Gambara

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Gambara

By

Honore de Balzac


Translated by
Clara Bell and James Waring




DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Marquis de Belloy

It was sitting by the fire, in a mysterious and magnificent
retreat,--now a thing of the past but surviving in our memory,
--whence our eyes commanded a view of Paris from the heights of
Belleville to those of Belleville, from Montmartre to the
triumphal Arc de l'Etoile, that one morning, refreshed by tea,
amid the myriad suggestions that shoot up and die like rockets
from your sparkling flow of talk, lavish of ideas, you tossed to
my pen a figure worthy of Hoffmann,--that casket of unrecognized
gems, that pilgrim seated at the gate of Paradise with ears to
hear the songs of the angels but no longer a tongue to repeat
them, playing on the ivory keys with fingers crippled by the
stress of divine inspiration, believing that he is expressing
celestial music to his bewildered listeners.

It was you who created GAMBARA; I have only clothed him. Let me
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, regretting only
that you do not yourself take up the pen at a time when gentlemen
ought to wield it as well as the sword, if they are to save their
country. You may neglect yourself, but you owe your talents to us.




GAMBARA



New Year's Day of 1831 was pouring out its packets of sugared almonds,
four o'clock was striking, there was a mob in the Palais-Royal, and
the eating-houses were beginning to fill. At this moment a coupe drew
up at the _perron_ and a young man stepped out; a man of haughty
appearance, and no doubt a foreigner; otherwise he would not have
displayed the aristocratic _chasseur_ who attended him in a plumed
hat, nor the coat of arms which the heroes of July still attacked.

This gentleman went into the Palais-Royal, and followed the crowd
round the galleries, unamazed at the slowness to which the throng of
loungers reduced his pace; he seemed accustomed to the stately step
which is ironically nicknamed the ambassador's strut; still, his
dignity had a touch of the theatrical. Though his features were
handsome and imposing, his hat, from beneath which thick black curls
stood out, was perhaps tilted a little too much over the right ear,
and belied his gravity by a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive
and half closed, looked down disdainfully on the crowd.

"There goes a remarkably good-looking young man," said a girl in a low
voice, as she made way for him to pass.

"And who is only too well aware of it!" replied her companion aloud
--who was very plain.

After walking all round the arcades, the young man looked by turns at
the sky and at his watch, and with a shrug of impatience went into a
tobacconist's shop, lighted a cigar, and placed himself in front of a
looking-glass to glance at his costume, which was rather more ornate
than the rules of French taste allow. He pulled down his collar and
his black velvet waistcoat, over which hung many festoons of the thick
gold chain that is made at Venice; then, having arranged the folds of
his cloak by a single jerk of his left shoulder, draping it gracefully
so as to show the velvet lining, he started again on parade,
indifferent to the glances of the vulgar.

As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black
enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais-Royal, but
as a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the
houses as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till
he reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street
--a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified
purlieus of the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a
careless servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of
the staircase.

The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's wife
craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour was
not unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim.
Earlier, he might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut
out. Tempted by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting,
to have followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for
a day, thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by
a thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to
believe in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under
the promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age
when romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?

The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
this would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning
to think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.

This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of
suspicion to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had been
welcomed in Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a man
always finds there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name, two
hundred thousand francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To such a
man banishment could but be a pleasure tour; his property was simply
sequestrated, and his friends let him know that after an absence of
two years he might return to his native land without danger.

After rhyming _crudeli affanni_ with _i miei tiranni_ in a dozen or so
of sonnets, and maintaining as many hapless Italian refugees out of
his own purse, Count Andrea, who was so unlucky as to be a poet,
thought himself released from patriotic obligations. So, ever since
his arrival, he had given himself up recklessly to the pleasures of
every kind which Paris offers _gratis_ to those who can pay for them.
His talents and his handsome person won him success among women, whom
he adored collectively as beseemed his years, but among whom he had
not as yet distinguished a chosen one. And indeed this taste was, in
him, subordinate to those for music and poetry which he had cultivated
from his childhood; and he thought success in these both more
difficult and more glorious to achieve than in affairs of gallantry,
since nature had not inflicted on him the obstacles men take most
pride in defying.

