The Brotherhood of Consolation
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THE BROTHERHOOD OF CONSOLATION
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
FIRST EPISODE
MADAME DE LA CHANTERIE
I
THE MALADY OF THE AGE
On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty
years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which a
spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to
Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the
Louvre. There is not another point of view to compare with it in the
capital of ideas. We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were,
of a gigantic vessel. We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans to
those of the Franks, from the Normans to the Burgundians, the
Middle-Ages, the Valois, Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon, and
Louis-Philippe. Vestiges are before us of all those sovereignties, in
monuments that recall their memory. The cupola of Sainte-Genevieve
towers above the Latin quarter. Behind us rises the noble apsis of the
cathedral. The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of
the miseries of Paris. After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we
can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that
ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and
the Hotel-Dieu,--a foul spot, which a modern municipality is
endeavoring at the present moment to remove.
In 1836 this marvellous scene presented still another lesson to the
eye: between the Parisian leaning on the parapet and the cathedral lay
the "Terrain" (such was the ancient name of this barren spot), still
strewn with the ruins of the Archiepiscopal Palace. When we
contemplate from that quay so many commemorating scenes, when the soul
has grasped the past as it does the present of this city of Paris,
then indeed Religion seems to have alighted there as if to spread her
hands above the sorrows of both banks and extend her arms from the
faubourg Saint-Antoine to the faubourg Saint-Marceau. Let us hope that
this sublime unity may be completed by the erection of an episcopal
palace of the Gothic order; which shall replace the formless buildings
now standing between the "Terrain," the rue d'Arcole, the cathedral,
and the quai de la Cite.
This spot, the heart of ancient Paris, is the loneliest and most
melancholy of regions. The waters of the Seine break there noisily,
the cathedral casts its shadows at the setting of the sun. We can
easily believe that serious thoughts must have filled the mind of a
man afflicted with a moral malady as he leaned upon that parapet.
Attracted perhaps by the harmony between his thoughts and those to
which these diverse scenes gave birth, he rested his hands upon the
coping and gave way to a double contemplation,--of Paris, and of
himself! The shadows deepened, the lights shone out afar, but still he
did not move, carried along as he was on the current of a meditation,
such as comes to many of us, big with the future and rendered solemn
by the past.
After a while he heard two persons coming towards him, whose voices
had caught his attention on the bridge which joins the Ile de la Cite
with the quai de la Tournelle. These persons no doubt thought
themselves alone, and therefore spoke louder than they would have done
in more frequented places. The voices betrayed a discussion which
apparently, from the few words that reached the ear of the involuntary
listener, related to a loan of money. Just as the pair approached the
quay, one of them, dressed like a working man, left the other with a
despairing gesture. The other stopped and called after him, saying:--
"You have not a sou to pay your way across the bridge. Take this," he
added, giving the man a piece of money; "and remember, my friend, that
God Himself is speaking to us when a good thought comes into our
hearts."
This last remark made the dreamer at the parapet quiver. The man who
made it little knew that, to use a proverbial expression, he was
killing two birds with one stone, addressing two miseries,--a working
life brought to despair, a suffering soul without a compass, the
victim of what Panurge's sheep call progress, and what, in France, is
called equality. The words, simple in themselves, became sublime from
the tone of him who said them, in a voice that possesses a spell. Are
there not, in fact, some calm and tender voices that produce upon us
the same effect as a far horizon outlook?
By his dress the dreamer knew him to be a priest, and he saw by the
last gleams of the fading twilight a white, august, worn face. The
sight of a priest issuing from the beautiful cathedral of
Saint-Etienne in Vienna, bearing the Extreme Unction to a dying
person, determined the celebrated tragic author Werner to become a
Catholic. Almost the same effect was produced upon the dreamer when he
looked upon the man who had, all unknowing, given him comfort; on the
threatening horizon of his future he saw a luminous space where shone
the blue of ether, and he followed that light as the shepherds of the
Gospel followed the voices that cried to them: "Christ, the Lord, is
born this day."
The man who had said the beneficent words passed on by the wall of the
cathedral, taking, as a result of chance, which often leads to great
results, the direction of the street from which the dreamer came, and
to which he was now returning, led by the faults of his life.
