Works of Honore De Balzac, page 199
“I will not receive him any more,” replied Madame Schontz, with a prudish little air. “Now that we have come to an understanding, my Fabien, you must go; it is one o’clock.”
This little scene gave birth in the household of Arthur and Aurelie (so completely happy until now) to a phase of domestic warfare produced in the bosom of all homes by some secret and alien interest in one of the partners. The next day when Arthur awoke he found Madame Schontz as frigid as that class of woman knows how to make herself.
“What happened last night?” he said, as he breakfasted, looking at Aurelie.
“What often happens in Paris,” she replied, “one goes to bed in damp weather and the next morning the pavements are dry and frozen so hard that they are dusty. Do you want a brush?”
“What’s the matter with you, dearest?”
“Go and find your great scarecrow of a wife!”
“My wife!” exclaimed the poor marquis.
“Don’t I know why you brought Maxime here? You mean to make up with Madame de Rochefide, who wants you perhaps for some indiscreet brat. And I, whom you call so clever, I advised you to give back her fortune! Oh! I see your scheme. At the end of five years Monsieur is tired of me. I’m getting fat, Beatrix is all bones — it will be a change for you! You are not the first I’ve known to like skeletons. Your Beatrix knows how to dress herself, that’s true; and you are man who likes figure-heads. Besides, you want to send Monsieur du Guenic to the right-about. It will be a triumph! You’ll cut quite an appearance in the world! How people will talk of it! Why! you’ll be a hero!”
Madame Schontz did not make an end of her sarcasms for two hours after mid-day, in spite of Arthur’s protestations. She then said she was invited out to dinner, and advised her “faithless one” to go without her to the Opera, for she herself was going to the Ambigu-Comique to meet Madame de la Baudraye, a charming woman, a friend of Lousteau. Arthur proposed, as proof of his eternal attachment to his little Aurelie and his detestation of his wife, to start the next day for Italy, and live as a married couple in Rome, Naples, Florence, — in short, wherever she liked, offering her a gift of sixty thousand francs.
“All that is nonsense,” she said. “It won’t prevent you from making up with your wife, and you’ll do a wise thing.”
Arthur and Aurelie parted on this formidable dialogue, he to play cards and dine at the club, she to dress and spend the evening tete-a-tete with Fabien.
Monsieur de Rochefide found Maxime at the club, and complained to him like a man who feels that his happiness is being torn from his heart by the roots, every fibre of which clung to it. Maxime listened to his moans, as persons of social politeness are accustomed to listen, while thinking of other things.
“I’m a man of good counsel in such matters, my dear fellow,” he answered. “Well, let me tell you, you are on the wrong road in letting Aurelie see how dear she is to you. Allow me to present you to Madame Antonia. There’s a heart to let. You’ll soon see La Schontz with other eyes. She is thirty-seven years old, that Schontz of yours, and Madame Antonia is only twenty-six! And what a woman! I may say she is my pupil. If Madame Schontz persists in keeping on the hind heels of her pride, don’t you know what that means?”
“Faith, no!”
“That she wants to marry, and if that’s the case, nothing can hinder her from leaving you. After a lease of six years a woman has a right to do so. Now, if you will only listen to me, you can do a better thing for yourself. Your wife is to-day worth more than all the Schontzes and Antonias of the quartier Saint-Georges. I admit the conquest is difficult, but it is not impossible; and after all that has happened she will make you as happy as an Orgon. In any case, you mustn’t look like a fool; come and sup to-night with Antonia.”
“No, I love Aurelie too well; I won’t give her any reason to complain of me.”
“Ah! my dear fellow, what a future you are preparing for yourself!” cried Maxime.
“It is eleven o’clock; she must have returned from the Ambigu,” said Rochefide, leaving the club.
And he called out his coachman to drive at top speed to the rue de la Bruyere.
Madame Schontz had given precise directions; monsieur could enter as master with the fullest understanding of madame; but, warned by the noise of monsieur’s arrival, madame had so arranged that the sound of her dressing-door closing as women’s doors do close when they are surprised, was to reach monsieur’s ears. Then, at a corner of the piano, Fabien’s hat, forgotten intentionally, was removed very awkwardly by a maid the moment after monsieur had entered the room.
