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Title: Another study of woman
Author: Honoré de Balzac
Editor: E. Haldeman-Julius
Translator: George Milburn
Release date: March 22, 2026 [eBook #78270]
Language: English
Original publication: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78270
Credits: Tim Miller, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN ***
LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. =1044=
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
Another Study
of Woman
Honoré de Balzac
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1926,
Haldeman-Julius Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN
TO LEON GOZLAN
AS A TESTIMONY TO GOOD LITERARY
BROTHERHOOD
ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN[1]
THE SALON OF MADEMOISELLE DES TOUCHES
In Parisian society you will almost always find two very different
evenings in the balls and social affairs. First, the official evening,
at which all the invited guests are present--a gay world bored with
itself and others. Each person poses for his neighbor. The majority of
the young women have come there to meet only one person. When each is
satisfied that she is the handsomest woman present in the eyes of that
person, and that his opinion is probably shared by some others, she
is ready to leave--after the exchange of a few trivial speeches, such
as “Shall you go early to La Crampade?”--“Madame de Portenduère sang
very well, I think.”--“Who is that little woman over there, weighted
down with diamonds?” Or, perhaps, after throwing out a few epigrams,
which give passing pleasure and permanent wounds, the groups begin to
disperse, mere acquaintances take leave, and then the mistress of the
house stops her personal friends and a few artists and lively fellows,
saying in a whisper: “Don’t go, we shall have supper presently.”
The company then gathers in a little salon. The second, the real
evening begins--an evening like those of the old régime, when everybody
understands what is talked about, conversation is general, and each
person present is expected to show his wit and to contribute to the
general entertainment. The scene has changed: frank laughter succeeds
the stiff artificial air which dulls the prettiest faces in society.
In short, pleasure begins as the social time ends. The ball, that cold
review of luxury, the parade of self-loves in full costume, is one of
those English inventions which tend to turn all other nations into
mere machines. England seems desirous that all the world should be
as much and as often bored as herself. This second party succeeding
the first is therefore in some French houses a lively protest of the
former spirits of our joyous land. But, unfortunately, few houses thus
protest; and the reason is plain: if suppers are no longer in vogue it
is because at no time, under any régime, were there ever so few persons
in France with settled positions, surroundings, fortunes, families, and
names as under the reign of Louis Philippe, in which the Revolution
was begun again legally. All the world is marching toward some end, or
it is trotting after wealth. Time has become the most costly of all
chattels; no one can allow himself the great indulgence of coming home
late and sleeping late the next morning. The second party is therefore
only found among women rich enough really to entertain; and since July,
1830, such women may be counted on one’s fingers.
In spite of the mute opposition of the faubourg Saint-Germain, two or
three women, among them the Marquise d’Espard and Mademoiselle des
Touches, refused to renounce the influence they had held up to that
time over Paris, and did not close their salons.
The salon of Mademoiselle des Touches, which was very celebrated in
Paris, was the last asylum of the true French wit of other days, with
its hidden profundity, its thousand casuistries, and its exquisite
politeness. There you might observe the grace of manner which underlay
the conventions of politeness; the easy flow of conversation in spite
of the natural reserve of well-bred persons; and, above all, generosity
and tolerance of ideas. There, no one dreamed of reserving his thought
for a drama; no one had in mind a book to be made out of a narrative.
In short, the hideous skeleton of literature in want did not rise and
show itself in the face of some piquant sally or some interesting topic.
During the evening which I shall now describe, chance had collected
in the salon of Mademoiselle des Touches a number of persons whose
undeniable merits had won for them European reputations. This is not
flattery of France, for several foreigners were among us. The men
who shone most brilliantly were by no means the most distinguished.
Ingenious repartees, shrewd observations, excellent satires,
descriptions given with brilliant clearness, sparkled and flowed
extemporaneously, lavished themselves without reserve as without
assumption, and were delightfully felt and delicately enjoyed. The men
of the world were particularly noticeable for a grace, warmth of fancy
that was wholly artistic. You will meet elsewhere in Europe elegant
manners, cordiality, good-fellowship and knowledge, but in Paris
only, in this salon and those I have just mentioned, will be found
in perfection that particular form of intellect which gives to these
social qualities an agreeable and varied harmony, a flowing motion by
which this wealth of thoughts, of formulas, or narratives, of history
itself, meanders easily along.
Paris, the capital of taste, alone knows the science which changes
conversation to a tournament in which the quality of each mind is
condensed into a flash, where each tilter says his word and casts his
experience into it, where all are amused, refreshed, and have their
faculties exercised. There alone you can exchange ideas; there you
do not carry, like the dolphin in the fable, a monkey on your back;
there you are understood, and you run no risk of staking your gold
against counterfeit coin or copper. There, in short, talk, light and
deep, floats, undulates, and turns, changing aspect and color at every
sentence; there, too, secrets are well betrayed. Lively criticism
and pithy narrative lead each other on. Eyes are listening as well
as ears; gestures put questions to which faces reply. There all is,
in a word, thought and wit. Never had the oral phenomenon--which, if
well studied and well-managed, makes the power of the orator and the
narrator--so completely bewitched me.
I was not the only one sensitive to these influences, and we passed
a delightful evening. The conversation finally turned to narrative,
and led, in its rapid course, to curious confidences, striking
portraits, and a multitude of fancies, which render that delightful
improvisation altogether untransferable to paper. But, by leaving to a
few things their pungency, their abrupt naturalness, their sophistical
sinuosities, perhaps you will understand the charm of a true French
soirée, taken at the moment when the pleasantest familiarity has made
everyone forget his self-interests, self-loves, or, if you prefer so to
call them, pretensions and affectations.
At about two in the morning, when supper was over, none but a few
intimates, all proved friends, tried by an intercourse of fifteen
years, and certain men of the world, well-bred and gifted with taste,
remained around the table. A tone of absolute equality held sway among
them; and yet there was no one present who did not feel proud of being
himself.
Mademoiselle des Touches always obliged her guests to remain at table
until they took their leave, having many times noticed the total change
that takes place in the minds of those present by removal to another
room. On the way between a dining-room and a salon the charm snaps.
According to Sterne, the ideas of an author are different after he
has shaved from what they were before. If Sterne is right, we may
boldly assert that the inclinations of people still seated around a
dinner-table are not those of the same persons when returned to the
salon. The atmosphere is heavier, the eye is no longer enlivened by
the delightful disorder of the dessert; they have lost the benefits
of that softening of the spirit, that kindliness and good-will which
pervaded their being in the pleasant state of mind of those who have
eaten well, and are sitting at their ease on chairs as comfortable as
they can be made. Perhaps we talk more willingly in presence of the
dessert and in company with choice wines, during the delightful moment
when we rest our elbows on the table and lean our heads on our hands.
Certain it is that people not only like to talk at such times, but
they like to listen. Digestion, nearly always attentive, is, according
to characters, either talkative or silent. Each person present then
follows his inclination.
This preamble was needed to introduce you to the charms of a
confidential narrative in which a celebrated man, now dead, depicted
the innocent jesuitism of a woman with the crafty shrewdness of a man
who has seen much of the world--a quality which makes public men the
most delightful narrators when, like Talleyrand and Metternich, they
condescend to tell a tale.
De Marsay, who had been prime minister for more than six months, had
already given proofs of superior capacity. Though friends who had long
known him were not surprised to see him display both the talents and
aptitudes of a statesman, they were still asking themselves whether
he felt within himself a great political strength, or whether he had
simply developed in the heat of circumstances. This question had just
been put to him, with an evidently philosophical intention, by a man of
intellect and observation whom he had made a prefect--a man who was a
journalist for a long time, and who admired the prime minister without
mingling his admiration with that touch of sour criticism by which, in
Paris, one superior man excuses himself for admiring another.
“Has there been in your earlier life any fact, thought, or desire,
which made you foresee your vocation?” asked Emile Blondet, “for we all
have, like Newton, our particular apple which falls, and takes us to
the surroundings in which our faculties can develop.”
“Yes,” replied de Marsay, “and I’ll tell you about it.”
Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, all de Marsay’s
intimates, settled themselves comfortably, each in his own way, and
looked at the prime minister. Is it necessary to say that the servants
had left the dining-room, that the doors were closed and the portières
drawn? The silence which now fell was so deep that the murmur of the
coachmen’s voices and the subdued stamping of the horses impatient for
their stable came up from the courtyard.
“A statesman, my friends, exists through one quality only,” said the
minister, playing with his pearl-handled and gold dessert-knife.
