Seraphita

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Seraphita


We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is
one of our own actions,--struggles which are, as it were, the reverse
side of humanity. This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side
to men. More than once Seraphita had proved to Wilfrid that she knew
this hidden and ever varied side, which is to the majority of men a
second being. Often she said to him in her dove-like voice: "Why all
this vehemence?" when on his way to her he had sworn she should be
his. Wilfrid was, however, strong enough to raise the cry of revolt to
which he had given utterance in Monsieur Becker's study. The narrative
of the old pastor had calmed him. Sceptical and derisive as he was, he
saw belief like a sidereal brilliance dawning on his life. He asked
himself if Seraphita were not an exile from the higher spheres seeking
the homeward way. The fanciful deifications of all ordinary lovers he
could not give to this lily of Norway in whose divinity he believed.
Why lived she here beside this fiord? What did she? Questions that
received no answer filled his mind. Above all, what was about to
happen between them? What fate had brought him there? To him,
Seraphita was the motionless marble, light nevertheless as a vapor,
which Minna had seen that day poised above the precipices of the
Falberg. Could she thus stand on the edge of all gulfs without danger,
without a tremor of the arching eyebrows, or a quiver of the light of
the eye? If his love was to be without hope, it was not without
curiosity.

From the moment when Wilfrid suspected the ethereal nature of the
enchantress who had told him the secrets of his life in melodious
utterance, he had longed to try to subject her, to keep her to
himself, to tear her from the heaven where, perhaps, she was awaited.
Earth and Humanity seized their prey; he would imitate them. His
pride, the only sentiment through which man can long be exalted, would
make him happy in this triumph for the rest of his life. The idea sent
the blood boiling through his veins, and his heart swelled. If he did
not succeed, he would destroy her,--it is so natural to destroy that
which we cannot possess, to deny what we cannot comprehend, to insult
that which we envy.

On the morrow, Wilfrid, laden with ideas which the extraordinary
events of the previous night naturally awakened in his mind, resolved
to question David, and went to find him on the pretext of asking after
Seraphita's health. Though Monsieur Becker spoke of the old servant as
falling into dotage, Wilfrid relied on his own perspicacity to
discover scraps of truth in the torrent of the old man's rambling
talk.

David had the immovable, undecided, physiognomy of an octogenarian.
Under his white hair lay a forehead lined with wrinkles like the stone
courses of a ruined wall; and his face was furrowed like the bed of a
dried-up torrent. His life seemed to have retreated wholly to the
eyes, where light still shone, though its gleams were obscured by a
mistiness which seemed to indicate either an active mental alienation
or the stupid stare of drunkenness. His slow and heavy movements
betrayed the glacial weight of age, and communicated an icy influence
to whoever allowed themselves to look long at him,--for he possessed
the magnetic force of torpor. His limited intelligence was only roused
by the sight, the hearing, or the recollection of his mistress. She
was the soul of this wholly material fragment of an existence. Any one
seeing David alone by himself would have thought him a corpse; let
Seraphita enter, let her voice be heard, or a mention of her be made,
and the dead came forth from his grave and recovered speech and
motion. The dry bones were not more truly awakened by the divine
breath in the valley of Jehoshaphat, and never was that apocalyptic
vision better realized than in this Lazarus issuing from the sepulchre
into life at the voice of a young girl. His language, which was always
figurative and often incomprehensible, prevented the inhabitants of
the village from talking with him; but they respected a mind that
deviated so utterly from common ways,--a thing which the masses
instinctively admire.

Wilfrid found him in the antechamber, apparently asleep beside the
stove. Like a dog who recognizes a friend of the family, the old man
raised his eyes, saw the foreigner, and did not stir.

"Where is she?" inquired Wilfrid, sitting down beside him.

David fluttered his fingers in the air as if to express the flight of
a bird.

"Does she still suffer?" asked Wilfrid.

"Beings vowed to Heaven are able so to suffer that suffering does not
lessen their love; this is the mark of the true faith," answered the
old man, solemnly, like an instrument which, on being touched, gives
forth an accidental note.

"Who taught you those words?"

"The Spirit."

"What happened to her last night? Did you force your way past the
Vertumni standing sentinel? did you evade the Mammons?"

"Yes"; answered David, as though awaking from a dream.

The misty gleam of his eyes melted into a ray that came direct from
the soul and made it by degrees brilliant as that of an eagle, as
intelligent as that of a poet.

"What did you see?" asked Wilfrid, astonished at this sudden change.

