The Lily of the Valley

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THE LILY OF THE VALLEY

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley



DEDICATION

To Monsieur J. B. Nacquart,
Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine.

Dear Doctor--Here is one of the most carefully hewn stones in the
second course of the foundation of a literary edifice which I have
slowly and laboriously constructed. I wish to inscribe your name
upon it, as much to thank the man whose science once saved me as
to honor the friend of my daily life.


De Balzac.




THE LILY OF THE VALLEY





ENVOI

Felix de Vandenesse to Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville:

I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we
love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore
the ordinary rules of common-sense. To smooth the frown upon their
brow, to soften the pout upon their lips, what obstacles we
miraculously overcome! We shed our blood, we risk our future!

You exact the history of my past life; here it is. But remember
this, Natalie; in obeying you I crush under foot a reluctance
hitherto unconquerable. Why are you jealous of the sudden reveries
which overtake me in the midst of our happiness? Why show the
pretty anger of a petted woman when silence grasps me? Could you
not play upon the contradictions of my character without inquiring
into the causes of them? Are there secrets in your heart which
seek absolution through a knowledge of mine? Ah! Natalie, you have
guessed mine; and it is better you should know the whole truth.
Yes, my life is shadowed by a phantom; a word evokes it; it hovers
vaguely above me and about me; within my soul are solemn memories,
buried in its depths like those marine productions seen in calmest
weather and which the storms of ocean cast in fragments on the
shore.

The mental labor which the expression of ideas necessitates has
revived the old, old feelings which give me so much pain when they
come suddenly; and if in this confession of my past they break
forth in a way that wounds you, remember that you threatened to
punish me if I did not obey your wishes, and do not, therefore,
punish my obedience. I would that this, my confidence, might
increase your love.

Until we meet,

Felix.




CHAPTER I

TWO CHILDHOODS

To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching
of all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose
tender roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest
buds are torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by
frost at the moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the
sorrows of the child whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose
smiles are checked by the cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that
tells of such poor hearts, oppressed by beings placed about them to
promote the development of their natures, would contain the true
history of my childhood.

What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral or
physical infirmity caused by mother's coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was a
reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first
neglect; as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not
discovered it. Far from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters
found amusement in making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which
children hide each other's peccadilloes, and which early teaches them
the principles of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that,
I was often punished for my brother's faults, without being allowed to
prove the injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in
children taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to
which I was subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother
whom they feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a
childish love of imitation; was it from a need of testing their
powers; or was it simply through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes
united to deprive me of the sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had
made me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling
hearts rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed
feelings turn to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth
from which, in after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many
characters the habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear,
and fear ends in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a
man, and makes him more or less a slave. But in my case these
perpetual tortures led to the development of a certain strength, which
increased through exercise and predisposed my spirit to the habit of
moral resistance. Always in expectation of some new grief--as the
martyrs expected some fresh blow--my whole being expressed, I doubt
not, a sullen resignation which smothered the grace and gaiety of
childhood, and gave me an appearance of idiocy which seemed to justify
my mother's threatening prophecies. The certainty of injustice
prematurely roused my pride--that fruit of reason--and thus, no doubt,
checked the evil tendencies which an education like mine encouraged.

Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her
solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous
of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such times
when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would
inflict upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced
that I could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and
watch the insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. Though my
loneliness naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation
was first aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my
early troubles. So little notice was taken of me that the governess
occasionally forgot to send me to bed. One evening I was peacefully
crouching under a fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of
curiosity which takes possession of a child's mind, and to which my
precocious melancholy gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters
were playing about and laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an
accompaniment to my thoughts. After a while the noise ceased and
darkness fell. My mother happened to notice my absence. To escape
blame, our governess, a terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, worked upon my
mother's fears,--told her I had a horror of my home and would long ago
have run away if she had not watched me; that I was not stupid but
sullen; and that in all her experience of children she had never known
one of so bad a disposition as mine. She pretended to search for me. I
answered as soon as I was called, and she came to the fig-tree, where
she very well knew I was. "What are you doing there?" she asked.
"Watching a star." "You were not watching a star," said my mother, who
was listening on her balcony; "children of your age know nothing of
astronomy." "Ah, madame," cried Mademoiselle Caroline, "he has opened
the faucet of the reservoir; the garden is inundated!" Then there was
a general excitement. The fact was that my sisters had amused
themselves by turning the cock to see the water flow, but a sudden
spurt wet them all over and frightened them so much that they ran away
without closing it. Accused and convicted of this piece of mischief
and told that I lied when I denied it, I was severely punished. Worse
than all, I was jeered at for my pretended love of the stars and
forbidden to stay in the garden after dark.

