes so delicate a distinction.

At breakfast, however, she asked him suddenly:--

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Portenduere kept me to dinner," he replied, "and after that we went
to the club to play whist."

"That's a foolish life, my Calyste," said Sabine. "Young noblemen in
these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of
the country the ground lost by their fathers. It isn't by smoking
cigars, playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent
things of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, not yet
by separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and
providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist. Instead of
being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said. Ah!
if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I
have nursed and cradled your child! I'd like to see that grand old
name of Guenic become once more historical!" Then suddenly plunging
her eyes into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a
pensive air, she added: "Admit that the first note you ever wrote me
was rather stiff."

"I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club."

"But you wrote on a woman's note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine
elegance."

"Those club directors are such dandies!"

The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle
Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so
intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments.
The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this
friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and
confidences apropos of their first infants.

While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, "I must
warn Savinien," Sabine was thinking, "I am sure that paper bore a
coronet." This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and
Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved
to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night
before she had flung into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should
soon return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages
with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient
cabriolet of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte's
house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of
fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste,
urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order
to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that
unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting
with a very good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel
ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold
service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed
a few ballads on /ideas/ of the lord, who afterwards published them as
his own!

Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose
great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he
rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but
it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse,
a present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat
that it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of
those chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine
was at a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste's
non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse
with its foaming mouth surprised her.

"Where can he have come from?"

The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not
exactly consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes,
shows us the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures
born of our brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible
of ideas.

"Where do you come from, dear angel?" Sabine said to Calyste, meeting
him on the first landing of the staircase. "Abd-el-Kader is nearly
foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been
waiting for you these three hours."

"Well, well," thought Calyste, who was making progress in
dissimulation, "I must get out of it by a present--Dear little
mother," he said aloud, taking her round the waist with more cajolery
than he would have used if he had not been conscious of guilt, "I see
that it is quite impossible to keep a secret, however innocent, from
the woman who loves us--"

"Well, don't tell secrets on the staircase," she said, laughing. "Come
in."

In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught
sight in a mirror of Calyste's face, on which, not aware that it could
be seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.

"Now for your secret?" she said, turning round.

"You have shown such heroism as a nurse," he said, "that the heir
presumptive of the Guenics is dearer to me than ever, and I wanted to
give you a surprise, precisely like any bourgeois of the rue Saint
Denis. They are finishing for you at this moment a dressing-table at
which true artists have worked, and my mother and aunt Zephirine have
contributed."

Sabine clasped him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast
with her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for
the piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark
doubt. It was one of those magnificent transports which can be
counted, and which no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend,
or life would be too soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at
the feet of women to adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments
when the forces of the heart and intellect gush forth like the waters
of sculptured nymphs from their inclining urns. Sabine burst into
tears.

Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a
sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing
heart came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her
nose at his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of
that letter paper! Another woman's head had lain there, whose hair and
face had left that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where
the kisses of her rival were still warm.

"What is the matter?" asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back
to consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her
smell salts.

"Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel
it. They won't come at once unless you fetch them yourself--go!"

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of
the porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked
about the salon as if beside herself, crying out, "My God! my God! my
God!"

Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized
upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were
like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever.
Her boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try
to issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and
cried aloud, "I am dying!"

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in.
After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the
first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend,
Madame de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her
brain like straws at the will of a waterspout. "I saw," she said
later, "myriads all at once."

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found
strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one
mad desire--to have certainty:--

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

Dear Mamma,--When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you
will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by
which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for
doing my duty. I was already well repaid by my own happiness in
doing it. I can never express the pleasure you have given me in
that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall
try to do so. Believe me, when I array myself before that
treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest
jewel is our little angel, etc.

She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to
post.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of
reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.

"Ursula, I think I am going to die," she said.

"What is the matter, dear?"

"Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you
yesterday?"

"Dined with me?" said Ursula, to whom her husband had said nothing,
not expecting such immediate inquiry. "Savinien and I dined alone
together and went to the Opera without Calyste."

