Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


And Maxime left Couture at the summit of happiness, saying to La
Palferine, "Shall I drive you home, my boy?"

By eleven o'clock Aurelie was alone with Couture, Fabien, and
Rochefide. Arthur was asleep on a sofa. Couture and Fabien each tried
to outstay the other, without success; and Madame Schontz finally
terminated the struggle by saying to Couture,--

"Good-night, I shall see you to-morrow."

A dismissal which he took in good part.

"Mademoiselle," said Fabien, in a low voice, "because you saw me
thoughtful at the offer which you indirectly made to me, do not think
there was the slightest hesitation on my part. But you do not know my
mother; she would never consent to my happiness."

"You have reached an age for respectful summons," retorted Aurelie,
insolently. "But if you are afraid of mamma you won't do for me."

"Josephine!" said the Heir, tenderly, passing his arm audaciously
round Madame Schontz' waist, "I thought you loved me!"

"Well?"

"Perhaps I could appease my mother, and obtain her consent."

"How?"

"If you would employ your influence--"

"To have you made baron, officer of the Legion of honor, and
chief-justice at Alencon,--is that it, my friend? Listen to me: I have
done so many things in my life that I am capable of virtue. I can be
an honest woman and a loyal wife; and I can push my husband very high.
But I wish to be loved by him without one look or one thought being
turned away from me. Does that suit you? Don't bind yourself
imprudently; it concerns your whole life, my little man."

"With a woman like you I can do it blind," cried Fabien, intoxicated
by the glance she gave him as much as by the liqueurs des Iles.

"You shall never repent that word, my dear; you shall be peer of
France. As for that poor old fellow," she continued, looking at
Rochefide, who was sound asleep, "after to-day I have d-o-n-e with
him."

Fabien caught Madame Schontz around the waist and kissed her with an
impulse of fury and joy, in which the double intoxication of wine and
love was secondary to ambition.

"Remember, my dear child," she said, "the respect you ought to show to
your wife; don't play the lover; leave me free to retire from my
mud-hole in a proper manner. Poor Couture, who thought himself sure of
wealth and a receiver-generalship!"

"I have a horror of that man," said Fabien; "I wish I might never see
him again."

"I will not receive him any more," replied Madame Schontz, with a
prudish little air. "Now that we have come to an understanding, my
Fabien, you must go; it is one o'clock."

This little scene gave birth in the household of Arthur and Aurelie
(so completely happy until now) to a phase of domestic warfare
produced in the bosom of all homes by some secret and alien interest
in one of the partners. The next day when Arthur awoke he found Madame
Schontz as frigid as that class of woman knows how to make herself.

"What happened last night?" he said, as he breakfasted, looking at
Aurelie.

"What often happens in Paris," she replied, "one goes to bed in damp
weather and the next morning the pavements are dry and frozen so hard
that they are dusty. Do you want a brush?"

"What's the matter with you, dearest?"

"Go and find your great scarecrow of a wife!"

"My wife!" exclaimed the poor marquis.

"Don't I know why you brought Maxime here? You mean to make up with
Madame de Rochefide, who wants you perhaps for some indiscreet brat.
And I, whom you call so clever, I advised you to give back her
fortune! Oh! I see your scheme. At the end of five years Monsieur is
tired of me. I'm getting fat, Beatrix is all bones--it will be a
change for you! You are not the first I've known to like skeletons.
Your Beatrix knows how to dress herself, that's true; and you are man
who likes figure-heads. Besides, you want to send Monsieur du Guenic
to the right-about. It will be a triumph! You'll cut quite an
appearance in the world! How people will talk of it! Why! you'll be a
hero!"

Madame Schontz did not make an end of her sarcasms for two hours after
mid-day, in spite of Arthur's protestations. She then said she was
invited out to dinner, and advised her "faithless one" to go without
her to the Opera, for she herself was going to the Ambigu-Comique to
meet Madame de la Baudraye, a charming woman, a friend of Lousteau.
Arthur proposed, as proof of his eternal attachment to his little
Aurelie and his detestation of his wife, to start the next day for
Italy, and live as a married couple in Rome, Naples, Florence,--in
short, wherever she liked, offering her a gift of sixty thousand
francs.

"All that is nonsense," she said. "It won't prevent you from making up
with your wife, and you'll do a wise thing."

Arthur and Aurelie parted on this formidable dialogue, he to play
cards and dine at the club, she to dress and spend the evening
/tete-a-tete/ with Fabien.

