Letters of Two Brides

by Honoré de Balzac

  The if only in that endlessly repeated prayer ravaged my soul. I found myself between belief and error, between life and death, darkness and light. A criminal awaiting his verdict is no more petrified than I as I plead guilty to this boldness before you. The smile on your lips, to which my eyes returned again and again, calmed those tempests aroused by the fear of displeasing you. In all my life, no one has ever smiled at me, not even my mother. The beautiful girl who was meant to be my wife spurned my heart and fell in love with my brother. My political efforts met only with defeat. In the eyes of my king I saw only a desire for vengeance; we have been such great enemies since our earliest days that he took my elevation to power by the Cortes[34] as a personal affront. For less than this, even the hardiest soul could lose all hope. Not to mention that I am under no illusion: I am fully aware of my external homeliness, and I know how difficult it is to gauge the value of my heart through such a vessel. When I first saw you, love was nothing more than a dream for me. Finding myself growing fond of you, I realized that devotion alone could inspire you to forgive me my affection. I looked at that portrait, I heard the divine promises expressed by that smile, and a hope I had never allowed myself to feel cast a glow through my soul. That dawn-like gleam must continually do battle with the gloom of doubt, with the fear that I might offend you should I let it shine out. No, you cannot love me yet, I understand that, but once you have felt the power, the deathlessness, the depth of my inexhaustible affection, you will offer it a small place in your heart. If my ambition is an insult, you need only tell me so without anger, and I will go back to my role, but should you be willing to try to love me, do not, without the most careful precautions, make it known to one who has made serving you the whole of his happiness in life.

  My dear, I believed I could see him as I read those last few words, just as pale as he was that evening I displayed the camellia to tell him I accepted the treasures of his devotion. I saw in those submissive sentences something very different from a mere flight of amorous rhetoric, and I felt a sort of great stirring inside me . . . the fresh wind of happiness.

  The weather has been dreadful, I’ve had no chance to go to the Bois de Boulogne, lest I arouse curious suspicions; for my mother, who often goes out even in the rain, has stayed at home alone.

  Wednesday evening

  I’ve just seen him, at the Opéra. My dear, he is no longer the same man; he came to our box, introduced by the Sardinian ambassador. Seeing in my eyes that I was not displeased by his boldness, he suddenly seemed awkward and shy, and then he called the Marquise d’Espard “mademoiselle.” The fire in his eyes outshone the lamps. Finally he went out, as if terrified he might commit some irreparable gaffe.

  “Baron de Macumer is in love!” Madame de Maufrigneuse said to my mother.

  “An extraordinary sight—and him a deposed minister!” my mother answered.

  I found the strength to look at Madame d’Espard, Madame de Maufrigneuse, and my mother with the curiosity of one unversed in some foreign language, trying to guess the things being said, but inside I felt an exquisite joy submerging my soul. There is only one word by which to explain what I now feel, and that word is “bliss.” Felipe loves so deeply that I find him worthy of love. I am the very principle of his life, and I hold in my hand the string that guides his thoughts. If you and I must tell each other all, then I will say that I long most ardently to see him beat down every obstacle, to see him come and ask me for myself, so that I might learn if I can still make that raging love quiet and meek with one single glance.

  Ah! my dear, I interrupted my letter there, and now I am all atremble. I heard a faint sound outside as I was writing. I rose to my feet, and through the window I saw him walking along the top of the wall, at great risk to his life. I hurried to the bedroom window and gave him nothing more than a sign; he leapt from the wall, which is ten feet high, and then ran down the road until I could see him, to show me he was unhurt. That thoughtfulness at a time when he was very likely dazed by his fall so moved me that I now find myself weeping without knowing why. Poor toad! Why did he come here, what did he want to tell me?

  I dare not write what I am thinking; I will now go to bed in my joy and reflect on all we would say if we were together. Farewell, my mute beauty. I have no time to chide you for your silence, but a month has gone by with no word from you. Have you perhaps become a happy wife? Have you perhaps surrendered the free will that made you so proud, and which nearly deserted me this evening?

