Ferragus

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Ferragus


"Monsieur, not a sound, not a word," said Bourignard, whose voice he
recognized. The man was elegantly dressed; he wore the order of the
Golden-Fleece, and a medal on his coat. "Monsieur," he continued, and
his voice was sibilant like that of a hyena, "you increase my efforts
against you by having recourse to the police. You will perish,
monsieur; it has now become necessary. Do you love Madame Jules? Are
you beloved by her? By what right do you trouble her peaceful life,
and blacken her virtue?"

Some one entered the card-room. Ferragus rose to go.

"Do you know this man?" asked Monsieur de Maulincour of the new-comer,
seizing Ferragus by the collar. But Ferragus quickly disengaged
himself, took Monsieur de Maulincour by the hair, and shook his head
rapidly.

"Must you have lead in it to make it steady?" he said.

"I do not know him personally," replied Henri de Marsay, the spectator
of this scene, "but I know that he is Monsieur de Funcal, a rich
Portuguese."

Monsieur de Funcal had disappeared. The baron followed but without
being able to overtake him until he reached the peristyle, where he
saw Ferragus, who looked at him with a jeering laugh from a brilliant
equipage which was driven away at high speed.

"Monsieur," said Auguste, re-entering the salon and addressing de
Marsay, whom he knew, "I entreat you to tell me where Monsieur de
Funcal lives."

"I do not know; but some one here can no doubt tell you."

The baron, having questioned the prefect, ascertained that the Comte
de Funcal lived at the Portuguese embassy. At this moment, while he
still felt the icy fingers of that strange man in his hair, he saw
Madame Jules in all her dazzling beauty, fresh, gracious, artless,
resplendent with the sanctity of womanhood which had won his love.
This creature, now infernal to him, excited no emotion in his soul but
that of hatred; and this hatred shone in a savage, terrible look from
his eyes. He watched for a moment when he could speak to her unheard,
and then he said:--

"Madame, your _bravi_ have missed me three times."

"What do you mean, monsieur?" she said, flushing. "I know that you
have had several unfortunate accidents lately, which I have greatly
regretted; but how could I have had anything to do with them?"

"You knew that _bravi_ were employed against me by that man of the rue
Soly?"

"Monsieur!"

"Madame, I now call you to account, not for my happiness only, but for
my blood--"

At this instant Jules Desmarets approached them.

"What are you saying to my wife, monsieur?"

"Make that inquiry at my own house, monsieur, if you are curious,"
said Maulincour, moving away, and leaving Madame Jules in an almost
fainting condition.

There are few women who have not found themselves, once at least in
their lives, _a propos_ of some undeniable fact, confronted with a
direct, sharp, uncompromising question,--one of those questions
pitilessly asked by husbands, the mere apprehension of which gives a
chill, while the actual words enter the heart like the blade of a
dagger. It is from such crises that the maxim has come, "All women
lie." Falsehood, kindly falsehood, venial falsehood, sublime
falsehood, horrible falsehood,--but always the necessity to lie. This
necessity admitted, ought they not to know how to lie well? French
women do it admirably. Our manners and customs teach them deception!
Besides, women are so naively saucy, so pretty, graceful, and withal
so true in lying,--they recognize so fully the utility of doing so in
order to avoid in social life the violent shocks which happiness might
not resist,--that lying is seen to be as necessary to their lives as
the cotton-wool in which they put away their jewels. Falsehood becomes
to them the foundation of speech; truth is exceptional; they tell it,
if they are virtuous, by caprice or by calculation. According to
individual character, some women laugh when they lie; others weep;
others are grave; some grow angry. After beginning life by feigning
indifference to the homage that deeply flatters them, they often end
by lying to themselves. Who has not admired their apparent superiority
to everything at the very moment when they are trembling for the
secret treasures of their love? Who has never studied their ease,
their readiness, their freedom of mind in the greatest embarrassments
of life? In them, nothing is put on. Deception comes as the snow from
heaven. And then, with what art they discover the truth in others!
With what shrewdness they employ a direct logic in answer to some
passionate question which has revealed to them the secret of the heart
of a man who was guileless enough to proceed by questioning! To
question a woman! why, that is delivering one's self up to her; does
she not learn in that way all that we seek to hide from her? Does she
not know also how to be dumb, through speaking? What men are daring
enough to struggle with the Parisian woman?--a woman who knows how to
hold herself above all dagger thrusts, saying: "You are very
inquisitive; what is it to you? Why do you wish to know? Ah! you are
jealous! And suppose I do not choose to answer you?"--in short, a
woman who possesses the hundred and thirty-seven methods of saying
_No_, and incommensurable variations of the word _Yes_. Is not a
treatise on the words _yes_ and _no_, a fine diplomatic, philosophic,
logographic, and moral work, still waiting to be written? But to
accomplish this work, which we may also call diabolic, isn't an
androgynous genius necessary? For that reason, probably, it will never
be attempted. And besides, of all unpublished works isn't it the best
known and the best practised among women? Have you studied the
behavior, the pose, the _disinvoltura_ of a falsehood? Examine it.

