Works of Honore De Balzac, page 1326
“I shall doubtless sup with my husband,” she said.
This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet’s several stabs with a dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!
Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two tears issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.
Caroline — pious woman that she was — opened the door violently without being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and then hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.
As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid’s finesse:
“Why, madame, your husband’s got back!”
“He has only got back to Paris,” returned the pious Caroline.
USELESS CARE.
Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and yet economically — a house, too, not easy to manage — who, from morality and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment to the sentiment of her duties. This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.
Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel’s, that he was very fond of mushrooms a l’Italienne.
If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good, great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial details.
Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells her that at Biffi’s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini, and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
Caroline’s cook goes to Biffi’s, comes back from Biffi’s, and exhibits to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman’s ears.
“Very good,” she says, “did he explain to you how to cook them?”
“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.
As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how a cook may feather his nest.
At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had waited for her husband.
But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure, there is, to the souls of the elect — and everybody will include a woman who adores her husband among the elect — there is, between these two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night and a fine day.
The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for some kind of shell-fish.
“Well, Adolphe?”
“Well, dear.”
“Don’t you recognize them?”
“Recognize what?”
“Your mushrooms a l’Italienne?”
“These mushrooms! I thought they were — well, yes, they are mushrooms!”
“Yes, and a l’Italienne, too.”
“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, a la milanaise. I abominate them!”
“What kind is it you like, then?”
“Fungi trifolati.”
Let us observe — to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the termination us, so that a Silbermanus is the same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a butterfly’s legs with pincers — that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen Latin.
“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face of his chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called Mushrooms a l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise. The mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe — ”
Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a woman’s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of eight. Ab uno disce omnes: which means, “There’s one of them: find the rest in your memory.” For we have taken this culinary description as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently loved women.
SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy. This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman’s confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who possess treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend wings and feet to their golden stores.
The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to abandon it.
Axiom. — A woman is never deserted without a reason.
This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the rage of a woman deserted.
Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may: for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust, engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of all.
Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel’s affair, which never comes to an end.
Axiom. — Every household has its Chaumontel’s affair. (See TROUBLE
WITHIN TROUBLE.)
In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
“Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left me? Why did he not take me with him?”
These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these frightful tempests which ravage a woman’s heart springs an ignoble, unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the shopkeeper’s wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker’s lady, the angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate, at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in the interest of their love. This fatal woman’s curiosity reduces them to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in this situation, has not lost her self-respect, — a situation in which her jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your little boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of your desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with private compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your india-rubber girdles — her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.
In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to know the whole truth.
And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
“Madame,” Justine one day observes, “monsieur really does go out to see a woman.”
Caroline turns pale.
“But don’t be alarmed, madame, it’s an old woman.”
“Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable.”
“But, madame, it isn’t a lady, it’s a woman, quite a common woman.”
“Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de
Fischtaminel told me so.”
And Caroline bursts into tears.
“I’ve been pumping Benoit.”
“What is Benoit’s opinion?”
“Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his secret from everybody, even from Benoit.”
For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go to pay spies and to purchase reports.
Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet; she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very much like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand mother who has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly school-bills, and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two thousand francs which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.
“What of the mother?” exclaims Caroline.
To end the matter, Justine, Caroline’s good genius, proves to her that M’lle Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her fortune, or else, again, that her place in society is so low there is no danger of madame’s ever meeting her.
Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she is quite happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like a boy. This little drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the conjectures to which Mother Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a causeless jealousy, are laid down here as the type of a situation, the varieties of which are as innumerable as characters, grades and sorts.
This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women seated upon the river’s bank may contemplate in it the course of their own married life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own adventures to mind, their untold disasters, the foibles which caused their errors, and the peculiar fatalities to which were due an instant of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary despair, or sufferings which they might have spared themselves, happy in their self-delusions.
This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more serious and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among vices of another kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work, women are invariably esteemed honest — until the end.
THE DOMESTIC TYRANT.
“My dear Caroline,” says Adolphe one day to his wife, “are you satisfied with Justine?”
“Yes, dear, quite so.”
