Ferragus

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FERRAGUS,
CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




PREPARER'S NOTE:

Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is entitled
The Duchesse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with the
Golden Eyes. The three stories are frequently combined under
the title The Thirteen.




DEDICATION

To Hector Berlioz.



PREFACE

Thirteen men were banded together in Paris under the Empire, all
imbued with one and the same sentiment, all gifted with sufficient
energy to be faithful to the same thought, with sufficient honor among
themselves never to betray one another even if their interests
clashed; and sufficiently wily and politic to conceal the sacred ties
that united them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above the
law, bold enough to undertake all things, and fortunate enough to
succeed, nearly always, in their undertakings; having run the greatest
dangers, but keeping silence if defeated; inaccessible to fear;
trembling neither before princes, nor executioners, not even before
innocence; accepting each other for such as they were, without social
prejudices,--criminals, no doubt, but certainly remarkable through
certain of the qualities that make great men, and recruiting their
number only among men of mark. That nothing might be lacking to the
sombre and mysterious poesy of their history, these Thirteen men have
remained to this day unknown; though all have realized the most
chimerical ideas that the fantastic power falsely attributed to the
Manfreds, the Fausts, and the Melmoths can suggest to the imagination.
To-day, they are broken up, or, at least, dispersed; they have
peaceably put their necks once more under the yoke of civil law, just
as Morgan, that Achilles among pirates, transformed himself from a
buccaneering scourge to a quiet colonist, and spent, without remorse,
around his domestic hearth the millions gathered in blood by the lurid
light of flames and slaughter.

Since the death of Napoleon, circumstances, about which the author
must keep silence, have still farther dissolved the original bond of
this secret society, always extraordinary, sometimes sinister, as
though it lived in the blackest pages of Mrs. Radcliffe. A somewhat
strange permission to relate in his own way a few of the adventures of
these men (while respecting certain susceptibilities) has only
recently been given to him by one of those anonymous heroes to whom
all society was once occultly subjected. In this permission the writer
fancied he detected a vague desire for personal celebrity.

This man, apparently still young, with fair hair and blue eyes, whose
sweet, clear voice seemed to denote a feminine soul, was pale of face
and mysterious in manner; he conversed affably, declared himself not
more than forty years of age, and apparently belonged to the very
highest social classes. The name which he assumed must have been
fictitious; his person was unknown in society. Who was he? That, no
one has ever known.

Perhaps, in confiding to the author the extraordinary matters which he
related to him, this mysterious person may have wished to see them in
a manner reproduced, and thus enjoy the emotions they were certain to
bring to the hearts of the masses,--a feeling analogous to that of
Macpherson when the name of his creation Ossian was transcribed into
all languages. That was certainly, for the Scotch lawyer, one of the
keenest, or at any rate the rarest, sensations a man could give
himself. Is it not the incognito of genius? To write the "Itinerary
from Paris to Jerusalem" is to take a share in the human glory of a
single epoch; but to endow his native land with another Homer, was not
that usurping the work of God?

The author knows too well the laws of narration to be ignorant of the
pledges this short preface is contracting for him; but he also knows
enough of the history of the _Thirteen_ to be certain that his present
tale will never be thought below the interest inspired by this
programme. Dramas steeped in blood, comedies filled with terror,
romantic tales through which rolled heads mysteriously decapitated,
have been confided to him. If readers were not surfeited with horrors
served up to them of late in cold blood, he might reveal the calm
atrocities, the surpassing tragedies concealed under family life. But
he chooses in preference gentler events,--those where scenes of purity
succeed the tempests of passion; where woman is radiant with virtue
and beauty. To the honor of the _Thirteen_ be it said that there are
such scenes in their history, which may have the honor of being some
day published as a foil of tales to listeners,--that race apart from
others, so curiously energetic, and so interesting in spite of its
crimes.

