The Lily of the Valley

H >> Honore de Balzac >> The Lily of the Valley


In the first place, I found her wanting in the qualities of mind which
distinguish Frenchwomen and make them so delightful to love; as all
those who have had the opportunity of loving in both countries
declare. When a Frenchwoman loves she is metamorphosed; her noted
coquetry is used to deck her love; she abandons her dangerous vanity
and lays no claim to any merit but that of loving well. She espouses
the interests, the hatreds, the friendships, of the man she loves; she
acquires in a day the experience of a man of business; she studies the
code, she comprehends the mechanism of credit, and could manage a
banker's office; naturally heedless and prodigal, she will make no
mistakes and waste not a single louis. She becomes, in turn, mother,
adviser, doctor, giving to all her transformations a grace of
happiness which reveals, in its every detail, her infinite love. She
combines the special qualities of the women of other countries and
gives unity to the mixture by her wit, that truly French product,
which enlivens, sanctions, justifies, and varies all, thus relieving
the monotony of a sentiment which rests on a single tense of a single
verb. The Frenchwoman loves always, without abatement and without
fatigue, in public or in solitude. In public she uses a tone which has
meaning for one only; she speaks by silence; she looks at you with
lowered eyelids. If the occasion prevents both speech and look she
will use the sand and write a word with the point of her little foot;
her love will find expression even in sleep; in short, she bends the
world to her love. The Englishwoman, on the contrary, makes her love
bend to the world. Educated to maintain the icy manners, the Britannic
and egotistic deportment which I described to you, she opens and shuts
her heart with the ease of a British mechanism. She possesses an
impenetrable mask, which she puts on or takes off phlegmatically.
Passionate as an Italian when no eye sees her, she becomes coldly
dignified before the world. A lover may well doubt his empire when he
sees the immobility of face, the aloofness of countenance, and hears
the calm voice, with which an Englishwoman leaves her boudoir.
Hypocrisy then becomes indifference; she has forgotten all.

Certainly the woman who can lay aside her love like a garment may be
thought to be capable of changing it. What tempests arise in the heart
of a man, stirred by wounded self-love, when he sees a woman taking
and dropping and again picking up her love like a piece of embroidery.
These women are too completely mistresses of themselves ever to belong
wholly to you; they are too much under the influence of society ever
to let you reign supreme. Where a Frenchwoman comforts by a look, or
betrays her impatience with visitors by witty jests, an Englishwoman's
silence is absolute; it irritates the soul and frets the mind. These
women are so constantly, and, under all circumstances, on their
dignity, that to most of them fashion reigns omnipotent even over
their pleasures. An Englishwoman forces everything into form; though
in her case the love of form does not produce the sentiment of art. No
matter what may be said against it, Protestantism and Catholicism
explain the differences which make the love of Frenchwomen so far
superior to the calculating, reasoning love of Englishwomen.
Protestantism doubts, searches, and kills belief; it is the death of
art and love. Where worldliness is all in all, worldly people must
needs obey; but passionate hearts flee from it; to them its laws are
insupportable.

You can now understand what a shock my self-love received when I found
that Lady Dudley could not live without the world, and that the
English system of two lives was familiar to her. It was no sacrifice
she felt called upon to make; on the contrary she fell naturally into
two forms of life that were inimical to each other. When she loved she
loved madly,--no woman of any country could be compared to her; but
when the curtain fell upon that fairy scene she banished even the
memory of it. In public she never answered to a look or a smile; she
was neither mistress nor slave; she was like an ambassadress, obliged
to round her phrases and her elbows; she irritated me by her
composure, and outraged my heart with her decorum. Thus she degraded
love to a mere need, instead of raising it to an ideal through
enthusiasm. She expressed neither fear, nor regrets, nor desire; but
at a given hour her tenderness reappeared like a fire suddenly
lighted.

