The Elixir of Life

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THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By
Clara Bell & James Waring



TO THE READER

At the very outset of the writer's literary career, a friend,
long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he
found the same story in a collection published about the
beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it
is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably
it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the
published editions of his collected works. The _Comedie Humaine_
is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own
to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La
Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a
tale already related by another. This is not one of the hoaxes in
vogue in the year 1830, when every author wrote his "tale of
horror" for the amusement of young ladies. When you have read the
account of Don Juan's decorous parricide, try to picture to
yourself the part which would be played under very similar
circumstances by honest folk who, in this nineteenth century,
will take a man's money and undertake to pay him a life annuity
on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for
the term of her natural life! Would they be for resuscitating
their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences
to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and
fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does
humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making
progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men's shoes as a
step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable
professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are
people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over
it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for
their pillow at night. To this class belong bishops' coadjutors,
cardinals' supernumeraries, _tontiniers_, and the like. Add to the
list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed
property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in
cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a
step-mother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to
themselves, "I shall be sure to come in for it in three years'
time, and then----" A murderer is less loathsome to us than a
spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may
be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day,
in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every
moment of his life. Then what must it be to live when every
moment of your life is tainted with murder? And have we not just
admitted that a host of human creatures in our midst are led by
our laws, customs, and usages to dwell without ceasing on a
fellow-creature's death? There are men who put the weight of a
coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere
shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre,
or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage;
who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the
irresistible charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be
kissed with a "Good-night, father!" Hourly they meet the gaze of
eyes that they would fain close for ever, eyes that still open
each morning to the light, like Belvidero's in this Study. God
alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought.
Picture to yourself the state of mind of a man who must pay a
life annuity to some old woman whom he scarcely knows; both live
in the country with a brook between them, both sides are free to
hate cordially, without offending against the social conventions
that require two brothers to wear a mask if the older will
succeed to the entail, and the other to the fortune of a younger
son. The whole civilization of Europe turns upon the principle of
hereditary succession as upon a pivot; it would be madness to
subvert the principle; but could we not, in an age that prides
itself upon its mechanical inventions, perfect this essential
portion of the social machinery?

If the author has preserved the old-fashioned style of address _To
the Reader_ before a work wherein he endeavors to represent all
literary forms, it is for the purpose of making a remark that
applies to several of the Studies, and very specially to this.
Every one of his compositions has been based upon ideas more or
less novel, which, as it seemed to him, needed literary
expression; he can claim priority for certain forms and for
certain ideas which have since passed into the domain of
literature, and have there, in some instances, become common
property; so that the date of the first publication of each Study
cannot be a matter of indifference to those of his readers who
would fain do him justice.

Reading brings us unknown friends, and what friend is like a
reader? We have friends in our own circle who read nothing of
ours. The author hopes to pay his debt, by dedicating this work
_Diis ignotis_.



THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

One winter evening, in a princely palace at Ferrara, Don Juan
Belvidero was giving a banquet to a prince of the house of Este.
A banquet in those times was a marvelous spectacle which only
royal wealth or the power of a mightly [sic] lord could furnish
forth. Seated about a table lit up with perfumed tapers, seven
laughter-loving women were interchanging sweet talk. The white
marble of the noble works of art about them stood out against the
red stucco walls, and made strong contrasts with the rich Turkey
carpets. Clad in satin, glittering with gold, and covered with
gems less brilliant than their eyes, each told a tale of
energetic passions as diverse as their styles of beauty. They
differed neither in their ideas nor in their language; but the
expression of their eyes, their glances, occasional gestures, or
the tones of their voices supplied a commentary, dissolute,
wanton, melancholy, or satirical, to their words.

One seemed to be saying--"The frozen heart of age might kindle at
my beauty."

Another--"I love to lounge upon cushions, and think with rapture
of my adorers."

A third, a neophyte at these banquets, was inclined to blush. "I
feel remorse in the depths of my heart! I am a Catholic, and
afraid of hell. But I love you, I love you so that I can
sacrifice my hereafter to you."