This dreamer was named Godefroid. Whoever reads this history will
understand the reasons which lead the writer to use the Christian
names only of some who are mentioned in it. The motives which led
Godefroid, who lived in the quarter of the Chaussee-d'Antin, to the
neighborhood of Notre-Dame at such an hour were as follows:--
The son of a retail shopkeeper, whose economy enabled him to lay by a
sort of fortune, he was the sole object of ambition to his father and
mother, who dreamed of seeing him a notary in Paris. For this reason,
at the age of seven, he was sent to an institution, that of the Abbe
Liautard, to be thrown among children of distinguished families who,
during the Empire, chose this school for the education of their sons
in preference to the lyceums, where religion was too much overlooked.
Social inequalities were not noticeable among schoolmates; but in
1821, his studies being ended, Godefroid, who was then with a notary,
became aware of the distance that separated him from those with whom
he had hitherto lived on familiar terms.
Obliged to go through the law school, he there found himself among a
crowd of the sons of the bourgeoisie, who, without fortunes to inherit
or hereditary distinctions, could look only to their own personal
merits or to persistent toil. The hopes that his father and mother,
then retired from business, placed upon him stimulated the youth's
vanity without exciting his pride. His parents lived simply, like the
thrifty Dutch, spending only one fourth of an income of twelve
thousand francs. They intended their savings, together with half their
capital, for the purchase of a notary's practice for their son.
Subjected to the rule of this domestic economy, Godefroid found his
immediate state so disproportioned to the visions of himself and his
parents, that he grew discouraged. In some feeble natures
discouragement turns to envy; others, in whom necessity, will,
reflection, stand in place of talent, march straight and resolutely in
the path traced out for bourgeois ambitions. Godefroid, on the
contrary, revolted, wished to shine, tried several brilliant ways, and
blinded his eyes. He endeavored to succeed; but all his efforts ended
in proving the fact of his own impotence. Admitting at last the
inequality that existed between his desires and his capacities, he
began to hate all social supremacies, became a Liberal, and attempted
to reach celebrity by writing a book; but he learned, to his cost, to
regard talent as he did nobility. Having tried the law, the notariat,
and literature, without distinguishing himself in any way, his mind
now turned to the magistracy.
About this time his father died. His mother, who contented herself in
her old age with two thousand francs a year, gave the rest of the
fortune to Godefroid. Thus possessed, at the age of twenty-five, of
ten thousand francs a year, he felt himself rich; and he was so,
relatively to the past. Until then his life had been spent on acts
without will, on wishes that were impotent; now, to advance with the
age, to act, to play a part, he resolved to enter some career or find
some connection that should further his fortunes. He first thought of
journalism, which always opens its arms to any capital that may come
in its way. To be the owner of a newspaper is to become a personage at
once; such a man works intellect, and has all the gratifications of it
and none of the labor. Nothing is more tempting to inferior minds than
to be able to rise in this way on the talents of others. Paris has
seen two or three parvenus of this kind,--men whose success is a
disgrace, both to the epoch and to those who have lent them their
shoulders.
In this sphere Godefroid was soon outdone by the brutal
Machiavellianism of some, or by the lavish prodigality of others; by
the fortunes of ambitious capitalists, or by the wit and shrewdness of
editors. Meantime he was drawn into all the dissipations that arise
from literary or political life, and he yielded to the temptations
incurred by journalists behind the scenes. He soon found himself in
bad company; but this experience taught him that his appearance was
insignificant, that he had one shoulder higher than the other, without
the inequality being redeemed by either malignancy or kindness of
nature. Such were the truths these artists made him feel.
Small, ill-made, without superiority of mind or settled purpose, what
chance was there for a man like that in an age when success in any
career demands that the highest qualities of the mind be furthered by
luck, or by tenacity of will which commands luck.
The revolution of 1830 stanched Godefroid's wounds. He had the courage
of hope, which is equal to that of despair. He obtained an
appointment, like other obscure journalists, to a government situation
in the provinces, where his liberal ideas, conflicting with the
necessities of the new power, made him a troublesome instrument.