“Did you go to the Ambigu, my little girl?”
“No, I changed my mind, and stayed at home to play music.”
“Who came to see you?” asked the marquis, good-humoredly, seeing the hat carried off by the maid.
“No one.”
At that audacious falsehood Arthur bowed his head; he passed beneath the Caudine forks of submission. A real love descends at times to these sublime meannesses. Arthur behaved with Madame Schontz as Sabine with Calyste, and Calyste with Beatrix.
Within a week the transition from larva to butterfly took place in the young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably, covering his deficits with an audacity equal to that of Danton. But he now paid his debts; he now, by advice of Maxime, had a little carriage; he was admitted to the Jockey Club and to the club of the rue de Gramont; he became supremely elegant, and he published in the “Journal des Debats” a novelette which won him in a few days a reputation which authors by profession obtain after years of toil and successes only; for there is nothing so usurping in Paris as that which ought to be ephemeral. Nathan, very certain that the count would never publish anything else, lauded the graceful and presuming young man so highly to Beatrix that she, spurred by the praise of the poet, expressed a strong desire to see this king of the vagabonds of good society.
“He will be all the more delighted to come here,” replied Nathan, “because, as I happen to know, he has fallen in love with you to the point of committing all sorts of follies.”
“But I am told he has already committed them.”
“No, not all; he has not yet committed that of falling in love with a virtuous woman.”
Some ten days after the scheme plotted on the boulevard between Maxime and his henchman, the seductive Charles-Edouard, the latter, to whom Nature had given, no doubt sarcastically, a face of charming melancholy, made his first irruption into the nest of the dove of the rue de Chartres, who took for his reception an evening when Calyste was obliged to go to a party with his wife.
If you should ever meet La Palferine you will understand perfectly the success obtained in a single evening by that sparkling mind, that animated fancy, especially if you take into consideration the admirable adroitness of the showman who consented to superintend this debut. Nathan was a good comrade, and he made the young count shine, as a jeweller showing off an ornament in hopes to sell it, makes the diamonds glitter. La Palferine was, discreetly, the first to withdraw; he left Nathan and the marquise together, relying on the collaboration of the celebrated author, which was admirable. Seeing that Beatrix was quite astounded, Raoul put fire into her heart by pretended reticences which stirred the fibres of a curiosity she did not know she possessed. Nathan hinted that La Palferine’s wit was not so much the cause of his success with women as his superiority in the art of love; a statement which magnified the count immensely.
This is the place to record a new effect of that great law of contraries, which produces so many crises in the human heart and accounts for such varied eccentricities that we are forced to remember it sometimes as well as its counterpart, the law of similitudes. All courtesans preserve in the depths of their heart a perennial desire to recover their liberty; to this they would sacrifice everything. They feel this antithetical need with such intensity that it is rare to meet with one of these women who has not aspired several times to a return to virtue through love. They are not discouraged by the most cruel deceptions. On the other hand, women restrained by their education, by the station they occupy, chained by the rank of their families, living in the midst of opulence, and wearing a halo of virtue, are drawn at times, secretly be it understood, toward the tropical regions of love. These two natures of woman, so opposed to each other, have at the bottom of their hearts, the one that faint desire for virtue, the other that faint desire for libertinism which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to have the courage to diagnose. In one, it is a last reflexion of the ray divine that is not extinct; in the other, it is the last remains of our primitive clay.
This claw of the beast was rapped, this hair of the devil was pulled by Nathan with extreme cleverness. The marquise began to ask herself seriously if, up to the present time, she had not been the dupe of her head, and whether her education was complete. Vice — what is it? Possibly only the desire to know everything.
XXVI. DISILLUSIONS — IN ALL BUT LA FONTAINE’S FABLES
The next day Calyste seemed to Beatrix just what he was: a perfect and loyal gentleman without imagination or cleverness. In Paris, a man called clever must have spontaneous brilliancy, as the fountains have water; men of the world and Parisians in general are in that way very clever. But Calyste loved too deeply, he was too much absorbed in his own sentiments to perceive the change in Beatrix, and to satisfy her need by displaying new resources. To her, he seemed pale indeed, after the brilliancy of the night before, and he caused not the faintest emotion to the hungry Beatrix. A great love is a credit opened to a power so voracious that bankruptcy is sure to come sooner or later.
