Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


"Well, Sabine," said the duchess, taking her daughter into her
bedroom, "tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?"

"Mamma, I am lost!"

"But how?"

"I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman--I conquered for a
time--I am pregnant again--and Calyste loves her so that I foresee a
total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! I
suffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he is
going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as
plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal
his feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence
over him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You'll see!
she will exact from him, as the price of forgiveness, my public
desertion, a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to
Switzerland or Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that
he knows nothing of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung
out in advance. If Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don't
know what he may become; but as for me, I will kill myself."

"But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin."

"Don't you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved
the child of that woman more than mine--Oh! that's the end of my
patience and all my resignation."

She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in
her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like
that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,
--it supports, it is a force.

"Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will
surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the
world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter," she said, going
to her /prie-Dieu/. "I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin
for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above
all things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to
succeed."

"And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste
has killed within me the holy fervor of love,--killed it by sickening
me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to
feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!"

The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the
faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an
office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of
the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the court-yard of the
hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the
ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery,
calmness, gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty
years of age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by
priestly austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he
espoused. Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an
expression more mysterious than mystical, animated that truly
apostolical face. He was smiling as he mounted the steps of the
portico, so little did he believe in the enormity of the cases about
which his penitent sent for him; but as the hand of the duchess was an
open palm for charity, she was worth the time which her innocent
confessions stole from the more serious miseries of the parish.

When the vicar was announced the duchess rose, and made a few steps
toward him in the salon,--a distinction she granted only to cardinals,
bishops, simple priests, duchesses older then herself, and persons of
royal blood.

"My dear abbe," she said, pointing to a chair and speaking in a low
voice, "I need the authority of your experience before I throw myself
into a rather wicked intrigue, although it is one which must result in
great good; and I desire to know from you whether I shall make
hindrances to my own salvation in the course I propose to follow."

"Madame la duchesse," replied the abbe, "do not mix up spiritual
things with worldly things; they are usually irreconcilable. In the
first place, what is this matter?"

"You know that my daughter Sabine is dying of grief; Monsieur du
Guenic has left her for Madame de Rochefide."

"It is very dreadful, very serious; but you know what our dear Saint
Francois de Sales says on that subject. Remember too how Madame Guyon
complained of the lack of mysticism in the proofs of conjugal love;
she would have been very willing to see her husband with a Madame de
Rochefide."

"Sabine is only too gentle; she is almost too completely a Christian
wife; but she has not the slightest taste for mysticism."

"Poor young woman!" said the abbe, maliciously. "What method will you
take to remedy the evil?"

"I have committed the sin, my dear director, of thinking how to launch
upon Madame de Rochefide a little man, very self-willed and full of
the worst qualities, who will certainly induce her to dismiss my
son-in-law."

"My daughter," replied the abbe, stroking his chin, "we are not now in
the confessional; I am not obliged to make myself your judge. From the
world's point of view, I admit that the result would be decisive--"

"The means seem to me odious," she said.

"Why? No doubt the duty of a Christian woman is to withdraw a sinning
woman from an evil path, rather than push her along it; but when a
woman has advanced upon that path as far as Madame de Rochefide, it is
not the hand of man, but that of God, which recalls such a sinner; she
needs a thunderbolt."

"Father," replied the duchess, "I thank you for your indulgence; but
the thought has occurred to me that my son-in-law is brave and a
Breton. He was heroic at the time of the rash affair of that poor
MADAME. Now, if the young fellow who undertook to make Madame de
Rochefide love him were to quarrel with Calyste, and a duel should
ensue--"

"You have thought wisely, Madame la duchesse; and it only proves that
in crooked paths you will always find rocks of stumbling."

"I have discovered a means, my dear abbe, to do a great good; to
withdraw Madame de Rochefide from the fatal path in which she now is;
to restore Calyste to his wife, and possibly to save from hell a poor
distracted creature."

"In that case, why consult me?" asked the vicar, smiling.

"Ah!" replied the duchess, "Because I must permit myself some rather
nasty actions--"

"You don't mean to rob anybody?"

"On the contrary, I shall apparently have to spend a great deal of
money."

"You will not calumniate, or--"

"Oh! oh!"