  20

  FROM RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE TO LOUISE DE CHAULIEU

  May

  If love is the life of the world, why do austere philosophers allow it no place in marriage? Why does Society take Woman’s sacrifice to the family as its highest law, inevitably sparking a silent battle in the very heart of every marriage? A battle that Society has in fact foreseen, so dangerous that Society has invented powers with which to arm men against us, realizing that we could undo everything by the magic of romance or the power of a secret hatred. I now see in marriage two opposed forces that the lawmakers should have united; when will they come together? So I say to myself as I read your words. Oh! my dear, just one of your letters makes a ruin of the edifice built by the great writer of the Aveyron, an edifice into which I had settled with some satisfaction. Old men make the laws, as any woman can plainly see; they have most sagaciously decreed that conjugal love without passion is no indignity for a woman, that she must give herself without love once the law has authorized a man to claim her as his. In their preoccupation with the family, they imitate nature, concerned solely with the perpetuation of the species. Once I was a living being, and now I am a thing! I have choked back more than one tear, far away and alone, which I wished I could exchange for a consoling smile. Why must our two fates be so different? Thanks to a shared love, your soul is growing and flourishing. You will find virtue in pleasure. You will suffer only by your own will. Your duty, if you marry your Felipe, will become the sweetest and most exalted of all sentiments. Our future is pregnant with the answer to that question, and I await it with anxious curiosity.

  You love, you are adored. Oh! my dear, you must give yourself over entirely to that beautiful poem that once so filled our minds. Feminine beauty, so refined and so sparkling in you, was created by God to charm and to please; He has His reasons. Yes, my angel, keep your ardor a closely held secret, and subject Felipe to all the subtle tests we invented to learn if the lover we dreamt of would be worthy of us. Above all, determine less if he loves you than if you love him: nothing is more deceptive than the mirage created in our soul by curiosity, by desire, by the anticipation of happiness. You who, unlike me, are still wholly your own, do not enter into the dangerous bargain of an irrevocable marriage without demanding the proper guarantees, I beg of you! A single gesture, a word, a glance, in a conversation without witnesses, the two souls stripped of their worldly masks, can illuminate many dark corners. You are noble enough, self-assured enough to venture boldly down paths where others would lose their way. You cannot imagine how anxiously I follow after you. In spite of the distance between us, I see you, I feel your emotions. Do not fail to write me, then, and omit nothing! Your letters offer me a life rich with passion here in my very simple, very sedate household, plain as a highway on a sunless day. What is happening here, my angel, is a series of quarrels with myself, which I prefer to keep secret for today; I will tell you more later. I give myself and then stubbornly take myself back, going from discouragement to hope and hope to discouragement. Perhaps I am asking life for more happiness than it owes us. When we are young, we always expect the ideal and the real to be one! My reflections, to which I must now devote myself alone, sitting at the foot of a high bluff in my grounds, have led me to conclude that love in marriage is a matter of chance on which no law can be founded, for law must be founded in universals. My Aveyron philosopher is right to see the family as the only source of social cohesion, and to submit woman to it as she has always been. The solution to that great
question, that almost fearsome question for us, is in the first child we bear, and so I am eager to be a mother, if only to give fodder to the ravenous energy of my soul.

  Louis is as always wonderfully kind, his love is concrete and my tenderness is abstract; he is happy, he gathers the rosebuds all alone, little caring what the soil has given up to produce them. Happy egoism! Whatever it might cost me, I maintain his illusions, just as a mother—such, at least, as I conceive of a mother—must exhaust herself for the sake of her child’s contentment. His joy is so deep that it closes his eyes, and it casts its glow even onto me. I fool him with my smile, or with the satisfied gaze given me by the knowledge that I am making him happy. My pet name for him in our private moments is thus “my child”! I await the fruit of all these sacrifices, which will be a secret between God, you, and me. Maternity is an enterprise in which I have invested a ruinous sum. Today it owes me too much, and I fear I may never be fully repaid: its task is to make use of my energy and enlarge my heart, to compensate me with unlimited joys. Oh! please God, may I not be deceived! For there lies my entire future, and, a terrifying thing to think, my virtue’s as well.