“To know how at all moments to be master of himself; to be able, on
all occasions, to meet the crisis of events, however unexpected and
accidental it may be; in short, to have, in his inner self, a cool,
detached being, which looks on as a spectator at all the movements of
our life, our passions, our sentiments, and which inspires us apropos
of all things, with the decision of a kind of ready-reckoner.”
“You are explaining to us why statesmen are so rare in France,” said
old Lord Dudley.
“From a sentimental point of view it is certainly horrible,” said
the minister, “and therefore when this phenomenon appears in a young
man--Richelieu, warned of Concini’s danger by a letter over-night,
slept till midday, when he knew his benefactor would be killed at ten
o’clock--that young man, be he Pitt, or Napoleon if you like, is a
monstrosity. I became that monster very early in life, thanks to a
woman.”
“I thought,” said Madame de Montcornet (Virginie Blondet), smiling,
“that we unmade more statesmen than we make.”
“The monster of whom I speak is only a monster inasmuch as he resists
your sex,” said the narrator, with an ironical bow.
“If this tale relates to a love-affair,” said the Baronne de Nucingen,
“I request that it may not be interrupted by reflections.”
“Reflection being so contrary to love,” remarked Joseph Bridau.
“I was nineteen years of age,” resumed de Marsay; “the Restoration was
becoming re-established--my oldest friends know how impetuous and fiery
I then was. I was in love for the first time, and I may, at this late
day, be permitted to say that I was one of the handsomest young men in
Paris. I had youth and beauty, two advantages due to chance, of which
we are as proud as if we had won them. I say nothing about the rest.
Like all young men, I was in love with a woman about six years older
than myself. Only one of you,” he said, looking round the table, “will
guess her name or recognize her. Ronquerolles was the only one in those
days who guessed my secret, and he kept it carefully. I might fear
_his_ smile, but he seems to be gone,” said the minister, again
looking about him.
“He would not stay to supper,” said his sister, Madame de Sérizy.
“For six months possessed by this love, but incapable of suspecting
that it mastered me,” continued the minister, “I gave myself up to that
adorable worship which is both the triumph and the fragile happiness
of youth. I treasured _her_ glove, I drank infusions of the
flowers _she_ had worn, I rose from my bed to go to stand beneath
_her_ windows. All my blood rushed to my heart as I breathed the
perfume that _she_ preferred. I was then a thousand leagues from
suspecting that women are furnaces without and marble within.”
“Oh, spare us those horrible sentiments,” said Madame de Camps,
laughing.
“I would then have blasted with contempt the philosopher who published
to the world that terrible opinion, so profoundly true,” replied de
Marsay. “You are all too wise and witty to need me to say more on that
point; but perhaps the rest that I have to tell may recall to you your
own follies. Well--a great lady, if ever there was one, a widow without
children (oh! she had every advantage), my idol went so far as to shut
herself up to mark my handkerchiefs with her own hair; in short, she
responded to my follies with follies of her own. How is it possible
not to believe in a passion when it is guaranteed by folly? We had
put, each of us, all our wits into concealing so complete and glorious
a love from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded. Of her, I shall
tell you nothing; perfect in those days, she was considered until quite
recently one of the handsomest women in Paris; at the time of which I
speak men would have risked death to secure her favor. She was left
comfortably as to fortune, for a woman who loved and was beloved; but
the Restoration, to which she was indebted for higher honors, made her
wealth insufficient to meet the requirements of her name and rank. As
for me, I had the self-conceit that conceives no suspicions. Although
my natural jealousy had in those days a hundred-and-twenty-Othello
power, that terrible sentiment slumbered in my breast like gold in
its bed of ore. I would have made my valet flog me had I felt the
baseness to doubt the purity and fidelity of that angel, so frail, so
strong, so fair, so naive, so pure, so candid, whose blue eyes let me
penetrate with adorable submission to the bottom of her heart. Never
the least hesitation in pose, or look, or word; always white and fresh
and tender to her beloved as the eastern lily of the Song of Songs. Ah,
my friends!” cried the minister, sorrowfully, becoming for the moment
a young man, “we must knock our heads very hard against the marble to
dispel that poetry.”
This cry of nature, which found its echo among the guests, piqued their
curiosity, already so cleverly excited.
“Every morning, mounted on that splendid Sultan you sent me from
England,” he said to Lord Dudley, “I rode past her _calèche_ and
read my orders for the day in her bouquet, prepared in case we were
unable to exchange a few words. Though we saw each other nearly every
evening in society, and she wrote to me every day, we had invented,
in order to deceive the world and baffle observation, a system of
behavior. Not to look at each other, to avoid ever being together,
to speak slightingly of each other’s qualities, all those well-worn
maneuvers were of little value compared with our device of a mutual
false devotion to an indifferent person, and an air of indifference to
the true idol. If two lovers will play that game they can always dupe
society, but they must be very sure of each other. Her substitute was
a man high in court favor, cold and devout, whom she did not receive
in her own house. Our comedy was only played for the benefit of fools
in salons. The question of marriage had not been discussed between us;
six years’ difference in our ages might cause her to reflect. She knew
nothing of the amount of my fortune, which, on principle, I have always
concealed. As for me, charmed by her mind, her manners, the extent of
her information and her knowledge of the world, I would have married
her without reflection. And yet her reserve pleased me. Had she been
the first to speak to me of marriage, I might have found something
vulgar in that accomplished soul. Six full and perfect months! a
diamond of the purest water! That was my allowance of love in this low
world. One morning, being attacked by one of those bone-fevers which
begin a severe cold, I wrote her a note putting off the happiness of a
meeting for another day. No sooner was the letter gone than I regretted
it. ‘She certainly will not believe that I am ill,’ I said to myself;
for she was fond of seeming jealous and suspicious. When jealousy is
real,” said de Marsay, interrupting himself, “it is the evident sign of
a single-minded love.”
“Why?” asked the Princesse de Cadignan, eagerly.
“A true and single-minded love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of
bodily apathy in harmony with the contemplation into which the person
falls. The mind then complicates all things; it works upon itself, it
sets up fantasies in place of realities, which only torture it; but
this jealousy is as fascinating as it is embarrassing.”
A foreign minister smiled, recognizing by the light of memory the truth
of this remark.
“‘Besides,’ I said to myself, ‘why lose a happy day?’” continued de
Marsay, resuming his narrative. “Wasn’t it better to go, ill as I was?
For if she thought me ill I believed her capable of coming to see me
and so compromising herself. I made an effort; I wrote a second letter,
and as my confidential man was not on hand, I took it myself. The river
lay between us; I had all Paris to cross. When I came within suitable
distance of her house I called a porter and told him to deliver the
letter immediately. Then the fine idea came into my head of driving
past the house in a hackney-coach to see if the letter was delivered
promptly. Just as I passed in front of it, about two o’clock in the
afternoon, the great gate opened to admit the carriage of--whom do
you suppose? The substitute! It is fifteen years since that happened;
well! as I tell you of it, this exhausted orator, this minister dried
to the core by contact with public business, still feels the boiling of
something in his heart and a fire in his diaphragm. At the end of an
hour I passed again--the carriage was still in the courtyard; my note
had doubtless not been taken up to her. At last, at half-past three
o’clock, the carriage drove away and I was able to study the face of my
rival. He was grave, he did not smile; but he was certainly in love,
and no doubt some plan was in the wind. At the appointed hour I kept
my tryst; the queen of my soul was calm and serene. Here I must tell
you that I have always thought Othello not only stupid, but guilty of
very bad taste. No man but one who was half a Negro would have behaved
as he did. Shakespeare felt that when he called his play the Moor of
Venice. The mere sight of the beloved woman has something so healing to
the heart, that it dissipates all vexations, doubts, sorrows; my wrath
subsided and I smiled again. This, at my present age, would have been
horribly dissimulating, but then it was simply the result of my youth
and love. My jealousy thus buried, I had the power to observe. I was
visibly ill; the horrible doubts which had tortured me increased the
appearance of illness, and she showed me the most tender solicitude.
I found occasion, however, to slip in the words: ‘Had you any visitor
this morning?’ explaining that I had wondered how she would amuse
herself after receiving my first note.
“‘I?’ she said, ‘how could I think of any amusement after hearing of
your illness? Until your second note came I was planning how to go to
you.’
“‘Then you were quite alone?’
“‘Quite,’ she answered, looking at me with so perfect an expression
of innocence that it rivaled that which drove the Moor to kill his
Desdemona. As she alone occupied her house, that word was a shocking
falsehood. A single lie destroys that absolute confidence which, for
certain souls, is itself the basis of love. To express to you what went
on inside of me at that moment, it is necessary to admit that we have
an inner being of which the visible man is the scabbard, and that that
being, brilliant as light itself, is as delicate as a vapor. Well, that
glorious inward _I_ was thenceforth and forever clothed in crêpe.