An author ought to be above converting his tale, when the tale is
true, into a species of surprise-game, and of taking his readers, as
certain novellists do, through many volumes and from cellar to cellar,
to show them the dry bones of a dead body, and tell them, by way of
conclusion, that _that_ is what has frightened them behind doors, hidden
in the arras, or in cellars where the dead man was buried and
forgotten. In spite of his aversion for prefaces, the author feels
bound to place the following statement at the head of this narrative.
Ferragus is a first episode which clings by invisible links to the
"History of the _Thirteen_," whose power, naturally acquired, can alone
explain certain acts and agencies which would otherwise seem
supernatural. Although it is permissible in tellers of tales to have a
sort of literary coquetry in becoming historians, they ought to
renounce the benefit that may accrue from an odd or fantastic title
--on which certain slight successes have been won in the present day.
Consequently, the author will now explain, succinctly, the reasons
that obliged him to select a title to his book which seems at first
sight unnatural.

_Ferragus_ is, according to ancient custom, a name taken by the chief
or Grand Master of the Devorants. On the day of their election these
chiefs continue whichever of the dynasties of their Order they are
most in sympathy with, precisely as the Popes do, on their accession,
in connection with pontifical dynasties. Thus the Devorants have
"Trempe-la Soupe IX.," "Ferragus XXII.," "Tutanus XIII.," "Masche-Fer
IV.," just as the Church has Clement XIV., Gregory VII., Julius II.,
Alexander VI., etc.

Now, then, who are the Devorants? "Devorant" is the name of one of
those tribes of "Companions" that issued in ancient times from the
great mystical association formed among the workers of Christianity to
rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. Companionism (to coin a word) still
exists in France among the people. Its traditions, powerful over minds
that are not enlightened, and over men not educated enough to cast
aside an oath, might serve the ends of formidable enterprises if some
rough-hewn genius were to seize hold of these diverse associations.
All the instruments of this Companionism are well-nigh blind. From
town to town there has existed from time immemorial, for the use of
Companions, an "Obade,"--a sort of halting-place, kept by a "Mother,"
an old woman, half-gypsy, with nothing to lose, knowing everything
that happens in her neighborhood, and devoted, either from fear or
habit, to the tribe, whose straggling members she feeds and lodges.
This people, ever moving and changing, though controlled by immutable
customs, has its eyes everywhere, executes, without judging it, a
WILL,--for the oldest Companion still belongs to an era when men had
faith. Moreover, the whole body professes doctrines that are
sufficiently true and sufficiently mysterious to electrify into a sort
of tribal loyalty all adepts whenever they obtain even a slight
development. The attachment of the Companions to their laws is so
passionate that the diverse tribes will fight sanguinary battles with
each other in defence of some question of principle.

Happily for our present public safety, when a Devorant is ambitious,
he builds houses, lays by his money, and leaves the Order. There is
many a curious thing to tell about the "Compagnons du Devoir"
[Companions of the Duty], the rivals of the Devorants, and about the
different sects of working-men, their usages, their fraternity, and
the bond existing between them and the free-masons. But such details
would be out of place here. The author must, however, add that under
the old monarchy it was not an unknown thing to find a
"Trempe-la-Soupe" enslaved to the king sentenced for a hundred and one
years to the galleys, but ruling his tribe from there, religiously
consulted by it, and when he escaped from his galley, certain of help,
succor, and respect, wherever he might be. To see its grand master at
the galleys is, to the faithful tribe, only one of those misfortunes
for which providence is responsible, and which does not release the
Devorants from obeying a power created by them to be above them. It
is but the passing exile of their legitimate king, always a king for
them. Thus we see the romantic prestige attaching to the name of
Ferragus and to that of the Devorants completely dissipated.