Bitten with liberalism, he did not know, as cleverer men did, how to
steer a course. Obedience to ministers he regarded as sacrificing his
opinions. Besides, the government seemed to him to be disobeying the
laws of its own origin. Godefroid declared for progress, where the
object of the government was to maintain the /statu quo/. He returned
to Paris almost poor, but faithful still to the doctrines of the
Opposition.
Alarmed by the excesses of the press, more alarmed still by the
attempted outrages of the republican party, he sought in retirement
from the world the only life suitable for a being whose faculties were
incomplete, and without sufficient force to bear up against the rough
jostling of political life, the struggles and sufferings of which
confer no credit,--a being, too, who was wearied with his many
miscarriages; without friends, for friendship demands either striking
merits or striking defects, and yet possessing a sensibility of soul
more dreamy than profound. Surely a retired life was the course left
for a young man whom pleasure had more than once misled,--whose heart
was already aged by contact with a world as restless as it was
disappointing.
His mother, who was dying in the peaceful village of Auteuil, recalled
her son to live with her, partly to have him near her, and partly to
put him in the way of finding an equable, tranquil happiness which
might satisfy a soul like his. She had ended by judging Godefroid,
finding him at twenty-eight with two-thirds of his fortune gone, his
desires dulled, his pretended capacities extinct, his activity dead,
his ambition humbled, and his hatred against all that reached
legitimate success increased by his own shortcomings.
She tried to marry him to an excellent young girl, the only daughter
of a retired merchant,--a woman well fitted to play the part of
guardian to the sickened soul of her son. But the father had the
business spirit which never abandons an old merchant, especially in
matrimonial negotiations, and after a year of attentions and
neighborly intercourse, Godefroid was not accepted. In the first
place, his former career seemed to these worthy people profoundly
immoral; then, during this very year, he had made still further
inroads into his capital, as much to dazzle the parents as to please
the daughter. This vanity, excusable as it was, caused his final
rejection by the family, who held dissipation of property in holy
horror, and who now discovered that in six years Godefroid had spent
or lost a hundred and fifty thousand francs of his capital.
This blow struck the young man's already wounded heart the more deeply
because the girl herself had no personal beauty. But, guided by his
mother in judging her character, he had ended by recognizing in the
woman he sought the great value of an earnest soul, and the vast
advantages of a sound mind. He had grown accustomed to the face; he
had studied the countenance; he loved the voice, the manners, the
glance of that young girl. Having cast on this attachment the last
stake of his life, the disappointment he endured was the bitterest of
all. His mother died, and he found himself, he who had always desired
luxury, with five thousand francs a year for his whole fortune, and
with the certainty that never in his future life could he repair any
loss whatsoever; for he felt himself incapable of the effort expressed
in that terrible injunction, to /make his way/.
Weak, impatient grief cannot easily be shaken off. During his
mourning, Godefroid tried the various chances and distractions of
Paris; he dined at table-d'hotes; he made acquaintances heedlessly; he
sought society, with no result but that of increasing his
expenditures. Walking along the boulevards, he often suffered deeply
at the sight of a mother walking with a marriageable daughter,--a
sight which caused him as painful an emotion as he formerly felt when
a young man passed him riding to the Bois, or driving in an elegant
equipage. The sense of his impotence told him that he could never hope
for the best of even secondary positions, nor for any easily won
career; and he had heart enough to feel constantly wounded, mind
enough to make in his own breast the bitterest of elegies.
Unfitted to struggle against circumstances, having an inward
consciousness of superior faculties without the will that could put
them in action, feeling himself incomplete, without force to undertake
any great thing, without resistance against the tastes derived from
his earlier life, his education, and his indolence, he was the victim
of three maladies, any one of which would be enough to sicken of life
a young man long alienated from religious faith.
Thus it was that Godefroid presented, even to the eye, the face that
we meet so often in Paris that it might be called the type of the
Parisian; in it we may see ambitions deceived or dead, inward
wretchedness, hatred sleeping in the indolence of a life passed in
watching the daily and external life of Paris, apathy which seeks
stimulation, lament without talent, a mimicry of strength, the venom
of past disappointments which excites to cynicism, and spits upon all
that enlarges and grows, misconceives all necessary authority,
rejoicing in its embarrassments, and will not hold to any social form.
