Seraphita

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Seraphita


"Their child was born,--the Seraphita we are now concerned with. From
the moment of her conception father and mother lived a still more
solitary life than in the past, lifting themselves up to heaven by
Prayer. They hoped to see Swedenborg, and faith realized their hope.
The day on which Seraphita came into the world Swedenborg appeared in
Jarvis, and filled the room of the new-born child with light. I was
told that he said, 'The work is accomplished; the Heavens rejoice!'
Sounds of unknown melodies were heard throughout the house, seeming to
come from the four points of heaven on the wings of the wind. The
spirit of Swedenborg led the father forth to the shores of the fiord
and there quitted him. Certain inhabitants of Jarvis, having
approached Monsieur Seraphitus as he stood on the shore, heard him
repeat those blissful words of Scripture: 'How beautiful on the
mountains are the feet of Him who is sent of God!'

"I had left the parsonage on my way to baptize the infant and name it,
and perform the other duties required by law, when I met the baron
returning to the house. 'Your ministrations are superfluous,' he said;
'our child is to be without name on this earth. You must not baptize
in the waters of an earthly Church one who has just been immersed in
the fires of Heaven. This child will remain a blossom, it will not
grow old; you will see it pass away. You exist, but our child has
life; you have outward senses, the child has none, its being is always
inward.' These words were uttered in so strange and supernatural a
voice that I was more affected by them than by the shining of his
face, from which light appeared to exude. His appearance realized the
phantasmal ideas which we form of inspired beings as we read the
prophesies of the Bible. But such effects are not rare among our
mountains, where the nitre of perpetual snows produces extraordinary
phenomena in the human organization.

"I asked him the cause of his emotion. 'Swedenborg came to us; he has
just left me; I have breathed the air of heaven,' he replied. 'Under
what form did he appear?' I said. 'Under his earthly form; dressed as
he was the last time I saw him in London, at the house of Richard
Shearsmith, Coldbath-fields, in July, 1771. He wore his brown frieze
coat with steel buttons, his waistcoat buttoned to the throat, a white
cravat, and the same magisterial wig rolled and powdered at the sides
and raised high in front, showing his vast and luminous brow, in
keeping with the noble square face, where all is power and
tranquillity. I recognized the large nose with its fiery nostril, the
mouth that ever smiled,--angelic mouth from which these words, the
pledge of my happiness, have just issued, "We shall meet soon."'

"The conviction that shone on the baron's face forbade all discussion;
I listened in silence. His voice had a contagious heat which made my
bosom burn within me; his fanaticism stirred my heart as the anger of
another makes our nerves vibrate. I followed him in silence to his
house, where I saw the nameless child lying mysteriously folded to its
mother's breast. The babe heard my step and turned its head toward me;
its eyes were not those of an ordinary child. To give you an idea of
the impression I received, I must say that already they saw and
thought. The childhood of this predestined being was attended by
circumstances quite extraordinary in our climate. For nine years our
winters were milder and our summers longer than usual. This phenomenon
gave rise to several discussions among scientific men; but none of
their explanations seemed sufficient to academicians, and the baron
smiled when I told him of them. The child was never seen in its nudity
as other children are; it was never touched by man or woman, but lived
a sacred thing upon the mother's breast, and it never cried. If you
question old David he will confirm these facts about his mistress, for
whom he feels an adoration like that of Louis IX. for the saint whose
name he bore.

"At nine years of age the child began to pray; prayer is her life. You
saw her in the church at Christmas, the only day on which she comes
there; she is separated from the other worshippers by a visible space.
If that space does not exist between herself and men she suffers. That
is why she passes nearly all her time alone in the chateau. The events
of her life are unknown; she is seldom seen; her days are spent in the
state of mystical contemplation which was, so Catholic writers tell
us, habitual with the early Christian solitaries, in whom the oral
tradition of Christ's own words still remained. Her mind, her soul,
her body, all within her is virgin as the snow on those mountains. At
ten years of age she was just what you see her now. When she was nine
her father and mother expired together, without pain or visible
malady, after naming the day and hour at which they would cease to be.
Standing at their feet she looked at them with a calm eye, not showing
either sadness, or grief, or joy, or curiosity. When we approached to
remove the two bodies she said, 'Carry them away!' 'Seraphita,' I
said, for so we called her, 'are you not affected by the death of your
father and your mother who loved you so much?' 'Dead?' she answered,
'no, they live in me forever-- That is nothing,' she pointed without
emotion to the bodies they were bearing away. I then saw her for the
third time only since her birth. In church it is difficult to
distinguish her; she stands near a column which, seen from the pulpit,
is in shadow, so that I cannot observe her features.

