The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  Ah, I have taken back all my letters, and I am throwing them in the fire! They are burning. You will never know what they confessed—love, passion, madness . . . I keep silent, Armand, I cease, I no longer wish to tell you anything of my feelings. If the prayers from my soul to yours have not been heard, as a woman I decline to owe your love to pity. It is my wish to be loved irresistibly or dropped without mercy. If you refuse to read this letter, it will be burned. If, having read it, you are not three hours later forever my only husband, I will have no shame knowing that it is in your hands: The pride of my despair will protect my memory from any insult and my end will be worthy of my love. As for you, when you see me no more on earth, though I shall still be alive, you will not think without a shudder of a woman who in three hours will no longer draw breath but to overwhelm you with her tenderness, a woman consumed by hopeless love, and faithful—not to shared pleasures but to unknown feelings.

  The Duchesse de La Vallière wept for lost happiness, for her vanished power, while the Duchesse de Langeais will be happy in her weeping and will remain a power for you. Yes, you will regret me . . . I see clearly that I was not of this world, and I thank you for having made it clear to me.

  Farewell, you will never touch my ax; yours was that of the executioner, mine is that of God; yours kills and mine saves. Your love was mortal, it knew how to bear neither disdain nor ridicule; mine can endure everything without weakening, it is eternally live. Oh, I feel a dark joy in crushing you, you who believed in your greatness, in humbling you by the calm and protective smile of weak angels who, in lying down at the feet of God, have the right and the power to watch over men in His name. You have had merely passing desires, while the poor nun will shed on you the light of her ardent prayers and cover you always with the wings of divine love.

  I have a presentiment of your reply, Armand, and grant you a meeting . . . in heaven. Friend, there strength and weakness are equally admitted; both are bound to suffer. This thought soothes the anguish of my final ordeal. You see, I am so calm that I would fear I no longer loved you, if it were not for you that I am leaving this world.

  Antoinette

  “Dear vidame,” said the duchess, arriving at Montriveau’s house, “do me the grace of asking at the door if he is in.”

  The commander, obeying in the manner of the eighteenth century, disembarked from the carriage and returned to answer “yes” to his cousin’s question, an answer that made her shiver. At this word, she took the commander, squeezed his hand, let him kiss her on both cheeks, and begged him to go at once without spying on her or trying to protect her.

  “But the passersby?” he said.

  “No one can fail to respect me,” she replied.

  This was the last word from the lady of fashion and the duchess. The commander went off. Madame de Langeais remained on the threshold, wrapped in her cloak, and waited for the clock to strike eight. The hour struck and all was still. This unhappy woman gave herself ten minutes, a quarter of an hour; indeed, she was inclined to see a new humiliation in this tardiness, and faith abandoned her. She could not help exclaiming, “Oh my God!” then left that deadly threshold. These were the first words of the Carmelite.

  Montriveau was in a meeting with several friends; he hurried them to finish up, but his clock was slow and he left for the Langeais mansion only when the duchess, transported by cold rage, was fleeing on foot through the streets of Paris. She wept when she reached boulevard d’Enfer. There, for the last time, she looked at Paris, smoking, burning, covered with a reddish glow from its streetlights; then she mounted a cab for hire and left this city never to return. When the Marquis de Montriveau came to the Langeais mansion, he did not find his mistress there and thought she was toying with him. So he ran to the home of the vidame and was received there just as the good man was slipping into his dressing gown, thinking of his pretty cousin’s happiness. Montriveau gave him a terrible look, a look that struck men and women alike as an electric shock.

  “Monsieur, would you lend yourself to this cruel joke?” he cried. “I have come from Madame de Langeais’s, and her servants say that she has left.”

  “A great disaster has happened, doubtless because of you,” answered the vidame. “I left the duchess at your door—”

  “At what time?”

  “At quarter to eight.”

  “My best to you,” said Montriveau, who quickly returned home to ask his porter if he had seen a lady at the door that evening.

