The Deserted Woman

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THE DESERTED WOMAN

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC




Translated By

Ellen Marriage





DEDICATION

To Her Grace the Duchesse d'Abrantes,
from her devoted servant,
Honore de Balzac.
PARIS, August 1835.




THE DESERTED WOMAN



In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower Normandy
a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint, brought on
by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other kind. His
convalescence demanded complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and
freedom from excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin
seemed to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a
picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient therefore
betook himself, and was received with the cordiality characteristic of
relatives who lead very retired lives, and regard a new arrival as a
godsend.

All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le
Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent two
or three evenings in his cousin's house, or with the friends who made
up Mme. de Sainte-Severe's circle, he very soon had made the
acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to
be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable
stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many
capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
day.

First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department, though
no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues away. This
species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of
the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He has no
manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal superiority,
tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the taxes, and
declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers created by the
nineteenth century, pointing out to you as a political monstrosity the
fact that the prime minister is a man of no birth. His wife takes a
decided tone, and talks in a loud voice. She has had adorers in her
time, but takes the sacrament regularly at Easter. She brings up her
daughters badly, and is of the opinion that they will always be rich
enough with their name.

Neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea of modern luxury. They
retain a livery only seen elsewhere on the stage, and cling to old
fashions in plate, furniture, and equipages, as in language and manner
of life. This is a kind of ancient state, moreover, that suits
passably well with provincial thrift. The good folk are, in fact, the
lords of the manor of a bygone age, /minus/ the quitrents and heriots,
the pack of hounds and the laced coats; full of honor among
themselves, and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only
see at a distance. The historical house /incognito/ is as quaint a
survival as a piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating somewhere among
them there is sure to be an uncle or a brother, a lieutenant-general,
an old courtier of the Kings's, who wears the red ribbon of the order
of Saint-Louis, and went to Hanover with the Marechal de Richelieu:
and here you will find him like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet
of the time of Louis Quinze.

This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier,
though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of
months of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous
tone and short-lived contemporary crazes. Madame is a woman of
fashion, though she looks rather conscious of her clothes, and is
always behind the mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected
by her neighbors. /Her/ plate is of modern fashion; she has "grooms,"
Negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what-not. Her oldest son drives a
tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his
younger brother is auditor to a Council of State. The father is well
posted up in official scandals, and tells you anecdotes of Louis
XVIII. and Madame du Cayla. He invests his money in the five per
cents, and is careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known
occasionally to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the
conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes of the department. He
is a member of the Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris,
and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country
gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration,
and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure
than that of the rival house; he takes the /Gazette/ and the /Debats/,
the other family only read the /Quotidienne/.

His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine to
the fable of the /Ass laden with Relics/. The good man's origin is
distinctly plebeian.

Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or
twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry
regiments, or nothing at all. Out on the roads, on horseback, they
rank half-way between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax
collector on his rounds. Pretty nearly all of them have been in the
Pages or in the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their
days in a /faisance-valoir/, more interested in felling timber and the
cider prospects than in the Monarchy.

Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the cards are
making, or over a game at backgammon, when they have exhausted the
usual stock of /dots/, and have married everybody off according to the
genealogies which they all know by heart. Their womenkind are haughty
dames, who assume the airs of Court ladies in their basket chaises.
They huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full dress; and
twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet from Paris,
brought as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives are they for the most
part, and garrulous.

These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, with a few
outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who have solved the
problem: given a human being, to remain absolutely stationary. They
might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and
their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the
province in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its
quintessence, the /genius loci/ incarnate. There is something frigid
and monumental about these ladies; they know exactly when to laugh and
when to shake their heads, and every now and then give out some
utterance which passes current as a witticism.

A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Faubourg
Saint-Germain, thanks to their money or their aristocratic leanings.
But despite their forty years, the circle still say of them, "Young
So-and-so has sound opinions," and of such do they make deputies. As
a rule, the elderly spinsters are their patronesses, not without
comment.

Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three
ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit;
for these great nobles find their own society rather dull, and
introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker
puts leaven into his dough.