Yes, I felt a cold and fleshless hand placing upon me the shroud of
experience, imposing upon my soul the eternal mourning which follows a
first betrayal. Lowering my eyes not to let her see my dazed condition,
a proud thought came into my mind which restored to me some strength:
‘If she deceives you she is unworthy of you.’ I excused the flush in
my face, and a few tears that came into my eyes, on the ground of
increased illness, and the gentle creature insisted on taking me home
in her carriage. On the way she was tenderness itself; her solicitude
would have deceived the same Moor of Venice whom I take for my point of
comparison. In fact, if that big child had hesitated two seconds longer
he would, as any intelligent spectator divines, have asked pardon of
Desdemona. Therefore, to kill a woman is the act of a child. She wept
as she left me at my own door, so unhappy was she at not being able
to nurse me herself! She wished she were my valet, she was jealous of
his cares! All this was written to me the next day as a happy Clarissa
might have written it. There is always the soul of a monkey in the
sweetest and most angelic of women!”
At these words the women present lowered their eyes as if wounded by a
cruel truth so brutally stated.
“I tell you nothing of the night, nor of the week that I passed,”
continued de Marsay, “but it was then that I saw myself a statesman.”
Those words were so finely uttered that, one and all, we made a gesture
of admiration.
“While reflecting, with an infernal spirit, on all the forms of cruel
vengeance to which we can subject a woman,” continued de Marsay--“and
there were many and irreparable ones in this case--I suddenly despised
myself; I felt that I was commonplace, and I formulated, insensibly, a
dreadful code, that of Indulgence. To take revenge upon a woman--does
not such an act admit that there is but one woman in the world for us,
and that we cannot live without her? If so, is vengeance a means to
recover her? But if she is not indispensable to us, if there are others
for us, why not allow her the same right to change that we claim for
ourselves? This, you must fully understand, applies only to passion;
otherwise it would be anti-social; nothing proves the necessity of
indissoluble marriage more than the instability of passion. The two
sexes need to be chained together like the wild beasts that they
are, in laws as mute and unchangeable as fate. Suppress revenge, and
betrayal becomes nothing in love, its teeth are drawn. Those who think
that there exists but one woman in the world for them, _they_
may take to vengeance, and then there is but one form for it--that of
Othello. Mine was different; it was this--”
The last three words produced among us that imperceptible movement
which journalists describe in parliamentary debates as “profound
sensation.”
“Cured of my cold and of pure, absolute, divinest love, I let myself go
into an adventure with another heroine, who was charming, of a style
of beauty exactly opposite to that of my deceiving angel. I took good
care, however, not to break with that very clever creature and good
comedian, for I don’t know whether a true love can of itself give more
graceful enjoyments than accomplished treachery. Such hypocrisy equals
virtue. I don’t say this for you Englishmen,” added the minister,
gently, addressing Lady Marimore, daughter of Lord Dudley. “Well, I
even tried to fall in love. It happened that I wanted for this new
angel a little gift done with my own hair, and I went to a certain
artist in hair, much in vogue in those days, who lived in the rue
Boucher. This man had a monopoly of gifts done in hair, and I give his
address for the benefit of those who haven’t much hair of their own; he
keeps locks of all kinds and all colors. After receiving my order, he
showed me his work. I then saw products of patients surpassing those of
fairy tales and even of convicts; and he put me up to all the caprices
and fashions which reigned in the realm of hair.
“‘For the last year,’ he said to me, ‘there has been a rage for marking
linen with hair; happily, I had a fine collection on hand and excellent
work-women.’
“Hearing these words, a suspicion crossed my mind. I drew out my
handkerchief and said to him:
“‘Probably this was done at your place, with false hair?’
“He looked attentively at the handkerchief and said:
“‘That lady was very difficult to suit; she insisted on matching the
very shade of her hair. My wife marked those handkerchiefs herself.
You have there, monsieur, one of the finest things of the kind ever
executed.’
“Before this last flash of light I might still have believed in
something; I could still have given some attention to a woman’s word.
I left that shop having faith in pleasure, but, in the matter of love,
as much of an atheist as a mathematician. Two months later I was seated
beside my angelic deceiver on a sofa in her boudoir. I was holding one
of her hands, which were very beautiful, and together we were climbing
the Alps of sentiment, gathering flowers by the way, plucking the
petals from the daisies (there is always a moment in life when we pluck
out the daisy petals, though it may be in a salon where there are no
daisies). At the moment of deepest tenderness, when we seem to love the
most, love is so conscious of its lack of duration that one feels an
invincible need to ask: ‘Do you love me?’--‘Will you love me always?’
I seized that lyrical moment, so warm, so flowery, so expansive, to
make her tell her finest lies, with the ravishing exaggerations of that
Gascon poetry peculiar to love. Charlotte then displayed the choicest
flowers of her deception: she could not live without me; I was the
only man in all the world to her; yet she feared to weary me, for in my
presence her mind forsook her; near me her faculties became all love;
she was too loving not to have many fears; of late she had sought a
means to attach me forever to her side; but God alone could do that.”
The women who were listening to de Marsay seemed offended by his
mimicry; for he accompanied these words with pantomime, poses of the
head, and affectations of manner, which conveyed the scene.
“At the moment when I was expected to believe these adorable
falsehoods, I said to her, still holding her right hand in mine:
“‘When do you marry the duke?’
“The thrust was so direct, my glance met hers so straight, that the
quiver of her hand lying softly in mine, slight as it was, could not
be completely concealed. Her eyes fell before mine, and a slight flush
came into her cheeks.
“‘The duke!’ she said, feigning the utmost astonishment. ‘What can you
mean?’
“‘I know all,’ I replied. ‘In my opinion you had better not delay the
marriage. He is rich, he is a duke; but also, he is religious--more
than that, he is a bigot! You don’t seem aware how urgent it is that
you should make him commit himself in his own eyes and before God; if
you don’t do this soon you will never gain your end.’
“‘Is this a dream?’ she said, pushing up her hair from her forehead
with Malibran’s celebrated gesture, fifteen years before Malibran ever
made it.
“‘Come, don’t play the babe unborn, my angel,’ I said, trying to take
both her hands. But she crossed them in front of her with an angry and
prudish little air. ‘Marry him, I am willing,’ I continued. ‘In fact, I
strongly advise it.’
“‘But,’ she said, falling at my feet, ‘there’s some horrible mistake
here; I love no man but you in this world; you can ask me for any proof
you like.’
“‘Rise, my dear,’ I said, ‘and do me the honor to be frank.’
“‘Yes, before Heaven.’
“‘Do you doubt my love?’
“‘No.’
“‘My fidelity?’
“‘No.’
“‘Well, then, I have committed the greatest of crimes,’ I went on. ‘I
have doubted your love and your fidelity; and I have looked at the
matter calmly--’
“‘Calmly!’ she cried, sighing. ‘Enough, Henri, I see that you no longer
love me.’
“You observe that she was quick to seize that way of escape. In such
scenes an adverb is often very dangerous. But luckily curiosity induced
her to add:
“‘What have you seen or heard? Have I ever spoken to the duke except
in society? Have you ever noticed in my eyes--’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have in his. You have made me go eight times to
Saint-Thomas d’Aquin to see you both hearing mass together.’
“‘Ah!’ she cried, ‘at last I have made you jealous!’
“‘I wish I could be,’ I replied, admiring the suppleness of that quick
mind, and the acrobatic feats by which she strove to blind me. ‘But,
by dint of going to church, I have become an unbeliever. The day of
my first cold and your first deception you received the duke when you
thought me safe in bed, and you told me you had seen no man.’
“‘Do you know that your conduct is infamous?’
“‘How so? I think your marriage with the duke an excellent affair; he
gives you a fine name, the only position that is really suited to you,
an honorable and brilliant future. You will be one of the queens of
Paris. I should do you a great wrong if I placed any obstacles in the
way of this arrangement, this honorable life, this superb alliance.
Ah! some day, Charlotte, you will do me justice by discovering how
different my character is from that of other young men. You are on the
point of being forced to break with me, and yet you would have found it
very difficult to do so. The duke is watching you; his virtue is very
stern, and it is high time that you and I should part. You will have to
be a prude, I warn you of that. The duke is a vain man, and he wants
to be proud of his wife.’
“‘Ah!’ she said, bursting into tears, ‘Henri, if you had only spoken!’
(you see she was determined to put the blame on me)--‘yes, if you had
wished it we could have lived all our lives together, married, happy
before the world, or in some quiet corner of it.’
