The Girl with the Golden Eyes

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THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Ellen Marriage




PREPARER'S NOTE:

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a trilogy. Part
one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de Langeais.
The three stories are frequently combined under the title The
Thirteen.




DEDICATION

To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.



THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES



One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful
to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in
perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled
along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by
death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and
contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the
poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as
masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of
joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible
signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A
few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its
cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay:
youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at
this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that
vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot
even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be
corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the
almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport
that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There
all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames,
evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and
is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or
acute. The social nature, even in fusion, seems to say after each
completed work: "Pass on to another!" just as Nature says herself.
Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied with insects and
flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too, it throws up fire
and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the
causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this
intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out
which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals in
more or less degree.

By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being
interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction
has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon
which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian,
with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth,
lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at
everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything,
forgets, desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion,
quits all with indifference--his kings, his conquests, his glory, his
idols of bronze or glass--as he throws away his stockings, his hats,
and his fortune. In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of
things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are
relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim; there's no true
kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the
pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the
salon, as in the street, there is no one _de trop_, there is no one
absolutely useful, or absolutely harmful--knaves or fools, men of wit
or integrity. There everything is tolerated: the government and the
guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to
this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the
dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith,
without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and
moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take those two
words for a lantern, and explore that great stucco cage, that hive
with its black gutters, and follow the windings of that thought which
agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider! And, in the first
place, examine the world which possesses nothing.

The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his
tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live--well, this
very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle,
outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his
child, and ties him to the wheel. The manufacturer--or I know not what
secondary thread which sets in motion all these folk who with their
foul hands mould and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out
iron, turn wood and steel, weave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate
flowers, work woolen things, break in horses, dress harness, carve in
copper, paint carriages, blow glass, corrode the diamond, polish
metals, turn marble into leaves, labor on pebbles, deck out thought,
tinge, bleach, or blacken everything--well, this middleman has come to
that world of sweat and good-will, of study and patience, with
promises of lavish wages, either in the name of the town's caprices or
with the voice of the monster dubbed speculation. Thus, these
_quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch, work, and suffer, to fast,
sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the future, greedy of
pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter on his palette,
lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays to the _cabarets_
which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the most shameless
of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money of this
people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at work, is
squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there is no
repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to actions
which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but
it steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, the
child's wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all
creatures have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood
beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel,
the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his
hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous
nation--sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season,
and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe
with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine,
to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold
and Pleasure! If we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands
for an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to
every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well
or ill earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals.
Were it not for the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned
every Tuesday? Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off
its pleasure, is penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread,
stimulated by a need of material procreation, which has become a habit
to it. None the less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its
complete men, unknown Napoleons, who are the type of its strength
carried to its highest expression, and sum up its social capacity in
an existence wherein thought and movement combine less to bring joy
into it than to neutralize the action of sorrow.

Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper's business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.

And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to
whom time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of
saltpetre and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious
nights, and in the day multiplies his personality for the service,
glory, and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the
problem of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to
the _Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the
opera, and to God; but, only in order that the _Constitutionnel_, his
office, the National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be
changed into coin. In fine, hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up
every day at five o'clock, he traverses like a bird the space which
separates his dwelling from the Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or
thunder, rain or snow, he is at the _Constitutionnel_, and waits there
for the load of newspapers which he has undertaken to distribute. He
receives this political bread with eagerness, takes it, bears it away.
At nine o'clock he is in the bosom of his family, flings a jest to his
wife, snatches a loud kiss from her, gulps down a cup of coffee, or
scolds his children. At a quarter to ten he puts in an appearance at
the _Mairie_. There, stuck upon a stool, like a parrot on its perch,
warmed by Paris town, he registers until four o'clock, with never a
tear or a smile, the deaths and births of an entire district. The
sorrow, the happiness, of the parish flow beneath his pen--as the
essence of the _Constitutionnel_ traveled before upon his shoulders.
Nothing weighs upon him! He goes always straight before him, takes his
patriotism ready made from the newspaper, contradicts no one, shouts
or applauds with the world, and lives like a bird. Two yards from his
parish, in the event of an important ceremony, he can yield his place
to an assistant, and betake himself to chant a requiem from a stall in
the church of which on Sundays he is the fairest ornament, where his
is the most imposing voice, where he distorts his huge mouth with
energy to thunder out a joyous _Amen_. So is he chorister. At four
o'clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy
and gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife,
he has no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of
sentiment. His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter;
their bright eyes storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all
the finery, the lace and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands
have wrought. Or, again, more often still, before his dinner he waits
on a client, copies the page of a newspaper, or carries to the
doorkeeper some goods that have been delayed. Every other day, at six,
he is faithful to his post. A permanent bass for the chorus, he
betakes himself to the opera, prepared to become a soldier or an arab,
prisoner, savage, peasant, spirit, camel's leg or lion, a devil or a
genie, a slave or a eunuch, black or white; always ready to feign joy
or sorrow, pity or astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to
hold his tongue, to hunt, or fight for Rome or Egypt, but always at
heart--a huckster still.