Such tyrannical restrains intensify a passion in the hearts of
children even more than in those of men; children think of nothing but
the forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly attractive to
them. I was often whipped for my star. Unable to confide in my kind, I
told it all my troubles in that delicious inward prattle with which we
stammer our first ideas, just as once we stammered our first words. At
twelve years of age, long after I was at school, I still watched that
star with indescribable delight,--so deep and lasting are the
impressions we receive in the dawn of life.

My brother Charles, five years older than I and as handsome a boy as
he now is a man, was the favorite of my father, the idol of my mother,
and consequently the sovereign of the house. He was robust and
well-made, and had a tutor. I, puny and even sickly, was sent at five
years of age as day pupil to a school in the town; taken in the morning
and brought back at night by my father's valet. I was sent with a scanty
lunch, while my school-fellows brought plenty of good food. This
trifling contrast between my privations and their prosperity made me
suffer deeply. The famous potted pork prepared at Tours and called
"rillettes" and "rillons" was the chief feature of their mid-day meal,
between the early breakfast and the parent's dinner, which was ready
when we returned from school. This preparation of meat, much prized by
certain gourmands, is seldom seen at Tours on aristocratic tables; if
I had ever heard of it before I went to school, I certainly had never
had the happiness of seeing that brown mess spread on slices of bread
and butter. Nevertheless, my desire for those "rillons" was so great
that it grew to be a fixed idea, like the longing of an elegant
Parisian duchess for the stews cooked by a porter's wife,--longings
which, being a woman, she found means to satisfy. Children guess each
other's covetousness, just as you are able to read a man's love, by
the look in the eyes; consequently I became an admirable butt for
ridicule. My comrades, nearly all belonging to the lower bourgeoisie,
would show me their "rillons" and ask if I knew how they were made and
where they were sold, and why it was that I never had any. They licked
their lips as they talked of them--scraps of pork pressed in their own
fat and looking like cooked truffles; they inspected my lunch-basket,
and finding nothing better than Olivet cheese or dried fruits, they
plagued me with questions: "Is that all you have? have you really
nothing else?"--speeches which made me realize the difference between
my brother and myself.

This contrast between my own abandonment and the happiness of others
nipped the roses of my childhood and blighted my budding youth. The
first time that I, mistaking my comrades' actions for generosity, put
forth my hand to take the dainty I had so long coveted and which was
now hypocritically held out to me, my tormentor pulled back his slice
to the great delight of his comrades who were expecting that result.
If noble and distinguished minds are, as we often find them, capable
of vanity, can we blame the child who weeps when despised and jeered
at? Under such a trial many boys would have turned into gluttons and
cringing beggars. I fought to escape my persecutors. The courage of
despair made me formidable; but I was hated, and thus had no
protection against treachery. One evening as I left school I was
struck in the back by a handful of small stones tied in a
handkerchief. When the valet, who punished the perpetrator, told this
to my mother she exclaimed: "That dreadful child! he will always be a
torment to us."

Finding that I inspired in my schoolmates the same repulsion that was
felt for me by my family, I sank into a horrible distrust of myself. A
second fall of snow checked the seeds that were germinating in my
soul. The boys whom I most liked were notorious scamps; this fact
roused my pride and I held aloof. Again I was shut up within myself
and had no vent for the feelings with which my heart was full. The
master of the school, observing that I was gloomy, disliked by my
comrades, and always alone, confirmed the family verdict as to my
sulky temper. As soon as I could read and write, my mother transferred
me to Pont-le-Voy, a school in charge of Oratorians who took boys of
my age into a form called the "class of the Latin steps" where dull
lads with torpid brains were apt to linger.

There I remained eight years without seeing my family; living the life
of a pariah,--partly for the following reason. I received but three
francs a month pocket-money, a sum barely sufficient to buy the pens,
ink, paper, knives, and rules which we were forced to supply
ourselves. Unable to buy stilts or skipping-ropes, or any of the
things that were used in the playground, I was driven out of the
games; to gain admission on suffrage I should have had to toady the
rich and flatter the strong of my division. My heart rose against
either of these meannesses, which, however, most children readily
employ. I lived under a tree, lost in dejected thought, or reading the
books distributed to us monthly by the librarian. How many griefs were
in the shadow of that solitude; what genuine anguish filled my
neglected life! Imagine what my sore heart felt when, at the first
distribution of prizes,--of which I obtained the two most valued,
namely, for theme and for translation,--neither my father nor my
mother was present in the theatre when I came forward to receive the
awards amid general acclamations, although the building was filled
with the relatives of all my comrades. Instead of kissing the
distributor, according to custom, I burst into tears and threw myself
on his breast. That night I burned my crowns in the stove. The parents
of the other boys were in town for a whole week preceding the
distribution of the prizes, and my comrades departed joyfully the next
day; while I, whose father and mother were only a few miles distant,
remained at the school with the "outremers,"--a name given to scholars
whose families were in the colonies or in foreign countries.