A man, like many another, of complex nature, he was easily fascinated
by the comfort of luxury, without which he could hardly have lived;
and, in the same way, he clung to the social distinctions which his
principles contemned. Thus his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a
poet were in frequent antagonism with his tastes, his feelings, and
his habits as a man of rank and wealth; but he comforted himself for
his inconsistencies by recognizing them in many Parisians, like
himself liberal by policy and aristocrats by nature.

Hence it was not without some uneasiness that he found himself,
on December 31, 1830, under a Paris thaw, following at the heels
of a woman whose dress betrayed the most abject, inveterate, and
long-accustomed poverty, who was no handsomer than a hundred others
to be seen any evening at the play, at the opera, in the world of
fashion, and who was certainly not so young as Madame de Manerville,
from whom he had obtained an assignation for that very day, and who
was perhaps waiting for him at that very hour.

But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that
woman's black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world
of buried sorrows and promised joys! And she had colored so fiercely
when, on coming out of a shop where she had lingered a quarter of an
hour, her look frankly met the Count's, who had been waiting for her
hard by! In fact, there were so many _buts_ and _ifs_, that, possessed
by one of those mad temptations for which there is no word in any
language, not even in that of the orgy, he had set out in pursuit of
this woman, hunting her down like a hardened Parisian.

On the way, whether he kept behind or ahead of this damsel, he studied
every detail of her person and her dress, hoping to dislodge the
insane and ridiculous fancy that had taken up an abode in his brain;
but he presently found in his examination a keener pleasure than he
had felt only the day before in gazing at the perfect shape of a woman
he loved, as she took her bath. Now and again, the unknown fair,
bending her head, gave him a look like that of a kid tethered with its
head to the ground, and finding herself still the object of his
pursuit, she hurried on as if to fly. Nevertheless, each time that a
block of carriages, or any other delay, brought Andrea to her side, he
saw her turn away from his gaze without any signs of annoyance. These
signals of restrained feelings spurred the frenzied dreams that had
run away with him, and he gave them the rein as far as the Rue
Froid-Manteau, down which, after many windings, the damsel vanished,
thinking she had thus spoilt the scent of her pursuer, who was, in
fact, startled by this move.

It was now quite dark. Two women, tattooed with rouge, who were
drinking black-currant liqueur at a grocer's counter, saw the young
woman and called her. She paused at the door of the shop, replied in a
few soft words to the cordial greeting offered her, and went on her
way. Andrea, who was behind her, saw her turn into one of the darkest
yards out of this street, of which he did not know the name. The
repulsive appearance of the house where the heroine of his romance had
been swallowed up made him feel sick. He drew back a step to study the
neighborhood, and finding an ill-looking man at his elbow, he asked
him for information. The man, who held a knotted stick in his right
hand, placed the left on his hip and replied in a single word:

"Scoundrel!"

But on looking at the Italian, who stood in the light of a
street-lamp, he assumed a servile expression.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said he, suddenly changing his tone. "There
is a restaurant near this, a sort of table-d'hote, where the cooking
is pretty bad and they serve cheese in the soup. Monsieur is in search
of the place, perhaps, for it is easy to see that he is an Italian
--Italians are fond of velvet and of cheese. But if monsieur would
like to know of a better eating-house, an aunt of mine, who lives a
few steps off, is very fond of foreigners."

Andrea raised his cloak as high as his moustache, and fled from the
street, spurred by the disgust he felt at this foul person, whose
clothes and manner were in harmony with the squalid house into which
the fair unknown had vanished. He returned with rapture to the
thousand luxuries of his own rooms, and spent the evening at the
Marquise d'Espard's to cleanse himself, if possible, of the smirch
left by the fancy that had driven him so relentlessly during the day.

