Works of Honore De Balzac, page 181
Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up Les Touches, and leave the two women forever.
“Not go to Les Touches!” he cried.
“Oh! yes, yes, go! do not look so, my darling!” she cried, kissing him on the eyes that had flashed such flames.
Under these circumstances Calyste often came near losing the fruit of Camille’s plot through the Breton fury of his love, of which he was ceasing to be the master. Finally, he swore to himself, in spite of his promise to Felicite, to see Beatrix, and speak to her. He wanted to read her eyes, to bathe in their light, to examine every detail of her dress, breathe its perfume, listen to the music of her voice, watch the graceful composition of her movements, embrace at a glance the whole figure, and study her as a general studies the field where he means to win a decisive battle. He willed as lovers will; he was grasped by desires which closed his ears and darkened his intellect, and threw him into an unnatural state in which he was conscious of neither obstacles, nor distances, nor the existence even of his own body.
One morning he resolved to go to Les Touches at an earlier hour than that agreed upon, and endeavor to meet Beatrix in the garden. He knew she walked there daily before breakfast.
Mademoiselle des Touches and the marquise had gone, as it happened, to see the marshes and the little bay with its margin of fine sand, where the sea penetrates and lies like a lake in the midst of the dunes. They had just returned, and were walking up a garden path beside the lawn, conversing as they walked.
“If the scenery pleases you,” said Camille, “we must take Calyste and make a trip to Croisic. There are splendid rocks there, cascades of granite, little bays with natural basins, charmingly unexpected and capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble fragments, — a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to dry in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris.”
“What! will you really risk Calyste?” cried the marquise, laughing, in a tone which proved that Camille’s ruse had answered its purpose.
“Ah, my dear,” she replied, “if you did but know the angelic soul of that dear child, you would understand me. In him, mere beauty is nothing; one must enter that pure heart, which is amazed at every step it takes into the kingdom of love. What faith! what grace! what innocence! The ancients were right enough in the worship they paid to sacred beauty. Some traveller, I forget who, relates that when wild horses lose their leader they choose the handsomest horse in the herd for his successor. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of things; it is the ensign which Nature hoists over her most precious creations; it is the trust of symbols as it is the greatest of accidents. Did any one ever suppose that angels could be deformed? are they not necessarily a combination of grace and strength? What is it that makes us stand for hours before some picture in Italy, where genius has striven through years of toil to realize but one of those accidents of Nature? Come, call up your sense of the truth of things and answer me; is it not the Idea of Beauty which our souls associate with moral grandeur? Well, Calyste is one of those dreams, those visions, realized. He has the regal power of a lion, tranquilly unsuspicious of its royalty. When he feels at his ease, he is witty; and I love his girlish timidity. My soul rests in his heart away from all corruptions, all ideas of knowledge, literature, the world, society, politics, — those useless accessories under which we stifle happiness. I am what I have never been, — a child! I am sure of him, but I like to play at jealousy; he likes it too. Besides, that is part of my secret.”
Beatrix walked on pensively, in silence. Camille endured unspeakable martyrdom, and she cast a sidelong look at her companion which looked like flame.
“Ah, my dear; but you are happy,” said Beatrix presently, laying her hand on Camille’s arm like a woman wearied out with some inward struggle.
“Yes, happy indeed!” replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.
The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.
“Yes, you are happy, but I!” she said, — ”to know of Conti’s infidelities, and have to bear them!”
“Why not leave him?” said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike a decisive blow.
“Can I?”
“Oh! poor boy!”
Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.
Camille rose.
“I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite,” she said.
“Our conversation has taken away mine,” remarked Beatrix.
The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the dark greens of the foliage. Calyste, who had slipped through the salon into the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he were meeting her by accident. Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as he approached her.
“Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?” he said, after the first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.
“But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me,” she said, in a gentle voice.
The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words encouraged Calyste.
“Am I so indifferent to you?” he said in a troubled voice, as the tears came into his eyes.
“Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?” replied the marquise. “Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?”
“Oh!” cried Calyste, “if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love her no longer.”
“Then why are you shut up together every morning?” she said, with a treacherous smile. “I don’t suppose that Camille, in spite of her passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their romances.”
“So then you know — ” began the guileless young Breton, his face glowing with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.