The fourth drained a cup of Chian wine. "Give me a joyous life!"
she cried; "I begin life afresh each day with the dawn. Forgetful
of the past, with the intoxication of yesterday's rapture still
upon me, I drink deep of life--a whole lifetime of pleasure and
of love!"

The woman who sat next to Juan Belvidero looked at him with a
feverish glitter in her eyes. She was silent. Then--"I should
need no hired bravo to kill my lover if he forsook me!" she cried
at last, and laughed, but the marvelously wrought gold comfit box
in her fingers was crushed by her convulsive clutch.

"When are you to be Grand Duke?" asked the sixth. There was the
frenzy of a Bacchante in her eyes, and her teeth gleamed between
the lips parted with a smile of cruel glee.

"Yes, when is that father of yours going to die?" asked the
seventh, throwing her bouquet at Don Juan with bewitching
playfulness. It was a childish girl who spoke, and the speaker
was wont to make sport of sacred things.

"Oh! don't talk about it," cried Don Juan, the young and handsome
giver of the banquet. "There is but one eternal father, and, as
ill luck will have it, he is mine."

The seven Ferrarese, Don Juan's friends, the Prince himself, gave
a cry of horror. Two hundred years later, in the days of Louis
XV., people of taste would have laughed at this witticism. Or was
it, perhaps, that at the outset of an orgy there is a certain
unwonted lucidity of mind? Despite the taper light, the clamor of
the senses, the gleam of gold and silver, the fumes of wine, and
the exquisite beauty of the women, there may perhaps have been in
the depths of the revelers' hearts some struggling glimmer of
reverence for things divine and human, until it was drowned in
glowing floods of wine! Yet even then the flowers had been
crushed, eyes were growing dull, and drunkenness, in Rabelais'
phrase, had "taken possession of them down to their sandals."

During that brief pause a door opened; and as once the Divine
presence was revealed at Belshazzar's feast, so now it seemed to
be manifest in the apparition of an old white-haired servant, who
tottered in, and looked sadly from under knitted brows at the
revelers. He gave a withering glance at the garlands, the golden
cups, the pyramids of fruit, the dazzling lights of the banquet,
the flushed scared faces, the hues of the cushions pressed by the
white arms of the women.

"My lord, your father is dying!" he said; and at those solemn
words, uttered in hollow tones, a veil of crape seemed to be
drawn over the wild mirth.

Don Juan rose to his feet with a gesture to his guests that might
be rendered by, "Excuse me; this kind of thing does not happen
every day."

Does it so seldom happen that a father's death surprises youth in
the full-blown splendor of life, in the midst of the mad riot of
an orgy? Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in
her disdain; but death is truer--Death has never forsaken any
man.

Don Juan closed the door of the banqueting-hall; and as he went
down the long gallery, through the cold and darkness, he strove
to assume an expression in keeping with the part he had to play;
he had thrown off his mirthful mood, as he had thrown down his
table napkin, at the first thought of this role. The night was
dark. The mute servitor, his guide to the chamber where the dying
man lay, lighted the way so dimly that Death, aided by cold,
silence, and darkness, and it may be by a reaction of drunkenness,
could send some sober thoughts through the spendthrift's soul. He
examined his life, and became thoughtful, like a man involved in
a lawsuit on his way to the Court.

Bartolommeo Belvidero, Don Juan's father, was an old man of
ninety, who had devoted the greatest part of his life to business
pursuits. He had acquired vast wealth in many a journey to
magical Eastern lands, and knowledge, so it was said, more
valuable than the gold and diamonds, which had almost ceased to
have any value for him.

"I would give more to have a tooth in my head than for a ruby,"
he would say at times with a smile. The indulgent father loved to
hear Don Juan's story of this and that wild freak of youth. "So
long as these follies amuse you, dear boy----" he would say
laughingly, as he lavished money on his son. Age never took such
pleasure in the sight of youth; the fond father did not remember
his own decaying powers while he looked on that brilliant young
life.