“Don’t you think she speaks to you rather impertinently?”
“Do you suppose I would notice a maid? But it seems you notice her!”
“What do you say?” asks Adolphe in an indignant way that is always delightful to women.
Justine is a genuine maid for an actress, a woman of thirty stamped by the small-pox with innumerable dimples, in which the loves are far from sporting: she is as brown as opium, has a good deal of leg and not much body, gummy eyes, and a tournure to match. She would like to have Benoit marry her, but at this unexpected suggestion, Benoit asked for his discharge. Such is the portrait of the domestic tyrant enthroned by Caroline’s jealousy.
Justine takes her coffee in the morning, in bed, and manages to have it as good as, not to say better than, that of her mistress. Justine sometimes goes out without asking leave, dressed like the wife of a second-class banker. She sports a pink hat, one of her mistress’ old gowns made over, an elegant shawl, shoes of bronze kid, and jewelry of doubtful character.
Justine is sometimes in a bad humor, and makes her mistress feel that she too is a woman like herself, though she is not married. She has her whims, her fits of melancholy, her caprices. She even dares to have her nerves! She replies curtly, she makes herself insupportable to the other servants, and, to conclude, her wages have been considerably increased.
“My dear, this girl is getting more intolerable every day,” says Adolphe one morning to his wife, on noticing Justine listening at the key-hole, “and if you don’t send her away, I will!”
Caroline, greatly alarmed, is obliged to give Justine a talking to, while her husband is out.
“Justine, you take advantage of my kindness to you: you have high wages, here, you have perquisites, presents: try to keep your place, for my husband wants to send you away.”
The maid humbles herself to the earth, she sheds tears: she is so attached to madame! Ah! she would rush into the fire for her: she would let herself be chopped into mince-meat: she is ready for anything.
“If you had anything to conceal, madame, I would take it on myself and say it was me!”
“Very well, Justine, very good, my girl,” says Caroline, terrified: “but that’s not the point: just try to keep in your place.”
“Ah, ha!” says Justine to herself, “monsieur wants to send me away, does he? Wait and see the deuce of a life I’ll lead you, you old curmudgeon!”
A week after, Justine, who is dressing her mistress’ hair, looks in the glass to make sure that Caroline can see all the grimaces of her countenance: and Caroline very soon inquires, “Why, what’s the matter, Justine?”
“I would tell you, readily, madame, but then, madame, you are so weak with monsieur!”
“Come, go on, what is it?”
“I know now, madame, why master wanted to show me the door: he has confidence in nobody but Benoit, and Benoit is playing the mum with me.”
“Well, what does that prove? Has anything been discovered?”
“I’m sure that between the two they are plotting something against you madame,” returns the maid with authority.
Caroline, whom Justine watches in the glass, turns pale: all the tortures of the previous petty trouble return, and Justine sees that she has become as indispensable to her mistress as spies are to the government when a conspiracy is discovered. Still, Caroline’s friends do not understand why she keeps so disagreeable a servant girl, one who wears a hat, whose manners are impertinent, and who gives herself the airs of a lady.
This stupid domination is talked of at Madame Deschars’, at Madame de Fischtaminel’s, and the company consider it funny. A few ladies think they can see certain monstrous reasons for it, reasons which compromise Caroline’s honor.
Axiom. — In society, people can put cloaks on every kind of truth, even the prettiest.
In short the aria della calumnia is executed precisely as if
Bartholo were singing it.
It is averred that Caroline cannot discharge her maid.
Society devotes itself desperately to discovering the secret of this enigma. Madame de Fischtaminel makes fun of Adolphe who goes home in a rage, has a scene with Caroline and discharges Justine.
This produces such an effect upon Justine, that she falls sick, and takes to her bed. Caroline observes to her husband, that it would be awkward to turn a girl in Justine’s condition into the street, a girl who is so much attached to them, too, and who has been with them sine their marriage.
“Let her go then as soon as she is well!” says Adolphe.
Caroline, reassured in regard to Adolphe, and indecently swindled by
Justine, at last comes to desire to get rid of her: she applies a
violent remedy to the disease, and makes up her mind to go under the