“‘Well, it is too late now,’ I said, kissing her hands and assuming the
air of a victim.
“‘But I can undo it all,’ she said.
“‘No, you have gone too far with the duke. I shall even make a journey,
to separate us from each other more completely. We should each have to
fear the love of our own hearts.’
“‘Do you think, Henri, that the duke has any suspicions?’
“‘I think not,’ I replied, ‘but he is watching you. Make yourself
_dévote_, attend to your religious duties, for the duke is seeking
proof; he is hesitating, and you ought to make him come to a decision.’
“She rose, walked about the boudoir in a state of agitation either
feigned or real; then she found a pose and a glance which she no doubt
felt to be in harmony with the situation; for she stopped before me,
held out her hand, and said in a voice full of emotion:
“‘Henri, you are a loyal, noble, charming man, and I shall never forget
you.’
“This was excellent strategy. She was enchanting in this attitude,
which was necessary to the situation in which she wanted to stand
toward me. I assumed the manner of a man so distressed that she took me
by the hand and led me--almost threw me, though gently--on the sofa,
saying, after a moment’s silence: ‘I am deeply grieved, my friend. You
love me truly?’
“‘Oh, yes.’
“‘Then what will become of you?’”
Here all the women present exchanged glances.
“I have suffered once more in thus recalling her treachery, but at
any rate I still laugh at the air of conviction and soft inward
satisfaction which she felt, if not at my death, at least at my eternal
unhappiness,” continued de Marsay. “Oh! you needn’t laugh yet,” he
said to the guests; “the best is still to come. I looked at her very
tenderly, after a pause, and said:
“‘Yes, that is what I have asked myself.’
“‘What will you do?’
“‘I asked myself that question the morning after the cold I told you
of.’
“‘And?--’ she said, with visible uneasiness.
“‘I began to pay court to that little lady whom I had for my
substitute.’
“Charlotte sprang up from the sofa like a frightened doe; she trembled
like a leaf, as she cast upon me one of those looks in which a woman
forgets her dignity, her modesty, her craftiness, even her grace--the
glittering glance of a hunted serpent, forced to its hole--and said:
“‘I, who loved him! I, who struggled! I, who--’
“On that third idea, which I leave you to guess, she made the finest
organ pause ears ever listened to.
“‘Good heavens!’ she cried, ‘how wretched women are! We are never truly
loved. There is nothing genuine to men in the purest sentiments. But,
let me tell you, though you trick us, you are still our dupes.’
“‘So I see,’ I said with a contrite air. ‘You have too much wit in your
anger for your heart to suffer much.’
“This modest sarcasm redoubled her wrath; she now wept tears of rage.
“‘You have degraded life and the world in my eyes,’ she said; ‘you have
torn away all my illusions, you have debased my heart--’
“In short, she said to me all that I had the right to say to her, with
an unconcealed simplicity, a naive effrontery, which would certainly
have got the better of any man but me.
“‘What will become of us, poor hapless women, in the social life which
Louis XVIII’s Charter has created for us? Yes, we were born to suffer.
As for love, we are always above you, and you are always below us, in
loyalty. None of you have honesty in your hearts. For you, love is a
game in which you think it fair to cheat.’
“‘Dear,’ I said, ‘to take things seriously in our present social life
would be to play at perfect love with an actress.’
“‘What infamous treachery!’ she cried. ‘So this has all been reasoned
out?’
“‘No; it is simply reasonable.’
“‘Farewell, Monsieur de Marsay,’ she said; ‘you have deceived me
shamefully.’
“‘Will Madame la duchesse,’ I asked in a submissive manner, ‘remember
Charlotte’s wrongs?’
“‘Assuredly,’ she said in a bitter tone.
“‘So then, you detest me?’
“She inclined her head; and I left her to a sentiment which allowed her
to think that she had something to avenge. My friends, I have deeply
studied the lives of men who have had success with women; and I feel
sure that neither the Maréchal de Richelieu, nor Lauzun, nor Louis de
Valois ever made, for the first time, so able a retreat. As for my own
heart and mind, they were formed then and forever; and the control I
gained over the unreflecting impulses which cause us to commit so many
follies gave me the coolness and self-possession which you know of.”
“How I pity the second woman!” said the Baronne de Nucingen.
An almost imperceptible smile which flickered for a moment on de
Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de Nucingen color.
“How people forget!” cried the Baron de Nucingen.
The naiveté of the celebrated banker had such success that his wife,
who had been that “second” of de Marsay’s, could not help laughing with
the rest of the company.
“You are all disposed to condemn that woman,” said Lady Dudley, “but I
can understand why she should not consider her marriage in the light
of an inconstancy. Men never will distinguish between constancy and
fidelity. I knew the woman whose history Monsieur de Marsay has just
related; she was one of the last of your great ladies.”
“Alas! you are right there,” said de Marsay. “For the last fifty
years we have been taking part in the steady destruction of all
social distinctions. We ought to have saved women from the great
shipwreck, but the Civil Code has passed its level over their heads.
However terrible the words may be, they must be said; the duchess is
disappearing, and so is the marquise. As for baronesses (I ask pardon
of Madame de Nucingen, who will make herself a true countess when
her husband becomes peer of France), the baronesses have never been
regarded seriously.”
“Aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” remarked Blondet, smiling.
“Countesses will remain,” said de Marsay. “An elegant woman will
always be more or less a countess--countess of the Empire, or of
yesterday, countess of the _vieille roche_, or, as they say in
Italy, countess of civility. But as for the _great lady_, she is
dead--dead with the grandiose surroundings of the last century; dead
with her powder, _mouches_, and high-heeled slippers, and her
busked corset adorned with its triangle of flowing ribbons. Duchesses
in the present day can pass through ordinary doors that are not widened
to admit a hoop. The Empire saw the last of the gowns with trains.
Napoleon little imagined the effects of the Code of which he was so
proud. That man, by creating his _duchesses_, generated the race
of _comme il faut_[2] women whom we see today--the resulting
product of his legislation.”
“Thought, used as a hammer by the lad leaving school and the nameless
journalist, has demolished the splendors of the social state,” said the
Comte de Vandenesse. “Today, any absurd fellow who can hold his head
above a collar, cover his manly breast with half a yard of satin in the
form of a waistcoat, present a brow shining with future genius under
his frizzed hair, and blunder along in varnished pumps and silk socks
costing half a dozen francs, now wears a glass in the arch of one eye
by squeezing his cheek against it and--whether he’s a lawyer’s clerk,
the son of a contractor, or a banker’s bastard--ogles impertinently the
prettiest duchess, rates her charms as she comes down the staircase of
a theater, and says to his friend (clothed by Buisson, like the rest of
us), ‘There, my dear fellow, is a _comme il faut_ woman.’”
“You have never made yourselves,” said Lord Dudley, “into a party;
it will be long now before you have any place politically. A great
deal has been said in France about organizing labor, but property has
never yet organized. Here is what is happening to you: A duke, no
matter who (there were still a few under Louis XVIII and Charles X
who possessed two hundred thousand francs a year, a splendid mansion
and a retinue of servants),--that duke could still behave like a
great seigneur. The last of these great French lords is the Prince de
Talleyrand. This duke dies, and, let us suppose, leaves four children,
two of whom are daughters. Each of these heirs, supposing that he has
managed to marry them well, will inherit, at most, sixty to eighty
thousand francs a year; each is father or mother of several children,
consequently obliged to live on one floor, probably the ground-floor,
of a house, with the strictest economy--it may be that they are even
obliged to borrow money. The wife of the eldest son, who is a duchess
in name only, has neither carriage, nor servants, nor opera-box, nor
time of her own; she hasn’t even her own suite of rooms in a family
mansion, nor her own fortune, nor her personal baubles. She is buried
in marriage as a wife of the rue Saint Denis is buried in commerce; she
buys the socks of her dear babes, feeds and teaches her daughters, whom
she no longer puts to school in a convent. Your women of rank simply
sit upon their nests.”
“Alas, yes!” said Joseph Bridau. “Our epoch no longer possesses those
exquisite feminine flowers which adorned the great centuries of the
French monarchy. The fan of the great lady is broken. Woman no longer
blushes, whispers sly malice, hides her face behind her fan only to
show it--the fan serves merely to fan her! When a thing is no longer
anything but what it _is_, it is too useful to belong to luxury.”