"I saw Species and Shapes; I heard the Spirit of all things; I beheld
the revolt of the Evil Ones; I listened to the words of the Good.
Seven devils came, and seven archangels descended from on high. The
archangels stood apart and looked on through veils. The devils were
close by; they shone, they acted. Mammon came on his pearly shell in
the shape of a beautiful naked woman; her snowy body dazzled the eye,
no human form ever equalled it; and he said, 'I am Pleasure; thou
shalt possess me!' Lucifer, prince of serpents, was there in sovereign
robes; his Manhood was glorious as the beauty of an angel, and he
said, 'Humanity shall be at thy feet!' The Queen of misers,--she who
gives back naught that she has ever received,--the Sea, came wrapped
in her virent mantle; she opened her bosom, she showed her gems, she
brought forth her treasures and offered them; waves of sapphire and of
emerald came at her bidding; her hidden wonders stirred, they rose to
the surface of her breast, they spoke; the rarest pearl of Ocean
spread its iridescent wings and gave voice to its marine melodies,
saying, 'Twin daughter of suffering, we are sisters! await me; let us
go together; all I need is to become a Woman.' The Bird with the wings
of an eagle and the paws of a lion, the head of a woman and the body
of a horse, the Animal, fell down before her and licked her feet, and
promised seven hundred years of plenty to her best-beloved daughter.
Then came the most formidable of all, the Child, weeping at her knees,
and saying, 'Wilt thou leave me, feeble and suffering as I am? oh, my
mother, stay!' and he played with her, and shed languor on the air,
and the Heavens themselves had pity for his wail. The Virgin of pure
song brought forth her choirs to relax the soul. The Kings of the East
came with their slaves, their armies, and their women; the Wounded
asked her for succor, the Sorrowful stretched forth their hands: 'Do
not leave us! do not leave us!' they cried. I, too, I cried, 'Do not
leave us! we adore thee! stay!' Flowers, bursting from the seed,
bathed her in their fragrance which uttered, 'Stay!' The giant Enakim
came forth from Jupiter, leading Gold and its friends and all the
Spirits of the Astral Regions which are joined with him, and they
said, 'We are thine for seven hundred years.' At last came Death on
his pale horse, crying, 'I will obey thee!' One and all fell prostrate
before her. Could you but have seen them! They covered as it were a
vast plain, and they cried aloud to her, 'We have nurtured thee, thou
art our child; do not abandon us!' At length Life issued from her Ruby
Waters, and said, 'I will not leave thee!' then, finding Seraphita
silent, she flamed upon her as the sun, crying out, 'I am light!' '_The
light_ is there!' cried Seraphita, pointing to the clouds where stood
the archangels; but she was wearied out; Desire had wrung her nerves,
she could only cry, 'My God! my God!' Ah! many an Angelic Spirit,
scaling the mountain and nigh to the summit, has set his foot upon a
rolling stone which plunged him back into the abyss! All these lost
Spirits adored her constancy; they stood around her,--a choir without
a song,--weeping and whispering, 'Courage!' At last she conquered;
Desire--let loose upon her in every Shape and every Species--was
vanquished. She stood in prayer, and when at last her eyes were lifted
she saw the feet of Angels circling in the Heavens."

"She saw the feet of Angels?" repeated Wilfrid.

"Yes," said the old man.

"Was it a dream that she told you?" asked Wilfrid.

"A dream as real as your life," answered David; "I was there."

The calm assurance of the old servant affected Wilfrid powerfully. He
went away asking himself whether these visions were any less
extraordinary than those he had read of in Swedenborg the night
before.

"If Spirits exist, they must act," he was saying to himself as he
entered the parsonage, where he found Monsieur Becker alone.

"Dear pastor," he said, "Seraphita is connected with us in form only,
and even that form is inexplicable. Do not think me a madman or a
lover; a profound conviction cannot be argued with. Convert my belief
into scientific theories, and let us try to enlighten each other.
To-morrow evening we shall both be with her."

"What then?" said Monsieur Becker.

"If her eye ignores space," replied Wilfrid, "if her thought is an
intelligent sight which enables her to perceive all things in their
essence, and to connect them with the general evolution of the
universe, if, in a word, she sees and knows all, let us seat the
Pythoness on her tripod, let us force this pitiless eagle by threats
to spread its wings! Help me! I breathe a fire which burns my vitals;
I must quench it or it will consume me. I have found a prey at last,
and it shall be mine!"

"The conquest will be difficult," said the pastor, "because this girl
is--"

"Is what?" cried Wilfrid.

"Mad," said the old man.

"I will not dispute her madness, but neither must you dispute her
wonderful powers. Dear Monsieur Becker, she has often confounded me
with her learning. Has she travelled?"

"From her house to the fiord, no further."

"Never left this place!" exclaimed Wilfrid. "Then she must have read
immensely."

"Not a page, not one iota! I am the only person who possesses any
books in Jarvis. The works of Swedenborg--the only books that were in
the chateau--you see before you. She has never looked into a single
one of them."