Bartolommeo Belvidero, at the age of sixty, had fallen in love
with an angel of peace and beauty. Don Juan had been the sole
fruit of this late and short-lived love. For fifteen years the
widower had mourned the loss of his beloved Juana; and to this
sorrow of age, his son and his numerous household had attributed
the strange habits that he had contracted. He had shut himself up
in the least comfortable wing of his palace, and very seldom left
his apartments; even Don Juan himself must first ask permission
before seeing his father. If this hermit, unbound by vows, came
or went in his palace or in the streets of Ferrara, he walked as
if he were in a dream, wholly engrossed, like a man at strife
with a memory, or a wrestler with some thought.

The young Don Juan might give princely banquets, the palace might
echo with clamorous mirth, horses pawed the ground in the
courtyards, pages quarreled and flung dice upon the stairs, but
Bartolommeo ate his seven ounces of bread daily and drank water.
A fowl was occasionally dressed for him, simply that the black
poodle, his faithful companion, might have the bones. Bartolommeo
never complained of the noise. If the huntsmen's horns and baying
dogs disturbed his sleep during his illness, he only said, "Ah!
Don Juan has come back again." Never on earth has there been a
father so little exacting and so indulgent; and, in consequence,
young Belvidero, accustomed to treat his father unceremoniously,
had all the faults of a spoiled child. He treated old Bartolommeo
as a wilful courtesan treats an elderly adorer; buying indemnity
for insolence with a smile, selling good-humor, submitting to be
loved.

Don Juan, beholding scene after scene of his younger years, saw
that it would be a difficult task to find his father's indulgence
at fault. Some new-born remorse stirred the depths of his heart;
he felt almost ready to forgive this father now about to die for
having lived so long. He had an accession of filial piety, like a
thief's return in thought to honesty at the prospect of a million
adroitly stolen.

Before long Don Juan had crossed the lofty, chilly suite of rooms
in which his father lived; the penetrating influences of the damp
close air, the mustiness diffused by old tapestries and presses
thickly covered with dust had passed into him, and now he stood
in the old man's antiquated room, in the repulsive presence of
the deathbed, beside a dying fire. A flickering lamp on a Gothic
table sent broad uncertain shafts of light, fainter or brighter,
across the bed, so that the dying man's face seemed to wear a
different look at every moment. The bitter wind whistled through
the crannies of the ill-fitting casements; there was a smothered
sound of snow lashing the windows. The harsh contrast of these
sights and sounds with the scenes which Don Juan had just quitted
was so sudden that he could not help shuddering. He turned cold
as he came towards the bed; the lamp flared in a sudden vehement
gust of wind and lighted up his father's face; the features were
wasted and distorted; the skin that cleaved to their bony
outlines had taken wan livid hues, all the more ghastly by force
of contrast with the white pillows on which he lay. The muscles
about the toothless mouth had contracted with pain and drawn
apart the lips; the moans that issued between them with appalling
energy found an accompaniment in the howling of the storm
without.

In spite of every sign of coming dissolution, the most striking
thing about the dying face was its incredible power. It was no
ordinary spirit that wrestled there with Death. The eyes glared
with strange fixity of gaze from the cavernous sockets hollowed
by disease. It seemed as if Bartolommeo sought to kill some enemy
sitting at the foot of his bed by the intent gaze of dying eyes.
That steady remorseless look was the more appalling because the
head that lay upon the pillow was passive and motionless as a
skull upon a doctor's table. The outlines of the body, revealed
by the coverlet, were no less rigid and stiff; he lay there as
one dead, save for those eyes. There was something automatic
about the moaning sounds that came from the mouth. Don Juan felt
something like shame that he must be brought thus to his father's
bedside, wearing a courtesan's bouquet, redolent of the fragrance
of the banqueting-chamber and the fumes of wine.

"You were enjoying yourself!" the old man cried as he saw his
son.

Even as he spoke the pure high notes of a woman's voice,
sustained by the sound of the viol on which she accompanied her
song, rose above the rattle of the storm against the casements,
and floated up to the chamber of death. Don Juan stopped his ears
against the barbarous answer to his father's speech.