The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists of a
certain quantity of antiquated notions; a few new inflections brewed
in company of an evening being added from time to time to the common
stock. Like sea-water in a little creek, the phrases which represent
these ideas surge up daily, punctually obeying the tidal laws of
conversation in their flow and ebb; you hear the hollow echo of
yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all
things here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make up a
body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse one
drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the
regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of no
more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious,
political, moral, or literary.

If a stranger is admitted to the /cenacle/, every member of it in turn
will say (not without a trace of irony), "You will not find the
brilliancy of your Parisian society here," and proceed forthwith to
criticise the life led by his neighbors, as if he himself were an
exception who had striven, and vainly striven, to enlighten the rest.
But any stranger so ill advised as to concur in any of their freely
expressed criticism of each other, is pronounced at once to be an
ill-natured person, a heathen, an outlaw, a reprobate Parisian "as
Parisians mostly are."

Before Gaston de Nueil made his appearance in this little world of
strictly observed etiquette, where every detail of life is an
integrant part of a whole, and everything is known; where the values
of personalty and real estate is quoted like stocks on the vast sheet
of the newspaper--before his arrival he had been weighed in the
unerring scales of Bayeusaine judgment.

His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out the amount of
his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, had produced the family
tree, and expatiated on the talents, breeding, and modesty of this
particular branch. So he received the precise amount of attentions to
which he was entitled; he was accepted as a worthy scion of a good
stock; and, for he was but twenty-three, was made welcome without
ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers of daughters looked
not unkindly upon him.

He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land in the valley
of the Auge; and sooner or later his father, as in duty bound, would
leave him the chateau of Manerville, with the lands thereunto
belonging. As for his education, political career, personal qualities,
and qualifications--no one so much as thought of raising the
questions. His land was undeniable, his rentals steady; excellent
plantations had been made; the tenants paid for repairs, rates, and
taxes; the apple-trees were thirty-eight years old; and, to crown all,
his father was in treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just
outside the paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No
hopes of a political career, no fame on earth, can compare with such
advantages as these.

Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe omitted to
mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor did Gaston himself say a
word about him. But, at the same time, it is true that the brother was
consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
lamented and forgotten.

At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of the circle.
He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits of
these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses,
their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
"Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and
characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's
life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of
variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister,
cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a
crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the
symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an
uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, there is
always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, gradually, if
nothing removes him from his surroundings, he grows accustomed to
them, and adapts himself to the vacuity which grows upon him and
renders him powerless. Even now, Gaston's lungs were accustomed to the
air; and he was willing to discern a kind of vegetable happiness in
days that brought no mental exertion and no responsibilities. The
constant stirring of the sap of life, the fertilizing influences of
mind on mind, after which he had sought so eagerly in Paris, were
beginning to fade from his memory, and he was in a fair way of
becoming a fossil with these fossils, and ending his days among them,
content, like the companions of Ulysses, in his gross envelope.

One evening Gaston de Nueil was seated between a dowager and one of
the vicars-general of the diocese, in a gray-paneled drawing-room,
floored with large white tiles. The family portraits which adorned the
walls looked down upon four card-tables, and some sixteen persons
gathered about them, chattering over their whist. Gaston, thinking of
nothing, digesting one of those exquisite dinners to which the
provincial looks forward all through the day, found himself justifying
the customs of the country.

He began to understand why these good folk continued to play with
yesterday's pack of cards and shuffle them on a threadbare tablecloth,
and how it was that they had ceased to dress for themselves or others.
He saw the glimmerings of something like a philosophy in the even
tenor of their perpetual round, in the calm of their methodical
monotony, in their ignorance of the refinements of luxury. Indeed, he
almost came to think that luxury profited nothing; and even now, the
city of Paris, with its passions, storms, and pleasures, was scarcely
more than a memory of childhood.

He admired in all sincerity the red hands, and shy, bashful manner of
some young lady who at first struck him as an awkward simpleton,
unattractive to the last degree, and surprisingly ridiculous. His doom
was sealed. He had gone from the provinces to Paris; he had led the
feverish life of Paris; and now he would have sunk back into the
lifeless life of the provinces, but for a chance remark which reached
his ear--a few words that called up a swift rush of such emotion as he
might have felt when a strain of really good music mingles with the
accompaniment of some tedious opera.