Madame Desmarets was seated in the right-hand corner of her carriage,
her husband in the left. Having forced herself to recover from her
emotion in the ballroom, she now affected a calm demeanor. Her husband
had then said nothing to her, and he still said nothing. Jules looked
out of the carriage window at the black walls of the silent houses
before which they passed; but suddenly, as if driven by a determining
thought, when turning the corner of a street he examined his wife, who
appeared to be cold in spite of the fur-lined pelisse in which she was
wrapped. He thought she seemed pensive, and perhaps she really was so.
Of all communicable things, reflection and gravity are the most
contagious.

"What could Monsieur de Maulincour have said to affect you so keenly?"
said Jules; "and why does he wish me to go to his house and find out?"

"He can tell you nothing in his house that I cannot tell you here,"
she replied.

Then, with that feminine craft which always slightly degrades virtue,
Madame Jules waited for another question. Her husband turned his face
back to the houses, and continued his study of their walls. Another
question would imply suspicion, distrust. To suspect a woman is a
crime in love. Jules had already killed a man for doubting his wife.
Clemence did not know all there was of true passion, of loyal
reflection, in her husband's silence; just as Jules was ignorant of
the generous drama that was wringing the heart of his Clemence.

The carriage rolled on through a silent Paris, bearing the couple,
--two lovers who adored each other, and who, gently leaning on the
same silken cushion, were being parted by an abyss. In these elegant
coupes returning from a ball between midnight and two in the morning,
how many curious and singular scenes must pass,--meaning those coupes
with lanterns, which light both the street and the carriage, those
with their windows unshaded; in short, legitimate coupes, in which
couples can quarrel without caring for the eyes of pedestrians,
because the civil code gives a right to provoke, or beat, or kiss, a
wife in a carriage or elsewhere, anywhere, everywhere! How many
secrets must be revealed in this way to nocturnal pedestrians,--to
those young fellows who have gone to a ball in a carriage, but are
obliged, for whatever cause it may be, to return on foot. It was the
first time that Jules and Clemence had been together thus,--each in a
corner; usually the husband pressed close to his wife.

"It is very cold," remarked Madame Jules.

But her husband did not hear her; he was studying the signs above the
shop windows.

"Clemence," he said at last, "forgive me the question I am about to
ask you."

He came closer, took her by the waist, and drew her to him.

"My God, it is coming!" thought the poor woman. "Well," she said
aloud, anticipating the question, "you want to know what Monsieur de
Maulincour said to me. I will tell you, Jules; but not without fear.
Good God! how is it possible that you and I should have secrets from
one another? For the last few moments I have seen you struggling
between a conviction of our love and vague fears. But that conviction
is clear within us, is it not? And these doubts and fears, do they not
seem to you dark and unnatural? Why not stay in that clear light of
love you cannot doubt? When I have told you all, you will still desire
to know more; and yet I myself do not know what the extraordinary
words of that man meant. What I fear is that this may lead to some
fatal affair between you. I would rather that we both forget this
unpleasant moment. But, in any case, swear to me that you will let
this singular adventure explain itself naturally. Here are the facts.
Monsieur de Maulincour declared to me that the three accidents you
have heard mentioned--the falling of a stone on his servant, the
breaking down of his cabriolet, and his duel about Madame de Serizy
--were the result of some plot I had laid against him. He also
threatened to reveal to you the cause of my desire to destroy him. Can
you imagine what all this means? My emotion came from the sight of his
face convulsed with madness, his haggard eyes, and also his words,
broken by some violent inward emotion. I thought him mad. That is all
that took place. Now, I should be less than a woman if I had not
perceived that for over a year I have become, as they call it, the
passion of Monsieur de Maulincour. He has never seen me except at a
ball; and our intercourse has been most insignificant,--merely that
which every one shares at a ball. Perhaps he wants to disunite us, so
that he may find me at some future time alone and unprotected. There,
see! already you are frowning! Oh, how cordially I hate society! We
were so happy without him; why take any notice of him? Jules, I
entreat you, forget all this! To-morrow we shall, no doubt, hear that
Monsieur de Maulincour has gone mad."