In which of these two women ought I to believe? I felt, as it were by
a thousand pin-pricks, the infinite differences between Henriette and
Arabella. When Madame de Mortsauf left me for a while she seemed to
leave to the air the duty of reminding me of her; the folds of her
gown as she went away spoke to the eye, as their undulating sound to
the ear when she returned; infinite tenderness was in the way she
lowered her eyelids and looked on the ground; her voice, that musical
voice, was a continual caress; her words expressed a constant thought;
she was always like unto herself; she did not halve her soul to suit
two atmospheres, one ardent, the other icy. In short, Madame de
Mortsauf reserved her mind and the flower of her thought to express
her feelings; she was coquettish in ideas with her children and with
me. But Arabella's mind was never used to make life pleasant; it was
never used at all for my benefit; it existed only for the world and by
the world, and it was spent in sarcasm. She loved to rend, to bite, as
it were,--not for amusement but to satisfy a craving. Madame de
Mortsauf would have hidden her happiness from every eye, Lady Dudley
chose to exhibit hers to all Paris; and yet with her impenetrable
English mask she kept within conventions even while parading in the
Bois with me. This mixture of ostentation and dignity, love and
coldness, wounded me constantly; for my soul was both virgin and
passionate, and as I could not pass from one temperature to the other,
my temper suffered. When I complained (never without precaution), she
turned her tongue with its triple sting against me; mingling boasts of
her love with those cutting English sarcasms. As soon as she found
herself in opposition to me, she made it an amusement to hurt my
feelings and humiliate my mind; she kneaded me like dough. To any
remark of mine as to keeping a medium in all things, she replied by
caricaturing my ideas and exaggerating them. When I reproached her for
her manner to me, she asked if I wished her to kiss me at the opera
before all Paris; and she said it so seriously that I, knowing her
desire to make people talk, trembled lest she should execute her
threat. In spite of her real passion she was never meditative,
self-contained, or reverent, like Henriette; on the contrary she was
insatiable as a sandy soil. Madame de Mortsauf was always composed,
able to feel my soul in an accent or a glance. Lady Dudley was never
affected by a look, or a pressure of the hand, nor yet by a tender
word. No proof of love surprised her. She felt so strong a necessity
for excitement, noise, celebrity, that nothing attained to her ideal
in this respect; hence her violent love, her exaggerated fancy,
--everything concerned herself and not me.

The letter you have read from Madame de Mortsauf (a light which still
shone brightly on my life), a proof of how the most virtuous of women
obeyed the genius of a Frenchwoman, revealing, as it did, her
perpetual vigilance, her sound understanding of all my prospects--that
letter must have made you see with what care Henriette had studied my
material interests, my political relations, my moral conquests, and
with what ardor she took hold of my life in all permissible
directions. On such points as these Lady Dudley affected the reticence
of a mere acquaintance. She never informed herself about my affairs,
nor of my likings or dislikings as a man. Prodigal for herself without
being generous, she separated too decidedly self-interest and love.
Whereas I knew very well, without proving it, that to save me a pang
Henriette would have sought for me that which she would never seek for
herself. In any great and overwhelming misfortune I should have gone
for counsel to Henriette, but I would have let myself be dragged to
prison sooner than say a word to Lady Dudley.

Up to this point the contrast relates to feelings; but it was the same
in outward things. In France, luxury is the expression of the man, the
reproduction of his ideas, of his personal poetry; it portrays the
character, and gives, between lovers, a precious value to every little
attention by keeping before them the dominant thought of the being
loved. But English luxury, which at first allured me by its choiceness
and delicacy, proved to be mechanical also. The thousand and one
attentions shown me at Clochegourde Arabella would have considered the
business of servants; each one had his own duty and speciality. The
choice of the footman was the business of her butler, as if it were a
matter of horses. She never attached herself to her servants; the
death of the best of them would not have affected her, for money could
replace the one lost by another equally efficient. As to her duty
towards her neighbor, I never saw a tear in her eye for the
misfortunes of another; in fact her selfishness was so naively candid
that it absolutely created a laugh. The crimson draperies of the great
lady covered an iron nature. The delightful siren who sounded at night
every bell of her amorous folly could soon make a young man forget the
hard and unfeeling Englishwoman, and it was only step by step that I
discovered the stony rock on which my seeds were wasted, bringing no
harvest. Madame de Mortsauf had penetrated that nature at a glance in
their brief encounter. I remembered her prophetic words. She was
right; Arabella's love became intolerable to me. I have since remarked
that most women who ride well on horseback have little tenderness.
Like the Amazons, they lack a breast; their hearts are hard in some
direction, but I do not know in which.

