Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


Therefore to describe her in 1836 is to picture her as she was in
1817. Women who know the conditions of temperament and happiness in
which a woman should live to resist the ravages of time will
understand how and why Felicite des Touches enjoyed this great
privilege as they study a portrait for which were reserved the
brightest tints of Nature's palette, and the richest setting.

Brittany presents a curious problem to be solved in the predominance
of dark hair, brown eyes, and swarthy complexions in a region so near
England that the atmospheric effects are almost identical. Does this
problem belong to the great question of races? to hitherto unobserved
physical influences? Science may some day find the reason of this
peculiarity, which ceases in the adjoining province of Normandy.
Waiting its solution, this odd fact is there before our eyes; fair
complexions are rare in Brittany, where the women's eyes are as black
and lively as those of Southern women; but instead of possessing the
tall figures and swaying lines of Italy and Spain, they are usually
short, close-knit, well set-up and firm, except in the higher classes
which are crossed by their alliances.

Mademoiselle des Touches, a true Breton, is of medium height, though
she looks taller than she really is. This effect is produced by the
character of her face, which gives height to her form. She has that
skin, olive by day and dazzling by candlelight, which distinguishes a
beautiful Italian; you might, if you pleased, call it animated ivory.
The light glides along a skin of that texture as on a polished
surface; it shines; a violent emotion is necessary to bring the
faintest color to the centre of the cheeks, where it goes away almost
immediately. This peculiarity gives to her face the calm impassibility
of the savage. The face, more long than oval, resembles that of some
beautiful Isis in the Egyptian bas-reliefs; it has the purity of the
heads of sphinxes, polished by the fire of the desert, kissed by a
Coptic sun. The tones of the skin are in harmony with the faultless
modelling of the head. The black and abundant hair descends in heavy
masses beside the throat, like the coif of the statues at Memphis, and
carries out magnificently the general severity of form. The forehead
is full, broad, and swelling about the temples, illuminated by
surfaces which catch the light, and modelled like the brow of the
hunting Diana, a powerful and determined brow, silent and
self-contained. The arch of the eye-brows, vigorously drawn, surmounts
a pair of eyes whose flame scintillates at times like that of a fixed
star. The white of the eye is neither bluish, nor strewn with scarlet
threads, nor is it purely white; it has the texture of horn, but the
tone is warm. The pupil is surrounded by an orange circle; it is of
bronze set in gold, but vivid gold and animated bronze. This pupil
has depth; it is not underlaid, as in certain eyes, by a species of
foil, which sends back the light and makes such eyes resemble those of
cats or tigers; it has not that terrible inflexibility which makes a
sensitive person shudder; but this depth has in it something of the
infinite, just as the external radiance of the eyes suggests the
absolute. The glance of an observer may be lost in that soul, which
gathers itself up and retires with as much rapidity as it gushed for a
second into those velvet eyes. In moments of passion the eyes of
Camille Maupin are sublime; the gold of her glance illuminates them
and they flame. But in repose they are dull; the torpor of meditation
often lends them an appearance of stupidity[*]; in like manner, when
the glow of the soul is absent the lines of the face are sad.

[*] George Sand says of herself, in "L'Histoire de Ma Vie," published
long after the above was written: "The habit of meditation gave me
/l'air bete/ (a stupid air). I say the word frankly, for all my
life I have been told this, and therefore it must be true."--TR.

The lashes of the eyelids are short, but thick and black as the tip of
an ermine's tail; the eyelids are brown and strewn with red fibrils,
which give them grace and strength,--two qualities which are seldom
united in a woman. The circle round the eyes shows not the slightest
blemish nor the smallest wrinkle. There, again, we find the granite
of an Egyptian statue softened by the ages. But the line of the
cheek-bones, though soft, is more pronounced than in other women and
completes the character of strength which the face expresses. The
nose, thin and straight, parts into two oblique nostrils, passionately
dilated at times, and showing the transparent pink of their delicate
lining. This nose is an admirable continuation of the forehead, with
which it blends in a most delicious line. It is perfectly white from
its spring to its tip, and the tip is endowed with a sort of mobility
which does marvels if Camille is indignant, or angry, or rebellious.
There, above all, as Talma once remarked, is seen depicted the anger
or the irony of great minds. The immobility of the human nostril
indicates a certain narrowness of soul; never did the nose of a miser
oscillate; it contracts like the lips; he locks up his face as he does
his money.