"What a singular affair!" thought Jules, as the carriage stopped under
the peristyle of their house. He gave his arm to his wife and together
they went up to their apartments.

To develop this history in all its truth of detail, and to follow its
course through many windings, it is necessary here to divulge some of
love's secrets, to glide beneath the ceilings of a marriage chamber,
not shamelessly, but like Trilby, frightening neither Dougal nor
Jeannie, alarming no one,--being as chaste as our noble French
language requires, and as bold as the pencil of Gerard in his picture
of Daphnis and Chloe.

The bedroom of Madame Jules was a sacred plot. Herself, her husband,
and her maid alone entered it. Opulence has glorious privileges, and
the most enviable are those which enable the development of sentiments
to their fullest extent,--fertilizing them by the accomplishment of
even their caprices, and surrounding them with a brilliancy that
enlarges them, with refinements that purify them, with a thousand
delicacies that make them still more alluring. If you hate dinners on
the grass, and meals ill-served, if you feel a pleasure in seeing a
damask cloth that is dazzlingly white, a silver-gilt dinner service,
and porcelain of exquisite purity, lighted by transparent candles,
where miracles of cookery are served under silver covers bearing coats
of arms, you must, to be consistent, leave the garrets at the tops of
the houses, and the grisettes in the streets, abandon garrets,
grisettes, umbrellas, and overshoes to men who pay for their dinners
with tickets; and you must also comprehend Love to be a principle
which develops in all its grace only on Savonnerie carpets, beneath
the opal gleams of an alabaster lamp, between guarded walls silk-hung,
before gilded hearths in chambers deadened to all outward sounds by
shutters and billowy curtains. Mirrors must be there to show the play
of form and repeat the woman we would multiply as love itself
multiplies and magnifies her; next low divans, and a bed which, like a
secret, is divined, not shown. In this coquettish chamber are
fur-lined slippers for pretty feet, wax-candles under glass with
muslin draperies, by which to read at all hours of the night, and
flowers, not those oppressive to the head, and linen, the fineness of
which might have satisfied Anne of Austria.

Madame Jules had realized this charming programme, but that was
nothing. All women of taste can do as much, though there is always in
the arrangement of these details a stamp of personality which gives to
this decoration or that detail a character that cannot be imitated.
To-day, more than ever, reigns the fanaticism of individuality. The
more our laws tend to an impossible equality, the more we shall get
away from it in our manners and customs. Thus, rich people are
beginning, in France, to become more exclusive in their tastes and
their belongings, than they have been for the last thirty years.
Madame Jules knew very well how to carry out this programme; and
everything about her was arranged in harmony with a luxury that suits
so well with love. Love in a cottage, or "Fifteen hundred francs and
my Sophy," is the dream of starvelings to whom black bread suffices in
their present state; but when love really comes, they grow fastidious
and end by craving the luxuries of gastronomy. Love holds toil and
poverty in horror. It would rather die than merely live on from hand
to mouth.

Many women, returning from a ball, impatient for their beds, throw off
their gowns, their faded flowers, their bouquets, the fragrance of
which has now departed. They leave their little shoes beneath a chair,
the white strings trailing; they take out their combs and let their
hair roll down as it will. Little they care if their husbands see the
puffs, the hairpins, the artful props which supported the elegant
edifices of the hair, and the garlands or the jewels that adorned it.
No more mysteries! all is over for the husband; no more painting or
decoration for him. The corset--half the time it is a corset of a
reparative kind--lies where it is thrown, if the maid is too sleepy to
take it away with her. The whalebone bustle, the oiled-silk
protections round the sleeves, the pads, the hair bought from a
coiffeur, all the false woman is there, scattered about in open sight.
_Disjecta membra poetae_, the artificial poesy, so much admired by
those for whom it is conceived and elaborated, the fragments of a
pretty woman, litter every corner of the room. To the love of a
yawning husband, the actual presents herself, also yawning, in a
dishabille without elegance, and a tumbled night-cap, that of last
night and that of to-morrow night also,--"For really, monsieur, if you
want a pretty cap to rumple every night, increase my pin-money."