This Parisian malady is to the active and permanent impulse towards
conspiracy in persons of energy what the sapwood is to the sap of the
trees; it preserves it, feeds it, and conceals it.
II
OLD HOUSE, OLD PEOPLE, OLD CUSTOMS
Weary of himself, Godefroid attempted one day to give a meaning to his
life, after meeting a former comrade who had been the tortoise in the
fable, while he in earlier days had been the hare. In one of those
conversations which arise when schoolmates meet again in after years,
--a conversation held as they were walking together in the sunshine on
the boulevard des Italiens,--he was startled to learn the success of a
man endowed apparently with less gifts, less means, less fortune than
himself; but who had bent his will each morning to the purpose
resolved upon the night before. The sick soul then determined to
imitate that simple action.
"Social existence is like the soil," his comrade had said to him; "it
makes us a return in proportion to our efforts."
Godefroid was in debt. As a first test, a first task, he resolved to
live in some retired place, and pay his debts from his income. To a
man accustomed to spend six thousand francs when he had but five, it
was no small undertaking to bring himself to live on two thousand.
Every morning he studied advertisements, hoping to find the offer of
some asylum where his expenses could be fixed, where he might have the
solitude a man wants when he makes a return upon himself, examines
himself, and endeavors to give himself a vocation. The manners and
customs of bourgeois boarding-houses shocked his delicacy, sanitariums
seemed to him unhealthy, and he was about to fall back into the fatal
irresolution of persons without will, when the following advertisement
met his eye:--
"To Let. A small lodging for seventy francs a month; suitable for
an ecclesiastic. A quiet tenant desired. Board supplied; the rooms
can be furnished at a moderate cost if mutually acceptable.
"Inquire of M. Millet, grocer, rue Chanoinesse, near Notre-Dame,
where all further information can be obtained."
Attracted by a certain kindliness concealed beneath these words, and
the middle-class air which exhaled from them, Godefroid had, on the
afternoon when we found him on the quay, called at four o'clock on the
grocer, who told him that Madame de la Chanterie was then dining, and
did not receive any one when at her meals. The lady, he said, was
visible in the evening after seven o'clock, or in the morning between
ten and twelve. While speaking, Monsieur Millet examined Godefroid,
and made him submit to what magistrates call the "first degree of
interrogation."
"Was monsieur unmarried? Madame wished a person of regular habits; the
gate was closed at eleven at the latest. Monsieur certainly seemed of
an age to suit Madame de la Chanterie."
"How old do you think me?" asked Godefroid.
"About forty!" replied the grocer.
This ingenuous answer threw the young man into a state of misanthropic
gloom. He went off and dined at a restaurant on the quai de la
Tournelle, and afterwards went to the parapet to contemplate
Notre-Dame at the moment when the fires of the setting sun were
rippling and breaking about the manifold buttresses of the apsis.
The young man was floating between the promptings of despair and the
moving voice of religious harmonies sounding in the bell of the
cathedral when, amid the shadows, the silence, the half-veiled light
of the moon, he heard the words of the priest. Though, like most of
the sons of our century, he was far from religious, his sensibilities
were touched by those words, and he returned to the rue Chanoinesse,
although he had almost made up his mind not to do so.
The priest and Godefroid were both surprised when they entered
together the rue Massilon, which is opposite to the small north portal
of the cathedral, and turned together into the rue Chanoinesse, at the
point where, towards the rue de la Colombe, it becomes the rue des
Marmousets. When Godefroid stopped before the arched portal of Madame
de la Chanterie's house, the priest turned towards him and examined
him by the light of the hanging street-lamp, probably one of the last
to disappear from the heart of old Paris.
"Have you come to see Madame de la Chanterie, monsieur?" said the
priest.
"Yes," replied Godefroid. "The words I heard you say to that workman
show me that, if you live here, this house must be salutary for the
soul."
"Then you were a witness of my defeat," said the priest, raising the
knocker of the door, "for I did not succeed."
"I thought, on the contrary, it was the workman who did not succeed;
he demanded money energetically."
"Alas!" replied the priest, "one of the great evils of revolutions in
France is that each offers a fresh premium to the ambitions of the
lower classes. To get out of his condition, to make his fortune (which
is regarded to-day as the only social standard), the working-man
throws himself into some of those monstrous associations which, if
they do not succeed, ought to bring the speculators to account before
human justice. This is what trusts often lead to."