At midnight he returns--a man, the good husband, the tender father; he
slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the
illusive forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the profit of
conjugal love the world's depravities, the voluptuous curves of
Taglioni's leg. And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and
hurries through his slumber as he does his life.

This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics,
government, religion, military science. Is he not a living
encyclopaedia, a grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris
itself, and knowing not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could
preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at
thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy,
will be held, according to certain leisured philosophers, to be
happier than the huckster is. The one perishes in a breath, and the
other by degrees. From his eight industries, from the labor of his
shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and his business, the
one derives--as from so many farms--children, some thousands of
francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever diverted the
heart of man. This fortune and these children, or the children who sum
up everything for him, become the prey of the world above, to which he
brings his ducats and his daughter or his son, reared at college, who,
with more education than his father, raises higher his ambitious gaze.
Often the son of a retail tradesman would fain be something in the
State.

Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian
sphere. Go up one story, then, and descend to the _entresol_: or climb
down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor; in fine, penetrate
into the world which has possessions: the same result! Wholesale
merchants, and their men--people with small banking accounts and much
integrity--rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs'
clerks, barristers' clerks, solicitors' clerks; in fine, all the
working, thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class
which honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary,
accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have
made, preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from
every sun-favored hill; which stretches its hands over the Orient, and
takes from it the shawls that the Russ and the Turk despise; which
harvests even from the Indies; crouches down in expectation of a sale,
greedy of profit; which discounts bills, turns over and collects all
kinds of securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the
fantasies of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature
age, sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy,
like the artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse
their strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds
alike, are burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of
the pace. In their case the physical distortion is accomplished
beneath the whip of interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which
torture the educated portion of this monstrous city, just as in the
case of the proletariat it is brought about by the cruel see-saw of
the material elaborations perpetually required from the despotism of
the aristocratic "_I will_." Here, too, then, in order to obey that
universal master, pleasure or gold, they must devour time, hasten
time, find more than four-and-twenty hours in the day and night, waste
themselves, slay themselves, and purchase two years of unhealthy
repose with thirty years of old age. Only, the working-man dies in
hospital when the last term of his stunted growth expires; whereas the
man of the middle class is set upon living, and lives on, but in a
state of idiocy. You will meet him, with his worn, flat old face, with
no light in his eyes, with no strength in his limbs, dragging himself
with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt of his Venus, of his
beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the National Guard, a
permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise, and, for his old
age, a little gold honestly earned. _HIS_ Monday is on Sunday, his
rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during which his
wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask in the
sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous dinner
has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but
what would Rabelais' Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of an
audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions
of this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae?
Have you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and
with no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the
vast copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by
morning. She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation
twelve thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is
up, passes into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the
week-end to the tradesmen of his district. By nine o'clock he is at
the passport office, of which he is one of the minor officials. By
evening he is at the box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other
theatre you like. The children are put out to nurse, and only return
to be sent to college or to boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live
on the third floor, have but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve
foot by eight, lit by argand lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty
thousand francs to their daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an
age when they begin to show themselves on the balcony of the opera, in
a _fiacre_ at Longchamps; or, on sunny days, in faded clothes on the
boulevards--the fruit of all this sowing. Respected by their
neighbors, in good odor with the government, connected with the upper
middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five the Cross of the Legion
of Honor, and his daughter's father-in-law, a parochial mayor, invites
him to his evenings. These life-long labors, then, are for the good of
the children, whom these lower middle classes are inevitably driven to
exalt. Thus each sphere directs all its efforts towards the sphere
above it. The son of the rich grocer becomes a notary, the son of the
timber merchant becomes a magistrate. No link is wanting in the chain,
and everything stimulates the upward march of money.

Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps,
will some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of
Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and
where they are condensed into the form known as _business_, there
moves and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process,
the crowd of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men,
bankers, big merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be
found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than
elsewhere. These people--almost all of them--live in unhealthy
offices, in fetid ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend
their days bowed down beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn
to be in time, not to be left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to
overreach a man or his money, to open or wind up some business, to
take advantage of some fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or
set him free. They infect their horses, they overdrive and age and
break them, like their own legs, before their time. Time is their
tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor
cut it short. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, and generous,
and, consequently, what face retain its beauty in this depraving
practice of a calling which compels one to bear the weight of the
public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them, estimate them, and
mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside their
hearts? . . . I do not know; but they leave them somewhere or other,
when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of
the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there is no such
thing as mystery; they see the reverse side of society, whose
confessors they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to
their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and
grow gloomy, or else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise,
espouse it. In fine, they necessarily become callous to every
sentiment, since man, his laws and his institutions, make them steal,
like jackals, from corpses that are still warm. At all hours the
financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the
pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they
all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul
becomes a larynx. Neither the great merchant, nor the judge, nor the
pleader preserves his sense of right; they feel no more, they apply
set rules that leave cases out of count. Borne along by their headlong
course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide
on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high
pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return to
their homes they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into
society, where they can make clients, acquaintances, protectors. They
all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces become
bloated, flushed, and emaciated.

To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such
multifold moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it
would be too pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret
and alarming, for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the
morality of society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their
specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything
which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they
question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear
to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in
interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social,
literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having
opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard of the
Code or the Tribunal of Commerce. Having started early to become men
of note, they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places
of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the
deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual
mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the
degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special
idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift
of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No man who has
allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear of these
huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either he has
practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young. If a
great merchant, something remains--he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did
Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who,
moreover has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and
Robespierre, however lofty they were? These men of affairs, _par
excellence_, attract money to them, and hoard it in order to ally
themselves with aristocratic families. If the ambition of the
working-man is that of the small tradesman, here, too, are the same
passions. The type of this class might be either an ambitious
bourgeois, who, after a life of privation and continual scheming,
passes into the Council of State as an ant passes through a chink; or
some newspaper editor, jaded with intrigue, whom the king makes a peer
of France--perhaps to revenge himself on the nobility; or some notary
become mayor of his parish: all people crushed with business, who, if
they attain their end, are literally _killed_ in its attainment. In
France the usage is to glorify wigs. Napoleon, Louis XVI., the great
rulers, alone have always wished for young men to fulfil their
projects.

Above this sphere the artist world exists. But here, too, the faces
stamped with the seal of originality are worn, nobly indeed, but worn,
fatigued, nervous. Harassed by a need of production, outrun by their
costly fantasies, worn out by devouring genius, hungry for pleasure,
the artists of Paris would all regain by excessive labor what they
have lost by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and
glory, money and art. To begin with, the artist is ceaselessly panting
under his creditors; his necessities beget his debts, and his debts
require of him his nights. After his labor, his pleasure. The comedian
plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the
sculptor is bent before his statue; the journalist is a marching
thought, like the soldier when at war; the painter who is the fashion
is crushed with work, the painter with no occupation, if he feels
himself to be a man of genius, gnaws his entrails. Competition,
rivalry, calumny assail talent. Some, in desperation, plunge into the
abyss of vice, others die young and unknown because they have
discounted their future too soon. Few of these figures, originally
sublime, remain beautiful. On the other hand, the flagrant beauty of
their heads is not understood. An artist's face is always exorbitant,
it is always above or below the conventional lines of what fools call
the _beau-ideal_. What power is it that destroys them? Passion. Every
passion in Paris resolves into two terms: gold and pleasure. Now, do
you not breathe again? Do you not feel air and space purified? Here is
neither labor nor suffering. The soaring arch of gold has reached the
summit. From the lowest gutters, where its stream commences, from the
little shops where it is stopped by puny coffer-dams, from the heart
of the counting-houses and great workshops, where its volume is that
of ingots--gold, in the shape of dowries and inheritances, guided by
the hands of young girls or the bony fingers of age, courses towards
the aristocracy, where it will become a blazing, expansive stream.
But, before leaving the four territories upon which the utmost wealth
of Paris is based, it is fitting, having cited the moral causes, to
deduce those which are physical, and to call attention to a
pestilence, latent, as it were, which incessantly acts upon the faces
of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper; to point out a
deleterious influence the corruption of which equals that of the
Parisian administrators who allow it so complacently to exist!