Works of Honore De Balzac, page 413
Lousteau found in Madame de la Baudraye an artlessness, nay, if you will, an innocence of mind which made her very original; there was much more of the unexpected and winning in her than in a girl. Lousteau was quite alive to a form of flattery which in most women is assumed, but which in Dinah was genuine; she really learned from him the ways of love; he really was the first to reign in her heart. And, indeed, he took the trouble to be exceedingly amiable.
Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of cantabile, of nocturnes, airs and refrains — shall we say of recipes, although we speak of love — which each one believes to be exclusively his own. Men who have reached Lousteau’s age try to distribute the “movements” of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion. Lousteau, regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection, was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing melodies and most elaborate barcarolles. In fact, he exhausted every resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of his manoeuvres.
“If that woman ever forgets me!” he would sometimes say to himself as they returned together from a long walk in the woods, “I will owe her no grudge — she will have found something better.”
When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.
Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence in Paris. Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an artist from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.
“What are you going to do?” asked Lousteau. “What is to be done to the chateau?”
“This is what I am going to do,” said the little man, leading Lousteau, the local artist, and Dinah out on the terrace.
He pointed out, on the front of the building, a shield supported by two sirens, not unlike that which may be seen on the arcade, now closed, through which there used to be a passage from the Quai des Tuileries to the courtyard of the old Louvre, and over which the words may still be seen, “Bibliotheque du Cabinet du Roi.” This shield bore the arms of the noble House of Uxelles, namely, Or and gules party per fess, with two lions or, dexter and sinister as supporters. Above, a knight’s helm, mantled of the tincture of the shield, and surmounted by a ducal coronet. Motto, Cy paroist! A proud and sonorous device.
“I want to put my own coat of arms in the place of that of the Uxelles; and as they are repeated six times on the two fronts and the two wings, it is not a trifling affair.”
“Your arms, so new, and since 1830!” exclaimed Dinah.
“Have I not created an entail?”
“I could understand it if you had children,” said the journalist.
“Oh!” said the old man, “Madame de la Baudraye is still young; there is no time lost.”
This allusion made Lousteau smile; he did not understand Monsieur de la Baudraye.
“There, Didine!” said he in Dinah’s ear, “what a waste of remorse!”
Dinah begged him to give her one day more, and the lovers parted after the manner of certain theatres, which give ten last performances of a piece that is paying. And how many promises they made! How many solemn pledges did not Dinah exact and the unblushing journalist give her!
Dinah, with superiority of the Superior Woman, accompanied Lousteau, in the face of all the world, as far as Cosne, with her mother and little La Baudraye. When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn:
“I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been loved for my own sake.”
And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth. Of Dinah’s three worshipers, Monsieur de Clagny only said to her: “I love you, come what may” — and Dinah accepted him as her confidant, lavished on him all the marks of friendship which women can devise for the Gurths who are ready thus to wear the collar of gilded slavery.
In Paris once more, Lousteau had, in a few weeks, lost the impression of the happy time he had spent at the Chateau d’Anzy. This is why: Lousteau lived by his pen.
In this century, especially since the triumph of the bourgeoisie — the commonplace, money-saving citizen — who takes good care not to imitate Francis I. or Louis XIV. — to live by the pen is a form of penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by the pen means to create — to create to-day, and to-morrow, and incessantly — or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality. So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist and a hack.
The life he leads is not unpleasing. Blue-stockings, beginners in every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career, publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any expense beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves; and he would say to those authors who published at their own expense, “I have your book always in my hands!” He took toll from vanity in the form of drawings or pictures. Every day had its engagements to dinner, every night its theatre, every morning was filled up with callers, visits, and lounging. His serial in the paper, two novels a year for weekly magazines, and his miscellaneous articles were the tax he paid for this easy-going life. And yet, to reach this position, Etienne had struggled for ten years.
At the present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good or the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself float with the stream, never caring for the future. He ruled a little set of newcomers, he had friendships — or rather, habits of fifteen years’ standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged his wit. He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum which he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the impecunious. Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as when, on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, “If I had but five hundred francs a month, I should be rich!”