"Of all the servants of the household there remained after the death
of the master and mistress only old David, who, in spite of his
eighty-two years, suffices to wait on his mistress. Some of our Jarvis
people tell wonderful tales about her. These have a certain weight in
a land so essentially conducive to mystery as ours; and I am now
studying the treatise on Incantations by Jean Wier and other works
relating to demonology, where pretended supernatural events are
recorded, hoping to find facts analogous to those which are attributed
to her."

"Then you do not believe in her?" said Wilfrid.

"Oh yes, I do," said the pastor, genially, "I think her a very
capricious girl; a little spoilt by her parents, who turned her head
with the religious ideas I have just revealed to you."

Minna shook her head in a way that gently expressed contradiction.

"Poor girl!" continued the old man, "her parents bequeathed to her
that fatal exaltation of soul which misleads mystics and renders them
all more or less mad. She subjects herself to fasts which horrify poor
David. The good old man is like a sensitive plant which quivers at the
slightest breeze, and glows under the first sun-ray. His mistress,
whose incomprehensible language has become his, is the breeze and the
sun-ray to him; in his eyes her feet are diamonds and her brow is
strewn with stars; she walks environed with a white and luminous
atmosphere; her voice is accompanied by music; she has the gift of
rendering herself invisible. If you ask to see her, he will tell you
she has gone to the _astral regions_. It is difficult to believe such a
story, is it not? You know all miracles bear more or less resemblance
to the story of the Golden Tooth. We have our golden tooth in Jarvis,
that is all. Duncker the fisherman asserts that he has seen her plunge
into the fiord and come up in the shape of an eider-duck, at other
times walking on the billows of a storm. Fergus, who leads the flocks
to the saeters, says that in rainy weather a circle of clear sky can
be seen over the Swedish castle; and that the heavens are always blue
above Seraphita's head when she is on the mountain. Many women hear
the tones of a mighty organ when Seraphita enters the church, and ask
their neighbors earnestly if they too do not hear them. But my
daughter, for whom during the last two years Seraphita has shown much
affection, has never heard this music, and has never perceived the
heavenly perfumes which, they say, make the air fragrant about her
when she moves. Minna, to be sure, has often on returning from their
walks together expressed to me the delight of a young girl in the
beauties of our spring-time, in the spicy odors of budding larches and
pines and the earliest flowers; but after our long winters what can be
more natural than such pleasure? The companionship of this so-called
spirit has nothing so very extraordinary in it, has it, my child?"

"The secrets of that spirit are not mine," said Minna. "Near it I know
all, away from it I know nothing; near that exquisite life I am no
longer myself, far from it I forget all. The time we pass together is
a dream which my memory scarcely retains. I may have heard yet not
remember the music which the women tell of; in that presence, I may
have breathed celestial perfumes, seen the glory of the heavens, and
yet be unable to recollect them here."

"What astonishes me most," resumed the pastor, addressing Wilfrid, "is
to notice that you suffer from being near her."

"Near her!" exclaimed the stranger, "she has never so much as let me
touch her hand. When she saw me for the first time her glance
intimidated me; she said: 'You are welcome here, for you were to
come.' I fancied that she knew me. I trembled. It is fear that forces
me to believe in her."

"With me it is love," said Minna, without a blush.

"Are you making fun of me?" said Monsieur Becker, laughing
good-humoredly; "you my daughter, in calling yourself a Spirit of Love,
and you, Monsieur Wilfrid, in pretending to be a Spirit of Wisdom?"

He drank a glass of beer and so did not see the singular look which
Wilfrid cast upon Minna.

"Jesting apart," resumed the old gentleman, "I have been much
astonished to hear that these two mad-caps ascended to the summit of
the Falberg; it must be a girlish exaggeration; they probably went to
the crest of a ledge. It is impossible to reach the peaks of the
Falberg."

"If so, father," said Minna, in an agitated voice, "I must have been
under the power of a spirit; for indeed we reached the summit of the
Ice-Cap."