"I bear you no grudge, my child," Bartolommeo went on.

The words were full of kindness, but they hurt Don Juan; he could
not pardon this heart-searching goodness on his father's part.

"What a remorseful memory for me!" he cried, hypocritically.

"Poor Juanino," the dying man went on, in a smothered voice, "I
have always been so kind to you, that you could not surely desire
my death?"

"Oh, if it were only possible to keep you here by giving up a
part of my own life!" cried Don Juan.

("We can always _say_ this sort of thing," the spendthrift thought;
"it is as if I laid the whole world at my mistress' feet.")

The thought had scarcely crossed his mind when the old poodle
barked. Don Juan shivered; the response was so intelligent that
he fancied the dog must have understood him.

"I was sure that I could count upon you, my son!" cried the dying
man. "I shall live. So be it; you shall be satisfied. I shall
live, but without depriving you of a single day of your life."

"He is raving," thought Don Juan. Aloud he added, "Yes, dearest
father, yes; you shall live, of course, as long as I live, for
your image will be for ever in my heart."

"It is not that kind of life that I mean," said the old noble,
summoning all his strength to sit up in bed; for a thrill of
doubt ran through him, one of those suspicions that come into
being under a dying man's pillow. "Listen, my son," he went on,
in a voice grown weak with that last effort, "I have no more wish
to give up life than you to give up wine and mistresses, horses
and hounds, and hawks and gold----"

"I can well believe it," thought the son; and he knelt down by
the bed and kissed Bartolommeo's cold hands. "But, father, my
dear father," he added aloud, "we must submit to the will of
God."

"I am God!" muttered the dying man.

"Do not blaspheme!" cried the other, as he saw the menacing
expression on his father's face. "Beware what you say; you have
received extreme unction, and I should be inconsolable if you
were to die before my eyes in mortal sin."

"Will you listen to me?" cried Bartolommeo, and his mouth
twitched.

Don Juan held his peace; an ugly silence prevailed. Yet above the
muffled sound of the beating of the snow against the windows rose
the sounds of the beautiful voice and the viol in unison, far off
and faint as the dawn. The dying man smiled.

"Thank you," he said, "for bringing those singing voices and the
music, a banquet, young and lovely women with fair faces and dark
tresses, all the pleasure of life! Bid them wait for me; for I am
about to begin life anew."

"The delirium is at its height," said Don Juan to himself.

"I have found out a way of coming to life again," the speaker
went on. "There, just look in that table drawer, press the spring
hidden by the griffin, and it will fly open."

"I have found it, father."

"Well, then, now take out a little phial of rock crystal."

"I have it."

"I have spent twenty years in----" but even as he spoke the old
man felt how very near the end had come, and summoned all his
dying strength to say, "As soon as the breath is out of me, rub
me all over with that liquid, and I shall come to life again."

"There is very little of it," his son remarked.

Though Bartolommeo could no longer speak, he could still hear and
see. When those words dropped from Don Juan, his head turned with
appalling quickness, his neck was twisted like the throat of some
marble statue which the sculptor had condemned to remain
stretched out for ever, the wide eyes had come to have a ghastly
fixity.

He was dead, and in death he lost his last and sole illusion.

He had sought a shelter in his son's heart, and it had proved to
be a sepulchre, a pit deeper than men dig for their dead. The
hair on his head had risen and stiffened with horror, his
agonized glance still spoke. He was a father rising in just anger
from his tomb, to demand vengeance at the throne of God.

"There! it is all over with the old man!" cried Don Juan.

He had been so interested in holding the mysterious phial to the
lamp, as a drinker holds up the wine-bottle at the end of a meal,
that he had not seen his father's eyes fade. The cowering poodle
looked from his master to the elixir, just as Don Juan himself
glanced again and again from his father to the flask. The
lamplight flickered. There was a deep silence; the viol was mute.
Juan Belvidero thought that he saw his father stir, and trembled.
The changeless gaze of those accusing eyes frightened him; he
closed them hastily, as he would have closed a loose shutter
swayed by the wind of an autumn night. He stood there motionless,
lost in a world of thought.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a shrill sound like the
creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but
dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger,
issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a
wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious
contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be
awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day.
Through the windows there came already a flush of dawn. The
thing, composed of wood, and cords, and wheels, and pulleys, was
more faithful in its service than he in his duty to Bartolommeo
--he, a man with that peculiar piece of human mechanism within
him that we call a heart.

Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in
the Gothic table--he meant to run no more risks of losing the
mysterious liquid.

Even at that solemn moment he heard the murmur of a crowd in the
gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled laughter and
light footfalls, and the rustling of silks--the sounds of a band
of revelers struggling for gravity. The door opened, and in came
the Prince and Don Juan's friends, the seven courtesans, and the
singers, disheveled and wild like dancers surprised by the dawn,
when the tapers that have burned through the night struggle with
the sunlight.

They had come to offer the customary condolence to the young
heir.

"Oho! is poor Don Juan really taking this seriously?" said the
Prince in Brambilla's ear.

"Well, his father was very good," she returned.

But Don Juan's night-thoughts had left such unmistakable traces
on his features, that the crew was awed into silence. The men
stood motionless. The women, with wine-parched lips and cheeks
marbled with kisses, knelt down and began a prayer. Don Juan
could scarce help trembling when he saw splendor and mirth and
laughter and song and youth and beauty and power bowed in
reverence before Death. But in those times, in that adorable
Italy of the sixteenth century, religion and revelry went hand in
hand; and religious excess became a sort of debauch, and a
debauch a religious rite!

The Prince grasped Don Juan's hand affectionately, then when all
faces had simultaneously put on the same grimace--half-gloomy,
half-indifferent--the whole masque disappeared, and left the
chamber of death empty. It was like an allegory of life.

As they went down the staircase, the Prince spoke to Rivabarella:
"Now, who would have taken Don Juan's impiety for a boast? He
loves his father."

"Did you see that black dog?" asked La Brambilla.

"He is enormously rich now," sighed Bianca Cavatolino.

"What is that to me?" cried the proud Veronese (she who had
crushed the comfit-box).

"What does it matter to you, forsooth?" cried the Duke. "With his
money he is as much a prince as I am."

At first Don Juan was swayed hither and thither by countless
thoughts, and wavered between two decisions. He took counsel with
the gold heaped up by his father, and returned in the evening to
the chamber of death, his whole soul brimming over with hideous
selfishness. He found all his household busy there. "His
lordship" was to lie in state to-morrow; all Ferrara would flock
to behold the wonderful spectacle; and the servants were busy
decking the room and the couch on which the dead man lay. At a
sign from Don Juan all his people stopped, dumfounded and
trembling.

"Leave me alone here," he said, and his voice was changed, "and
do not return until I leave the room."

When the footsteps of the old servitor, who was the last to go,
echoed but faintly along the paved gallery, Don Juan hastily
locked the door, and sure that he was quite alone, "Let us try,"
he said to himself.

Bartolommeo's body was stretched on a long table. The embalmers
had laid a sheet over it, to hide from all eyes the dreadful
spectacle of a corpse so wasted and shrunken that it seemed like
a skeleton, and only the face was uncovered. This mummy-like
figure lay in the middle of the room. The limp clinging linen
lent itself to the outlines it shrouded--so sharp, bony, and
thin. Large violet patches had already begun to spread over the
face; the embalmers' work had not been finished too soon.

Don Juan, strong as he was in his scepticism, felt a tremor as he
opened the magic crystal flask. When he stood over that face, he
was trembling so violently, that he was actually obliged to wait
for a moment. But Don Juan had acquired an early familiarity with
evil; his morals had been corrupted by a licentious court, a
reflection worthy of the Duke of Urbino crossed his mind, and it
was a keen sense of curiosity that goaded him into boldness. The
devil himself might have whispered the words that were echoing
through his brain, _Moisten one of the eyes with the liquid_! He
took up a linen cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious
fluid, and passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the corpse.
The eye unclosed. . . .