  “Yes, monsieur, a beautiful woman who seemed to be having a good deal of trouble. She was weeping like a Madeleine without making a sound and was holding herself as straight as a needle. At last she said ‘Oh my God!’ in a way that—begging your pardon—broke our hearts, my wife’s and mine, who were there without being seen.”

  These few words made this hard man go pale. He wrote some lines to Monsieur de Ronquerolles, which he sent him on the spot, and went back to his apartment. Toward midnight, the Marquis de Ronquerolles arrived.

  “What is it, my good friend?” he said, seeing the general.

  Armand gave him the duchess’s letter to read.

  “Well?” asked Ronquerolles.

  “She was at my door at eight o’clock, and at quarter past eight she disappeared. I have lost her, and I love her! Ah, if my life belonged to me, I would already have blown my brains out!”

  “Now, now!” said Ronquerolles. “Calm down. Duchesses do not fly away like wagtails. She will not manage more than three leagues per hour; tomorrow we men shall do six.

  “Oh, confound it!” he continued. “Madame de Langeais is not an ordinary woman. We will all be on horseback tomorrow. The police will tell us where she has gone. Whether she is on the road or hidden in Paris, we shall find her. Do we not have the telegraph to stop her without following her? You will be happy. But my dear brother, you have committed the sin that men of your energy are more or less guilty of committing. You judge other souls according to your own, and do not know where humanity breaks when you pull the cords too tight. Why did you not tell me sooner? I would have told you: Be there on time.

  “Until tomorrow, then,” he added, shaking Montriveau’s hand while he remained silent. “Sleep if you can.”

  But the vast resources in which men of state, sovereigns, ministers, bankers, indeed all human power is socially invested, were deployed in vain. Neither Montriveau nor his friends could find a trace of the duchess. She had obviously taken refuge in a cloister. Montriveau resolved to search or have searched all the convents in the world. He must have the duchess, even if it cost him the life of an entire city. To do justice to this extraordinary man, we must say that his passionate furor did not abate for a day and lasted five years.

  Not until 1829 did the Duc de Navarreins learn by chance that his daughter had departed for Spain, as Julia Hopwood’s chambermaid, and that she had left this lady in Cádiz. Lady Julia had no notion that Mademoiselle Caroline was the illustrious duchess whose disappearance was the talk of Parisian high society.

  We may now understand the depth of the lovers’ feelings when they found each other again at the grille of the Carmelite convent, in the presence of a mother superior. And the violence awakened in them both will doubtless explain the ending of this adventure.

  4. GOD GIVES THE ENDING

  In 1823 the Duc de Langeais died and his wife was free. Antoinette de Navarreins was living consumed by love on a ledge of the Mediterranean, but the pope could break the vows of Sister Theresa. The happiness bought by such love could blossom for the two lovers. These thoughts sent Montriveau flying from Cádiz to Marseille, from Marseille to Paris. Some months after his arrival in France, a merchant brig armed for war set sail from Marseille for Spain. The vessel had been chartered by several men of distinction, nearly all French, who were taken with a great passion for the East and wanted to travel to those lands. Montriveau’s familiar knowledge of Eastern customs made him an invaluable traveling companion for these persons, who begged him to join them on
their expedition and he agreed. The minister of war named him a lieutenant general and put him on the artillery committee to facilitate this pleasure party.

  Twenty-four hours after its departure the brig stopped northwest of an island in sight of the Spanish coast. The vessel had been specially chosen for her shallow draft and light sail so that it might lie at anchor safely half a league away from the reefs that secure the island from approach in this direction. If fishing boats or the island’s inhabitants perceived the brig in this anchorage, they could not imagine any reason for concern. Then it was easy to justify its presence. Before arriving in sight of the island, Montriveau hoisted the flag of the United States. The sailors hired for service on the vessel were Americans and spoke only English. One of Monsieur de Montriveau’s companions took the men ashore in a longboat and made them so drunk at an inn in the little town that they could not talk. Then he let on that the brig was manned by treasure seekers, men known in the United States for their fanaticism and whose story had been recorded by one of the writers of that country. Thus the presence of the vessel among the reefs was sufficiently explained. The owners and passengers, said the self-styled boatswain, were searching for the remains of a galleon sunk in 1778, carrying treasure from Mexico. The innkeepers and authorities of the country asked no more questions.