"You went to call on Mme. de Beauseant yesterday, did you not?" The
speaker was an elderly lady, and she addressed the head of the local
royal family.

"I went this morning. She was so poorly and depressed, that I could
not persuade her to dine with us to-morrow."

"With Mme. de Champignelles?" exclaimed the dowager with something
like astonishment in her manner.

"With my wife," calmly assented the noble. "Mme. de Beauseant is
descended from the House of Burgundy, on the spindle side, 'tis true,
but the name atones for everything. My wife is very much attached to
the Vicomtesse, and the poor lady has lived alone for such a long
while, that----"

The Marquis de Champignelles looked round about him while he spoke
with an air of cool unconcern, so that it was almost impossible to
guess whether he made a concession to Mme. de Beauseant's misfortunes,
or paid homage to her noble birth; whether he felt flattered to
receive her in his house, or, on the contrary, sheer pride was the
motive that led him to try to force the country families to meet the
Vicomtesse.

The women appeared to take counsel of each other by a glance; there
was a sudden silence in the room, and it was felt that their attitude
was one of disapproval.

"Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady whose adventure
with M. d'Ajuda-Pinto made so much noise?" asked Gaston of his
neighbor.

"The very same," he was told. "She came to Courcelles after the
marriage of the Marquis d'Ajuda; nobody visits her. She has, besides,
too much sense not to see that she is in a false position, so she has
made no attempt to see any one. M. de Champignelles and a few
gentlemen went to call upon her, but she would see no one but M. de
Champignelles, perhaps because he is a connection of the family. They
are related through the Beauseants; the father of the present Vicomte
married a Mlle. de Champignelles of the older branch. But though the
Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed to be a descendant of the House of
Burgundy, you can understand that we could not admit a wife separated
from her husband into our society here. We are foolish enough still to
cling to these old-fashioned ideas. There was the less excuse for the
Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred man of the world,
who would have been quite ready to listen to reason. But his wife is
quite mad----" and so forth and so forth.

M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker's voice, gathered nothing
of the sense of the words; his brain was too full of thick-coming
fancies. Fancies? What other name can you give to the alluring charms
of an adventure that tempts the imagination and sets vague hopes
springing up in the soul; to the sense of coming events and mysterious
felicity and fear at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact
on which these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed? Over these
fancies thought hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in the
germ all the joys of love. Perhaps, indeed, all passion is contained
in that thought-germ, as the beauty, and fragrance, and rich color of
the flower is all packed in the seed.

M. de Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beauseant had taken refuge in
Normandy, after a notoriety which women for the most part envy and
condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some sort excuse the
transgression. Any sort of celebrity bestows an inconceivable
prestige. Apparently for women, as for families, the glory of the
crime effaces the stain; and if such and such a noble house is proud
of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and
pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a
happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be
pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only pitiless to
the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all
intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we
raise ourselves above other people's heads? The common herd of
humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise
above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by which they
rise.

It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston de Nueil at
unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some interest
in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses which,
for want of a better name, we are wont to call "fatality," that drew
him to Mme. de Beauseant.

The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before him
with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world for him, a
world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to conquer.
Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the human
beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a woman; what
woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation
replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried
formality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be
received or to pass current? The sound of Mme. de Beauseant's name
revived a young man's dreams and wakened urgent desires that had lain
dormant for a little.