The cause of this phenomenon was as follows: Lousteau lived in the Rue des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly furnished. When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time. These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs. The months of January, April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months. The rent and the porter’s account cleaned him out. Lousteau took no fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same, smoked thirty francs’ worth of cigars, and could never refuse the mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress. He thus dipped so deeply into the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could no more find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was making seven or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822, when he was hardly getting two hundred.
Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life, and as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out of the tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his intimate allies — Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of garden, looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table:
“What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful hints!”
“Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the matter as we give to a drama or a novel,” said Nathan.
“And Florine?” retorted Bixiou.
“Oh, we all have a Florine,” said Etienne, flinging away the end of his cigar and thinking of Madame Schontz.
Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on the interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for Lousteau, the man of her heart. Like all those women who get the name in Paris of Lorettes, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, round about which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone’s throw from Lousteau. This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her friends by boasting of having a Wit for her lover.
These details of Lousteau’s life and fortune are indispensable, for this penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian luxury had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on Dinah’s life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now understand how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist, up to his ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his Baroness with his friends and even with Madame Schontz. To such readers as regard such things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to make excuses which they will not accept.
“What did you do at Sancerre?” asked Bixiou the first time he met Lousteau.
“I did good service to three worthy provincials — a Receiver-General of Taxes, a little cousin of his, and a Public Prosecutor, who for ten years had been dancing round and round one of the hundred ‘Tenth Muses’ who adorn the Departments,” said he. “But they had no more dared to touch her than we touch a decorated cream at dessert till some strong-minded person has made a hole in it.”
“Poor boy!” said Bixiou. “I said you had gone to Sancerre to turn Pegasus out to grass.”
“Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome,” retorted Lousteau. “Ask Bianchon, my dear fellow.”
“A Muse and a Poet! A homoeopathic cure then!” said Bixiou.
On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-mark.
“Good! very good!” said Lousteau.
“‘Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul — — ’ twenty pages of it! all at one sitting, and dated midnight! She writes when she finds herself alone. Poor woman! Ah, ha! And a postscript —
“‘I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my mind.’ — What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written,” said Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire after having read them. “That woman was born to reel off copy!”
Lousteau was not much afraid of Madame Schontz, who really loved him for himself, but he had supplanted a friend in the heart of a Marquise. This Marquise, a lady nowise coy, sometimes dropped in unexpectedly at his rooms in the evening, arriving veiled in a hackney coach; and she, as a literary woman, allowed herself to hunt through all his drawers.
A week later, Lousteau, who hardly remembered Dinah, was startled by another budget from Sancerre — eight leaves, sixteen pages! He heard a woman’s step; he thought it announced a search from the Marquise, and tossed these rapturous and entrancing proofs of affections into the fire — unread!
“A woman’s letter!” exclaimed Madame Schontz, as she came in. “The paper, the wax, are scented — ”
“Here you are, sir,” said a porter from the coach office, setting down two huge hampers in the ante-room. “Carriage paid. Please to sign my book.”
“Carriage paid!” cried Madame Schontz. “It must have come from Sancerre.”
“Yes, madame,” said the porter.
“Your Tenth Muse is a remarkably intelligent woman,” said the courtesan, opening one of the hampers, while Lousteau was writing his name. “I like a Muse who understands housekeeping, and who can make game pies as well as blots. And, oh! what beautiful flowers!” she went on, opening the second hamper. “Why, you could get none finer in Paris! — And here, and here! A hare, partridges, half a roebuck! — We will ask your friends and have a famous dinner, for Athalie has a special talent for dressing venison.”
Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was clever. The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of Mirabeau’s letters to Sophie. The style of a true lover is transparent. It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty — but only for two beings. As soon as a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the product of the head, not of the heart. But a woman will always be beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of this flow of wit.
By the end of December Lousteau had ceased to read Dinah’s letters; they lay in a heap in a drawer of his chest that was never locked, under his shirts, which they scented.