  21

  FROM LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE

  June

  Dear married doe, your letter came just when it was needed; it let me justify to myself a bold act I have been thinking of night and day. I have a kind of hunger for the unknown—or, if you like, the forbid-den—which worries me and portends a battle inside me between society’s laws and nature’s. I don’t know if nature is stronger in me than society, but I find myself seeking concessions from each of those two powers. To say all this more clearly, I wanted to speak with Felipe alone, by night, under the linden trees at the far end of our garden. That is most certainly the desire of a girl who deserves the title of bold little vixen, as the duchess laughingly calls me, echoed by my father. Nonetheless, I find that scandalous project both prudent and wise. For one thing, I would be repaying him for so many nights spent at the foot of my wall; for another, I want to know what Monsieur Felipe would think of this escapade, and to judge him in such circumstances—to make of him my beloved spouse should he transform that indiscretion into a beautiful moment, or to never see him again if he is not more respectful and tremulous than when he greets me from his horse on the Champs-Élysées. As for the opinion of society, there is less risk in seeing my suitor this way than in smiling at him in the drawing room of Madame de Maufrigneuse or the aged Marquise de Beauséant, where we are now surrounded by spies, for, God knows, when a girl is suspected of taking an interest in a monster like Macumer, every eye is upon her! Oh, if you only knew how I’ve stirred myself up with dreams of that project, how the search for a way to bring it about has occupied my thoughts! I missed your company: we would have talked it all over for several sweet little hours, lost in the labyrinths of uncertainty, reveling in all the good or bad things that might come with a first nocturnal rendezvous, in the shadows and silence, beneath the Chaulieu mansion’s magnificent, moon-dappled lindens. Instead, I trembled all alone, thinking, “Ah! Renée, where are you?” Your letter was the spark in the powder keg, and my last scruples were blown to kingdom come. From my window, I dropped into my lover’s hands a very precise drawing of the key to the little garden door, along with this note:

  You must be stopped from making a grave misstep. Should you fall and break your neck, you would ruin the honor of the one you claim to love. Are you worthy of a new proof of esteem, and do you deserve a private conversation at the hour when the moon leaves the lindens at the end of the garden in darkness?

  Last night, at one o’clock, as Griffith was preparing for bed, I said to her, “Take your shawl and come with me, my dear, I want to go to the end of the garden without anyone knowing!” She followed me without a word. What feelings I had inside me, my Renée! for, after a rather long wait in the grips of a delightful little terror, I caught sight of him, gliding along like a shadow. Once safely arrived in the garden, I said to Griffith, “Don’t be surprised. Baron de Macumer is here; that’s precisely why I’ve brought you along.” She said nothing.

  “What do you want with me?” said Felipe, in a voice whose emotion showed that the sound of our rustling dresses in the silence of the night and our footfalls in the sand, however discreet, had had a marked effect on him.

  “I want to say to you what I would never be able to write,” I answered.

  Griffith walked off some six paces. It was one of those warm, flower-scented nights, and I was dizzy with pleasure to find myself virtually alone with him in the soft darkness of the lindens, with the garden beyond all the brighter in that the moonlight shone white off the façade of our house. That contrast vaguely created an image of the mystery of our love, destined to end in the dazzling public display that is marriage. After wondering together for a moment at the thrill of this situation, equally new to us both, as full of surprise for us both, I recovered my voice.

  “I have no fear of slander, but I would like you never to climb that tree again,” I said, pointing to the elm, “nor this wall. We have played the schoolboy and the boarding-school girl long enough: let us elevate our sentiments to the level of our destinies. Should you die from a fall, I would die dishonored. . . .” I looked at him; he was ashen. “And were you caught, my mother or I would be suspected. . . .”

  “Forgive me,” he said weakly.

  “Simply walk along the boulevard, and I will hear your footsteps. Should I want to see you, I will open my window, but I will make you run that risk, and I will run it myself, only in the gravest of circumstances. Why have you forced me, by your imprudence, to commit an imprudence of my own, and to lower your opinion of me?” I thought the tears I saw in his eyes the most beautiful answer in the world. “You must find what I’ve done tonight exceedingly dangerous,” I said with a smile.

  We silently walked one or two circles beneath the trees before he spoke again. “You must think me very dull; I am so drunk with happiness that I find myself without strength or wit, but know at least that to me your every act is sacred simply because you allow yourself to undertake it. My respect for you can be compared only to my respect for God. And of course, Miss Griffith is here.”