"Have you tried to talk with her?"

"What good would that do?"

"Does no one live with her in that house?"

"She has no friends but you and Minna, nor any servant except old
David."

"It cannot be that she knows nothing of science nor of art."

"Who should teach her?" said the pastor.

"But if she can discuss such matters pertinently, as she has often
done with me, what do you make of it?"

"The girl may have acquired through years of silence the faculties
enjoyed by Apollonius of Tyana and other pretended sorcerers burned
by the Inquisition, which did not choose to admit the fact of
second-sight."

"If she can speak Arabic, what would you say to that?"

"The history of medical science gives many authentic instances of
girls who have spoken languages entirely unknown to them."

"What can I do?" exclaimed Wilfrid. "She knows of secrets in my past
life known only to me."

"I shall be curious if she can tell me thoughts that I have confided
to no living person," said Monsieur Becker.

Minna entered the room.

"Well, my daughter, and how is your familiar spirit?"

"He suffers, father," she answered, bowing to Wilfrid. "Human
passions, clothed in their false riches, surrounded him all night, and
showed him all the glories of the world. But you think these things
mere tales."

"Tales as beautiful to those who read them in their brains as the
'Arabian Nights' to common minds," said the pastor, smiling.

"Did not Satan carry our Savior to the pinnacle of the Temple, and
show him all the kingdoms of the world?" she said.

"The Evangelists," replied her father, "did not correct their copies
very carefully, and several versions are in existence."

"You believe in the reality of these visions?" said Wilfrid to Minna.

"Who can doubt when he relates them."

"He?" demanded Wilfrid. "Who?"

"He who is there," replied Minna, motioning towards the chateau.

"Are you speaking of Seraphita?" he said.

The young girl bent her head, and looked at him with an expression of
gentle mischief.

"You too!" exclaimed Wilfrid, "you take pleasure in confounding me.
Who and what is she? What do you think of her?"

"What I feel is inexplicable," said Minna, blushing.

"You are all crazy!" cried the pastor.

"Farewell, until to-morrow evening," said Wilfrid.



CHAPTER IV

THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY

There are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays
co-operate. Nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of
ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn
the spectators. Transmitted as heirlooms from generation to
generation, these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could
be the most faithful of historians had they speech. They know the joys
and sorrows of the great and those of the small. Everywhere do they
go; they are worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to
usurers, borne off in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in
masterpieces conceived by art for their protection. None, except the
pearl of Cleopatra, has been lost. The Great and the Fortunate
assemble to witness the coronation of some king, whose trappings are
the work of men's hands, but the purple of whose raiment is less
glorious than that of the flowers of the field. These festivals,
splendid in light, bathed in music which the hand of man creates, aye,
all the triumphs of that hand are subdued by a thought, crushed by a
sentiment. The Mind can illumine in a man and round a man a light more
vivid, can open his ear to more melodious harmonies, can seat him on
clouds of shining constellations and teach him to question them. The
Heart can do still greater things. Man may come into the presence of
one sole being and find in a single word, a single look, an influence
so weighty to bear, of so luminous a light, so penetrating a sound,
that he succumbs and kneels before it. The most real of all splendors
are not in outward things, they are within us. A single secret of
science is a realm of wonders to the man of learning. Do the trumpets
of Power, the jewels of Wealth, the music of Joy, or a vast concourse
of people attend his mental festival? No, he finds his glory in some
dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering man whispers a single
word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted in a mine, reveals
to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every attractive form
which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated in a wayside
ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the Divine, with all
their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine exile; he walked
attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who prayed and those
who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the Sent of God, who
knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three of his
disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest of
inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material
Forms, illuminating the Spiritual Faculties, so that they saw him in
his glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.

Monsieur Becker, Wilfrid, and Minna were all under the influence of
fear as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each
desired to question. To them, in their several ways, the Swedish
castle had grown to mean some gigantic representation, some spectacle
like those whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously
marshalled by the poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to
men, are real to those who begin to penetrate the Spiritual World. On
the tiers of this Coliseum Monsieur Becker seated the gray legions of
Doubt, the stern ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked
the various antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they
all appeared, in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which
art embodies Time,--an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the
other a broken globe, the human universe.

Wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest
hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering
powers.

Minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought
with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds which met her ear
redoubled her curiosity.

To all three, therefore, this evening was to be what that other
evening had been for the pilgrims to Emmaus, what a vision was to
Dante, an inspiration to Homer,--to them, three aspects of the world
revealed, veils rent away, doubts dissipated, darkness illumined.
Humanity in all its moods expecting light could not be better
represented than here by this young girl, this man in the vigor of his
age, and these old men, of whom one was learned enough to doubt, the
other ignorant enough to believe. Never was any scene more simple in
appearance, nor more portentous in reality.