“Everything in France has assisted in producing the _comme il
faut_ woman,” said Daniel d’Arthèz. “The aristocracy has consented
to this state of things by retreating to its estates to hide and
die--emigrating to the interior before ideas as formerly it emigrated
to foreign parts before the populace. Women who could have established
European salons, controlled opinion and turned it like a glove, who
should have ruled the world by guiding the men of art and thought who
outwardly ruled it, have committed the fatal blunder of abandoning
their ground, ashamed to have to struggle with a bourgeoisie
intoxicated by power and making its début on the world’s stage only,
perhaps, to be hacked in pieces by the barbarians who are at its
heels. Where the bourgeois affects to see princesses, there are none
but so-called fashionable women. Princes no longer find great ladies
to distinguish; they cannot even render famous a woman taken from the
ranks. The Duc de Bourbon was the last prince to use that privilege.”
“And Heaven knows what it cost him!” said Lord Dudley.
“The press follows suit,” remarked Rastignac. “Women no longer have
the charm of spoken _feuilletons_, delightful satires uttered in
choicest language. In like manner we nowadays read _feuilletons_
written in a _patois_ which changes every three years, and ‘little
journals,’ as lively as undertakers, and as light as the lead of their
own type. French conversation is now carried on in revolutionary
Iroquois from end to end of France, where the long printed columns of
the newspapers take the place in ancient mansions of those brilliant
coteries of men and women who _conversed_ there in former days.”
“The knell of Great Society has sounded, do you know it?” said a
Russian prince; “and the first stroke of its iron tongue is your modern
French term: _femme comme il faut_.”
“You are right prince,” said de Marsay. “That woman, issuing from
the ranks of the nobility, or growing from the bourgeoisie, coming
from any and every region, even the provinces, is the expression of
the spirit of our day--a last image of good taste, wit, intellect,
grace, and distinction united, but all diminishing. We shall see no
more _grandes dames_ in France, but for a long time still to come
there will be _comme il faut_ women, sent by public opinion to
the Upper Feminine Chamber--women who will be to the fair sex what the
‘gentleman’ is among his fellows in England.”
“And they call that progress!” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “I would
like to know what progress is.”
“_This_,” said Madame de Nucingen: “Formerly a woman might have
the voice of a fish-wife, the walk of a grenadier, the forehead of the
boldest hussy, a fat foot, a thick hand, but nevertheless that woman
was a ‘great lady’; but now, be she a Montmorency--if the Demoiselles
de Montmorency could ever have such attributes--she would _not_ be
a woman _comme il faut_.”
“What is meant by a woman _comme il faut_?” asked Comte Adam
Laginski, naively.
“She’s a modern creation, a deplorable triumph of the elective system
applied to the fair sex,” said de Marsay. “Every revolution has its
term, or saying, in which it is summed up and described. Our social
revolution has ended in the _comme il faut_ woman.”
“You are right,” said the Russian prince, who had come to Paris to make
himself a literary reputation. “To explain certain terms or sayings
added century by century to your noble language, would be to write a
glorious history. _Organize_, for instance, is the word of the
Empire; it contains Napoleon--the whole of him.”
“But all that is not telling us what you mean by the woman _comme il
faut_,” cried the young Pole, with some impatience.
“I’ll explain her to you,” said Emile Blondet. “On a fine morning you
are lounging about Paris. It is more than two o’clock, but not yet
five. You see a woman coming toward you; the first glance you cast
upon her is like the preface to a fine book; it makes you anticipate
a world of refined and elegant things. Like the botanist crossing
hill and valley as he searches for specimens, among all varieties of
Parisian commonness you have found a rare flower. Either this woman
is accompanied by two very distinguished-looking men, one of whom is
decorated, or by a footman in undress livery who follows her at a
little distance. She wears neither startling colors, nor open-worked
stockings, nor over-ornamental buckles, nor drawers with embroidered
frills visible at her ankles. You notice that her shoes are either
prunella, with strings crossed on the instep over thread stockings of
extreme fineness, or gray silk stockings that are perfectly plain; or
else she wears dainty little boots of exquisite simplicity. Some pretty
and inexpensive stuff makes you notice her gown, the shape of which
surprises the bourgeois, it is almost always a pelisse, fastened by
knots of ribbon and delicately edged with a silken cord or an almost
imperceptible binding. The lady has an art of her own in putting on
a shawl or a mantle; she knows how to wrap it from her waist to her
throat, forming a sort of carapace which would make a bourgeoise
look like a tortoise, but under which the _comme il faut_ woman
contrives to suggest a beautiful figure while concealing it. How? by
what means? That is a secret which she keeps, without the protection
of any patent. She walks with a certain concentric and harmonious
motion, which makes her sweet alluring figure quiver under the stuffs
as an adder at midday makes the green grass-tops above him move.
Does she owe to angel or devil that graceful undulation which plays
beneath the black silk mantle, sways the lace of its border, and sheds
a balmy air which I shall venture to call the breeze-Parisian? You
remark upon her arms, about her waist, around her neck, a science of
folds draping even a restive stuff, which reminds you of the ancient
Mnemosyne. Ah! how well she understands--forgive me the expression--the
technique of walking. Examine well the way in which she puts her
foot forward, moulding an outline beneath her gown with a decent
precision which excites the admiration, restrained by respect, of
those who pass her. If an Englishwoman tried that walk she would look
like a grenadier marching to the assault of a redoubt. To the woman
of Paris belongs the genius of gait. The municipality has long owed
her our coming asphalt pavements. You will observe that this lady
jostles no one. In order to pass, she stands still, waiting with proud
modesty until a way is made for her. Her attitude, both tranquil and
disdainful, obliges the most insolent dandy to step aside. Her bonnet,
of remarkable simplicity, has fresh strings. Possibly, there may be
flowers upon it; but the cleverest of these women wear only ribbons.
Feathers require a carriage, flowers attract the eye. Beneath the
bonnet you see the cool and restful face of a woman who is sure of
herself, but without self-conceit; who looks at nothing, but sees all;
and whose vanity, lulled by continual gratification, gives to her
countenance an expression of indifference which piques curiosity. She
knows she is being studied; she is well aware that nearly everyone,
even women, turn round to look at her. She passes through Paris like
a film of gossamer, as white and as pearly. This beautiful specimen
of her sex prefers the warmest latitudes and the cleanest longitudes
in Paris; you will therefore find her between the 10th and the 110th
arcade of the rue de Rivoli, along the line of the boulevards, from
the equator of the Panorama, where the productions of the Indies
flourish and the finest creations of industry are blooming, to the cape
of the Madeleine; you will find her also in the least muddy regions
of the bourgeoisie, between number 30 and number 150 of the rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. During the winter she takes her pleasure on
the terrace of the Feuillants, and not upon the bituminous pavements
which skirt it. According to weather, she glides through the alleys
of the Champs Elysées. Never will you meet this charming variety of
woman in the hyperboreal regions of the rue Saint-Denis, never in the
Kamchatka of muddy streets small and commercial, and never anywhere
in rainy weather. These flowers of Paris, opening to the sun, perfume
the promenades and fold their leaves by five in the afternoon like a
convolvulus. The women whom you will see later having slightly the same
air and trying to imitate them are of another race. This fair unknown,
the Beatrice of our day, is the _comme il faut_ woman.