As for the _Thirteen_, they were all men of the stamp of Trelawney, Lord
Byron's friend, who was, they say, the original of his "Corsair." They
were all fatalists, men of nerve and poesy, weary of leading flat and
empty lives, driven toward Asiatic enjoyments by forces all the more
excessive because, long dormant, they awoke furious. One of them,
after re-reading "Venice Preserved," and admiring the sublime union of
Pierre and Jaffier, began to reflect on the virtues shown by men who
are outlawed by society, on the honesty of galley-slaves, the
faithfulness of thieves among each other, the privileges of exorbitant
power which such men know how to win by concentrating all ideas into a
single will. He saw that Man is greater than men. He concluded that
society ought to belong wholly to those distinguished beings who, to
natural intelligence, acquired wisdom, and fortune, add a fanaticism
hot enough to fuse into one casting these different forces. That done,
their occult power, vast in action and in intensity, against which the
social order would be helpless, would cast down all obstacles, blast
all other wills, and give to each the devilish power of all. This
world apart within the world, hostile to the world, admitting none of
the world's ideas, not recognizing any law, not submitting to any
conscience but that of necessity, obedient to a devotion only, acting
with every faculty for a single associate when one of their number
asked for the assistance of all,--this life of filibusters in lemon
kid gloves and cabriolets; this intimate union of superior beings,
cold and sarcastic, smiling and cursing in the midst of a false and
puerile society; this certainty of forcing all things to serve an end,
of plotting a vengeance that could not fail of living in thirteen
hearts; this happiness of nurturing a secret hatred in the face of
men, and of being always in arms against this; this ability to
withdraw to the sanctuary of self with one idea more than even the
most remarkable of men could have,--this religion of pleasure and
egotism cast so strong a spell over Thirteen men that they revived the
society of Jesuits to the profit of the devil.

It was horrible and stupendous; but the compact was made, and it
lasted precisely because it appeared to be so impossible.

There was, therefore, in Paris a brotherhood of _Thirteen_, who belonged
to each other absolutely, but ignored themselves as absolutely before
the world. At night they met, like conspirators, hiding no thought,
disposing each and all of a common fortune, like that of the Old Man
of the Mountain; having their feet in all salons, their hands in all
money-boxes, and making all things serve their purpose or their fancy
without scruple. No chief commanded them; no one member could arrogate
to himself that power. The most eager passion, the most exacting
circumstance, alone had the right to pass first. They were Thirteen
unknown kings,--but true kings, more than ordinary kings and judges
and executioners,--men who, having made themselves wings to roam
through society from depth to height, disdained to be anything in the
social sphere because they could be all. If the present writer ever
learns the reasons of their abdication of this power, he will take
occasion to tell them.[*]

[*] See Theophile Gautier's account of the society of the "Cheval
Rouge." Memoir of Balzac. Roberts Brothers, Boston.

Now, with this brief explanation, he may be allowed to begin the tale
of certain episodes in the history of the _Thirteen_, which have more
particularly attracted him by the Parisian flavor of their details and
the whimsicality of their contrasts.




FERRAGUS,
CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS



CHAPTER I

MADAME JULES

Certain streets in Paris are as degraded as a man covered with infamy;
also, there are noble streets, streets simply respectable, young
streets on the morality of which the public has not yet formed an
opinion; also cut-throat streets, streets older than the age of the
oldest dowagers, estimable streets, streets always clean, streets
always dirty, working, laboring, and mercantile streets. In short, the
streets of Paris have every human quality, and impress us, by what we
must call their physiognomy, with certain ideas against which we are
defenceless. There are, for instance, streets of a bad neighborhood in
which you could not be induced to live, and streets where you would
willingly take up your abode. Some streets, like the rue Montmartre,
have a charming head, and end in a fish's tail. The rue de la Paix is
a wide street, a fine street, yet it wakens none of those gracefully
noble thoughts which come to an impressible mind in the middle of the
rue Royale, and it certainly lacks the majesty which reigns in the
Place Vendome.

If you walk the streets of the Ile Saint-Louis, do not seek the reason
of the nervous sadness that lays hold upon you save in the solitude of
the spot, the gloomy look of the houses, and the great deserted
mansions. This island, the ghost of _fermiers-generaux_, is the Venice
of Paris. The Place de la Bourse is voluble, busy, degraded; it is
never fine except by moonlight at two in the morning. By day it is
Paris epitomized; by night it is a dream of Greece. The rue
Traversiere-Saint-Honore--is not that a villainous street? Look at the
wretched little houses with two windows on a floor, where vice, crime,
and misery abound. The narrow streets exposed to the north, where the
sun never comes more than three or four times a year, are the
cut-throat streets which murder with impunity; the authorities of the
present day do not meddle with them; but in former times the
Parliament might perhaps have summoned the lieutenant of police and
reprimanded him for the state of things; and it would, at least, have
issued some decree against such streets, as it once did against the
wigs of the Chapter of Beauvais. And yet Monsieur Benoiston de
Chateauneuf has proved that the mortality of these streets is double
that of others! To sum up such theories by a single example: is not
the rue Fromentin both murderous and profligate!