Monsieur de Rochefide found Maxime at the club, and complained to him
like a man who feels that his happiness is being torn from his heart
by the roots, every fibre of which clung to it. Maxime listened to his
moans, as persons of social politeness are accustomed to listen, while
thinking of other things.

"I'm a man of good counsel in such matters, my dear fellow," he
answered. "Well, let me tell you, you are on the wrong road in letting
Aurelie see how dear she is to you. Allow me to present you to Madame
Antonia. There's a heart to let. You'll soon see La Schontz with other
eyes. She is thirty-seven years old, that Schontz of yours, and Madame
Antonia is only twenty-six! And what a woman! I may say she is my
pupil. If Madame Schontz persists in keeping on the hind heels of her
pride, don't you know what that means?"

"Faith, no!"

"That she wants to marry, and if that's the case, nothing can hinder
her from leaving you. After a lease of six years a woman has a right
to do so. Now, if you will only listen to me, you can do a better
thing for yourself. Your wife is to-day worth more than all the
Schontzes and Antonias of the quartier Saint-Georges. I admit the
conquest is difficult, but it is not impossible; and after all that
has happened she will make you as happy as an Orgon. In any case, you
mustn't look like a fool; come and sup to-night with Antonia."

"No, I love Aurelie too well; I won't give her any reason to complain
of me."

"Ah! my dear fellow, what a future you are preparing for yourself!"
cried Maxime.

"It is eleven o'clock; she must have returned from the Ambigu," said
Rochefide, leaving the club.

And he called out his coachman to drive at top speed to the rue de la
Bruyere.

Madame Schontz had given precise directions; monsieur could enter as
master with the fullest understanding of madame; but, warned by the
noise of monsieur's arrival, madame had so arranged that the sound of
her dressing-door closing as women's doors do close when they are
surprised, was to reach monsieur's ears. Then, at a corner of the
piano, Fabien's hat, forgotten intentionally, was removed very
awkwardly by a maid the moment after monsieur had entered the room.

"Did you go to the Ambigu, my little girl?"

"No, I changed my mind, and stayed at home to play music."

"Who came to see you?" asked the marquis, good-humoredly, seeing the
hat carried off by the maid.

"No one."

At that audacious falsehood Arthur bowed his head; he passed beneath
the Caudine forks of submission. A real love descends at times to
these sublime meannesses. Arthur behaved with Madame Schontz as Sabine
with Calyste, and Calyste with Beatrix.

Within a week the transition from larva to butterfly took place in the
young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la
Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably,
covering his deficits with an audacity equal to that of Danton. But he
now paid his debts; he now, by advice of Maxime, had a little
carriage; he was admitted to the Jockey Club and to the club of the
rue de Gramont; he became supremely elegant, and he published in the
"Journal des Debats" a novelette which won him in a few days a
reputation which authors by profession obtain after years of toil and
successes only; for there is nothing so usurping in Paris as that
which ought to be ephemeral. Nathan, very certain that the count would
never publish anything else, lauded the graceful and presuming young
man so highly to Beatrix that she, spurred by the praise of the poet,
expressed a strong desire to see this king of the vagabonds of good
society.

"He will be all the more delighted to come here," replied Nathan,
"because, as I happen to know, he has fallen in love with you to the
point of committing all sorts of follies."

"But I am told he has already committed them."

"No, not all; he has not yet committed that of falling in love with a
virtuous woman."

Some ten days after the scheme plotted on the boulevard between Maxime
and his henchman, the seductive Charles-Edouard, the latter, to whom
Nature had given, no doubt sarcastically, a face of charming
melancholy, made his first irruption into the nest of the dove of the
rue de Chartres, who took for his reception an evening when Calyste
was obliged to go to a party with his wife.

If you should ever meet La Palferine you will understand perfectly the
success obtained in a single evening by that sparkling mind, that
animated fancy, especially if you take into consideration the
admirable adroitness of the showman who consented to superintend this
debut. Nathan was a good comrade, and he made the young count shine,
as a jeweller showing off an ornament in hopes to sell it, makes the
diamonds glitter. La Palferine was, discreetly, the first to withdraw;
he left Nathan and the marquise together, relying on the collaboration
of the celebrated author, which was admirable. Seeing that Beatrix was
quite astounded, Raoul put fire into her heart by pretended reticences
which stirred the fibres of a curiosity she did not know she
possessed. Nathan hinted that La Palferine's wit was not so much the
cause of his success with women as his superiority in the art of love;
a statement which magnified the count immensely.