Camille's mouth, arching at the corners, is of a vivid red; blood
abounds there, and supplies the living, thinking oxide which gives
such seduction to the lips, reassuring the lover whom the gravity of
that majestic face may have dismayed. The upper lip is thin, the
furrow which unites it with the nose comes low, giving it a centre
curve which emphasizes its natural disdain. Camille has little to do
to express anger. This beautiful lip is supported by the strong red
breadth of its lower mate, adorable in kindness, swelling with love, a
lip like the outer petal of a pomegranate such as Phidias might have
carved, and the color of which it has. The chin is firm and rather
full; but it expresses resolution and fitly ends this profile, royal
if not divine. It is necessary to add that the upper lip beneath the
nose is lightly shaded by a charming down. Nature would have made a
blunder had she not cast that tender mist upon the face. The ears are
delicately convoluted,--a sign of secret refinement. The bust is
large, the waist slim and sufficiently rounded. The hips are not
prominent, but very graceful; the line of the thighs is magnificent,
recalling Bacchus rather than the Venus Callipyge. There we may see
the shadowy line of demarcation which separates nearly every woman of
genius from her sex; there such women are found to have a certain
vague similitude to man; they have neither the suppleness nor the soft
abandonment of those whom Nature destines for maternity; their gait is
not broken by faltering motions. This observation may be called
bi-lateral; it has its counterpart in men, whose thighs are those of
women when they are sly, cunning, false, and cowardly. Camille's neck,
instead of curving inward at the nape, curves out in a line that
unites the head to the shoulders without sinuosity, a most signal
characteristic of force. The neck itself presents at certain moments
an athletic magnificence. The spring of the arms from the shoulders,
superb in outline, seems to belong to a colossal woman. The arms are
vigorously modelled, ending in wrists of English delicacy and charming
hands, plump, dimpled, and adorned with rosy, almond-shaped nails;
these hands are of a whiteness which reveals that the body, so round,
so firm, so well set-up, is of another complexion altogether than the
face. The firm, cold carriage of the head is corrected by the mobility
of the lips, their changing expression, and the artistic play of the
nostrils.

And yet, in spite of all these promises--hidden, perhaps, from the
profane--the calm of that countenance has something, I know not what,
that is vexatious. More sad, more serious than gracious, that face is
marked by the melancholy of constant meditation. For this reason
Mademoiselle des Touches listens more than she talks. She startles by
her silence and by that deep-reaching glance of intense fixity. No
educated person could see her without thinking of Cleopatra, that dark
little woman who almost changed the face of the world. But in Camille
the natural animal is so complete, so self-sufficing, of a nature so
leonine, that a man, however little of a Turk he may be, regrets the
presence of so great a mind in such a body, and could wish that she
were wholly woman. He fears to find the strange distortion of an
abnormal soul. Do not cold analysis and matter-of-fact theory point to
passions in such a woman? Does she judge, and not feel? Or, phenomenon
more terrible, does she not feel and judge at one and the same time?
Able for all things through her brain, ought her course to be
circumscribed by the limitations of other women? Has that intellectual
strength weakened her heart? Has she no charm? Can she descend to
those tender nothings by which a woman occupies, and soothes and
interests the man she loves? Will she not cast aside a sentiment when
it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps
and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her
eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something
unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind
should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. Camille
Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller's Isis, seated in
the darkness of the temple, at whose feet her priests find the dead
bodies of the daring men who have consulted her.

The adventures of her life declared to be true by the world, and which
Camille has never disavowed, enforce the questions suggested by her
personal appearance. Perhaps she likes those calumnies.

The nature of her beauty has not been without its influence on her
fame; it has served it, just as her fortune and position have
maintained her in society. If a sculptor desires to make a statue of
Brittany let him take Mademoiselle des Touches for his model. That
full-blooded, powerful temperament is the only nature capable of
repelling the action of time. The constant nourishment of the pulp, so
to speak, of that polished skin is an arm given to women by Nature to
resist the invasion of wrinkles; in Camille's case it was aided by the
calm impassibility of her features.