At the moment when I begin to feel the burden of the yoke, when
weariness took possession of soul and body too, when at last I
comprehended the sanctity that true feeling imparts to love, when
memories of Clochegourde were bringing me, in spite of distance, the
fragrance of the roses, the warmth of the terrace, and the warble of
the nightingales,--at this frightful moment, when I saw the stony bed
beneath me as the waters of the torrent receded, I received a blow
which still resounds in my heart, for at every hour its echo wakes.

I was working in the cabinet of the king, who was to drive out at four
o'clock. The Duc de Lenoncourt was on service. When he entered the
room the king asked him news of the countess. I raised my head hastily
in too eager a manner; the king, offended by the action, gave me the
look which always preceded the harsh words he knew so well how to say.

"Sire, my poor daughter is dying," replied the duke.

"Will the king deign to grant me leave of absence?" I cried, with
tears in my eyes, braving the anger which I saw about to burst.

"Go, _my lord_," he answered, smiling at the satire in his words, and
withholding his reprimand in favor of his own wit.

More courtier than father, the duke asked no leave but got into the
carriage with the king. I started without bidding Lady Dudley
good-bye; she was fortunately out when I made my preparations, and I
left a note telling her I was sent on a mission by the king. At the
Croix de Berny I met his Majesty returning from Verrieres. He threw me
a look full of his royal irony, always insufferable in meaning, which
seemed to say: "If you mean to be anything in politics come back; don't
parley with the dead." The duke waved his hand to me sadly. The two
pompous equipages with their eight horses, the colonels and their gold
lace, the escort and the clouds of dust rolled rapidly away, to cries
of "Vive le Roi!" It seemed to me that the court had driven over the
dead body of Madame de Mortsauf with the utter insensibility which
nature shows for our catastrophes. Though the duke was an excellent
man he would no doubt play whist with Monsieur after the king had
retired. As for the duchess, she had long ago given her daughter the
first stab by writing to her of Lady Dudley.

My hurried journey was like a dream,--the dream of a ruined gambler; I
was in despair at having received no news. Had the confessor pushed
austerity so far as to exclude me from Clochegourde? I accused
Madeleine, Jacques, the Abbe Dominis, all, even Monsieur de Mortsauf.
Beyond Tours, as I came down the road bordered with poplars which
leads to Poncher, which I so much admired that first day of my search
for mine Unknown, I met Monsieur Origet. He guessed that I was going
to Clochegourde; I guessed that he was returning. We stopped our
carriages and got out, I to ask for news, he to give it.

"How is Madame de Mortsauf?" I said.

"I doubt if you find her living," he replied. "She is dying a
frightful death--of inanition. When she called me in, last June, no
medical power could control the disease; she had the symptoms which
Monsieur de Mortsauf has no doubt described to you, for he thinks he
has them himself. Madame la comtesse was not in any transient
condition of ill-health, which our profession can direct and which is
often the cause of a better state, nor was she in the crisis of a
disorder the effects of which can be repaired; no, her disease had
reached a point where science is useless; it is the incurable result
of grief, just as a mortal wound is the result of a stab. Her physical
condition is produced by the inertia of an organ as necessary to life
as the action of the heart itself. Grief has done the work of a
dagger. Don't deceive yourself; Madame de Mortsauf is dying of some
hidden grief."

"Hidden!" I exclaimed. "Her children have not been ill?"

"No," he said, looking at me significantly, "and since she has been so
seriously attacked Monsieur de Mortsauf has ceased to torment her. I
am no longer needed; Monsieur Deslandes of Azay is all-sufficient;
nothing can be done; her sufferings are dreadful. Young, beautiful,
and rich, to die emaciated, shrunken with hunger--for she dies of
hunger! During the last forty days the stomach, being as it were
closed up, has rejected all nourishment, under whatever form we
attempt to give it."

Monsieur Origet pressed my hand with a gesture of respect.

"Courage, monsieur," he said, lifting his eyes to heaven.

The words expressed his compassion for sufferings he thought shared;
he little suspected the poisoned arrow which they shot into my heart.
I sprang into the carriage and ordered the postilion to drive on,
promising a good reward if I arrived in time.