This is the place to record a new effect of that great law of
contraries, which produces so many crises in the human heart and
accounts for such varied eccentricities that we are forced to remember
it sometimes as well as its counterpart, the law of similitudes. All
courtesans preserve in the depths of their heart a perennial desire to
recover their liberty; to this they would sacrifice everything. They
feel this antithetical need with such intensity that it is rare to
meet with one of these women who has not aspired several times to a
return to virtue through love. They are not discouraged by the most
cruel deceptions. On the other hand, women restrained by their
education, by the station they occupy, chained by the rank of their
families, living in the midst of opulence, and wearing a halo of
virtue, are drawn at times, secretly be it understood, toward the
tropical regions of love. These two natures of woman, so opposed to
each other, have at the bottom of their hearts, the one that faint
desire for virtue, the other that faint desire for libertinism which
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to have the courage to diagnose.
In one, it is a last reflexion of the ray divine that is not extinct;
in the other, it is the last remains of our primitive clay.

This claw of the beast was rapped, this hair of the devil was pulled
by Nathan with extreme cleverness. The marquise began to ask herself
seriously if, up to the present time, she had not been the dupe of her
head, and whether her education was complete. Vice--what is it?
Possibly only the desire to know everything.



XXVI

DISILLUSIONS--IN ALL BUT LA FONTAINE'S FABLES

The next day Calyste seemed to Beatrix just what he was: a perfect and
loyal gentleman without imagination or cleverness. In Paris, a man
called clever must have spontaneous brilliancy, as the fountains have
water; men of the world and Parisians in general are in that way very
clever. But Calyste loved too deeply, he was too much absorbed in his
own sentiments to perceive the change in Beatrix, and to satisfy her
need by displaying new resources. To her, he seemed pale indeed, after
the brilliancy of the night before, and he caused not the faintest
emotion to the hungry Beatrix. A great love is a credit opened to a
power so voracious that bankruptcy is sure to come sooner or later.

In spite of the fatigue of this day (the day when a woman is bored by
a lover) Beatrix trembled with fear at the thought of a possible
meeting between La Palferine and Calyste, a man of courage without
assertion. She hesitated to see the count again; but the knot of her
hesitation was cut by a decisive event.

Beatrix had taken the third of a box at the Opera, obscurely situated
on the lower tier for the purpose of not being much in sight. For the
last few days Calyste, grown bolder, had escorted the marquise to her
box, placing himself behind her, and timing their arrival at a late
hour so as to meet no one in the corridors. Beatrix, on these
occasions, left the box alone before the end of the last act, and
Calyste followed at a distance to watch over her, although old Antoine
was always there to attend his mistress. Maxime and La Palferine had
studied this strategy, which was prompted by respect for the
proprieties, also by that desire for concealment which characterizes
the idolators of the little god, and also, again, by the fear which
oppresses all women who have been constellations in the world and whom
love has caused to fall from their zodiacal eminence. Public
humiliation is dreaded as an agony more cruel than death itself. But,
by a manoeuvre of Maxime's, that blow to her pride, that outrage which
women secure of their rank in Olympus cast upon others who have fallen
from their midst, was now to descend on Beatrix.

At a performance of "Lucia," which ends, as every one knows, with one
of the finest triumphs of Rubini, Madame de Rochefide, whom Antoine
had not yet come to fetch, reached the peristyle of the opera-house by
the lower corridor just as the staircase was crowded by fashionable
women ranged on the stairs or standing in groups below it, awaiting
the announcement of their carriages. Beatrix was instantly recognized;
whispers which soon became a murmur arose in every group. In a moment
the crowd dispersed; the marquise was left alone like a leper. Calyste
dared not, seeing his wife on the staircase, advance to accompany her,
though twice she vainly cast him a tearful glance, a prayer, that he
would come to her. At that moment, La Palferine, elegant, superb,
charming, left two ladies with whom he had been talking, and came down
to the marquise.

"Take my arm," he said, bowing, "and walk proudly out. I will find
your carriage."

"Will you come home with me and finish the evening?" she answered,
getting into her carriage and making room for him.

La Palferine said to his groom, "Follow the carriage of madame," and
then he jumped into it beside her to the utter stupefaction of
Calyste, who stood for a moment planted on his two legs as if they
were lead. It was the sight of him standing thus, pale and livid, that
caused Beatrix to make the sign to La Palferine to enter her carriage.
Doves can be Robespierres in spite of their white wings. Three
carriages reached the rue de Chartres with thundering rapidity,--that
of Calyste, that of the marquise, and that of La Palferine.