In spite of the fatigue of this day (the day when a woman is bored by a lover) Beatrix trembled with fear at the thought of a possible meeting between La Palferine and Calyste, a man of courage without assertion. She hesitated to see the count again; but the knot of her hesitation was cut by a decisive event.
Beatrix had taken the third of a box at the Opera, obscurely situated on the lower tier for the purpose of not being much in sight. For the last few days Calyste, grown bolder, had escorted the marquise to her box, placing himself behind her, and timing their arrival at a late hour so as to meet no one in the corridors. Beatrix, on these occasions, left the box alone before the end of the last act, and Calyste followed at a distance to watch over her, although old Antoine was always there to attend his mistress. Maxime and La Palferine had studied this strategy, which was prompted by respect for the proprieties, also by that desire for concealment which characterizes the idolators of the little god, and also, again, by the fear which oppresses all women who have been constellations in the world and whom love has caused to fall from their zodiacal eminence. Public humiliation is dreaded as an agony more cruel than death itself. But, by a manoeuvre of Maxime’s, that blow to her pride, that outrage which women secure of their rank in Olympus cast upon others who have fallen from their midst, was now to descend on Beatrix.
At a performance of “Lucia,” which ends, as every one knows, with one of the finest triumphs of Rubini, Madame de Rochefide, whom Antoine had not yet come to fetch, reached the peristyle of the opera-house by the lower corridor just as the staircase was crowded by fashionable women ranged on the stairs or standing in groups below it, awaiting the announcement of their carriages. Beatrix was instantly recognized; whispers which soon became a murmur arose in every group. In a moment the crowd dispersed; the marquise was left alone like a leper. Calyste dared not, seeing his wife on the staircase, advance to accompany her, though twice she vainly cast him a tearful glance, a prayer, that he would come to her. At that moment, La Palferine, elegant, superb, charming, left two ladies with whom he had been talking, and came down to the marquise.
“Take my arm,” he said, bowing, “and walk proudly out. I will find your carriage.”
“Will you come home with me and finish the evening?” she answered, getting into her carriage and making room for him.
La Palferine said to his groom, “Follow the carriage of madame,” and then he jumped into it beside her to the utter stupefaction of Calyste, who stood for a moment planted on his two legs as if they were lead. It was the sight of him standing thus, pale and livid, that caused Beatrix to make the sign to La Palferine to enter her carriage. Doves can be Robespierres in spite of their white wings. Three carriages reached the rue de Chartres with thundering rapidity, — that of Calyste, that of the marquise, and that of La Palferine.
“Oh! you here?” said Beatrix, entering her salon on the arm of the young count, and finding Calyste, whose horse had outstripped those of the other carriages.
“Then you know monsieur?” said Calyste, furiously.
“Monsieur le Comte de la Palferine was presented to me ten days ago by Nathan,” she replied; “but you, monsieur, you have known me four years! — ”
“And I am ready, madame,” said Charles-Edouard, “to make the Marquise d’Espard repent to her third generation for being the first to turn away from you.”
“Ah! it was she, was it?” cried Beatrix; “I will make her rue it.”
“To revenge yourself thoroughly,” said the young man in her ear, “you ought to recover your husband; and I am capable of bringing him back to you.”
The conversation, thus begun, went on till two in the morning, without allowing Calyste, whose anger was again and again repressed by a look from Beatrix, to say one word to her in private. La Palferine, though he did not like Beatrix, showed a superiority of grace, good taste, and cleverness equal to the evident inferiority of Calyste, who wriggled in his chair like a worm cut in two, and actually rose three times as if to box the ears of La Palferine. The third time that he made a dart forward, the young count said to him, “Are you in pain, monsieur?” in a manner which sent Calyste back to his chair, where he sat as rigid as a mile-stone.
The marquise conversed with the ease of a Celimene, pretending to ignore that Calyste was there. La Palferine had the cleverness to depart after a brilliant witticism, leaving the two lovers to a quarrel.