And yet, when he was in bed, the vision came back to him, but clearer
and brighter than the reality. The girl was walking in front of him;
now and again as she stepped across a gutter her skirts revealed a
round calf; her shapely hips swayed as she walked. Again Andrea longed
to speak to her--and he dared not, he, Marcosini, a Milanese nobleman!
Then he saw her turn into the dark passage where she had eluded him,
and blamed himself for not having followed her.

"For, after all," said he to himself, "if she really wished to avoid
me and put me off her track, it is because she loves me. With women of
that stamp, coyness is a proof of love. Well, if I had carried the
adventure any further, it would, perhaps, have ended in disgust. I
will sleep in peace."

The Count was in the habit of analyzing his keenest sensations, as men
do involuntarily when they have as much brains as heart, and he was
surprised when he saw the strange damsel of the Rue Froid-Manteau once
more, not in the pictured splendor of his dream but in the bare
reality of dreary fact. And, in spite of it all, if fancy had stripped
the woman of her livery of misery, it would have spoilt her for him;
for he wanted her, he longed for her, he loved her--with her muddy
stockings, her slipshod feet, her straw bonnet! He wanted her in the
very house where he had seen her go in.

"Am I bewitched by vice, then?" he asked himself in dismay. "Nay, I
have not yet reached that point. I am but three-and-twenty, and there
is nothing of the senile fop about me."

The very vehemence of the whim that held possession of him to some
extent reassured him. This strange struggle, these reflections, and
this love in pursuit may perhaps puzzle some persons who are
accustomed to the ways of Paris life; but they may be reminded that
Count Andrea Marcosini was not a Frenchman.

Brought up by two abbes, who, in obedience to a very pious father, had
rarely let him out of their sight, Andrea had not fallen in love with
a cousin at the age of eleven, or seduced his mother's maid by the
time he was twelve; he had not studied at school, where a lad does not
learn only, or best, the subjects prescribed by the State; he had
lived in Paris but a few years, and he was still open to those sudden
but deep impressions against which French education and manners are so
strong a protection. In southern lands a great passion is often born
of a glance. A gentleman of Gascony who had tempered strong feelings
by much reflection had fortified himself by many little recipes
against sudden apoplexies of taste and heart, and he advised the Count
to indulge at least once a month in a wild orgy to avert those storms
of the soul which, but for such precautions, are apt to break out at
inappropriate moments. Andrea now remembered this advice.

"Well," thought he, "I will begin to-morrow, January 1st."



This explains why Count Andrea Marcosini hovered so shyly before
turning down the Rue Froid-Manteau. The man of fashion hampered the
lover, and he hesitated for some time; but after a final appeal to his
courage he went on with a firm step as far as the house, which he
recognized without difficulty.

There he stopped once more. Was the woman really what he fancied her?
Was he not on the verge of some false move?

At this juncture he remembered the Italian table d'hote, and at once
jumped at the middle course, which would serve the ends alike of his
curiosity and of his reputation. He went in to dine, and made his way
down the passage; at the bottom, after feeling about for some time, he
found a staircase with damp, slippery steps, such as to an Italian
nobleman could only seem a ladder.

Invited to the first floor by the glimmer of a lamp and a strong smell
of cooking, he pushed a door which stood ajar and saw a room dingy
with dirt and smoke, where a wench was busy laying a table for about
twenty customers. None of the guests had yet arrived.

After looking round the dimly lighted room where the paper was
dropping in rags from the walls, the gentleman seated himself by a
stove which was roaring and smoking in the corner.

Attracted by the noise the Count made in coming in and disposing of
his cloak, the major-domo presently appeared. Picture to yourself a
lean, dried-up cook, very tall, with a nose of extravagant dimensions,
casting about him from time to time, with feverish keenness, a glance
that he meant to be cautious. On seeing Andrea, whose attire bespoke
considerable affluence, Signor Giardini bowed respectfully.

The Count expressed his intention of taking his meals as a rule in the
society of some of his fellow-countrymen; he paid in advance for a
certain number of tickets, and ingenuously gave the conversation a
familiar bent to enable him to achieve his purpose quickly.

Hardly had he mentioned the woman he was seeking when Signor Giardini,
with a grotesque shrug, looked knowingly at his customer, a bland
smile on his lips.