In 1817 this charming young woman opened her house to artists, authors
of renown, learned and scientific men, and publicists,--a society
toward which her tastes led her. Her salon resembled that of Baron
Gerard, where men of rank mingled with men of distinction of all
kinds, and the elite of Parisian women came. The parentage of
Mademoiselle des Touches, and her fortune, increased by that of her
aunt the nun, protected her in the attempt, always very difficult in
Paris, to create a society. Her worldly independence was one reason of
her success. Various ambitious mothers indulged in the hope of
inducing her to marry their sons, whose fortunes were out of
proportion to the age of their escutcheons. Several peers of France,
allured by the prospect of eighty thousand francs a year and a house
magnificently appointed, took their womenkind, even the most
fastidious and intractable, to visit her. The diplomatic world, always
in search of amusements of the intellect, came there and found
enjoyment. Thus Mademoiselle des Touches, surrounded by so many forms
of individual interests, was able to study the different comedies
which passion, covetousness, and ambition make the generality of men
perform,--even those who are highest in the social scale. She saw,
early in life, the world as it is; and she was fortunate enough not to
fall early into absorbing love, which warps the mind and faculties of
a woman and prevents her from judging soberly.

Ordinarily a woman feels, enjoys, and judges, successively; hence
three distinct ages, the last of which coincides with the mournful
period of old age. In Mademoiselle des Touches this order was
reversed. Her youth was wrapped in the snows of knowledge and the ice
of reflection. This transposition is, in truth, an additional
explanation of the strangeness of her life and the nature of her
talent. She observed men at an age when most women can only see one
man; she despised what other women admired; she detected falsehood in
the flatteries they accept as truths; she laughed at things that made
them serious. This contradiction of her life with that of others
lasted long; but it came to a terrible end; she was destined to find
in her soul a first love, young and fresh, at an age when women are
summoned by Nature to renounce all love.

Meantime, a first affair in which she was involved has always remained
a secret from the world. Felicite, like other women, was induced to
believe that beauty of body was that of soul. She fell in love with a
face, and learned, to her cost, the folly of a man of gallantry, who
saw nothing in her but a mere woman. It was some time before she
recovered from the disgust she felt at this episode. Her distress was
perceived by a friend, a man, who consoled her without personal
after-thought, or, at any rate, he concealed any such motive if he had
it. In him Felicite believed she found the heart and mind which were
lacking to her former lover. He did, in truth, possess one of the most
original minds of our age. He, too, wrote under a pseudonym, and his
first publications were those of an adorer of Italy. Travel was the
one form of education which Felicite lacked. A man of genius, a poet
and a critic, he took Felicite to Italy in order to make known to her
that country of all Art. This celebrated man, who is nameless, may be
regarded as the master and maker of "Camille Maupin." He bought into
order and shape the vast amount of knowledge already acquired by
Felicite; increased it by study of the masterpieces with which Italy
teems; gave her the frankness, freedom, and grace, epigrammatic, and
intense, which is the character of his own talent (always rather
fanciful as to form) which Camille Maupin modified by delicacy of
sentiment and the softer terms of thought that are natural to a woman.
He also roused in her a taste for German and English literature and
made her learn both languages while travelling. In Rome, in 1820,
Felicite was deserted for an Italian. Without that misery she might
never have been celebrated. Napoleon called misfortune the midwife of
genius. This event filled Mademoiselle des Touches, and forever, with
that contempt for men which later was to make her so strong. Felicite
died, Camille Maupin was born.

She returned to Paris with Conti, the great musician, for whom she
wrote the librettos of two operas. But she had no more illusions, and
she became, at heart, unknown to the world, a sort of female Don Juan,
without debts and without conquests. Encouraged by success, she
published the two volumes of plays which at once placed the name of
Camille Maupin in the list of illustrious anonymas. Next, she related
her betrayed and deluded love in a short novel, one of the
masterpieces of that period. This book, of a dangerous example, was
classed with "Adolphe," a dreadful lamentation, the counterpart of
which is found in Camille's work. The true secret of her literary
metamorphosis and pseudonym has never been fully understood. Some
delicate minds have thought it lay in a feminine desire to escape fame
and remain obscure, while offering a man's name and work to criticism.