"--injure your neighbor?"

"I don't know about that."

"Come, tell me your plan," said the abbe, now becoming curious.

"Suppose, instead of driving out one nail by another,--this is what I
thought at my /prie-Dieu/ after imploring the Blessed Virgin to
enlighten me,--I were to free Calyste by persuading Monsieur de
Rochefide to take back his wife? Instead of lending a hand to evil for
the sake of doing good to my daughter, I should do one great good by
another almost as great--"

The vicar looked at the Portuguese lady, and was pensive.

"That is evidently an idea that came to you from afar," he said, "so
far that--"

"I have thanked the Virgin for it," replied the good and humble
duchess; "and I have made a vow--not counting a novena--to give twelve
hundred francs to some poor family if I succeed. But when I
communicated my plan to Monsieur de Grandlieu he began to laugh, and
said: 'Upon my honor, at your time of life I think you women have a
devil of your own.'"

"Monsieur le duc made as a husband the same reply I was about to make
when you interrupted me," said the abbe, who could not restrain a
smile.

"Ah! Father, if you approve of the idea, will you also approve of the
means of execution? It is necessary to do to a certain Madame Schontz
(a Beatrix of the quartier Saint-Georges) what I proposed to do to
Madame de Rochefide."

"I am certain that you will not do any real wrong," said the vicar,
cleverly, not wishing to hear any more, having found the result so
desirable. "You can consult me later if you find your conscience
muttering," he added. "But why, instead of giving that person in the
rue Saint-Georges a fresh occasion for scandal, don't you give her a
husband?"

"Ah! my dear director, now you have rectified the only bad thing I had
in my plan. You are worthy of being an archbishop, and I hope I shall
not die till I have had the opportunity of calling you Your Eminence."

"I see only one difficulty in all this," said the abbe.

"What is that?"

"Suppose Madame de Rochefide chooses to keep your son-in-law after she
goes back to her husband?"

"That's my affair," replied the duchess; "when one doesn't often
intrigue, one does so--"

"Badly, very badly," said the abbe. "Habit is necessary for
everything. Try to employ some of those scamps who live by intrigue,
and don't show your own hand."

"Ah! monsieur l'abbe, if I make use of the means of hell, will Heaven
help me?"

"You are not at confession," repeated the abbe. "Save your child."

The worthy duchess, delighted with her vicar, accompanied him to the
door of the salon.



XXII

THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE

A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who
enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a
Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he
had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very
sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so
agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us
to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after
his wife had placed him in the position of a /deserted husband/. The
reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference
which our laws and our morals put between the two sexes in the same
situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness
for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with
the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there,
like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most
aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.

Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an
only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife
of the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole
master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d'Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two
hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich
inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he
married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his
wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature
such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to
Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in
her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this
immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the
faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure
he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that
authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the
matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a
reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage
and the /petits journaux/, by his method of repeating them, and
applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had
served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point
that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest
did not dare to contradict them.

This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the
convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously.
Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to
adopt and the first to abandon a new fashion. Accused of nothing worse
than spending too much time at his toilet and wearing a corset, he
presented the type of those persons who displease no one by adopting
incessantly the ideas and the follies of everbody, and who, astride of
circumstance, never grow old.

As a husband, he was pitied; people thought Beatrix inexcusable for
deserting the best fellow on earth, and social jeers only touched the
woman. A member of all clubs, subscriber to all the absurdities
generated by patriotism or party spirit ill-understood (a compliance
which put him in the front rank /a propos/ of all such matters), this
loyal, brave, and very silly nobleman, whom unfortunately so many rich
men resemble, would naturally desire to distinguish himself by
adopting some fashionable mania. Consequently, he glorified his name
principally in being the sultan of a four-footed harem, governed by an
old English groom, which cost him monthly from four to five thousand
francs. His specialty was /running horses;/ he protected the equine
race and supported a magazine devoted to hippic questions; but, for
all that, he knew very little of the animals, and from shoes to
bridles he depended wholly on his groom,--all of which will
sufficiently explain to you that this semi-bachelor had nothing
actually of his own, neither mind, taste, position, or absurdity; even
his fortune came from his fathers. After having tasted the
displeasures of marriage he was so content to find himself once more a
bachelor that he said among his friends, "I was born with a caul"
(that is, to good luck).

Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of
making an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in
which since the death of his father nothing had been changed,
resembled those of masters who are travelling; he lived there little,
never dined, and seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such
indifference.

After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the
kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around
happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain
Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du
Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,--of which
one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera
/galop/, "When one thinks that all /that/ is lodged and clothed and
lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!"--this world has
already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and
customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the
historian should proportion the number of such personages to the
diverse endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in
poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often
self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.

Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to
distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself,
belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility
cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who are
interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat,
accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might
better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame
de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers
in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the
heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of
carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of
Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes
where the wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged
by the words, /Apartments to let/.

The situation of these dames is determined by that which they take in
the apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by the
rue de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if
she approaches the farther line of the Boulevard Exterieur or rises
towards the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When
Monsieur de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on
the third floor of the only house that remained in the rue de Berlin;
thus she was camping on the border-land between misery and its
reverse. This person was not really named, as you may suppose, either
Schontz or Aurelie. She concealed the name of her father, an old
soldier of the Empire, that perennial colonel who always appears at
the dawn of all these feminine existences either as father or seducer.
Madame Schontz had received the gratuitous education of Saint-Denis,
where young girls are admirably brought up, but where, unfortunately,
neither husbands nor openings in life are offered to them when they
leave the school,--an admirable creation of the Emperor, which now
lacks but one thing, the Emperor himself!

"I shall be there, to provide for the daughters of my faithful
legions," he replied to a remark of one of his ministers, who foresaw
the future.

Napoleon had also said, "I shall be there!" for the members of the
Institute; to whom they had better give no salary than send them
eighty francs each month, a wage that is less than that of certain
clerks!

Aurelie was really the daughter of the intrepid Colonel Schiltz, a
leader of those bold Alsacian guerillas who came near saving the
Emperor in the campaign of France. He died at Metz,--robbed, pillaged,
ruined. In 1814 Napoleon put the little Josephine Schiltz, then about
nine years old, at Saint-Denis. Having lost both father and mother and
being without a home and without resources, the poor child was not
dismissed from the institution on the second return of the Bourbons.
She was under-mistress of the school till 1827, but then her patience
gave way; her beauty seduced her. When she reached her majority
Josephine Schiltz, the Empress's goddaughter, was on the verge of the
adventurous life of a courtesan, persuaded to that doubtful future by
the fatal example of some of her comrades like herself without
resources, who congratulated themselves on their decision. She
substituted /on/ for /il/ in her father's name and placed herself
under the patronage of Saint-Aurelie.

Lively, witty, and well-educated, she committed more faults than her
duller companions, whose misdemeanors had invariably self-interest for
their base. After knowing various writers, poor but dishonest, clever
but deeply in debt; after trying certain rich men as calculating as
they were foolish; and after sacrificing solid interests to one true
love,--thus going through all the schools in which experience is
taught,--on a certain day of extreme misery, when, at Valentino's (the
first stage to Musard) she danced in a gown, hat, and mantle that were
all borrowed, she attracted the attention of Arthur de Rochefide, who
had come there to see the famous /galop/. Her cleverness instantly
captivated the man who at that time knew not what passion to devote
himself to. So that two years after his desertion by Beatrix, the
memory of whom often humiliated him, the marquis was not blamed by any
one for marrying, so to speak, in the thirteenth arrondissement, a
substitute for his wife.

Let us sketch the four periods of this happiness. It is necessary to
show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement
affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in the
forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire or
moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of
passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never
varies. The heart and the money-box are always in the same exact and
clearly defined relation. Thus informed, you will be able to estimate
the difficulties the duchess was certain to encounter in her
charitable enterprise.

[*] Before 1859 there was no 13th arrondissement in Paris, hence the
saying.--TR.

Who knows the power in France of witty sayings upon ordinary minds, or
what harm the clever men who invent them have done? For instance, no
book-keeper could add up the figures of the sums remaining
unproductive and lost in the depths of generous hearts and
strong-boxes by that ignoble phrase, "/tirer une carotte!/"

The saying has become so popular that it must be allowed to soil this
page. Besides, if we penetrate within the 13th arrondissement, we are
forced to accept its picturesque patois. /Tirer une carotte/ has a
dozen allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: /To dupe/.
Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of
being /carotte/. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of
his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was,
therefore, very /rat/, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The
word /rat/, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one
entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast
who is niggardly.