"This is really serious," said Monsieur Becker. "Minna is always
truthful."

"Monsieur Becker," said Wilfrid, "I swear to you that Seraphita
exercises such extraordinary power over me that I know no language in
which I can give you the least idea of it. She has revealed to me
things known to myself alone."

"Somnambulism!" said the old man. "A great many such effects are
related by Jean Wier as phenomena easily explained and formerly
observed in Egypt."

"Lend me Swedenborg's theosophical works," said Wilfrid, "and let me
plunge into those gulfs of light,--you have given me a thirst for
them."

Monsieur Becker took down a volume and gave it to his guest, who
instantly began to read it. It was about nine o'clock in the evening.
The serving-woman brought in the supper. Minna made tea. The repast
over, each turned silently to his or her occupation; the pastor read
the Incantations; Wilfrid pursued the spirit of Swedenborg; and the
young girl continued to sew, her mind absorbed in recollections. It
was a true Norwegian evening--peaceful, studious, and domestic; full
of thoughts, flowers blooming beneath the snow. Wilfrid, as he
devoured the pages of the prophet, lived by his inner senses only; the
pastor, looking up at times from his book, called Minna's attention to
the absorption of their guest with an air that was half-serious,
half-jesting. To Minna's thoughts the face of Seraphitus smiled upon her
as it hovered above the clouds of smoke which enveloped them. The clock
struck twelve. Suddenly the outer door was opened violently. Heavy but
hurried steps, the steps of a terrified old man, were heard in the
narrow vestibule between the two doors; then David burst into the
parlor.

"Danger, danger!" he cried. "Come! come, all! The evil spirits are
unchained! Fiery mitres are on their heads! Demons, Vertumni, Sirens!
they tempt her as Jesus was tempted on the mountain! Come, come! and
drive them away."

"Do you not recognize the language of Swedenborg?" said the pastor,
laughing, to Wilfrid. "Here it is; pure from the source."

But Wilfrid and Minna were gazing in terror at old David, who, with
hair erect, and eyes distraught, his legs trembling and covered with
snow, for he had come without snow-shoes, stood swaying from side to
side, as if some boisterous wind were shaking him.

"Is he harmed?" cried Minna.

"The devils hope and try to conquer her," replied the old man.

The words made Wilfrid's pulses throb.

"For the last five hours she has stood erect, her eyes raised to
heaven and her arms extended; she suffers, she cries to God. I cannot
cross the barrier; Hell has posted the Vertumni as sentinels. They
have set up an iron wall between her and her old David. She wants me,
but what can I do? Oh, help me! help me! Come and pray!"

The old man's despair was terrible to see.

"The Light of God is defending her," he went on, with infectious
faith, "but oh! she might yield to violence."

"Silence, David! you are raving. This is a matter to be verified. We
will go with you," said the pastor, "and you shall see that there are
no Vertumni, nor Satans, nor Sirens, in that house."

"Your father is blind," whispered David to Minna.

Wilfrid, on whom the reading of Swedenborg's first treatise, which he
had rapidly gone through, had produced a powerful effect, was already
in the corridor putting on his skees; Minna was ready in a few
moments, and both left the old men far behind as they darted forward
to the Swedish castle.

"Do you hear that cracking sound?" said Wilfrid.

"The ice of the fiord stirs," answered Minna; "the spring is coming."

Wilfrid was silent. When the two reached the courtyard they were
conscious that they had neither the faculty nor the strength to enter
the house.

"What think you of her?" asked Wilfrid.

"See that radiance!" cried Minna, going towards the window of the
salon. "He is there! How beautiful! O my Seraphitus, take me!"

The exclamation was uttered inwardly. She saw Seraphitus standing
erect, lightly swathed in an opal-tinted mist that disappeared at a
little distance from the body, which seemed almost phosphorescent.

"How beautiful she is!" cried Wilfrid, mentally.

Just then Monsieur Becker arrived, followed by David; he saw his
daughter and guest standing before the window; going up to them, he
looked into the salon and said quietly, "Well, my good David, she is
only saying her prayers."

"Ah, but try to enter, Monsieur."

"Why disturb those who pray?" answered the pastor.