“Calyste!” cried Camille, angrily, suddenly appearing and interrupting him. She took his arm and drew him away to some distance. “Calyste, is this what you promised me?”
Beatrix heard these words of reproach as Mademoiselle des Touches disappeared toward the house, taking Calyste with her. She was stupefied by the young man’s assertion, and could not comprehend it; she was not as strong as Claude Vignon. In truth, the part being played by Camille Maupin, as shocking as it was grand, is one of those wicked grandeurs which women only practise when driven to extremity. By it their hearts are broken; in it the feelings of their sex are lost to them; it begins an abnegation which ends by either plunging them to hell, or lifting them to heaven.
During breakfast, which Calyste was invited to share, the marquise, whose sentiments could be noble and generous, made a sudden return upon herself, resolving to stifle the germs of love which were rising in her heart. She was neither cold nor hard to Calyste, but gently indifferent, — a course which tortured him. Felicite brought forward a proposition that they should make, on the next day but one, an excursion into the curious and interesting country lying between Les Touches, Croisic, and the village of Batz. She begged Calyste to employ himself on the morrow in hiring a boat and sailors to take them across the little bay, undertaking herself to provide horses and provisions, and all else that was necessary for a party of pleasure, in which there was to be no fatigue. Beatrix stopped the matter short, however, by saying that she did not wish to make excursions round the country. Calyste’s face, which had beamed with delight at the prospect, was suddenly overclouded.
“What are you afraid of, my dear?” asked Camille.
“My position is so delicate I do not wish to compromise — I will not say my reputation, but my happiness,” she said, meaningly, with a glance at the young Breton. “You know very well how suspicious Conti can be; if he knew — ”
“Who will tell him?”
“He is coming back here to fetch me,” said Beatrix.
Calyste turned pale. In spite of all that Camille could urge, in spite of Calyste’s entreaties, Madame de Rochefide remained inflexible, and showed what Camille had called her obstinacy. Calyste left Les Touches the victim of one of those depressions of love which threaten, in certain men, to turn into madness. He began to revolve in his mind some decided means of coming to an explanation with Beatrix.
XII. CORRESPONDENCE
When Calyste reached home, he did not leave his room until dinner time; and after dinner he went back to it. At ten o’clock his mother, uneasy at his absence, went to look for him, and found him writing in the midst of a pile of blotted and half-torn paper. He was writing to Beatrix, for distrust of Camille had come into his mind. The air and manner of the marquise during their brief interview in the garden had singularly encouraged him.
No first love-letter ever was or ever will be, as may readily be supposed, a brilliant effort of the mind. In all young men not tainted by corruption such a letter is written with gushings from the heart, too overflowing, too multifarious not to be the essence, the elixir of many other letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.
Here is the one that Calyste finally composed and which he read aloud to his poor, astonished mother. To her the old mansion seemed to have taken fire; this love of her son flamed up in it like the glare of a conflagration.
Calyste to Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.
Madame, — I loved you when you were to me but a dream; judge,
therefore, of the force my love acquired when I saw you. The dream
was far surpassed by the reality. It is my grief and my misfortune
to have nothing to say to you that you do not know already of your
beauty and your charms; and yet, perhaps, they have awakened in no
other heart so deep a sentiment as they have in me.
In so many ways you are beautiful; I have studied you so much
while thinking of you day and night that I have penetrated the
mysteries of your being, the secrets of your heart, and your
delicacy, so little appreciated. Have you ever been loved,
understood, adored as you deserve to be?
Let me tell you now that there is not a trait in your nature which
my heart does not interpret; your pride is understood by mine; the
grandeur of your glance, the grace of your bearing, the
distinction of your movements, — all things about your person are
in harmony with the thoughts, the hopes, the desires hidden in the
depths of your soul; it is because I have divined them all that I
think myself worthy of your notice. If I had not become, within
the last few days, another yourself, I could not speak to you of
myself; this letter, indeed, relates far more to you than it does
to me.
Beatrix, in order to write to you, I have silenced my youth, I
have laid aside myself, I have aged my thoughts, — or, rather, it
is you who have aged them, by this week of dreadful sufferings
caused, innocently indeed, by you.
Do not think me one of those common lovers at whom I have heard
you laugh so justly. What merit is there in loving a young and
beautiful and wise and noble woman. Alas! I have no merit! What
can I be to you? A child, attracted by effulgence of beauty and by
moral grandeur, as the insects are attracted to the light. You
cannot do otherwise than tread upon the flowers of my soul; they
are there at your feet, and all my happiness consists in your
stepping on them.