  Armand and his devoted friends, who backed him up in his difficult enterprise, thought at first that neither ruse nor strength could succeed in delivering or carrying off Sister Theresa from the side of the little coastal town. So by common agreement, these audacious men resolved to take the bull by the horns. They wanted to cut a path to the convent through the most inaccessible places and to conquer nature the way General Lamarque had conquered in the assault on Capri. In this instance, it seemed to Montriveau, who had been on that incredible expedition, the sheer granite blocks at the end of the island offered less purchase than those of Capri, and the nuns seemed to him more fearsome than Sir Hudson Lowe. Raising a hubbub in order to carry off the duchess seemed shameful to the men. They might as well lay siege to the town and the convent, leaving not a single witness to their victory, as pirates do. For them, this enterprise had therefore only two aspects: either a fire, an armed struggle that would frighten a Europe ignorant of the reason for the crime, or some mysterious aerial abduction that would persuade the nuns that the devil had paid them a visit. This last plan prevailed in the secret council held in Paris before the departure. Then everything had been foreseen for the success of an enterprise that offered these men, bored with the pleasures of Paris, a real caper.

  An extremely light pirogue, manufactured in Marseille after a Malaysian model, allowed them to navigate the reefs to a spot where they could go no farther. Two cables of iron wire served as a bridge, such as the Chinese use, going from rock to rock. The reefs were bound together in this way by a system of cables and baskets that resembled those threads on which certain spiders move as they wrap a tree. This was instinctive work, which the Chinese—a people essentially given to imitation—were the first to copy, historically speaking. Neither the crests nor the caprices of the sea could displace these fragile constructions. The cables had enough play to offer the waves that curvature studied by an engineer, the late Cachin, the immortal creator of the harbor at Cherbourg. Against this cunningly devised line the angry sea was helpless; the law of that curve was a secret wrested from nature by the genius of observation, which accounts for nearly all human genius.

  Monsieur de Montriveau’s companions were all alone on this vessel. They were out of sight of every human eye. The most powerful telescopes manned on the top decks by sailors on passing ships could not have discovered the cables hidden in the reefs or the men hidden in the rocks. After eleven days of preparatory work, these thirteen human devils were able to reach the foot of the cliff, which rose thirty fathoms from the sea. This sheer rock of granite was as difficult for a man to climb as the polished contours of a plain porcelain vase would be for a mouse. Still, there was a cleft, a straight line of fissure where blocks of wood could be firmly wedged about a foot apart, into which these daring workers could nail iron crampons. These crampons, prepared in advance, held by a broad bracket on which they set a step made out of an extremely light plank of pine, and this plank was adapted to the notches of a mast as tall as the promontory and firmly planted in the rock at the shore. With ingenuity worthy of these men of action, one of them, a skillful mathematician, had calculated the angle from which the steps must gradually rise, like a fan, starting at the middle of the mast and reaching its upper end at the top of the rock. This method was repeated in reverse by the steps from below. This stairway, miraculously light and perfectly solid, cost twenty-two days of labor. A phosphorous light and the undertow of the waves would destroy all trace of it forever in a single night. No indiscretion, then, was possible, and no search for the violators of the convent could succeed.

  The top of the rock formed a platform with sheer drops on all sides. The thirteen strangers, examining the terrain with telescopes from atop the masthead, were reassured that in spite of some difficulties they could easily reach the gardens of the convent where the trees were thick enough to offer certain shelter. There, no doubt, they would have to decide how to manage the nun’s abduction. After such great efforts, they did not want to compromise the success of their enterprise by risking discovery and were obliged to wait until the last quarter of the moon had faded.