Notwithstanding my impatience I seemed to do the distance in a few
minutes, so absorbed was I in the bitter reflections that crowded upon
my soul. Dying of grief, yet her children were well? then she died
through me! My conscience uttered one of those arraignments which echo
throughout our lives and sometimes beyond them. What weakness, what
impotence in human justice, which avenges none but open deeds! Why
shame and death to the murderer who kills with a blow, who comes upon
you unawares in your sleep and makes it last eternally, who strikes
without warning and spares you a struggle? Why a happy life, an
honored life, to the murderer who drop by drop pours gall into the
soul and saps the body to destroy it? How many murderers go
unpunished! What indulgence for fashionable vice! What condoning of
the homicides caused by moral wrongs! I know not whose avenging hand
it was that suddenly, at that moment, raised the painted curtain that
reveals society. I saw before me many victims known to you and me,
--Madame de Beauseant, dying, and starting for Normandy only a few
days earlier; the Duchesse de Langeais lost; Lady Brandon hiding herself
in Touraine in the little house where Lady Dudley had stayed two weeks,
and dying there, killed by a frightful catastrophe,--you know it. Our
period teems with such events. Who does not remember that poor young
woman who poisoned herself, overcome by jealousy, which was perhaps
killing Madame de Mortsauf? Who has not shuddered at the fate of that
enchanting young girl who perished after two years of marriage, like a
flower torn by the wind, the victim of her chaste ignorance, the
victim of a villain with whom Ronquerolles, Montriveau, and de Marsay
shake hands because he is useful to their political projects? What
heart has failed to throb at the recital of the last hours of the
woman whom no entreaties could soften, and who would never see her
husband after nobly paying his debts? Madame d'Aiglemont saw death
beside her and was saved only by my brother's care. Society and
science are accomplices in crimes for which there are no assizes. The
world declares that no one dies of grief, or of despair; nor yet of
love, of anguish hidden, of hopes cultivated yet fruitless, again and
again replanted yet forever uprooted. Our new scientific nomenclature
has plenty of words to explain these things; gastritis, pericarditis,
all the thousand maladies of women the names of which are whispered in
the ear, all serve as passports to the coffin followed by hypocritical
tears that are soon wiped by the hand of a notary. Can there be at the
bottom of this great evil some law which we do not know? Must the
centenary pitilessly strew the earth with corpses and dry them to dust
about him that he may raise himself, as the millionaire battens on a
myriad of little industries? Is there some powerful and venomous life
which feasts on these gentle, tender creatures? My God! do I belong to
the race of tigers?

Remorse gripped my heart in its scorching fingers, and my cheeks were
furrowed with tears as I entered the avenue of Clochegourde on a damp
October morning, which loosened the dead leaves of the poplars planted
by Henriette in the path where once she stood and waved her
handkerchief as if to recall me. Was she living? Why did I feel her
two white hands upon my head laid prostrate in the dust? In that
moment I paid for all the pleasures that Arabella had given me, and I
knew that I paid dearly. I swore not to see her again, and a hatred of
England took possession of me. Though Lady Dudley was only a variety
of her species, I included all Englishwomen in my judgment.

I received a fresh shock as I neared Clochegourde. Jacques, Madeleine,
and the Abbe Dominis were kneeling at the foot of a wooden cross
placed on a piece of ground that was taken into the enclosure when the
iron gate was put up, which the count and countess had never been
willing to remove. I sprang from the carriage and went towards them,
my heart aching at the sight of these children and that grave old man
imploring the mercy of God. The old huntsman was there too, with bared
head, standing a little apart.

I stooped to kiss Jacques and Madeleine, who gave me a cold look and
continued praying. The abbe rose from his knees; I took him by the arm
to support myself, saying, "Is she still alive?" He bowed his head
sadly and gently. "Tell me, I implore you for Christ's sake, why are
you praying at the foot of this cross? Why are you here, and not with
her? Why are the children kneeling here this chilly morning? Tell me
all, that I may do no harm through ignorance."

"For the last few days Madame le comtesse has been unwilling to see
her children except at stated times.--Monsieur," he continued after a
pause, "perhaps you had better wait a few hours before seeing Madame
de Mortsauf; she is greatly changed. It is necessary to prepare her
for this interview, or it might cause an increase in her sufferings
--death would be a blessed release from them."