In spite of any such desire, if she had it, her celebrity increased
daily, partly through the influence of her salon, partly from her own
wit, the correctness of her judgments, and the solid worth of her
acquirements. She became an authority; her sayings were quoted; she
could no longer lay aside at will the functions with which Parisian
society invested her. She came to be an acknowledged exception. The
world bowed before the genius and position of this strange woman; it
recognized and sanctioned her independence; women admired her mind,
men her beauty. Her conduct was regulated by all social conventions.
Her friendships seemed purely platonic. There was, moreover, nothing
of the female author about her. Mademoiselle des Touches is charming
as a woman of the world,--languid when she pleases, indolent,
coquettish, concerned about her toilet, pleased with the airy nothings
so seductive to women and to poets. She understands very well that
after Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho,
and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without /grands seigneurs/ and
a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art
and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor
to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed with a generosity
that makes her a dupe; so filled is she with pity for sorrow,--filled
also with contempt for the prosperous. She has lived since 1830, the
centre of a choice circle, surrounded by tried friends who love her
tenderly and esteem each other. Far from the noisy fuss of Madame de
Stael, far from political strifes, she jokes about Camille Maupin,
that junior of George Sand (whom she calls her brother Cain), whose
recent fame has now eclipsed her own. Mademoiselle des Touches admires
her fortunate rival with angelic composure, feeling no jealousy and no
secret vexation.

Until the period when this history begins, she had led as happy a life
as a woman strong enough to protect herself can be supposed to live.
From 1817 to 1834 she had come some five or six times to Les Touches.
Her first stay was after her first disillusion in 1818. The house was
uninhabitable, and she sent her man of business to Guerande and took a
lodging for herself in the village. At that time she had no suspicion
of her coming fame; she was sad, she saw no one; she wanted, as it
were, to contemplate herself after her great disaster. She wrote to
Paris to have the furniture necessary for a residence at Les Touches
sent down to her. It came by a vessel to Nantes, thence by small boats
to Croisic, from which little place it was transported, not without
difficulty, over the sands to Les Touches. Workmen came down from
Paris, and before long she occupied Les Touches, which pleased her
immensely. She wanted to meditate over the events of her life, like a
cloistered nun.

At the beginning of the winter she returned to Paris. The little town
of Guerande was by this time roused to diabolical curiosity; its whole
talk was of the Asiatic luxury displayed at Les Touches. Her man of
business gave orders after her departure that visitors should be
admitted to view the house. They flocked from the village of Batz,
from Croisic, and from Savenay, as well as from Guerande. This public
curiosity brought in an enormous sum to the family of the porter and
gardener, not less, in two years, than seventeen francs.

After this, Mademoiselle des Touches did not revisit Les Touches for
two years, not until her return from Italy. On that occasion she came
by way of Croisic and was accompanied by Conti. It was some time
before Guerande became aware of her presence. Her subsequent
apparitions at Les Touches excited comparatively little interest. Her
Parisian fame did not precede her; her man of business alone knew the
secret of her writings and of her connection with the celebrity of
Camille Maupin. But at the period of which we are now writing the
contagion of the new ideas had made some progress in Guerande, and
several persons knew of the dual form of Mademoiselle des Touches'
existence. Letters came to the post-office, directed to Camille Maupin
at Les Touches. In short, the veil was rent away. In a region so
essentially Catholic, archaic, and full of prejudice, the singular
life of this illustrious woman would of course cause rumors, some of
which, as we have seen, had reached the ears of the Abbe Grimont and
alarmed him; such a life could never be comprehended in Guerande; in
fact, to every mind, it seemed unnatural and improper.