“It is not always easy, my dear count,” said Blondet, interrupting
himself for a moment, “for foreigners to perceive the differences by
which a connoisseur _emeritus_ distinguishes the two species,
for women are born comedians. But those differences strike the eye of
all Parisians: hooks are visible, tapes show their yellowish white
through a gap at the back of the gown; shoes are worn at heel, bonnet
strings have been ironed, the gown puffs out too much, the bustle is
flattened. You notice a sort of effort in the premeditated lowering
of the eyelids. The attitude is conventional. As for the bourgeoise,
it is impossible to confound her with the woman who is _comme il
faut_; she makes an admirable foil to her, she explains the charm
the unknown lady has cast upon you. The bourgeoise is busy; she is
out in all weathers; comes and goes and trots; is undecided whether
she will, or whether she will not enter a shop. Where the _comme
il faut_ woman knows perfectly well what she wants and what she
means to do, the bourgeoise is undecided, pulls up her gown to cross a
gutter, drags a child after her, and is forced to watch for carriages;
she is a mother in public and lectures her daughter; carries money
in a hand-bag and wears open-work stockings, a boa above a fur cape
in winter, and a shawl with a scarf in summer--the bourgeoise is an
adept at the superfluities of the toilet. As for your Beatrice, you
will find her in the evening at the Opera, or in a ballroom. She
then appears under an aspect so different that you fancy her two
different creations without relationship. The woman has issued from
her morning vestments like a butterfly from its larva. She serves,
as a dainty morsel to your raptured senses, the form which her shawl
scarce outlined in the morning. At the theater the woman of society
never goes higher than the second tier of boxes, unless at the Italian
opera. You can therefore study at your ease the precise slowness of
her movements. This adorable maneuverer uses all the little artifices
of woman’s manner with a natural ease that precludes the idea of art
and premeditation. Is her hand royally beautiful, the most suspicious
man would believe it absolutely necessary to roll, or fasten up, or
toss aside whichever ringlet or curl she may touch. Has she nobility of
profile, you will think she is merely giving irony or charm to what she
says to her neighbor, by turning her head in a manner to produce that
magic effect, so dear to great painters, which draws the light to the
cheek, defines the nose with a clear outline, illumines the pink of the
nostril, carves the forehead with sharp prominence, and leaves a touch
of high light on the chin. If she has a pretty foot she throws herself
on a sofa with the coquetry of a cat in the sunshine, her feet forward,
without your seeing anything more in that pretty pose than a charming
model of lassitude for a sculptor. No other woman but the woman
_comme il faut_ is ever perfectly at her ease in her clothes;
nothing disturbs her. You will never see her putting in place, like a
bourgeoise, a rebellious shoulder-knot, or looking to see if the lace
of her chemisette fulfills it purpose of unfaithful guardian to the
sparkling whiteness of her bosom; never will you find her looking in a
mirror to learn whether her coiffure is perfectly intact. Her toilet
is always in harmony with her character; she had had time to study
herself and to decide what suits her; she has long known what does not
suit her. You never see her when the audience of a theater disperses;
she departs before the end of the play. If by chance she is seen, calm
and sedate, upon the steps of the staircase, some strong sentiment
has prompted her. She is there to order; she has some look to give,
some promise to receive. Perhaps she is descending slowly to gratify
the vanity of a slave whom she occasionally obeys. If you meet her in
society, at a ball or a _soirée_, you will gather the honey, real
or affected, of her practised voice; you will be enchanted with her
idle talk, to which she contrives to impart the semblance of thought
with inimitable skill--”
“Then it isn’t necessary for the _comme il faut_ woman to have
intellect?” said the young Polish count.
“It is impossible to be that kind of woman without taste,” said the
Princesse de Cadignan.
“And to have taste is, in France, to have more than mind,” said the
Russian prince.
“The mind of this woman is the triumph of an art that is wholly
plastic,” replied Blondet. “You don’t know what she says, but you are
charmed. She has nodded her head or sweetly shrugged her handsome
shoulders, or gilded some meaningless phrase with a smile or a
charming pout, or put Voltaire’s epigram into an ‘Oh!’ an ‘Ah!’ an ‘Is
it possible?’ The turn of her head is an active interrogation; she
gives meaning of some kind to the movement with which she dances a
vinaigrette fastened by a chain to her finger. These are artificial
great effects obtained by very small ones: she lets her hand fall nobly
from the arm of her chair, and all is said; she has rendered judgment
without appeal, fit to move the most insensible. She has listened to
you, she has given you an opportunity to show your wit; and--I appeal
to your modesty--such moments in society are rare.”
The innocent air of the young Pole whom Blondet was addressing made
every one laugh heartily.
“You can’t talk half an hour with a bourgeoise before she brings to
light her husband under one form or another,” continued Blondet, whose
gravity was not shaken; “but if your _comme il faut_ woman is
married she has the tact to conceal her husband, and the perseverance
of a Christopher Columbus would hardly enable you to discover him. If
you have not been able to question others on this point, you will see
her toward the end of the evening fix her eyes steadily on a man of
middle age, who inclines his head and leaves the room; she has told her
husband to call up the carriage, and she departs. In her own house no
_comme il faut_ woman is ever seen before four o’clock, the hour
at which she receives. She is wise enough to make you wait even then.
You will find good taste throughout her house; her luxury is intended
for use, and is renewed when needful; you will see nothing there under
glass cases, nor any swathings of protective gauze. The staircase is
warm; flowers gladden you everywhere; flowers are the only presents
she accepts, and those from a few persons only; bouquets give pleasure
and live for a single day and are then renewed. To her they are, as in
the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly trifles of fashion are
spread about, but her salons are not turned into a museum or an old
curiosity shop. You will find her seated on a sofa at the corner of the
fireplace, whence she will bow to you without rising. Her conversation
is no longer that of the ballroom; in her own house she is bound to
entertain you. The _comme il faut_ woman possesses all these
shades of behavior in perfection. She welcomes in you a man who will
swell the circle of her society, the great object of the cares and
anxieties of all women of the world. Consequently, to attach you to
her salon she will make herself charmingly coquettish. You will feel
above all, in that salon, how isolated women are in the present day and
why they endeavor to have a little society about them in which they
can shine as constellations. But this is the death of conversation;
conversation is impossible without generalities.”
“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have seized upon the great defect of
our epoch. Epigram, that book in a word, no longer falls, as in the
eighteenth century, on persons and on things, but on petty events and
dies with the day.”
“The wit of the _comme il faut_ woman, when she has any,”
resumed Blondet, “consists in putting a doubt on everything, while
the bourgeoise uses hers to affirm everything. There lies a great
difference between the two women. The bourgeoise is certain of her
virtue; the _comme il faut_ woman is not sure whether she has any
yet, or whether she has always had it. This hesitation about everything
is one of the last graces our horrible epoch has granted her. She
seldom goes to church, but she will talk religion to you and try to
convert you, if you have the good sense to play the freethinker, for
that will open the way to the stereotyped phrases, the motions of the
head and the gestures which belong to such women: ‘Ah, fie! I thought
you had more intelligence than to attack religion. Society is crumbling
already and you remove its prop. But religion at this moment is you and
I, it is property, it is the future of our children! Ah! let us not
be egotists. Individualism is the disease of our epoch, and religion
is the sole remedy; it unites the families that your laws disunite,’
etc., etc. She begins in this way a neo-Christian sermon sprinkled with
political ideas, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moral
(oh! devilishly moral), in which you will find echoes of every protest
that modern doctrines driven to bay have given voice to.”
The women present could not help laughing at the mincing affectations
of their sex with which Emile Blondet illustrated his sarcasms.
“Those remarks, my dear Comte Adam,” said Blondet, looking at the
young Pole, “will show you that the _comme il faut_ woman
represents intellectual hodge-podge as well as political jumble; just
as she lives surrounded by the brilliant but not lasting products of
modern industry, which aims at the destruction of its work in order
to replace it. You will leave her house saying to yourself, ‘She
has, decidedly, very superior ideas’; and you think so all the more
because she has sounded your heart and mind with a delicate hand; she
has sought your secrets--for the _comme il faut_ woman feigns
ignorance of everything, in order to discover everything; but she is
discreet; there are things she never admits knowing, however well she
may know them. Nevertheless you will feel uneasy, you are ignorant of
the real state of her heart. Formerly the great ladies loved openly,
banners displayed; now the woman _comme il faut_ has her little
passion ruled like a sheet of music paper with its signs and notes,
its minims, rests, and sharps and flats. Always weak, she will neither
sacrifice her love, her husband, or the future of her children.
She’s a woman of ambiguous middle-paths, of squint-eyed temporizing
with conventions, of unavowed passions carried along between two
breakwaters. She fears her servants like an Englishwoman who sees
before her the perspective of a divorce suit. This woman, so apparently
at her ease in a ballroom, so charming on the street, is a slave at
home. She has no independence, unless locked in with her own ideas.
She is determined to remain outwardly the woman _comme il faut_.
That’s her theory of life. A woman separated from her husband, reduced
to a pittance, without carriage or luxury or opera-box, is today
neither wife, maid, nor bourgeoise; she dissolves, she becomes a
thing. What is to become of her? The Carmelites won’t take married
women. Will her lover always want her? That’s a question. Therefore
the _comme il faut_ woman may sometimes cause calumny, but never
condemnation.”
“That is all true, horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.
“Consequently, the _comme il faut_ woman,” continued Blondet,
“lives between English hypocrisy and the frankness of the eighteenth
century--a bastard system emblematic of a period when nothing that
comes is like that which goes, when transitions lead nowhere, when
the great figures of the past are blotted out, and distinctions are
purely personal. In my opinion it is impossible for a woman, even
though she be born on the steps of a throne, to acquire before the
age of twenty-five, the encyclopedic science of nothings, the art of
maneuvering, the various great little things--music of the voice,
harmonies of color, angelic deviltries and innocent wickedness, the
language and the silence, the gravity and the folly, the wit and the
stupidity, the diplomacy and the ignorance which constitute the woman
_comme il faut_.”
“Accepting the description you have just given of her,” said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “where do you class the
authoress? Is _she_ a woman _comme il faut_!”