"_Basta_!" he exclaimed. "_Capisco_. Your Excellency has come spurred
by two appetites. La Signora Gambara will not have wasted her time if
she has gained the interest of a gentleman so generous as you appear
to be. I can tell you in a few words all we know of the woman, who is
really to be pitied.

"The husband is, I believe, a native of Cremona and has just come here
from Germany. He was hoping to get the Tedeschi to try some new music
and some new instruments. Isn't it pitiable?" said Giardini, shrugging
his shoulders. "Signor Gambara, who thinks himself a great composer,
does not seem to me very clever in other ways. An excellent fellow
with some sense and wit, and sometimes very agreeable, especially when
he has had a few glasses of wine--which does not often happen, for he
is desperately poor; night and day he toils at imaginary symphonies
and operas instead of trying to earn an honest living. His poor wife
is reduced to working for all sorts of people--the women on the
streets! What is to be said? She loves her husband like a father, and
takes care of him like a child.

"Many a young man has dined here to pay his court to madame; but not
one has succeeded," said he, emphasizing the word. "La Signora
Marianna is an honest woman, monsieur, much too honest, worse luck for
her! Men give nothing for nothing nowadays. So the poor soul will die
in harness.

"And do you suppose that her husband rewards her for her devotion?
Pooh, my lord never gives her a smile! And all their cooking is done
at the baker's; for not only does the wretched man never earn a sou;
he spends all his wife can make on instruments which he carves, and
lengthens, and shortens, and sets up and takes to pieces again till
they produce sounds that will scare a cat; then he is happy. And yet
you will find him the mildest, the gentlest of men. And, he is not
idle; he is always at it. What is to be said? He is crazy and does not
know his business. I have seen him, monsieur, filing and forging his
instruments and eating black bread with an appetite that I envied him
--I, who have the best table in Paris.

"Yes, Excellenza, in a quarter of an hour you shall know the man I am.
I have introduced certain refinements into Italian cookery that will
amaze you! Excellenza, I am a Neapolitan--that is to say, a born cook.
But of what use is instinct without knowledge? Knowledge! I have spent
thirty years in acquiring it, and you see where it has left me. My
history is that of every man of talent. My attempts, my experiments,
have ruined three restaurants in succession at Naples, Parma, and
Rome. To this day, when I am reduced to make a trade of my art, I more
often than not give way to my ruling passion. I give these poor
refugees some of my choicest dishes. I ruin myself! Folly! you will
say? I know it; but how can I help it? Genius carries me away, and I
cannot resist concocting a dish which smiles on my fancy.

"And they always know it, the rascals! They know, I can promise you,
whether I or my wife has stood over the fire. And what is the
consequence? Of sixty-odd customers whom I used to see at my table
every day when I first started in this wretched place, I now see
twenty on an average, and give them credit for the most part. The
Piedmontese, the Savoyards, have deserted, but the connoisseurs, the
true Italians, remain. And there is no sacrifice that I would not make
for them. I often give them a dinner for five and twenty sous which
has cost me double."

Signore Giardini's speech had such a full flavor of Neapolitan cunning
that the Count was delighted, and could have fancied himself at
Gerolamo's.

"Since that is the case, my good friend," said he familiarly to the
cook, "and since chance and your confidence have let me into the
secret of your daily sacrifices, allow me to pay double."

As he spoke Andrea spun a forty-franc piece on the stove, out of which
Giardini solemnly gave him two francs and fifty centimes in change,
not without a certain ceremonious mystery that amused him hugely.

"In a few minutes now," the man added, "you will see your _donnina_. I
will seat you next the husband, and if you wish to stand in his good
graces, talk about music. I have invited every one for the evening,
poor things. Being New Year's Day, I am treating the company to a dish
in which I believe I have surpassed myself."

Signor Giardini's voice was drowned by the noisy greetings of the
guests, who streamed in two and two, or one at a time, after the
manner of tables-d'hote. Giardini stayed by the Count, playing the
showman by telling him who the company were. He tried by his
witticisms to bring a smile to the lips of a man who, as his
Neapolitan instinct told him, might be a wealthy patron to turn to
good account.