  Montriveau slept on the rock for two nights, wrapped in his coat. The evensongs and matins filled him with inexpressible joy. He went up to the wall to be able to hear the music of the organ and made an effort to distinguish one voice among the mass of voices. But in spite of the silence, only the jumbled effects of the music reached his ears in the vast space. In those sweet harmonies defects of execution are lost; the pure thought of art alone reaches the soul without demanding efforts of attention or a strain on understanding. For Armand, overwhelming memories of love flowered again whole in this breath of music, in which he wanted to find airborne promises of happiness. The day following the last night, he climbed down before sunrise after several hours inert, with his eyes focused on the window of a cell without a grille. The grilles were not necessary above this abyss. A light shone there all night long. And that instinct of the heart—which is false as often as it is true—had cried to him, “She is there!”

  “She is surely there, and tomorrow I will have her,” he said to himself, mingling joyous thoughts with the slow tolling of a bell. Odd quirkiness of the heart! He loved even more passionately the nun withering in the yearnings of love, consumed by tears, fasting, and prayer vigils, the woman of twenty-nine tried and tested years, rather than the insouciant young girl, the sylphlike twenty-four-year-old. But men with strong souls have a penchant for sublime expressions that noble misery or impetuous movements of thought have engraved on the face of a woman.

  Is the beauty of a sorrowful woman not the most affecting of all for men who feel in their hearts an inexhaustible treasure of consolations and tenderness for a creature so gracious in weakness and strong in feeling? The fresh-faced beauty, smooth-skinned with high coloring, the pretty woman, in short, is the popular attraction of ordinary people. Montriveau could not but love those faces in which love awakened amid the folds of sadness and the ruins of melancholy. Does a lover not call forth a new creature by his powerful desires, a young woman, throbbing with life, who breaks through an envelope beautiful for him alone, which the world sees as destroyed? In truth he possesses two women: one who presents herself to others as pale, discolored, sad; the other who dwells in his heart, unseen, an angel who understands life through feeling and appears in all her glory only for the celebrants of love. Before leaving his post, the general heard weak harmonies, sweet voices full of tenderness coming from this cell. Climbing down beneath the rock where his friends were waiting, he told them that never in his life had he felt such captivating bliss, and his few words bore the stamp of that discreet but communicative passion
whose imposing expression men always respect.

  The following evening, eleven devoted companions ascended in the darkness to the top of the rocks, each of them carrying a dagger, a provision of chocolate, and all the tools required by the thieves’ trade. Reaching the surrounding wall, they breached it by means of ladders they had devised in the cemetery of the convent. Montriveau recognized the vaulted long gallery by which he had previously come to the parlor and the windows of that room. On the spot, his plan was made and adopted. Open a passage through the window of that parlor which lit up the section belonging to the Carmelites, penetrate the corridors, see if the names were inscribed on each cell, go to Sister Theresa’s cell, surprise her as she slept, and carry her off, bound and gagged. All these aspects of the plan were easy for the men, who combined boldness with a convict’s dexterity as well as knowledge peculiar to men of the world, and they were quite prepared to wield their daggers to buy silence.

  The grille of the window was sawed apart in two hours. Three men stood guard outside and two others remained in the parlor. The rest were posted, barefoot, at even intervals through the cloister. Young Henri de Marsay, the most nimble man among them, out of caution disguised in a Carmelite’s robe identical to the dress of the convent, led the way with Montriveau hidden behind him. The clock struck three just as the false nun and Montriveau reached the dormitory. They had quickly recognized the placement of the cells. Then, hearing no noise, they read with the aid of a dark lantern the names fortunately written on each door and accompanied by those mystic words, those portraits of saints male or female that each nun inscribed in the form of an epigraph for her new life and in which she revealed her last thought. Arriving at the cell of Sister Theresa, Montriveau read this inscription: SUB INVOCATIONE SANCTAE MATRIS THERESAE! The epigraph read: ADOREMUS IN AETERNUM. Suddenly his companion put a hand on his shoulder and gestured toward the strong beam of light coming through a crack in the door, lighting up the tiles of the corridor. Just then, Monsieur de Ronquerolles joined them.