At this instant the moon, rising above the Falberg, cast its rays upon
the window. All three turned round, attracted by this natural effect
which made them quiver; when they turned back to again look at
Seraphita she had disappeared.

"How strange!" exclaimed Wilfrid.

"I hear delightful sounds," said Minna.

"Well," said the pastor, "it is all plain enough; she is going to
bed."

David had entered the house. The others took their way back in
silence; none of them interpreted the vision in the same manner,
--Monsieur Becker doubted, Minna adored, Wilfrid longed.

Wilfrid was a man about thirty-six years of age. His figure, though
broadly developed, was not wanting in symmetry. Like most men who
distinguish themselves above their fellows, he was of medium height;
his chest and shoulders were broad, and his neck short,--a
characteristic of those whose hearts are near their heads; his hair
was black, thick, and fine; his eyes, of a yellow brown, had, as it
were, a solar brilliancy, which proclaimed with what avidity his
nature aspired to Light. Though these strong and virile features were
defective through the absence of an inward peace,--granted only to a
life without storms or conflicts,--they plainly showed the
inexhaustible resources of impetuous senses and the appetites of
instinct; just as every motion revealed the perfection of the man's
physical apparatus, the flexibility of his senses, and their fidelity
when brought into play. This man might contend with savages, and hear,
as they do, the tread of enemies in distant forests; he could follow a
scent in the air, a trail on the ground, or see on the horizon the
signal of a friend. His sleep was light, like that of all creatures
who will not allow themselves to be surprised. His body came quickly
into harmony with the climate of any country where his tempestuous
life conducted him. Art and science would have admired his
organization in the light of a human model. Everything about him was
symmetrical and well-balanced,--action and heart, intelligence and
will. At first sight he might be classed among purely instinctive
beings, who give themselves blindly up to the material wants of life;
but in the very morning of his days he had flung himself into a higher
social world, with which his feelings harmonized; study had widened
his mind, reflection had sharpened his power of thought, and the
sciences had enlarged his understanding. He had studied human laws,
--the working of self-interests brought into conflict by the passions,
and he seemed to have early familiarized himself with the abstractions
on which societies rest. He had pored over books,--those deeds of dead
humanity; he had spent whole nights of pleasure in every European
capital; he had slept on fields of battle the night before the combat
and the night that followed victory. His stormy youth may have flung
him on the deck of some corsair and sent him among the contrasting
regions of the globe; thus it was that he knew the actions of a living
humanity. He knew the present and the past,--a double history; that of
to-day, that of other days. Many men have been, like Wilfrid, equally
powerful by the Hand, by the Heart, by the Head; like him, the
majority have abused their triple power. But though this man still
held by certain outward liens to the slimy side of humanity, he
belonged also and positively to the sphere where force is intelligent.
In spite of the many veils which enveloped his soul, there were
certain ineffable symptoms of this fact which were visible to pure
spirits, to the eyes of the child whose innocence has known no breath
of evil passions, to the eyes of the old man who has lived to regain
his purity.

These signs revealed a Cain for whom there was still hope,--one who
seemed as though he were seeking absolution from the ends of the
earth. Minna suspected the galley-slave of glory in the man; Seraphita
recognized him. Both admired and both pitied him. Whence came their
prescience? Nothing could be more simple nor yet more extraordinary.
As soon as we seek to penetrate the secrets of Nature, where nothing
is secret, and where it is only necessary to have the eyes to see, we
perceive that the simple produces the marvellous.

"Seraphitus," said Minna one evening a few days after Wilfrid's
arrival in Jarvis, "you read the soul of this stranger while I have
only vague impressions of it. He chills me or else he excites me; but
you seem to know the cause of this cold and of this heat; tell me what
it means, for you know all about him."

"Yes, I have seen the causes," said Seraphitus, lowing his large
eyelids.

"By what power?" asked the curious Minna.