When they entered the room, ushered in by old David, they found
Seraphita standing by a table on which were served the various dishes
which compose a "tea"; a form of collation which in the North takes
the place of wine and its pleasures,--reserved more exclusively for
Southern climes. Certainly nothing proclaimed in her, or in him, a
being with the strange power of appearing under two distinct forms;
nothing about her betrayed the manifold powers which she wielded. Like
a careful housewife attending to the comfort of her guests, she
ordered David to put more wood into the stove.

"Good evening, my neighbors," she said. "Dear Monsieur Becker, you do
right to come; you see me living for the last time, perhaps. This
winter has killed me. Will you sit there?" she said to Wilfrid. "And
you, Minna, here?" pointing to a chair beside her. "I see you have
brought your embroidery. Did you invent that stitch? the design is
very pretty. For whom is it,--your father, or monsieur?" she added,
turning to Wilfrid. "Surely we ought to give him, before we part, a
remembrance of the daughters of Norway."

"Did you suffer much yesterday?" asked Wilfrid.

"It was nothing," she answered; "the suffering gladdened me; it was
necessary, to enable me to leave this life."

"Then death does not alarm you?" said Monsieur Becker, smiling, for he
did not think her ill.

"No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying: to some, death is
victory, to others, defeat."

"Do you think that you have conquered?" asked Minna.

"I do not know," she said, "perhaps I have only taken a step in the
path."

The lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled
beneath slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the
prying guests and kept them silent. Monsieur Becker was the first to
recover courage.

"Dear child," he said, "you are truth itself, and you are ever kind. I
would ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your
tea-table. If we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things;
if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of
our doubts?"

"Ah!" she said smiling, "I walk on the clouds. I visit the depths of
the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the
singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant
colors shine! I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my
orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes
can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the
virgin to whom the pearls dart from their ocean depths and--"

"--who led me safely to the summit of the Falberg?" said Minna,
interrupting her.

"Thou! thou too!" exclaimed the strange being, with a luminous glance
at the young girl which filled her soul with trouble. "Had I not the
faculty of reading through your foreheads the desires which have
brought you here, should I be what you think I am?" she said,
encircling all three with her controlling glance, to David's great
satisfaction. The old man rubbed his hands with pleasure as he left
the room.

"Ah!" she resumed after a pause, "you have come, all of you, with the
curiosity of children. You, my poor Monsieur Becker, have asked
yourself how it was possible that a girl of seventeen should know even
a single one of those secrets which men of science seek with their
noses to the earth,--instead of raising their eyes to heaven. Were I
to tell you how and at what point the plant merges into the animal you
would begin to doubt your doubts. You have plotted to question me; you
will admit that?"

"Yes, dear Seraphita," answered Wilfrid; "but the desire is a natural
one to men, is it not?"

"You will bore this dear child with such topics," she said, passing
her hand lightly over Minna's hair with a caressing gesture.

The young girl raised her eyes and seemed as though she longed to lose
herself in him.

"Speech is the endowment of us all," resumed the mysterious creature,
gravely. "Woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing
that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here
below. Speech moves the universe. Monsieur Becker, I desire to say
nothing unnecessarily. I know the difficulties that beset your mind;
would you not think it a miracle if I were now to lay bare the past
history of your consciousness? Well, the miracle shall be
accomplished. You have never admitted to yourself the full extent of
your doubts. I alone, immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; I
can terrify you with yourself.

"You stand on the darkest side of Doubt. You do not believe in God,
--although you know it not,--and all things here below are secondary
to him who rejects the first principle of things. Let us leave aside
the fruitless discussions of false philosophy. The spiritualist
generations made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the
materialist generations have made to deny Spirit. Why such
discussions? Does not man himself offer irrefragable proof of both
systems? Do we not find in him material things and spiritual things?
None but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of
Matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little
difference between its elements and those of other animals. On the
other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects
has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of Matter. As to
this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned with your doubts, not
with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of thinkers, the
relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by
your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not
seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in man,
with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he
perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so
multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one
has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who can
reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in
relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here,
then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly
obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.

"Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter
and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins
a universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other.
Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being?
have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of
man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us
therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths
presented to our minds in the union of a Material universe and a
Spiritual universe,--a creation visible, ponderable, tangible,
terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible;
completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by
indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives equally from the
one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world these two worlds,
absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact.
However abstract man may suppose the relation which binds two things
together, the line of junction is perceptible. How? Where? We are not
now in search of the vanishing point where Matter subtilizes. If such
were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by physical relations,
studded with stars at immeasurable distances the heavens which veil
Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why you deny Him the
faculty of giving a body to thought.