You will notice throughout how my unhappiness increased in proportion
as the social spheres on which I entered widened. God knows what
efforts I made to weaken the decree which condemned me to live within
myself! What hopes, long cherished with eagerness of soul, were doomed
to perish in a day! To persuade my parents to come and see me, I wrote
them letters full of feeling, too emphatically worded, it may be; but
surely such letters ought not to have drawn upon me my mother's
reprimand, coupled with ironical reproaches for my style. Not
discouraged even then, I implored the help of my sisters, to whom I
always wrote on their birthdays and fete-days with the persistence of
a neglected child; but it was all in vain. As the day for the
distribution of prizes approached I redoubled my entreaties, and told
of my expected triumphs. Misled by my parents' silence, I expected
them with a beating heart. I told my schoolfellows they were coming;
and then, when the old porter's step sounded in the corridors as he
called my happy comrades one by one to receive their friends, I was
sick with expectation. Never did that old man call my name!

One day, when I accused myself to my confessor of having cursed my
life, he pointed to the skies, where grew, he said, the promised palm
for the "Beati qui lugent" of the Saviour. From the period of my first
communion I flung myself into the mysterious depths of prayer,
attracted to religious ideas whose moral fairyland so fascinates young
spirits. Burning with ardent faith, I prayed to God to renew in my
behalf the miracles I had read of in martyrology. At five years of age
I fled to my star; at twelve I took refuge in the sanctuary. My
ecstasy brought dreams unspeakable, which fed my imagination, fostered
my susceptibilities, and strengthened my thinking powers. I have often
attributed those sublime visions to the guardian angel charged with
moulding my spirit to its divine destiny; they endowed my soul with
the faculty of seeing the inner soul of things; they prepared my heart
for the magic craft which makes a man a poet when the fatal power is
his to compare what he feels within him with reality,--the great
things aimed for with the small things gained. Those visions wrote
upon my brain a book in which I read that which I must voice; they
laid upon my lips the coal of utterance.

My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the
Oratorian teachings, took me from Pont-le-Voy, and sent me to Paris to
an institution in the Marais. I was then fifteen. When examined as to
my capacity, I, who was in the rhetoric class at Pont-le-Voy, was
pronounced worthy of the third class. The sufferings I had endured in
my family and in school were continued under another form during my
stay at the Lepitre Academy. My father gave me no money; I was to be
fed, clothed, and stuffed with Latin and Greek, for a sum agreed on.
During my school life I came in contact with over a thousand comrades;
but I never met with such an instance of neglect and indifference as
mine. Monsieur Lepitre, who was fanatically attached to the Bourbons,
had had relations with my father at the time when all devoted
royalists were endeavoring to bring about the escape of Marie
Antoinette from the Temple. They had lately renewed acquaintance; and
Monsieur Lepitre thought himself obliged to repair my father's
oversight, and to give me a small sum monthly. But not being
authorized to do so, the amount was small indeed.

The Lepitre establishment was in the old Joyeuse mansion where, as in
all seignorial houses, there was a porter's lodge. During a recess,
which preceded the hour when the man-of-all-work took us to the
Charlemagne Lyceum, the well-to-do pupils used to breakfast with the
porter, named Doisy. Monsieur Lepitre was either ignorant of the fact
or he connived at this arrangement with Doisy, a regular smuggler whom
it was the pupils' interest to protect,--he being the secret guardian
of their pranks, the safe confidant of their late returns and their
intermediary for obtaining forbidden books. Breakfast on a cup of
"cafe-au-lait" is an aristocratic habit, explained by the high prices
to which colonial products rose under Napoleon. If the use of sugar
and coffee was a luxury to our parents, with us it was the sign of
self-conscious superiority. Doisy gave credit, for he reckoned on the
sisters and aunts of the pupils, who made it a point of honor to pay
their debts. I resisted the blandishments of his place for a long
time. If my judges knew the strength of its seduction, the heroic
efforts I made after stoicism, the repressed desires of my long
resistance, they would pardon my final overthrow. But, child as I was,
could I have the grandeur of soul that scorns the scorn of others?
Moreover, I may have felt the promptings of several social vices whose
power was increased by my longings.