  “She’s here for the others, Felipe, not for us,” I answered sharply. My dear, he understood me.

  “I know full well,” he went on, giving me the humblest of looks, “that were she not here everything would be just as if she were watching us: even when we do not stand before men, we stand before God, and we require our own esteem no less than the world’s.”

  “Thank you, Felipe,” I answered, extending my hand in a gesture you can surely imagine. “A woman—and take me for a woman—is inclined to love a man who understands her. Oh! inclined, nothing more,” I added, putting a finger to my lips. “I would not have you feel more hope than I mean to give you. My heart will belong only to him who can read it and truly know it. Our sentiments need not be identical, but they must have the same breadth and the same elevation. I do not wish to overestimate myself, for no doubt there are many flaws in what I see as my qualities, but I would be very sorry if I did not have them.”

  “First you accepted me as your servant, and then you allowed me to love you,” he said, trembling and looking at me with each word. “I already have more than I ever desired.”

  “But,” I hurried to answer, “I find your lot preferable to mine; I would not be sorry to change it, and that change depends on you.”

  “And now it is my turn to thank you,” he answered. “I know the duties of a loyal lover. I must prove that I am worthy, and you have the right to test me for as long as you please. You may send me away, my God! should I disappoint your hopes.”

  “I know you love me,” I told him. “So far”—and I cruelly emphasized those words—“you are the favorite, which is why you are here.”

  We began walking in circles again, talking, and I must confess that, once placed at his ease, it was with the most heartfelt
eloquence that my Spaniard told me not of his passion but of his tender sentiments, explaining his feelings by way of an adorable comparison with divine love. His penetrating voice lent a particular force to his already refined ideas; it called to mind the tones of the nightingale. He spoke softly, in his rich middle register, and his sentences came one upon the next, quick as the bubbles in boiling water. His heart overflowed in each one.

  “Stop,” I said, “or I will be here longer than I should.” And with a gesture I sent him away.

  “Well, here you are promised to a man, mademoiselle,” said Griffith.

  “In England, perhaps, but not in France,” I answered airily. “I want to marry for love and not be deceived, nothing more.” As you see, my dear, love was not coming to me, so I did as Muhammad did with his mountain.

  Friday

  I saw my slave again; he grew timid, he put on a mysterious, reverent air that I like, for it seems imbued with my glory and power. But nothing in his gaze or demeanor might suggest to society’s sibyls that he feels the boundless love I can see plain as day. Nonetheless, my dear, I am not overcome, dominated, tamed; on the contrary, it is I who tame, who dominate, who overcome. . . . I am finally reasoning for myself. Ah! I would so like to feel once more the fear caused me by the fascination of the great man or commoner to whom I refused myself. There are two sorts of love: there is one love that commands and another that obeys. They are not the same, and they give birth to two very different passions; in order to have a full measure of life, perhaps a woman must know both. Can those two passions intermingle? Can a man in whom we inspire love, inspire love in us? Will Felipe one day be my master? Will I tremble as he does? Those questions send a shiver down my spine. How blind he is! In his place, I would have thought Mademoiselle de Chaulieu very coquettishly cold, stiff, and calculating beneath those linden trees. No, that’s not loving, it’s playing with fire. Felipe continues to please me, but I now feel calm and at ease. No more obstacles! What a terrible thought. Everything is settling down and relaxing inside me, and I am loath to study myself too closely. He was wrong to hide the violence of his love, for he left me my own mistress. In other words, I am not enjoying the benefits of that semi-scandalous behavior. Yes, my dear, however sweet I find the memory of that half hour beneath the trees, the pleasure it brought me seems far fainter than the emotions I felt as I wondered, “Shall I go? Shall I not? Shall I write him? Shall I not?” Is the same perhaps true of all our pleasures? Are they better deferred than enjoyed? Is anticipation better than possession? Are the rich poor? Did you and I overdevelop our emotions by too vigorous an exercise of our imaginations? There are times when that thought makes my blood run cold. Do you know why? I imagine returning to the end of the garden, this time without Griffith. How far would I go then? Imagination has no limits, and pleasures do. Tell me, my dear professor in a corset, how to reconcile those two terms of a woman’s existence?