"Ursula, dearest, in the name of your love for Savinien, keep silence
about what you have just said to me and what I shall now tell you. You
alone shall know why I die--I am betrayed! at the end of three years,
at twenty-two years of age!"

Her teeth chattered, her eyes were dull and frozen, her face had taken
on the greenish tinge of an old Venetian mirror.

"You! so beautiful! For whom?"

"I don't know yet. But Calyste has told me two lies. Do not pity me,
do not seem incensed, pretend ignorance and perhaps you can find out
who /she/ is through Savinien. Oh! that letter of yesterday!"

Trembling, shaking, she sprang from her bed to a piece of furniture
from which she took the letter.

"See," she said, lying down again, "the coronet of a marquise! Find
out if Madame de Rochefide has returned to Paris. Am I to have a heart
in which to weep and moan? Oh, dearest!--to see one's beliefs, one's
poesy, idol, virtue, happiness, all, all in pieces, withered, lost! No
God in the sky! no love upon earth! no life in my heart! no anything!
I don't know if there's daylight; I doubt the sun. I've such anguish
in my soul I scarcely feel the horrible sufferings in my body.
Happily, the baby is weaned; my milk would have poisoned him."

At that idea the tears began to flow from Sabine's eyes which had
hitherto been dry.

Pretty Madame de Portenduere, holding in her hand the fatal letter,
the perfume of which Sabine again inhaled, was at first stupefied by
this true sorrow, shocked by this agony of love, without as yet
understanding it, in spite of Sabine's incoherent attempts to relate
the facts. Suddenly Ursula was illuminated by one of those ideas which
come to none but sincere friends.

"I must save her!" she thought to herself. "Trust me, Sabine," she
cried. "Wait for my return; I will find out the truth."

"Ah! in my grave I'll love you," exclaimed Sabine.

The viscountess went straight to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, pledged
her to secrecy, and then explained to her fully her daughter's
situation.

"Madame," she said as she ended, "do you not think with me, that in
order to avoid some fatal illness--perhaps, I don't know, even madness
--we had better confide the whole truth to the doctor, and invent some
tale to clear that hateful Calyste and make him seem for the time
being innocent?"

"My dear child," said the duchess, who was chilled to the heart by
this confidence, "friendship has given you for the moment the
experience of a woman of my age. I know how Sabine loves her husband;
you are right, she might become insane."

"Or lose her beauty, which would be worse," said the viscountess.

"Let us go to her!" cried the duchess.

Fortunately they arrived a few moments before the famous /accoucheur/,
Dommanget, the only one of the two men of science whom Calyste had
been able to find.

"Ursula has told me everything," said the duchess to her daughter,
"and you are mistaken. In the first place, Madame de Rochefide is not
in Paris. As for what your husband did yesterday, my dear, I can tell
you that he lost a great deal of money at cards, so that he does not
even know how to pay for your dressing-table."

"But /that?/" said Sabine, holding out to her mother the fatal letter.

"That!" said the duchess, laughing; "why, that is written on the
Jockey Club paper; everybody writes nowadays on coroneted paper; even
our stewards will soon be titled."

The prudent mother threw the unlucky paper into the fire as she spoke.

When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the duchess, who had given
instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine to
the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the /accoucheur/ and
Calyste in the salon.

"Sabine's life is at stake, monsieur," she said to Calyste; "you have
betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."

Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.

"And," continued the duchess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you
have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the
truth. But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not
wish the death of my daughter, I am sure--All this, Monsieur
Dommanget, will put you on the track of her real illness and its
cause. As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me understands your
error, though she does not pardon it. Such pardons can only be brought
by a lifetime of after happiness. If you wish me to esteem you, you
must, in the first place, save my daughter; next, you must forget
Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth having once. Learn to lie; have
the courage of a criminal, and his impudence. I have just told a lie
myself, and I shall have to do hard penance for that mortal sin."

She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever
physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her
symptoms the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the
success of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste
sitting at the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an
expression of tenderness.