"Oh! you here?" said Beatrix, entering her salon on the arm of the
young count, and finding Calyste, whose horse had outstripped those of
the other carriages.

"Then you know monsieur?" said Calyste, furiously.

"Monsieur le Comte de la Palferine was presented to me ten days ago by
Nathan," she replied; "but you, monsieur, /you/ have known me four
years!--"

"And I am ready, madame," said Charles-Edouard, "to make the Marquise
d'Espard repent to her third generation for being the first to turn
away from you."

"Ah! it was /she/, was it?" cried Beatrix; "I will make her rue it."

"To revenge yourself thoroughly," said the young man in her ear, "you
ought to recover your husband; and I am capable of bringing him back
to you."

The conversation, thus begun, went on till two in the morning, without
allowing Calyste, whose anger was again and again repressed by a look
from Beatrix, to say one word to her in private. La Palferine, though
he did not like Beatrix, showed a superiority of grace, good taste,
and cleverness equal to the evident inferiority of Calyste, who
wriggled in his chair like a worm cut in two, and actually rose three
times as if to box the ears of La Palferine. The third time that he
made a dart forward, the young count said to him, "Are you in pain,
monsieur?" in a manner which sent Calyste back to his chair, where he
sat as rigid as a mile-stone.

The marquise conversed with the ease of a Celimene, pretending to
ignore that Calyste was there. La Palferine had the cleverness to
depart after a brilliant witticism, leaving the two lovers to a
quarrel.

Thus, by Maxime's machinations, the fire of discord flamed in the
separate households of Monsieur and of Madame de Rochefide. The next
day, learning the success of this last scene from La Palferine at the
Jockey Club, where the young count was playing whist, Maxime went to
the hotel Schontz to ascertain with what success Aurelie was rowing
her boat.

"My dear," said Madame Schontz, laughing at Maxime's expression, "I am
at an end of my expedients. Rochefide is incurable. I end my career of
gallantry by perceiving that cleverness is a misfortune."

"Explain to me that remark."

"In the first place, my dear friend, I have kept Arthur for the last
week to a regimen of kicks on the shin and perpetual wrangling and
jarring; in short, all we have that is most disagreeable in our
business. 'You are ill,' he says to me with paternal sweetness, 'for I
have been good to you always and I love you to adoration.' 'You are to
blame for one thing, my dear,' I answered; 'you bore me.' 'Well, if I
do, haven't you the wittiest and handsomest young man in Paris to
amuse you?' said the poor man. I was caught. I actually felt I loved
him."

"Ah!" said Maxime.

"How could I help it? Feeling is stronger than we; one can't resist
such things. So I changed pedals. I began to entice my judicial
wild-boar, now turned like Arthur to a sheep; I gave him Arthur's sofa.
Heavens! how he bored me. But, you understand, I had to have Fabien
there to let Arthur surprise us."

"Well," cried Maxime, "go on; what happened? Was Arthur furious?"

"You know nothing about it, my old fellow. When Arthur came in and
'surprised' us, Fabien and me, he retreated on the tips of his toes to
the dining-room, where he began to clear his throat, 'broum, broum!'
and cough, and knock the chairs about. That great fool of a Fabien, to
whom, of course, I can't explain the whole matter, was frightened.
There, my dear Maxime, is the point we have reached."

Maxime nodded his head, and played for a few moments with his cane.

"I have known such natures," he said. "And the only way for you to do
is to pitch Arthur out of the window and lock the door upon him. This
is how you must manage it. Play that scene over again with Fabien;
when Arthur surprises you, give Fabien a glance Arthur can't mistake;
if he gets angry, that will end the matter; if he still says, 'broum,
broum!' it is just as good; you can end it a better way."

"How?"

"Why, get angry, and say: 'I believed you loved me, respected me; but
I see you've no feeling at all, not even jealousy,'--you know the
tirade. 'In a case like this, Maxime' (bring me in) 'would kill his
man on the spot' (then weep). 'And Fabien, he' (mortify him by
comparing him with that fellow), 'Fabien whom I love, Fabien would
have drawn a dagger and stabbed you to the heart. Ah, that's what it
is to love! Farewell, monsieur; take back your house and all your
property; I shall marry Fabien; /he/ gives me his name; /he/ marries
me in spite of his old mother--but /you/--'"

"I see! I see!" cried Madame Schontz. "I'll be superb! Ah! Maxime,
there will never be but one Maxime, just as there's only one de
Marsay."