“When she is not gifted with genius, she is a woman _comme il n’en
faut pas_,”[3] replied Emile Blondet, accompanying his answer with a
glance which might pass for a frank compliment to Camille Maupin. “But
that is not my own saying; it belongs to Napoleon, who hated women of
genius,” he added.
“Don’t be too hard on Napoleon,” said Canalis, with an emphatic tone
and gesture, “It was one of his littlenesses--for he had them--to be
jealous of literary fame. Who can explain, or describe, or comprehend
Napoleon?--a man represented always with folded arms, yet who did all
things; who was the greatest known Power, the most concentrated power,
the most corrosive and acid of all powers; a strong genius which led
an armed civilization throughout the world and fixed it nowhere; a
man who could do all because he willed all; prodigious phenomenon of
Will!--subduing disease by a battle, yet doomed to die of disease
in his bed after living unscathed amid cannon-balls and bullets;
a man who had in his head a Code and a Sword, word and action; a
clear-sighted mind which divined all except his own fall; a capricious
politician who played his soldiers like pawns and yet respected three
heads--Talleyrand, Pozzo di Borgo, and Metternich, diplomatists whose
death would have saved the French Empire, but whose life seemed to him
of more value than that of thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by
some rare privilege, nature had left a heart in his iron body; a man
at midnight kind and laughing among women, and the next day handling
Europe without gloves; hypocritical and generous; loving vulgarity and
simplicity; without taste, but protecting Art; and, in spite of these
antitheses, grand in all things by instinct or by organization; Caesar
at twenty-five years of age, Cromwell at thirty, but a good husband and
a good father like any bourgeois of Père Lachaise; a man who created
great public buildings, empires, kings, codes, poems, and one romance,
and all with greater range than accuracy. Did he not attempt to make
Europe France; and after bearing our weight upon the earth until it
changed the laws of gravitation, has he not left us poorer than the day
he put his hand upon us? He who made an empire with his name, lost that
name on the borders of his empire in a sea of blood and slaughtered
men. A man all thought and action, who was able to comprehend both
Desaix and Fouché.”
“Despotic power and legal justice, each in due season, makes the true
ruler,” said de Marsay.
“But,” said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the other women with
a smile both dubious and satirical, “have we women really deteriorated
as these gentlemen seem to think? Because today, under a system which
belittles everything, you men like little dishes, little apartments,
little paintings, little journals, little books, is that any reason why
women should be less grand than they have been? Does the human heart
change because you change your habits? In all epochs passions remain
the same. I know splendid devotions, sublime endurances which lack
publicity--fame, if you prefer to call it so. Many a woman is not less
an Agnes Sorel because she never saved a king of France. Do you think
our Marquise d’Espard worth less than Madame Doublet or Madame du
Deffand, in whose salon so much harm was said and done? Isn’t Taglioni
the equal of Camargo? and Malibran of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets
superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, thanks
to the grocers who govern us, we have no style of our own, didn’t the
Empire have a style as fully its own as that of Louis XV? And its
splendor was surely fabulous. Have the arts and sciences lost ground?”
“I agree with you, madame,” said Général de Montriveau. “In my opinion
the women of this epoch are truly great. When posterity gives a
verdict upon us will not Madame Recamier’s fame be equal to that of
the loveliest women of past ages? We have made history so fast that
we lack historians to write it down. The reign of Louis XIV had but
one Madame de Sévigné, while we have a thousand today in Paris who
can write better letters, but do not publish them. Whether the French
woman calls herself _femme comme il faut_ or great lady, she will
always be the pre-eminent woman. Emile Blondet has made us a picture of
the manners and charms of a woman of the present day; but, if occasion
offered, this mincing, affected being, who plays a part and warbles out
the ideas of Monsieur this, that, and the other, would show herself
heroic! Even your faults, mesdames, seem the more poetic because they
are and always will be hedged about with great dangers. I have seen
much of the world, perhaps I have studied it too late; but, under
circumstances in which the illegality of your sentiments might find
excuse, I have always observed the effects of some chance--you may
call it Providence if you like--which fatally overtake those women whom
we call frail.”
“I hope,” said Madame de Camps, “that we are able to be great in other
ways.”
“Oh, let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us!” cried Madame de
Sérizy.
“All the more because he has preached by example,” said the Baronne de
Nucingen.
“Alas!” said Général de Montriveau, “of the many dramas--that’s a word
you are constantly using,” he said with a nod to Blondet, “in which to
my knowledge the hand of God has showed itself, the most terrible was
one that was partly my own doing.”
“Oh, tell it to us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I love to shudder.”
“The taste of a virtuous woman,” said de Marsay replying to the
charming daughter of Lord Dudley.
“During the campaign of 1812,” said Général de Montriveau, “I was
the involuntary cause of a terrible misfortune, which may serve you,
Docteur Bianchon,” he said, turning to me--“you, who take so much note
of the human mind while you study the human body--to solve certain of
your riddles concerning the will. I was making my second campaign; I
liked the danger and I laughed at everything, simple young lieutenant
of artillery that I was! When we reached the Beresina the army no
longer kept, as you know, any discipline; military obedience was at an
end. A crowd of men of all nations was making its way instinctively
from north to south. Soldiers drove their bare-footed and ragged
general from their camp-fires if he brought them neither wood nor
provisions. After the passage of that famous river, the disorder was
checked. I came out quietly, alone, without food, from the marshes of
Zembin, and I walked along looking for a house where some one might
be willing to admit me. Finding none all day, being driven away from
those I came to, I fortunately saw late in the evening a miserable
little Polish farmhouse, of which I can give you no idea unless you
have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest hovels
of La Beauce. These Polish dwellings consist of a single room, one
end of which is divided off by a plank partition and serves as a
storehouse for provisions. I saw in the twilight a light smoke rising
from this building, and hoping to find comrades more compassionate than
the persons I had hitherto approached, I marched boldly to the door.
Entering, I found a table spread. Several officers, among whom was
a woman (a not unusual sight), were eating potatoes and horse-flesh
broiled on the embers, and frozen beets. I recognized two or three
captains of artillery belonging to the regiment in which I had first
served. I was received with a volley of hails which would greatly have
surprised me on the other side of the Beresina; but at this moment
the cold was less intense, my comrades were resting, they were warm,
they were eating, and piles of straw at the end of the room offered
them the prospect of a delightful night. We didn’t ask for much in
those days. My comrades could be generous gratis--a very common way
of being generous, by the bye. At the end of the table, near the door
which led into the small room filled with straw and hay, I saw my
former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met in
the varied collection of men it has been my lot to know. He was an
Italian. Whenever human beings are handsome in southern countries they
are sublimely handsome. Have you ever noticed the peculiar whiteness
of Italians when they are white? It is magnificent, especially in the
light. When I read the fantastic portrait Charles Nodier has given
us of Colonel Oudet, I found my own impressions expressed in every
sentence. Italian, like most of the officers of his regiment--borrowed
by the Emperor from the army of Prince Eugène--my colonel was a man of
great height, admirably proportioned, possibly a trifle too stout, but
amazingly vigorous and light, agile as a greyhound. His black hair,
curling profusely, set into brilliant relief a clear white skin like
that of a woman. He had handsome feet, small hands, a charming mouth,
and an aquiline nose with delicate lines, the tip of which contracted
naturally and turned white when he was angry, which was often. His
irascibility so passed all belief that I shall tell you nothing of it;
you shall judge for yourself. No one was ever at ease in his presence.
Perhaps I was the only man who did not fear him. It is true that he
had taken a singular liking to me; he thought whatever I did was good.
When anger worked within him, his forehead contracted, his muscles
stood out in the middle of it like the horse-shoe of Red-gauntlet. That
sign would have terrified you more than the magnetic lightning of his
blue eyes. His whole body would then quiver, and his strength, always
so great in his normal condition, passed all bounds. He rolled his
r’s excessively. His voice, certainly as powerful as that of Charles
Nodier’s Oudet, gave an indescribable richness of sound to the syllable
which contained that consonant. Though this vice of pronunciation was,
in him, and at all times, a charm, you cannot imagine the power that
accent, considered so vulgar in Paris, was capable of expressing when
he commanded a maneuver, or was in any way excited. You must have heard
it to understand it. When the colonel was tranquil his blue eyes were
full of angelic sweetness; his pure brow sparkled with an expression
that was full of charm. At a parade of the Army of Italy no man could
compare with him. Even d’Orsay himself, the handsome d’Orsay, was
vanquished by our colonel at the last review held by Napoleon before
his entrance into Russia. In this gifted man all was contradiction.