I wrung the hand of the good man, whose look and voice soothed the
pangs of others without sharpening them.

"We are praying God to help her," he continued; "for she, so saintly,
so resigned, so fit to die, has shown during the last few weeks a
horror of death; for the first time in her life she looks at others
who are full of health with gloomy, envious eyes. This aberration
comes less, I think, from the fear of death than from some inward
intoxication,--from the flowers of her youth which ferment as they
wither. Yes, an evil angel is striving against heaven for that
glorious soul. She is passing through her struggle on the Mount of
Olives; her tears bathe the white roses of her crown as they fall, one
by one, from the head of this wedded Jephtha. Wait; do not see her
yet. You would bring to her the atmosphere of the court; she would see
in your face the reflection of the things of life, and you would add
to the bitterness of her regret. Have pity on a weakness which God
Himself forgave to His Son when He took our nature upon Him. What
merit would there be in conquering if we had no adversary? Permit her
confessor or me, two old men whose worn-out lives cause her no pain,
to prepare her for this unlooked-for meeting, for emotions which the
Abbe Birotteau has required her to renounce. But, in the things of
this world there is an invisible thread of divine purpose which
religion alone can see; and since you have come perhaps you are led by
some celestial star of the moral world which leads to the tomb as to
the manger--"

He then told me, with that tempered eloquence which falls like dew
upon the heart, that for the last six months the countess had suffered
daily more and more, in spite of Monsieur Origet's care. The doctor
had come to Clochegourde every evening for two months, striving to
rescue her from death; for her one cry had been, "Oh, save me!" "To
heal the body the heart must first be healed," the doctor had
exclaimed one day.

"As the illness increased, the words of this poor woman, once so
gentle, have grown bitter," said the Abbe. "She calls on earth to keep
her, instead of asking God to take her; then she repents these murmurs
against the divine decree. Such alternations of feeling rend her heart
and make the struggle between body and soul most horrible. Often the
body triumphs. 'You have cost me dear,' she said one day to Jacques
and Madeleine; but in a moment, recalled to God by the look on my
face, she turned to Madeleine with these angelic words, 'The happiness
of others is the joy of those who cannot themselves be happy,'--and
the tone with which she said them brought tears to my eyes. She falls,
it is true, but each time that her feet stumble she rises higher
towards heaven."

Struck by the tone of the successive intimations chance had sent me,
and which in this great concert of misfortunes were like a prelude of
mournful modulations to a funereal theme, the mighty cry of expiring
love, I cried out: "Surely you believe that this pure lily cut from
earth will flower in heaven?"

"You left her still a flower," he answered, "but you will find her
consumed, purified by the forces of suffering, pure as a diamond
buried in the ashes. Yes, that shining soul, angelic star, will issue
glorious from the clouds and pass into the kingdom of the Light."

As I pressed the hand of the good evangelist, my heart overflowing
with gratitude, the count put his head, now entirely white, out of the
door and immediately sprang towards me with signs of surprise.

"She was right! He is here! 'Felix, Felix, Felix has come!' she kept
crying. My dear friend," he continued, beside himself with terror,
"death is here. Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one
foot in the grave?"

I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold
of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn,
the Abbe Birotteau stopped me.

"Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present," he said to
me.

Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going,
all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette
gave them.

"What has happened?" cried the count, alarmed by the commotion, as
much from fear of the coming event as from the natural uneasiness of
his character.

"Only a sick woman's fancy," said the abbe. "Madame la comtesse does
not wish to receive monsieur le vicomte as she now is. She talks of
dressing; why thwart her?"

Manette came in search of Madeleine, whom I saw leave the house a few
moments after she had entered her mother's room. We were all, Jacques
and his father, the two abbes and I, silently walking up and down the
lawn in front of the house. I looked first at Montbazon and then at
Azay, noticing the seared and yellow valley which answered in its
mourning (as it ever did on all occasions) to the feelings of my
heart. Suddenly I beheld the dear "mignonne" gathering the autumn
flowers, no doubt to make a bouquet at her mother's bidding. Thinking
of all which that signified, I was so convulsed within me that I
staggered, my sight was blurred, and the two abbes, between whom I
walked, led me to the wall of a terrace, where I sat for some time
completely broken down but not unconscious.