Then one of those chances came to Lousteau which such bohemians ought to clutch by every hair. In the middle of December, Madame Schontz, who took a real interest in Etienne, sent to beg him to call on her one morning on business.
“My dear fellow, you have a chance of marrying.”
“I can marry very often, happily, my dear.”
“When I say marrying, I mean marrying well. You have no prejudices: I need not mince matters. This is the position: A young lady has got into trouble; her mother knows nothing of even a kiss. Her father is an honest notary, a man of honor; he has been wise enough to keep it dark. He wants to get his daughter married within a fortnight, and he will give her a fortune of a hundred and fifty thousand francs — for he has three other children; but — and it is not a bad idea — he will add a hundred thousand francs, under the rose, hand to hand, to cover the damages. They are an old family of Paris citizens, Rue des Lombards — — ”
“Well, then, why does not the lover marry her?”
“Dead.”
“What a romance! Such things are nowhere to be heard of but in the Rue des Lombards.”
“But do not take it into your head that a jealous brother murdered the seducer. The young man died in the most commonplace way of a pleurisy caught as he came out of the theatre. A head-clerk and penniless, the man entrapped the daughter in order to marry into the business — A judgment from heaven, I call it!”
“Where did you hear the story?”
“From Malaga; the notary is her milord.”
“What, Cardot, the son of that little old man in hair-powder, Florentine’s first friend?”
“Just so. Malaga, whose ‘fancy’ is a little tomtit of a fiddler of eighteen, cannot in conscience make such a boy marry the girl. Besides, she has no cause to do him an ill turn. — Indeed, Monsieur Cardot wants a man of thirty at least. Our notary, I feel sure, will be proud to have a famous man for his son-in-law. So just feel yourself all over. — You will pay your debts, you will have twelve thousand francs a year, and be a father without any trouble on your part; what do you say to that to the good? And, after all, you only marry a very consolable widow. There is an income of fifty thousand francs in the house, and the value of the connection, so in due time you may look forward to not less than fifteen thousand francs a year more for your share, and you will enter a family holding a fine political position; Cardot is the brother-in-law of old Camusot, the depute who lived so long with Fanny Beaupre.”
“Yes,” said Lousteau, “old Camusot married little Daddy Cardot’s eldest daughter, and they had high times together!”
“Well!” Madame Schontz went on, “and Madame Cardot, the notary’s wife, was a Chiffreville — manufacturers of chemical products, the aristocracy of these days! Potash, I tell you! Still, this is the unpleasant side of the matter. You will have a terrible mother-in-law, a woman capable of killing her daughter if she knew — ! This Cardot woman is a bigot; she has lips like two faded narrow pink ribbons.
“A man of the town like you would never pass muster with that woman, who, in her well-meaning way, will spy out your bachelor life and know every fact of the past. However, Cardot says he means to exert his paternal authority. The poor man will be obliged to do the civil to his wife for some days; a woman made of wood, my dear fellow; Malaga, who has seen her, calls her a penitential scrubber. Cardot is a man of forty; he will be mayor of his district, and perhaps be elected deputy. He is prepared to give in lieu of the hundred thousand francs a nice little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, with a forecourt and a garden, which cost him no more than sixty thousand at the time of the July overthrow; he would sell, and that would be an opportunity for you to go and come at the house, to see the daughter, and be civil to the mother. — And it would give you a look of property in Madame Cardot’s eyes. You would be housed like a prince in that little mansion. Then, by Camusot’s interest, you may get an appointment as librarian to some public office where there is no library. — Well, and then if you invest your money in backing up a newspaper, you will get ten thousand francs a year on it, you can earn six, your librarianship will bring you in four. — Can you do better for yourself?
“If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by the end of two years. What is the damage? — an anticipated dividend! It is quite the fashion.
“Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with Malaga to-morrow. You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the secret has been let out — by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry — and then you are master of the situation. As to your wife! — Why her misconduct leaves you as free as a bachelor — — ”
“Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball.”
“I love you for your own sake, that is all — and I can reason. Well! why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is nothing to meditate over. Marriage is heads or tails — well, you have tossed heads up.”