Gaston de Nueil was absent-minded and preoccupied for the rest of the
evening. He was pondering how he might gain access to Mme. de
Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy matter. She was believed to
be extremely clever. But if men and women of parts may be captivated
by something subtle or eccentric, they are also exacting, and can read
all that lies below the surface; and after the first step has been
taken, the chances of failure and success in the difficult task of
pleasing them are about even. In this particular case, moreover, the
Vicomtesse, besides the pride of her position, had all the dignity of
her name. Her utter seclusion was the least of the barriers raised
between her and the world. For which reasons it was well-nigh
impossible that a stranger, however well born, could hope for
admittance; and yet, the next morning found M. de Nueil taking his
walks abroad in the direction of Courcelles, a dupe of illusions
natural at his age. Several times he made the circuit of the garden
walls, looking earnestly through every gap at the closed shutters or
open windows, hoping for some romantic chance, on which he founded
schemes for introducing himself into this unknown lady's presence,
without a thought of their impracticability. Morning after morning was
spent in this way to mighty purpose; but with each day's walk, that
vision of a woman living apart from the world, of love's martyr buried
in solitude, loomed larger in his thoughts, and was enshrined in his
soul. So Gaston de Nueil walked under the walls of Courcelles, and
some gardener's heavy footstep would set his heart beating high with
hope.

He thought of writing to Mme. de Beauseant, but on mature
consideration, what can you say to a woman whom you have never seen, a
complete stranger? And Gaston had little self-confidence. Like most
young persons with a plentiful crop of illusions still standing, he
dreaded the mortifying contempt of silence more than death itself, and
shuddered at the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth to
face so many chances of being thrown on the fire. He was distracted by
innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of inventing chimeras,
weaving romances, and cudgeling his brains, he hit at last upon one of
the hopeful stratagems that are sure to occur to your mind if you
persevere long enough, a stratagem which must make clear to the most
inexperienced woman that here was a man who took a fervent interest in
her. The caprice of social conventions puts as many barriers between
lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise in the most delightfully
fantastic tale; indeed, the most extravagant pictures are seldom
exaggerations. In real life, as in the fairy tales, the woman belongs
to him who can reach her and set her free from the position in which
she languishes. The poorest of calenders that ever fell in love with
the daughter of the Khalif is in truth scarcely further from his lady
than Gaston de Nueil from Mme. de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse knew
absolutely nothing of M. de Nueil's wanderings round her house; Gaston
de Nueil's love grew to the height of the obstacles to overleap; and
the distance set between him and his extemporized lady-love produced
the usual effect of distance, in lending enchantment.

One day, confident in his inspiration, he hoped everything from the
love that must pour forth from his eyes. Spoken words, in his opinion,
were more eloquent than the most passionate letter; and, besides, he
would engage feminine curiosity to plead for him. He went, therefore,
to M. de Champignelles, proposing to employ that gentleman for the
better success of his enterprise. He informed the Marquis that he had
been entrusted with a delicate and important commission which
concerned the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, that he felt doubtful whether
she would read a letter written in an unknown handwriting, or put
confidence in a stranger. Would M. de Champignelles, on his next
visit, ask the Vicomtesse if she would consent to receive him--Gaston
de Nueil? While he asked the Marquis to keep his secret in case of a
refusal, he very ingeniously insinuated sufficient reasons for his own
admittance, to be duly passed on to the Vicomtesse. Was not M. de
Champignelles a man of honor, a loyal gentleman incapable of lending
himself to any transaction in bad taste, nay, the merest suspicion of
bad taste! Love lends a young man all the self-possession and astute
craft of an old ambassador; all the Marquis' harmless vanities were
gratified, and the haughty grandee was completely duped. He tried hard
to fathom Gaston's secret; but the latter, who would have been greatly
perplexed to tell it, turned off M. de Champignelles' adroit
questioning with a Norman's shrewdness, till the Marquis, as a gallant
Frenchman, complimented his young visitor upon his discretion.

M. de Champignelles hurried off at once to Courcelles, with that
eagerness to serve a pretty woman which belongs to his time of life.
In the Vicomtesse de Beauseant's position, such a message was likely
to arouse keen curiosity; so, although her memory supplied no reason
at all that could bring M. de Nueil to her house, she saw no objection
to his visit--after some prudent inquiries as to his family and
condition. At the same time, she began by a refusal. Then she
discussed the propriety of the matter with M. de Champignelles,
directing her questions so as to discover, if possible, whether he
knew the motives for the visit, and finally revoked her negative
answer. The discussion and the discretion shown perforce by the
Marquis had piqued her curiosity.