The porter opened a heavy door. The priest said to Godefroid:
"Monsieur has perhaps come about the little suite of rooms?"
"Yes, monsieur."
The priest and Godefroid then crossed a wide courtyard, at the farther
end of which loomed darkly a tall house flanked by a square tower
which rose above the roof, and appeared to be in a dilapidated
condition. Whoever knows the history of Paris, knows that the soil
before and around the cathedral has been so raised that there is not a
vestige now of the twelve steps which formerly led up to it. To-day
the base of the columns of the porch is on a level with the pavement;
consequently what was once the ground-floor of the house of which we
speak is now its cellar. A portico, reached by a few steps, leads to
the entrance of the tower, in which a spiral stairway winds up round a
central shaft carved with a grape-vine. This style, which recalls the
stairways of Louis XII. at the chateau of Blois, dates from the
fourteenth century. Struck by these and other evidences of antiquity,
Godefroid could not help saying, with a smile, to the priest: "This
tower is not of yesterday."
"It sustained, they say, an assault of the Normans, and probably
formed part of the first palace of the kings of Paris; but, according
to actual tradition, it was certainly the dwelling of the famous Canon
Fulbert, the uncle of Heloise."
As he ended these words, the priest opened the door of the apartment
which appeared now to be the ground-floor of the house, but was in
reality towards both the front and back courtyard (for there was a
small interior court) on the first floor.
In the antechamber a maid-servant, wearing a cambric cap with fluted
frills for its sole decoration, was knitting by the light of a little
lamp. She stuck her needles into her hair, held her work in her hand,
and rose to open the door of a salon which looked out on the inner
court. The dress of the woman was somewhat like that of the Sisters of
Mercy.
"Madame, I bring you a tenant," said the priest, ushering Godefroid
into the salon, where the latter saw three persons sitting in
armchairs near Madame de la Chanterie.
These three persons rose; the mistress of the house rose; then, when
the priest had drawn up another armchair for Godefroid, and when the
future tenant had seated himself in obedience to a gesture of Madame
de la Chanterie, accompanied by the old-fashioned words, "Be seated,
monsieur," the man of the boulevards fancied himself at some enormous
distance from Paris,--in lower Brittany or the wilds of Canada.
Silence has perhaps its own degrees. Godefroid, already penetrated
with the silence of the rues Massillon and Chanoinesse, where two
carriages do not pass in a month, and grasped by the silence of the
courtyard and the tower, may have felt that he had reached the very
heart of silence in this still salon, guarded by so many old streets,
old courts, old walls.
This part of the Ile, which is called "the Cloister," has preserved
the character of all cloisters; it is damp, cold, and monastically
silent even at the noisiest hours of the day. It will be remarked,
also, that this portion of the Cite, crowded between the flank of
Notre-Dame and the river, faces the north, and is always in the shadow
of the cathedral. The east winds swirl through it unopposed, and the
fogs of the Seine are caught and retained by the black walls of the
old metropolitan church. No one will therefore be surprised at the
sensations Godefroid felt when he found himself in this old dwelling,
in presence of four silent human beings, who seemed as solemn as the
things which surrounded them.
He did not look about him, being seized with curiosity as to Madame de
la Chanterie, whose name was already a puzzle to him. This lady was
evidently a person of another epoch, not to say of another world. Her
face was placid, its tones both soft and cold; the nose aquiline; the
forehead full of sweetness; the eyes brown; the chin double; and all
were framed in silvery white hair. Her gown could only be called by
its ancient name of "fourreau," so tightly was she sheathed within it,
after the fashion of the eighteenth century. The material--a brown
silk, with very fine and multiplied green lines--seemed also of that
period. The bodice, which was one with the skirt, was partly hidden
beneath a mantle of /poult-de-soie/ edged with black lace, and
fastened on the bosom by a brooch enclosing a miniature. Her feet, in
black velvet boots, rested on a cushion. Madame de la Chanterie, like
her maid, was knitting a stocking, and she, too, had a needle stuck
through her white curls beneath the lace of her cap.