Thus, by Maxime’s machinations, the fire of discord flamed in the separate households of Monsieur and of Madame de Rochefide. The next day, learning the success of this last scene from La Palferine at the Jockey Club, where the young count was playing whist, Maxime went to the hotel Schontz to ascertain with what success Aurelie was rowing her boat.
“My dear,” said Madame Schontz, laughing at Maxime’s expression, “I am at an end of my expedients. Rochefide is incurable. I end my career of gallantry by perceiving that cleverness is a misfortune.”
“Explain to me that remark.”
“In the first place, my dear friend, I have kept Arthur for the last week to a regimen of kicks on the shin and perpetual wrangling and jarring; in short, all we have that is most disagreeable in our business. ‘You are ill,’ he says to me with paternal sweetness, ‘for I have been good to you always and I love you to adoration.’ ‘You are to blame for one thing, my dear,’ I answered; ‘you bore me.’ ‘Well, if I do, haven’t you the wittiest and handsomest young man in Paris to amuse you?’ said the poor man. I was caught. I actually felt I loved him.”
“Ah!” said Maxime.
“How could I help it? Feeling is stronger than we; one can’t resist such things. So I changed pedals. I began to entice my judicial wild-boar, now turned like Arthur to a sheep; I gave him Arthur’s sofa. Heavens! how he bored me. But, you understand, I had to have Fabien there to let Arthur surprise us.”
“Well,” cried Maxime, “go on; what happened? Was Arthur furious?”
“You know nothing about it, my old fellow. When Arthur came in and ‘surprised’ us, Fabien and me, he retreated on the tips of his toes to the dining-room, where he began to clear his throat, ‘broum, broum!’ and cough, and knock the chairs about. That great fool of a Fabien, to whom, of course, I can’t explain the whole matter, was frightened. There, my dear Maxime, is the point we have reached.”
Maxime nodded his head, and played for a few moments with his cane.
“I have known such natures,” he said. “And the only way for you to do is to pitch Arthur out of the window and lock the door upon him. This is how you must manage it. Play that scene over again with Fabien; when Arthur surprises you, give Fabien a glance Arthur can’t mistake; if he gets angry, that will end the matter; if he still says, ‘broum, broum!’ it is just as good; you can end it a better way.”
“How?”
“Why, get angry, and say: ‘I believed you loved me, respected me; but I see you’ve no feeling at all, not even jealousy,’ — you know the tirade. ‘In a case like this, Maxime’ (bring me in) ‘would kill his man on the spot’ (then weep). ‘And Fabien, he’ (mortify him by comparing him with that fellow), ‘Fabien whom I love, Fabien would have drawn a dagger and stabbed you to the heart. Ah, that’s what it is to love! Farewell, monsieur; take back your house and all your property; I shall marry Fabien; he gives me his name; he marries me in spite of his old mother — but you — ’”
“I see! I see!” cried Madame Schontz. “I’ll be superb! Ah! Maxime, there will never be but one Maxime, just as there’s only one de Marsay.”
“La Palferine is better than I,” replied the Comte de Trailles, modestly. “He’ll make his mark.”
“La Palferine has tongue, but you have fist and loins. What weights you’ve carried! what cuffs you’ve given!”
“La Palferine has all that, too; he is deep and he is educated, whereas I am ignorant,” replied Maxime. “I have seen Rastignac, who has made an arrangement with the Keeper of the Seals. Fabien is to be appointed chief-justice at once, and officer of the Legion of honor after one year’s service.”
“I shall make myself devote,” said Madame Schontz, accenting that speech in a manner which obtained a nod of approbation from Maxime.
“Priests can do more than even we,” he replied sententiously.
“Ah! can they?” said Madame Schontz. “Then I may still find some one in the provinces fit to talk to. I’ve already begun my role. Fabien has written to his mother that grace has enlightened me; and he has fascinated the good woman with my million and the chief-justiceship. She consents that we shall live with her, and sends me her portrait, and wants mine. If Cupid looked at hers he would die on the spot. Come, go away, Maxime. I must put an end to my poor Arthur to-night, and it breaks my heart.”