These observations, incomprehensible out of Paris, will doubtless be
understood by musing men of thought and poesy and pleasure, who know,
while rambling about Paris, how to harvest the mass of floating
interests which may be gathered at all hours within her walls; to them
Paris is the most delightful and varied of monsters: here, a pretty
woman; farther on, a haggard pauper; here, new as the coinage of a new
reign; there, in this corner, elegant as a fashionable woman. A
monster, moreover, complete! Its garrets, as it were, a head full of
knowledge and genius; its first storeys stomachs repleted; its shops,
actual feet, where the busy ambulating crowds are moving. Ah! what an
ever-active life the monster leads! Hardly has the last vibration of
the last carriage coming from a ball ceased at its heart before its
arms are moving at the barriers and it shakes itself slowly into
motion. Doors open; turning on their hinges like the membrane of some
huge lobster, invisibly manipulated by thirty thousand men or women,
of whom each individual occupies a space of six square feet, but has a
kitchen, a workshop, a bed, children, a garden, little light to see
by, but must see all. Imperceptibly, the articulations begin to crack;
motion communicates itself; the street speaks. By mid-day, all is
alive; the chimneys smoke, the monster eats; then he roars, and his
thousand paws begin to ramp. Splendid spectacle! But, O Paris! he who
has not admired your gloomy passages, your gleams and flashes of
light, your deep and silent _cul-de-sacs_, who has not listened to
your murmurings between midnight and two in the morning, knows nothing
as yet of your true poesy, nor of your broad and fantastic contrasts.

There are a few amateurs who never go their way heedlessly; who savor
their Paris, so to speak; who know its physiognomy so well that they
see every wart, and pimple, and redness. To others, Paris is always
that monstrous marvel, that amazing assemblage of activities, of
schemes, of thoughts; the city of a hundred thousand tales, the head
of the universe. But to those few, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or
beautiful, living or dead; to them Paris is a creature; every man,
every fraction of a house is a lobe of the cellular tissue of that
great courtesan whose head and heart and fantastic customs they know
so well. These men are lovers of Paris; they lift their noses at such
or such a corner of a street, certain that they can see the face of a
clock; they tell a friend whose tobacco-pouch is empty, "Go down that
passage and turn to the left; there's a tobacconist next door to a
confectioner, where there's a pretty girl." Rambling about Paris is,
to these poets, a costly luxury. How can they help spending precious
minutes before the dramas, disasters, faces, and picturesque events
which meet us everywhere amid this heaving queen of cities, clothed in
posters,--who has, nevertheless, not a single clean corner, so
complying is she to the vices of the French nation! Who has not
chanced to leave his home early in the morning, intending to go to
some extremity of Paris, and found himself unable to get away from the
centre of it by the dinner-hour? Such a man will know how to excuse
this vagabondizing start upon our tale; which, however, we here sum up
in an observation both useful and novel, as far as any observation can
be novel in Paris, where there is nothing new,--not even the statue
erected yesterday, on which some young gamin has already scribbled his
name.

Well, then! there are streets, or ends of streets, there are houses,
unknown for the most part to persons of social distinction, to which a
woman of that class cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding
things to be thought of her. Whether the woman be rich and has a
carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one
of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her
reputation as a virtuous woman. If, by chance, she is there at nine in
the evening the conjectures that an observer permits himself to make
upon her may prove fearful in their consequences. But if the woman is
young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if
the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at
the end of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if
beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman
with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of
young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the
first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough.
There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead
to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the
modern school.

Unhappily, this scene, this modern drama itself, will be comprehended
by only a small number of persons; and it is a pity to tell the tale
to a public which cannot enter into its local merit. But who can
flatter himself that he will ever be understood? We all die unknown
--'tis the saying of women and of authors.