About the end of the second year my father and mother came to Paris.
My brother had written me the day of their arrival. He lived in Paris,
but had never been to see me. My sisters, he said, were of the party;
we were all to see Paris together. The first day we were to dine in
the Palais-Royal, so as to be near the Theatre-Francais. In spite of
the intoxication such a programme of unhoped-for delights excited, my
joy was dampened by the wind of a coming storm, which those who are
used to unhappiness apprehend instinctively. I was forced to own a
debt of a hundred francs to the Sieur Doisy, who threatened to ask my
parents himself for the money. I bethought me of making my brother the
emissary of Doisy, the mouth-piece of my repentance and the mediator
of pardon. My father inclined to forgiveness, but my mother was
pitiless; her dark blue eye froze me; she fulminated cruel prophecies:
"What should I be later if at seventeen years of age I committed such
follies? Was I really a son of hers? Did I mean to ruin my family? Did
I think myself the only child of the house? My brother Charles's
career, already begun, required large outlay, amply deserved by his
conduct which did honor to the family, while mine would always
disgrace it. Did I know nothing of the value of money, and what I cost
them? Of what use were coffee and sugar to my education? Such conduct
was the first step into all the vices."

After enduring the shock of this torrent which rasped my soul, I was
sent back to school in charge of my brother. I lost the dinner at the
Freres Provencaux, and was deprived of seeing Talma in Britannicus.
Such was my first interview with my mother after a separation of
twelve years.

When I had finished school my father left me under the guardianship of
Monsieur Lepitre. I was to study the higher mathematics, follow a
course of law for one year, and begin philosophy. Allowed to study in
my own room and released from the classes, I expected a truce with
trouble. But, in spite of my nineteen years, perhaps because of them,
my father persisted in the system which had sent me to school without
food, to an academy without pocket-money, and had driven me into debt
to Doisy. Very little money was allowed to me, and what can you do in
Paris without money? Moreover, my freedom was carefully chained up.
Monsieur Lepitre sent me to the law school accompanied by a
man-of-all-work who handed me over to the professor and fetched me home
again. A young girl would have been treated with less precaution than
my mother's fears insisted on for me. Paris alarmed my parents, and
justly. Students are secretly engaged in the same occupation which
fills the minds of young ladies in their boarding-schools. Do what you
will, nothing can prevent the latter from talking of lovers, or the
former of women. But in Paris, and especially at this particular time,
such talk among young lads was influenced by the oriental and sultanic
atmosphere and customs of the Palais-Royal.

The Palais-Royal was an Eldorado of love where the ingots melted away
in coin; there virgin doubts were over; there curiosity was appeased.
The Palais-Royal and I were two asymptotes bearing one towards the
other, yet unable to meet. Fate miscarried all my attempts. My father
had presented me to one of my aunts who lived in the Ile St. Louis.
With her I was to dine on Sundays and Thursdays, escorted to the house
by either Monsieur or Madame Lepitre, who went out themselves on those
days and were to call for me on their way home. Singular amusement for
a young lad! My aunt, the Marquise de Listomere, was a great lady, of
ceremonious habits, who would never have dreamed of offering me money.
Old as a cathedral, painted like a miniature, sumptuous in dress, she
lived in her great house as though Louis XV. were not dead, and saw
none but old women and men of a past day,--a fossil society which made
me think I was in a graveyard. No one spoke to me and I had not the
courage to speak first. Cold and alien looks made me ashamed of my
youth, which seemed to annoy them. I counted on this indifference to
aid me in certain plans; I was resolved to escape some day directly
after dinner and rush to the Palais-Royal. Once seated at whist my
aunt would pay no attention to me. Jean, the footman, cared little for
Monsieur Lepitre and would have aided me; but on the day I chose for
my adventure that luckless dinner was longer than usual,--either
because the jaws employed were worn out or the false teeth more
imperfect. At last, between eight and nine o'clock, I reached the
staircase, my heart beating like that of Bianca Capello on the day of
her flight; but when the porter pulled the cord I beheld in the street
before me Monsieur Lepitre's hackney-coach, and I heard his pursy
voice demanding me!

Three times did fate interpose between the hell of the Palais-Royal
and the heaven of my youth. On the day when I, ashamed at twenty years
of age of my own ignorance, determined to risk all dangers to put an
end to it, at the very moment when I was about to run away from
Monsieur Lepitre as he got into the coach,--a difficult process, for
he was as fat as Louis XVIII. and club-footed,--well, can you believe
it, my mother arrived in a post-chaise! Her glance arrested me; I
stood still, like a bird before a snake. What fate had brought her
there? The simplest thing in the world. Napoleon was then making his
last efforts. My father, who foresaw the return of the Bourbons, had
come to Paris with my mother to advise my brother, who was employed in
the imperial diplomatic service. My mother was to take me back with
her, out of the way of dangers which seemed, to those who followed the
march of events intelligently, to threaten the capital. In a few
minutes, as it were, I was taken out of Paris, at the very moment when
my life there was about to become fatal to me.

The tortures of imagination excited by repressed desires, the
weariness of a life depressed by constant privations had driven me to
study, just as men, weary of fate, confine themselves in a cloister.
To me, study had become a passion, which might even be fatal to my
health by imprisoning me at a period of life when young men ought to
yield to the bewitching activities of their springtide youth.