"I have the gift of Specialism," he answered. "Specialism is an inward
sight which can penetrate all things; you will only understand its
full meaning through a comparison. In the great cities of Europe where
works are produced by which the human Hand seeks to represent the
effects of the moral nature was well as those of the physical nature,
there are glorious men who express ideas in marble. The sculptor acts
on the stone; he fashions it; he puts a realm of ideas into it. There
are statues which the hand of man has endowed with the faculty of
representing the noble side of humanity, or the whole evil side; most
men see in such marbles a human figure and nothing more; a few other
men, a little higher in the scale of being, perceive a fraction of the
thoughts expressed in the statue; but the Initiates in the secrets of
art are of the same intellect as the sculptor; they see in his work
the whole universe of his thought. Such persons are in themselves the
principles of art; they bear within them a mirror which reflects
nature in her slightest manifestations. Well! so it is with me; I have
within me a mirror before which the moral nature, with its causes and
effects, appears and is reflected. Entering thus into the
consciousness of others I am able to divine both the future and the
past. How? do you still ask how? Imagine that the marble statue is the
body of a man, a piece of statuary in which we see the emotion,
sentiment, passion, vice or crime, virtue or repentance which the
creating hand has put into it, and you will then comprehend how it is
that I read the soul of this foreigner--though what I have said does
not explain the gift of Specialism; for to conceive the nature of that
gift we must possess it."

Though Wilfrid belonged to the two first divisions of humanity, the
men of force and the men of thought, yet his excesses, his tumultuous
life, and his misdeeds had often turned him towards Faith; for doubt
has two sides; a side to the light and a side to the darkness. Wilfrid
had too closely clasped the world under its forms of Matter and of
Mind not to have acquired that thirst for the unknown, that longing to
_go beyond_ which lay their grasp upon the men who know, and wish, and
will. But neither his knowledge, nor his actions, nor his will, had
found direction. He had fled from social life from necessity; as a
great criminal seeks the cloister. Remorse, that virtue of weak
beings, did not touch him. Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins
again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all. But in traversing
the world, which he made his cloister, Wilfrid had found no balm for
his wounds; he saw nothing in nature to which he could attach himself.
In him, despair had dried the sources of desire. He was one of those
beings who, having gone through all passions and come out victorious,
have nothing more to raise in their hot-beds, and who, lacking
opportunity to put themselves at the head of their fellow-men to
trample under iron heel entire populations, buy, at the price of a
horrible martyrdom, the faculty of ruining themselves in some belief,
--rocks sublime, which await the touch of a wand that comes not to
bring the waters gushing from their far-off spring.

Led by a scheme of his restless, inquiring life to the shores of
Norway, the sudden arrival of winter had detained the wanderer at
Jarvis. The day on which, for the first time, he saw Seraphita, the
whole past of his life faded from his mind. The young girl excited
emotions which he had thought could never be revived. The ashes gave
forth a lingering flame at the first murmurings of that voice. Who has
ever felt himself return to youth and purity after growing cold and
numb with age and soiled with impurity? Suddenly, Wilfrid loved as he
had never loved; he loved secretly, with faith, with fear, with inward
madness. His life was stirred to the very source of his being at the
mere thought of seeing Seraphita. As he listened to her he was
transported into unknown worlds; he was mute before her, she
magnetized him. There, beneath the snows, among the glaciers, bloomed
the celestial flower to which his hopes, so long betrayed, aspired;
the sight of which awakened ideas of freshness, purity, and faith
which grouped about his soul and lifted it to higher regions,--as
Angels bear to heaven the Elect in those symbolic pictures inspired by
the guardian spirit of a great master. Celestial perfumes softened the
granite hardness of the rocky scene; light endowed with speech shed
its divine melodies on the path of him who looked to heaven. After
emptying the cup of terrestrial love which his teeth had bitten as he
drank it, he saw before him the chalice of salvation where the limpid
waters sparkled, making thirsty for ineffable delights whoever dare
apply his lips burning with a faith so strong that the crystal shall
not be shattered.

But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been
seeking up and down the earth. He went impetuously to Seraphita,
meaning to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under
which he bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm
in his saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery
animal only made the rider heavier and more solid. He sought her to
relate his life,--to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of
his faults, to show the ruins of his desert. But no sooner had he
crossed her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes
of scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none
behind, than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his
prey in the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a
message of love, and stops his bound. A gulf opened before him, into
which his frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a
voice which changed his being; he became as a child, a child of
sixteen, timid and frightened before this maiden with serene brow,
this white figure whose inalterable calm was like the cruel
impassibility of human justice. The combat between them had never
ceased until this evening, when with a glance she brought him down, as
a falcon making his dizzy spirals in the air around his prey causes it
to fall stupefied to earth, before carrying it to his eyrie.