"La Palferine is better than I," replied the Comte de Trailles,
modestly. "He'll make his mark."

"La Palferine has tongue, but you have fist and loins. What weights
you've carried! what cuffs you've given!"

"La Palferine has all that, too; he is deep and he is educated,
whereas I am ignorant," replied Maxime. "I have seen Rastignac, who
has made an arrangement with the Keeper of the Seals. Fabien is to be
appointed chief-justice at once, and officer of the Legion of honor
after one year's service."

"I shall make myself /devote/," said Madame Schontz, accenting that
speech in a manner which obtained a nod of approbation from Maxime.

"Priests can do more than even we," he replied sententiously.

"Ah! can they?" said Madame Schontz. "Then I may still find some one
in the provinces fit to talk to. I've already begun my role. Fabien
has written to his mother that grace has enlightened me; and he has
fascinated the good woman with my million and the chief-justiceship.
She consents that we shall live with her, and sends me her portrait,
and wants mine. If Cupid looked at hers he would die on the spot.
Come, go away, Maxime. I must put an end to my poor Arthur to-night,
and it breaks my heart."

Two days later, as they met on the threshold of the Jockey Club,
Charles-Edouard said to Maxime, "It is done."

The words, which contained a drama accomplished in part by vengeance,
made Maxime smile.

"Now come in and listen to Rochefide bemoaning himself; for you and
Aurelie have both touched goal together. Aurelie has just turned
Arthur out of doors, and now it is our business to get him a home. He
must give Madame du Ronceret three hundred thousand francs and take
back his wife; you and I must prove to him that Beatrix is superior to
Aurelie."

"We have ten days before us to do it in," said Charles-Edouard, "and
in all conscience that's not too much."

"What will you do when the shell bursts?"

"A man has always mind enough, give him time to collect it; I'm superb
at that sort of preparation."

The two conspirators entered the salon together, and found Rochefide
aged by two years; he had not even put on his corset, his beard had
sprouted, and all his elegance was gone.

"Well, my dear marquis?" said Maxime.

"Ah, my dear fellow, my life is wrecked."

Arthur talked for ten minutes, and Maxime listened gravely, thinking
all the while of his own marriage, which was now to take place within
a week.

"My dear Arthur," he replied at last; "I told you the only means I
knew to keep Aurelie, but you wouldn't--"

"What was it?"

"Didn't I advise you to go and sup with Antonia?"

"Yes, you did. But how could I? I love, and you, you only make love--"

"Listen to me, Arthur; give Aurelie three hundred thousand francs for
that little house, and I'll promise to find some one to suit you
better. I'll talk to you about it later, for there's d'Ajuda making
signs that he wants to speak to me."

And Maxime left the inconsolable man for the representative of a
family in need of consolation.

"My dear fellow," said d'Ajuda in his ear, "the duchess is in despair.
Calyste is having his trunks packed secretly, and he has taken out a
passport. Sabine wants to follow them, surprise Beatrix, and maul her.
She is pregnant, and it takes the turn of murderous ideas; she has
actually and openly bought pistols."

"Tell the duchess that Madame de Rochefide will not leave Paris, but
within a fortnight she will have left Calyste. Now, d'Ajuda, shake
hands. Neither you nor I have ever said, or known, or done anything
about this; we admire the chances of life, that's all."

"The duchess has already made me swear on the holy Gospels to hold my
tongue."

"Will you receive my wife a month hence?"

"With pleasure."

"Then every one, all round, will be satisfied," said Maxime. "Only
remind the duchess that she must make that journey to Italy with the
du Guenics, and the sooner the better."

For ten days Calyste was made to bear the weight of an anger all the
more invincible because it was in part the effect of a real passion.
Beatrix now experienced the love so brutally but faithfully described
to the Duchesse de Grandlieu by Maxime de Trailles. Perhaps no
well-organized beings exist who do not experience that terrible
passion once in the course of their lives. The marquise felt herself
mastered by a superior force,--by a young man on whom her rank and
quality did not impose, who, as noble as herself, regarded her with an
eye both powerful and calm, and from whom her greatest feminine arts
and efforts could with difficulty obtain even a smile of approval. In
short, she was oppressed by a tyrant who never left her that she did
not fall to weeping, bruised and wounded, yet believing herself to
blame. Charles-Edouard played upon Madame de Rochefide the same comedy
Madame de Rochefide had played on Calyste for the last six months.