Felicite, during her present stay, was not alone in Les Touches. She
had a guest. That guest was Claude Vignon, a scornful and powerful
writer who, though doing criticism only, has found means to give the
public and literature the impression of a certain superiority.
Mademoiselle des Touches had received this writer for the last seven
years, as she had so many other authors, journalists, artists, and men
of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter
penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the
way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him.
She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various
ways,--by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she
wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune
would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance in the
literary world.

With these apparent intentions she had brought Claude Vignon from
Paris to Les Touches, as an eagle bears away a kid in its talons,--to
study him, and decide upon some positive course. But, in truth, she
was misleading both Calyste and Claude; she was not even thinking of
marriage; her heart was in the throes of the most violent convulsion
that could agitate a soul as strong as hers. She found herself the
dupe of her own mind; too late she saw life lighted by the sun of
love, shining as love shines in a heart of twenty.

Let us now see Camille's convent where this was happening.



VII

LES TOUCHES

A few hundred yards from Guerande the soil of Brittany comes to an
end; the salt-marshes and the sandy dunes begin. We descend into a
desert of sand, which the sea has left for a margin between herself
and earth, by a rugged road through a ravine that has never seen a
carriage. This desert contains waste tracts, ponds of unequal size,
round the shores of which the salt is made on muddy banks, and a
little arm of the sea which separates the mainland from the island of
Croisic. Geographically, Croisic is really a peninsula; but as it
holds to Brittany only by the beaches which connect it with the
village of Batz (barren quicksands very difficult to cross), it may be
more correct to call it an island.

At the point where the road from Croisic to Guerande turns off from
the main road of /terra firma/, stands a country-house, surrounded by
a large garden, remarkable for its trimmed and twisted pine-trees,
some being trained to the shape of sun-shades, others, stripped of
their branches, showing their reddened trunks in spots where the bark
has peeled. These trees, victims of hurricanes, growing against wind
and tide (for them the saying is literally true), prepare the mind for
the strange and depressing sight of the marshes and dunes, which
resemble a stiffened ocean. The house, fairly well built of a species
of slaty stone with granite courses, has no architecture; it presents
to the eye a plain wall with windows at regular intervals. These
windows have small leaded panes on the ground-floor and large panes on
the upper floor. Above are the attics, which stretch the whole length
of an enormously high pointed roof, with two gables and two large
dormer windows on each side of it. Under the triangular point of each
gable a circular window opens its cyclopic eye, westerly to the sea,
easterly on Guerande. One facade of the house looks on the road to
Guerande, the other on the desert at the end of which is Croisic;
beyond that little town is the open sea. A brook escapes through an
opening in the park wall which skirts the road to Croisic, crosses the
road, and is lost in the sands beyond it.

The grayish tones of the house harmonize admirably with the scene it
overlooks. The park is an oasis in the surrounding desert, at the
entrance of which the traveller comes upon a mud-hut, where the
custom-house officials lie in wait for him. This house without land
(for the bulk of the estate is really in Guerande) derives an income
from the marshes and a few outlying farms of over ten thousand francs
a year. Such is the fief of Les Touches, from which the Revolution
lopped its feudal rights. The /paludiers/, however, continue to call
it "the chateau," and they would still say "seigneur" if the fief were
not now in the female line. When Felicite set about restoring Les
Touches, she was careful, artist that she is, not to change the
desolate exterior which gives the look of a prison to the isolated
structure. The sole change was at the gate, which she enlivened by two
brick columns supporting an arch, beneath which carriages pass into
the court-yard where she planted trees.

The arrangement of the ground-floor is that of nearly all country
houses built a hundred years ago. It was, evidently, erected on the
ruins of some old castle formerly perched there. A large panelled
entrance-hall has been turned by Felicite into a billiard-room; from
it opens an immense salon with six windows, and the dining-room. The
kitchen communicates with the dining-room through an office. Camille
has displayed a noble simplicity in the arrangement of this floor,
carefully avoiding all splendid decoration. The salon, painted gray,
is furnished in old mahogany with green silk coverings. The furniture
of the dining-room comprises four great buffets, also of mahogany,
chairs covered with horsehair, and superb engravings by Audran in
mahogany frames. The old staircase, of wood with heavy balusters, is
covered all over with a green carpet.