Passion lives by contrasts. Therefore do not ask me whether he was
conscious of those irresistible influences to which our nature” (the
general looked toward the Princesse de Cadignan) “bends like molten
glass beneath the blower’s pipe; but it so chanced that by some unusual
fatality the colonel had had but few love-affairs, or had neglected
to have them. To give you an idea of his violence, I will tell you in
two words what I once saw him do in a fit of anger. We were marching
with our cannon along a very narrow road, bordered on one side by woods
and on the other by a rather steep bank. Half way along this road we
met another regiment of artillery, its colonel marching with it. This
colonel wanted to make the captain of our regiment at the head of the
first battery give way to his troop. Naturally our captain refused.
But the colonel of the other regiment made a sign to his first battery
to advance, and in spite of the care the first driver took to keep
close into the woods the wheel of the gun carriage caught the right
leg of our captain, broke it, and flung him to the other side of his
horse. It was done in a moment. Our colonel, who happened to be at a
little distance, saw the quarrel, and galloped furiously up through
the trees and among the wheels at the risk of being flung with all his
hoofs in the air, reaching the spot in face of the other colonel just
as the captain cried out, ‘Help!’ and fell. No! our Italian colonel
was no longer a man. Foam, like that of champagne, boiled from his
mouth, he growled like a lion. Incapable of uttering a word, even a
cry, he made a dreadful sign to his adversary, pointing to the wood,
and drew his sabre. They entered it. In two seconds we saw the other
colonel on the ground with his head split in two. The soldiers of that
regiment retreated, ha! the devil! and in quick time, too! Our captain,
who just missed being killed, and who was yelping in the ditch where
the wheel of the gun-carriage had flung him, had a wife, a charming
Italian woman from Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel.
This circumstance had greatly increased his fury. His protection was
due to the husband; he was bound to defend him as well as the wife.
Now, in the miserable Polish cabin this side of Zembin, where, as
I told you, I received such cordial welcome, this very captain sat
opposite to me, and his wife was at the other end of the table opposite
to the colonel. She was a little woman, named Rosina, very dark, but
bearing in her black eyes, shaped like almonds, all the ardor of the
sun of Sicily. At this moment she was deplorably thin, her cheeks were
covered with dust like a peach exposed to the weather on a high road.
Scarcely clothed and all in rags, wearied by marches, her hair in
disorder beneath the fragment of a shawl tied across her head, there
was still all the presence of a woman about her; her movements were
pretty, her rosy, dimpled mouth, her white teeth, the lines of her face
and bust, charms which misery, cold, and want of care had not entirely
effaced--still told of love and sweetness to anyone whose mind could
dwell upon a woman. Rosina evidently possessed one of those natures
which are fragile in appearance, but are full of nervous strength.
The face of the husband, a Piedmontese nobleman, expressed a sort of
jeering good-humor, if it is permissible to ally those two words.
Brave, intelligent and educated, he nevertheless seemed to ignore the
relations which had existed between his wife and the colonel for nearly
three years. I attributed this indifference to the strange customs
of Italy, or to some secret in their own home; but there was in the
man’s face one feature which had always inspired me with involuntary
distrust. His underlip, thin and very flexible, turned down at its two
extremities instead of turning up, which seemed to me to reveal an
underlying cruelty in a character apparently phlegmatic and indolent.
You can well imagine that the conversation was not brilliant when I
entered. My weary comrades were eating in silence, but they naturally
asked me a few questions; and we related our several misfortunes,
mingling them with reflections on the campaign, the generals, their
blunders, the Russians, and the cold. Soon after my arrival, the
colonel, having finished his meagre meal, wiped his mustache, wished us
good-night, cast his black eye toward the woman, and said, ‘Rosina.’
Then without awaiting any reply he went into the space partitioned off
for forage. The meaning of his summons was evident; and the young woman
made an indescribable gesture, which expressed both the annoyance that
she felt at seeing her dependance thus exhibited without respect for
human feelings, and her sense of the affront offered to her dignity as
a woman and to her husband. And yet in the strained expression of her
features and in the violent contraction of her eyebrows, there seemed
to be a sort of foreboding; perhaps a presentiment of her fate came
over her. Rosina continued to sit tranquilly at the table; a moment
later the colonel’s voice was heard repeating her name, ‘Rosina!’
The tone of this new summons was even more brutal than that of the
first. The rolling accent of the colonel’s voice and the echo which
the Italian language gives to vowels and final letters revealed in a
startling manner the tyranny, impatience, and will of that man. Rosina
turned pale, but she rose, passed behind us, and joined the colonel.
All my comrades maintained a rigid silence; but I, unhappily, after
looking round at them, began to laugh, and the laugh was then repeated
from mouth to mouth. ‘You laugh?’ said the husband. ‘Faith, comrade,’ I
replied, becoming serious, ‘I did wrong, I admit it; I ask ten thousand
pardons; and if you are not content with such excuses I am ready to
give you satisfaction.’ ‘It is not you who have done wrong, it is I,’
he replied coldly. Thereupon we all shook down our straw about the
room and were soon lost in the sleep of weariness. The next day each
man, without awaking his neighbor, without looking for a journeying
companion, started on his way with that utter egotism which made our
retreat from Russia one of the most horrible dramas of personality,
sadness, and horror which ever took place beneath the heavens. Yet
after each man had gone some seven or eight hundred yards from our
night’s lodging, we came together and marched along like geese led in
flocks by the unconscious dominance of a child. A common necessity was
driving us along. When we reached a slight elevation from which we
could see the house where we had passed the night, we heard sounds that
resembled the roaring of lions in the desert or the bellowing of bulls;
but no! that clamor could not be compared to any known sound. Mingled
with that horrible and sinister roar came the feeble cry of a woman. We
all turned round, seized with a sensation--I know not how to describe
it--of fear; the house was no longer visible, only a burning pile; the
building, which someone had barricaded, was in flames. Clouds of smoke,
driven by the wind, rolled toward us, bringing raucous sounds and a
strong indescribable odor. A few steps from us marched the captain, who
had quietly joined our caravan; we looked at him in silence, for none
of us dared question him. But he, divining our curiosity, touched his
breast with the forefinger of his right hand and pointed with the left
to the conflagration. ‘Son io!’ he said. We continued our way without
another word to him.”
“There is nothing more fearful than the revolt of sheep,” said de
Marsay.
“It would be too dreadful to let us part with that horrible scene in
our minds,” said Madame de Montcornet. “I shall dream of it.”
“Tell us, before we go, what punishment befell Monsieur de Marsay’s
first love,” said Lord Dudley, smiling.
“When Englishmen jest their foils are buttoned,” remarked Emile Blondet.
“Monsieur Bianchon can tell you that,” replied de Marsay, turning to
me. “He saw her die.”
“Yes,” I said, “and her death was one of the most beautiful I ever
witnessed. The duke and I had passed the night beside the pillow of
the dying woman, whose disease, consumption, was then in its final
stages; no hope remained, and she had received the last offices of
the Church the preceding evening. The duke had fallen asleep. Madame
la duchesse, waking about four in the morning, made me, in a touching
manner and with a smile, a tender little sign to let him sleep; and yet
she felt she was about to die! She had reached a stage of extraordinary
thinness, but her face preserved its features, and its outlines were
truly sublime. Her pallor made her skin resemble porcelain behind
which a light has been placed. Her brilliant eyes and the color in her
cheeks shone out upon this skin so softly beautiful, while the whole
countenance seemed to breathe forth a commanding tranquility. Evidently
she pitied the duke, and the feeling took its rise in a lofty sentiment
which seemed to see no limit in the approach of death. The silence was
profound. The chamber, softly lighted by a lamp, had the appearance of
all sick-chambers at the moment of death. At that instant the clock
struck. The duke awoke, and was in despair at having slept. I did not
see the gesture of impatience with which he showed the regret he felt
at having lost his wife from sight during the few last moments granted
to him; but it is certain that any other person than the dying woman
might have been mistaken about him. A statesman, preoccupied with the
interests of France, the duke had many of those apparent oddities which
often make men of genius pass for fools, though the explanation may be
found in the exquisite nature and requirements of their mind. He now
took a chair beside the bed and looked fixedly at his wife. The dying
woman put out her hand and took that of her husband which she pressed
gently, saying in a soft but trembling voice:
“‘My poor friend, who will understand you in the future?’
“So saying, she died, looking at him.”
[Footnote 1: Translated by George Milburn.]
[Footnote 2: “As it should be”--correct, ideal, perfect.]
[Footnote 3: “As it shouldn’t be,” the opposite of _comme il
faut_.]
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
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