Absolute devotion, unbounded faith, love unquenchable, — all these
treasures of a true and tender heart are nothing, nothing! they
serve only to love with, they cannot win the love we crave.
Sometimes I do not understand why a worship so ardent does not
warm its idol; and when I meet your eye, so cold, so stern, I turn
to ice within me. Your disdain, that is the acting force between
us, not my worship. Why? You cannot hate me as much as I love you;
why, then, does the weaker feeling rule the stronger? I loved
Felicite with all the powers of my heart; yet I forgot her in a
day, in a moment, when I saw you. She was my error; you are my
truth.
You have, unknowingly, destroyed my happiness, and yet you owe me
nothing in return. I loved Camille without hope, and I have no
hope from you; nothing is changed but my divinity. I was a pagan;
I am now a Christian, that is all —
Except this: you have taught me that to love is the greatest of
all joys; the joy of being loved comes later. According to
Camille, it is not loving to love for a short time only; the love
that does not grow from day to day, from hour to hour, is a mere
wretched passion. In order to grow, love must not see its end; and
she saw the end of ours, the setting of our sun of love. When I
beheld you, I understood her words, which, until then, I had
disputed with all my youth, with all the ardor of my desires, with
the despotic sternness of twenty years. That grand and noble
Camille mingled her tears with mine, and yet she firmly rejected
the love she saw must end. Therefore I am free to love you here on
earth and in the heaven above us, as we love God. If you loved me,
you would have no such arguments as Camille used to overthrow my
love. We are both young; we could fly on equal wing across our
sunny heaven, not fearing storms as that grand eagle feared them.
But ha! what am I saying? my thoughts have carried me beyond the
humility of my real hopes. Believe me, believe in the submission,
the patience, the mute adoration which I only ask you not to wound
uselessly. I know, Beatrix, that you cannot love me without the
loss of your self-esteem; therefore I ask for no return. Camille
once said there was some hidden fatality in names, a propos of
hers. That fatality I felt for myself on the jetty of Guerande,
when I read on the shores of the ocean your name. Yes, you will
pass through my life as Beatrice passed through that of Dante. My
heart will be a pedestal for that white statue, cold, distant,
jealous, and oppressive.
It is forbidden to you to love me; I know that. You will suffer a
thousand deaths, you will be betrayed, humiliated, unhappy; but
you have in you a devil’s pride, which binds you to that column
you have once embraced, — you are like Samson, you will perish by
holding to it. But this I have not divined; my love is too blind
for that; Camille has told it to me. It is not my mind that speaks
to you of this, it is hers. I have no mind with which to reason
when I think of you; blood gushes from my heart, and its hot wave
darkens my intellect, weakens my strength, paralyzes my tongue,
and bends my knees. I can only adore you, whatever you may do to
me.
Camille calls your resolution obstinacy; I defend you, and I call
it virtue. You are only the more beautiful because of it. I know
my destiny, and the pride of a Breton can rise to the height of
the woman who makes her pride a virtue.
Therefore, dear Beatrix, be kind, be consoling to me. When victims
were selected, they crowned them with flowers; so do you to me;
you owe me the flowers of pity, the music of my sacrifice. Am I
not a proof of your grandeur? Will you not rise to the level of my
disdained love, — disdained in spite of its sincerity, in spite of
its immortal passion?
Ask Camille how I behaved to her after the day she told me, on her
return to Les Touches, that she loved Claude Vignon. I was mute; I
suffered in silence. Well, for you I will show even greater
strength, — I will bury my feelings in my heart, if you will not
drive me to despair, if you will only understand my heroism. A
single word of praise from you is enough to make me bear the pains
of martyrdom.
But if you persist in this cold silence, this deadly disdain, you
will make me think you fear me. Ah, Beatrix, be with me what you
are, — charming, witty, gay, and tender. Talk to me of Conti, as
Camille has talked to me of Claude. I have no other spirit in my
soul, no other genius but that of love; nothing is there that can
make you fear me; I will be in your presence as if I loved you
not.
Can you reject so humble a prayer? — the prayer of a child who only
asks that his Light shall lighten him, that his Sun may warm him.