At half-past eight o'clock one evening, in the rue Pagevin, in the
days when that street had no wall which did not echo some infamous
word, and was, in the direction of the rue Soly, the narrowest and
most impassable street in Paris (not excepting the least frequented
corner of the most deserted street),--at the beginning of the month of
February about thirteen years ago, a young man, by one of those
chances which come but once in life, turned the corner of the rue
Pagevin to enter the rue des Vieux-Augustins, close to the rue Soly.
There, this young man, who lived himself in the rue de Bourbon, saw in
a woman near whom he had been unconsciously walking, a vague
resemblance to the prettiest woman in Paris; a chaste and delightful
person, with whom he was secretly and passionately in love,--a love
without hope; she was married. In a moment his heart leaped, an
intolerable heat surged from his centre and flowed through all his
veins; his back turned cold, the skin of his head crept. He loved, he
was young, he knew Paris; and his knowledge did not permit him to be
ignorant of all there was of possible infamy in an elegant, rich,
young, and beautiful woman walking there, alone, with a furtively
criminal step. _She_ in that mud! at that hour!

The love that this young man felt for that woman may seem romantic,
and all the more so because he was an officer in the Royal Guard. If
he had been in the infantry, the affair might have seemed more likely;
but, as an officer of rank in the cavalry, he belonged to that French
arm which demands rapidity in its conquests and derives as much vanity
from its amorous exploits as from its dashing uniform. But the passion
of this officer was a true love, and many young hearts will think it
noble. He loved this woman because she was virtuous; he loved her
virtue, her modest grace, her imposing saintliness, as the dearest
treasures of his hidden passion. This woman was indeed worthy to
inspire one of those platonic loves which are found, like flowers amid
bloody ruins, in the history of the middle-ages; worthy to be the
hidden principle of all the actions of a young man's life; a love as
high, as pure as the skies when blue; a love without hope and to which
men bind themselves because it can never deceive; a love that is
prodigal of unchecked enjoyment, especially at an age when the heart
is ardent, the imagination keen, and the eyes of a man see very
clearly.

Strange, weird, inconceivable effects may be met with at night in
Paris. Only those who have amused themselves by watching those effects
have any idea how fantastic a woman may appear there at dusk. At times
the creature whom you are following, by accident or design, seems to
you light and slender; the stockings, if they are white, make you
fancy that the legs must be slim and elegant; the figure though
wrapped in a shawl, or concealed by a pelisse, defines itself
gracefully and seductively among the shadows; anon, the uncertain
gleam thrown from a shop-window or a street lamp bestows a fleeting
lustre, nearly always deceptive, on the unknown woman, and fires the
imagination, carrying it far beyond the truth. The senses then bestir
themselves; everything takes color and animation; the woman appears in
an altogether novel aspect; her person becomes beautiful. Behold! she
is not a woman, she is a demon, a siren, who is drawing you by
magnetic attraction to some respectable house, where the worthy
_bourgeoise_, frightened by your threatening step and the clack of
your boots, shuts the door in your face without looking at you.

A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker,
suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who
was before the young man. Ah! surely, _she_ alone had that swaying
figure; she alone knew the secret of that chaste gait which innocently
set into relief the many beauties of that attractive form. Yes, that
was the shawl, and that the velvet bonnet which she wore in the
mornings. On her gray silk stockings not a spot, on her shoes not a
splash. The shawl held tightly round the bust disclosed, vaguely, its
charming lines; and the young man, who had often seen those shoulders
at a ball, knew well the treasures that the shawl concealed. By the
way a Parisian woman wraps a shawl around her, and the way she lifts
her feet in the street, a man of intelligence in such studies can
divine the secret of her mysterious errand. There is something, I know
not what, of quivering buoyancy in the person, in the gait; the woman
seems to weigh less; she steps, or rather, she glides like a star, and
floats onward led by a thought which exhales from the folds and motion
of her dress. The young man hastened his step, passed the woman, and
then turned back to look at her. Pst! she had disappeared into a
passage-way, the grated door of which and its bell still rattled and
sounded. The young man walked back to the alley and saw the woman
reach the farther end, where she began to mount--not without receiving
the obsequious bow of an old portress--a winding staircase, the lower
steps of which were strongly lighted; she went up buoyantly, eagerly,
as though impatient.