Madame Schontz had too much sense and she knew men too well not to
conceive great hopes from such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide
allowed her five hundred francs a month, furnished for her, rather
shabbily, an apartment costing twelve hundred francs a year on a
second floor in the rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurelie's
character, while she, perceiving his object, gave him a character to
study. Consequently, Rochefide became happy in meeting with a woman of
noble nature. But he saw nothing surprising in that; her mother was a
Barnheim of Baden, a well-bred woman. Besides, Aurelie was so well
brought up herself! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she
possessed a thorough knowledge of foreign literatures. She could hold
her own against all second-class pianists. And, remark this! she
behaved about her talents like a well-bred woman; she never mentioned
them. She picked up a brush in a painter's studio, used it half
jestingly, and produced a head which caused general astonishment. For
mere amusement during the time she pined as under-mistress at
Saint-Denis, she had made some advance in the domain of the sciences,
but her subsequent life had covered these good seeds with a coating of
salt, and she now gave Arthur the credit of the sprouting of the
precious germs, re-cultivated for him.

Thus Aurelie began by showing a disinterestedness equal to her other
charms, which allowed this weak corvette to attach its grapnels
securely to the larger vessel. Nevertheless, about the end of the
first year, she made ignoble noises in the antechamber with her clogs,
coming in about the time when the marquis was awaiting her, and
hiding, as best she could, the draggled tail of an outrageously muddy
gown. In short, she had by this time so perfectly persuaded her /gros
papa/ that all her ambition, after so many ups and downs, was to
obtain honorably a comfortable little bourgeois existence, that, about
ten months after their first meeting, the second phase of happiness
declared itself.

Madame Schontz then obtained a fine apartment in the rue
Neuve-Saint-Georges. Arthur, who could no longer conceal the amount of
his fortune, gave her splendid furniture, a complete service of plate,
twelve hundred francs a month, a low carriage with one horse,--this,
however, was hired; but he granted a tiger very graciously. Madame
Schontz was not the least grateful for this munificence; she knew the
motive of her Arthur's conduct, and recognized the calculations of the
male /rat/. Sick of living at a restaurant, where the fare is usually
execrable, and where the least little /gourmet/ dinner costs sixty
francs for one, and two hundred francs if you invite three friends,
Rochefide offered Madame Schontz forty francs a day for his dinner and
that of a friend, everything included. Aurelie accepted.

Thus having made him take up all her moral letters of credit, drawn
one by one on Monsieur de Rochefide's comfort, she was listened to
with favor when she asked for five hundred francs more a month for her
dress, in order not to shame her /gros papa/, whose friends all
belonged to the Jockey Club.

"It would be a pretty thing," she said, "if Rastignac, Maxime de
Trailles, d'Esgrignon, La Roche-Hugon, Ronqueroles, Laginski,
Lenoncourt, found you with a sort of Madame Everard. Besides, have
confidence in me, papa, and you'll be the gainer."

In fact, Aurelie contrived to display new virtues in this second
phase. She laid out for herself a house-keeping role for which she
claimed much credit. She made, so she said, both ends meet at the
close of the month on two thousand five hundred francs without a debt,
--a thing unheard of in the faubourg Saint-Germain of the 13th
arrondissement,--and she served dinners infinitely superior to those
of Nucingen, at which exquisite wines were drunk at twelve francs a
bottle. Rochefide, amazed, and delighted to be able to invite his
friends to the house with economy, declared, as he caught her round
the waist,--

"She's a treasure!"

Soon after he hired one-third of a box at the Opera for her; next he
took her to first representations. Then he began to consult his
Aurelie, and recognized the excellence of her advice. She let him take
the clever sayings she said about most things for his own, and, these
being unknown to others, raised his reputation as an amusing man. He
now acquired the certainty of being loved truly, and for himself
alone. Aurelie refused to make the happiness of a Russian prince who
offered her five thousand francs a month.