"This one," said he, "is a poor composer who would like to rise
from song-writing to opera, and cannot. He blames the managers,
music-sellers,--everybody, in fact, but himself, and he has no worse
enemy. You can see--what a florid complexion, what self-conceit, how
little firmness in his features! he is made to write ballads. The man
who is with him and looks like a match-hawker, is a great music
celebrity--Gigelmi, the greatest Italian conductor known; but he has
gone deaf, and is ending his days in penury, deprived of all that made
it tolerable. Ah! here comes our great Ottoboni, the most guileless
old fellow on earth; but he is suspected of being the most vindictive
of all who are plotting for the regeneration of Italy. I cannot think
how they can bear to banish such a good man."

And here Giardini looked narrowly at the Count, who, feeling himself
under inquisition as to his politics, entrenched himself in Italian
impassibility.

"A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no
political opinions, Excellenza," Giardini went on. "But to see that
worthy man, who looks more like a lamb than a lion, everybody would
say what I say, were it before the Austrian ambassador himself.
Besides, in these times liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going
its rounds again. At least, so these good people think," said he,
leaning over to speak in the Count's ear, "and why should I thwart
their hopes? I, for my part, do not hate an absolute government.
Excellenza, every man of talent is for depotism!

"Well, though full of genius, Ottoboni takes no end of pains to
educate Italy; he writes little books to enlighten the intelligence of
the children and the common people, and he smuggles them very cleverly
into Italy. He takes immense trouble to reform the moral sense of our
luckless country, which, after all, prefers pleasure to freedom,--and
perhaps it is right."

The Count preserved such an impenetrable attitude that the cook could
discover nothing of his political views.

"Ottoboni," he ran on, "is a saint; very kind-hearted; all the
refugees are fond of him; for, Excellenza, a liberal may have his
virtues. Oho! Here comes a journalist," said Giardini, as a man came
in dressed in the absurd way which used to be attributed to a poet in
a garret; his coat was threadbare, his boots split, his hat shiny, and
his overcoat deplorably ancient. "Excellenza, that poor man is full of
talent, and incorruptibly honest. He was born into the wrong times,
for he tells the truth to everybody; no one can endure him. He writes
theatrical articles for two small papers, though he is clever enough
to work for the great dailies. Poor fellow!

"The rest are not worth mentioning, and Your Excellency will find them
out," he concluded, seeing that on the entrance of the musician's wife
the Count had ceased to listen to him.



On seeing Andrea here, Signora Marianna started visibly and a bright
flush tinged her cheeks.

"Here he is!" said Giardini, in an undertone, clutching the Count's
arm and nodding to a tall man. "How pale and grave he is poor man! His
hobby has not trotted to his mind to-day, I fancy."

Andrea's prepossession for Marianna was crossed by the captivating
charm which Gambara could not fail to exert over every genuine artist.
The composer was now forty; but although his high brow was bald and
lined with a few parallel, but not deep, wrinkles; in spite, too, of
hollow temples where the blue veins showed through the smooth,
transparent skin, and of the deep sockets in which his black eyes were
sunk, with their large lids and light lashes, the lower part of his
face made him still look young, so calm was its outline, so soft the
modeling. It could be seen at a glance that in this man passion had
been curbed to the advantage of the intellect; that the brain alone
had grown old in some great struggle.

Andrea shot a swift look at Marianna, who was watching him. And he
noted the beautiful Italian head, the exquisite proportion and rich
coloring that revealed one of those organizations in which every human
power is harmoniously balanced, he sounded the gulf that divided this
couple, brought together by fate. Well content with the promise he
inferred from this dissimilarity between the husband and wife, he made
no attempt to control a liking which ought to have raised a barrier
between the fair Marianna and himself. He was already conscious of
feeling a sort of respectful pity for this man, whose only joy she
was, as he understood the dignified and serene acceptance of ill
fortune that was expressed in Gambara's mild and melancholy gaze.