There's life as it is! A woman makes herself old and unpleasing to her
husband; but dainty and elegant and adorned for others, for the rival
of all husbands,--for that world which calumniates and tears to shreds
her sex.

Inspired by true love, for Love has, like other creations, its
instinct of preservation, Madame Jules did very differently; she found
in the constant blessing of her love the necessary impulse to fulfil
all those minute personal cares which ought never to be relaxed,
because they perpetuate love. Besides, such personal cares and duties
proceed from a personal dignity which becomes all women, and are among
the sweetest of flatteries, for is it not respecting in themselves the
man they love?

So Madame Jules denied to her husband all access to her dressing-room,
where she left the accessories of her toilet, and whence she issued
mysteriously adorned for the mysterious fetes of her heart. Entering
their chamber, which was always graceful and elegant, Jules found a
woman coquettishly wrapped in a charming _peignoir_, her hair simply
wound in heavy coils around her head; a woman always more simple, more
beautiful there than she was before the world; a woman just refreshed
in water, whose only artifice consisted in being whiter than her
muslins, sweeter than all perfumes, more seductive than any siren,
always loving and therefore always loved. This admirable understanding
of a wife's business was the secret of Josephine's charm for Napoleon,
as in former times it was that of Caesonia for Caius Caligula, of
Diane de Poitiers for Henri II. If it was largely productive to women
of seven or eight lustres what a weapon is it in the hands of young
women! A husband gathers with delight the rewards of his fidelity.

Returning home after the conversation which had chilled her with fear,
and still gave her the keenest anxiety, Madame Jules took particular
pains with her toilet for the night. She wanted to make herself, and
she did make herself enchanting. She belted the cambric of her
dressing-gown round her waist, defining the lines of her bust; she
allowed her hair to fall upon her beautifully modelled shoulders. A
perfumed bath had given her a delightful fragrance, and her little
bare feet were in velvet slippers. Strong in a sense of her advantages
she came in stepping softly, and put her hands over her husband's
eyes. She thought him pensive; he was standing in his dressing-gown
before the fire, his elbow on the mantel and one foot on the fender.
She said in his ear, warming it with her breath, and nibbling the tip
of it with her teeth:--

"What are you thinking about, monsieur?"

Then she pressed him in her arms as if to tear him away from all evil
thoughts. The woman who loves has a full knowledge of her power; the
more virtuous she is, the more effectual her coquetry.

"About you," he answered.

"Only about me?"

"Yes."

"Ah! that's a very doubtful 'yes.'"

They went to bed. As she fell asleep, Madame Jules said to herself:--

"Monsieur de Maulincour will certainly cause some evil. Jules' mind is
preoccupied, disturbed; he is nursing thoughts he does not tell me."

It was three in the morning when Madame Jules was awakened by a
presentiment which struck her heart as she slept. She had a sense both
physical and moral of her husband's absence. She did not feel the arm
Jules passed beneath her head,--that arm in which she had slept,
peacefully and happy, for five years; an arm she had never wearied. A
voice said to her, "Jules suffers, Jules is weeping." She raised her
head, and then sat up; felt that her husband's place was cold, and saw
him sitting before the fire, his feet on the fender, his head resting
against the back of an arm-chair. Tears were on his cheeks. The poor
woman threw herself hastily from her bed and sprang at a bound to her
husband's knees.

"Jules! what is it? Are you ill? Speak, tell me! Speak to me, if you
love me!" and she poured out a hundred words expressing the deepest
tenderness.

Jules knelt at her feet, kissed her hands and knees, and answered with
fresh tears:--

"Dear Clemence, I am most unhappy! It is not loving to distrust the
one we love. I adore you and suspect you. The words that man said to
me to-night have struck to my heart; they stay there in spite of
myself, and confound me. There is some mystery here. In short, and I
blush to say it, your explanations do not satisfy me. My reason casts
gleams into my soul which my love rejects. It is an awful combat.
Could I stay there, holding your head, and suspecting thoughts within
it to me unknown? Oh! I believe in you, I believe in you!" he cried,
seeing her smile sadly and open her mouth as if to speak. "Say
nothing; do not reproach me. Besides, could you say anything I have
not said myself for the last three hours? Yes, for three hours, I have
been here, watching you as you slept, so beautiful! admiring that
pure, peaceful brow. Yes, yes! you have always told me your thoughts,
have you not? I alone am in that soul. While I look at you, while my
eyes can plunge into yours I see all plainly. Your life is as pure as
your glance is clear. No, there is no secret behind those transparent
eyes." He rose and kissed their lids. "Let me avow to you, dearest
soul," he said, "that for the last five years each day has increased
my happiness, through the knowledge that you are all mine, and that no
natural affection even can take any of your love. Having no sister, no
father, no mother, no companion, I am neither above nor below any
living being in your heart; I am alone there. Clemence, repeat to me
those sweet things of the spirit you have so often said to me; do not
blame me; comfort me, I am so unhappy. I have an odious suspicion on
my conscience, and you have nothing in your heart to sear it. My
beloved, tell me, could I stay there beside you? Could two heads
united as ours have been lie on the same pillow when one was suffering
and the other tranquil? What are you thinking of?" he cried abruptly,
observing that Clemence was anxious, confused, and seemed unable to
restrain her tears.

"I am thinking of my mother," she answered, in a grave voice. "You
will never know, Jules, what I suffer in remembering my mother's dying
farewell, said in a voice sweeter than all music, and in feeling the
solemn touch of her icy hand at a moment when you overwhelm me with
those assurances of your precious love."

She raised her husband, strained him to her with a nervous force
greater than that of men, and kissed his hair, covering it with tears.

"Ah! I would be hacked in pieces for you! Tell me that I make you
happy; that I am to you the most beautiful of women--a thousand women
to you. Oh! you are loved as no other man ever was or will be. I don't
know the meaning of those words 'duty,' 'virtue.' Jules, I love you
for yourself; I am happy in loving you; I shall love you more and more
to my dying day. I have pride in my love; I feel it is my destiny to
have one sole emotion in my life. What I shall tell you now is
dreadful, I know--but I am glad to have no child; I do not wish for
any. I feel I am more wife than mother. Well, then, can you fear?
Listen to me, my own beloved, promise to forget, not this hour of
mingled tenderness and doubt, but the words of that madman. Jules, you
_must_. Promise me not to see him, not to go to him. I have a deep
conviction that if you set one foot in that maze we shall both roll
down a precipice where I shall perish--but with your name upon my
lips, your heart in my heart. Why hold me so high in that heart and
yet so low in reality? What! you who give credit to so many as to
money, can you not give me the charity of faith? And on the first
occasion in our lives when you might prove to me your boundless trust,
do you cast me from my throne in your heart? Between a madman and me,
it is the madman whom you choose to believe? oh, Jules!" She stopped,
threw back the hair that fell about her brow and neck, and then, in a
heart-rending tone, she added: "I have said too much; one word should
suffice. If your soul and your forehead still keep this cloud, however
light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it."

She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale.

"Oh! I will kill that man," thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in
his arms and carried her to her bed.

"Let us sleep in peace, my angel," he said. "I have forgotten all, I
swear it!"

Clemence fell asleep to the music of those sweet words, softly
repeated. Jules, as he watched her sleeping, said in his heart:--

"She is right; when love is so pure, suspicion blights it. To that
young soul, that tender flower, a blight--yes, a blight means death."

When a cloud comes between two beings filled with affection for each
other and whose lives are in absolute unison, that cloud, though it
may disperse, leaves in those souls a trace of its passage. Either
love gains a stronger life, as the earth after rain, or the shock
still echoes like distant thunder through a cloudless sky. It is
impossible to recover absolutely the former life; love will either
increase or diminish.

At breakfast, Monsieur and Madame Jules showed to each other those
particular attentions in which there is always something of
affectation. There were glances of forced gaiety, which seemed the
efforts of persons endeavoring to deceive themselves. Jules had
involuntary doubts, his wife had positive fears. Still, sure of each
other, they had slept. Was this strained condition the effect of a
want of faith, or was it only a memory of their nocturnal scene? They
did not know themselves. But they loved each other so purely that the
impression of that scene, both cruel and beneficent, could not fail to
leave its traces in their souls; both were eager to make those traces
disappear, each striving to be the first to return to the other, and
thus they could not fail to think of the cause of their first
variance. To loving souls, this is not grief; pain is still far-off;
but it is a sort of mourning, which is difficult to depict. If there
are, indeed, relations between colors and the emotions of the soul,
if, as Locke's blind man said, scarlet produces on the sight the
effect produced upon the hearing by a blast of trumpets, it is
permissible to compare this reaction of melancholy to mourning tones
of gray.