Letters of Two Brides

by Honoré de Balzac

  I am exceedingly curious to know just when motherhood begins. It cannot be in the midst of the horrible pains I am dreading.

  Farewell, my happy friend! Farewell, you in whom I am reborn and through whom I imagine those beautiful ardors, those jealousies born of a single glance, those words whispered in the ear, those pleasures that envelop us like another atmosphere, another blood, another light, another life! Ah! my darling, I too understand love. Never weary of telling me all. Let us remain true to our pact. For my part, I will spare you nothing. And so I will say, to end this letter on a serious note, that a deep, insurmountable terror seized hold of me as I reread your words. I could only see that splendid love of yours as a challenge to God. Will this world’s sovereign master, Sorrow, not be angry to have been offered no share of your feast? Is there one superb fortune he has not overturned? Oh, Louise, amid all your happiness, do not forget to pray to God. Do good, be charitable and kind; ward off all adversity by your modesty. I myself, since my wedding, have become still more pious than I was at the convent. You have made no mention of religion in Paris. In your adoration of Felipe, I sense that you are turning more to the saint than to God, contravening the proverb. But my terror is simply an effect of excessive friendship. You do go to church together, and you do perform good works in secret, do you not? You will perhaps find me very provincial in these last lines of my letter, but remember that my fears conceal only a deep friendship, friendship as La Fontaine understood it, the sort of friendship that worries and frets over things merely imagined, over nebulous suspicions. You deserve to be happy, since you think of me in your happiness, just as I think of you in my monotonous life, slightly gray but full, sober but productive—and bless you for that!

  29

  FROM MONSIEUR DE L’ESTORADE TO BARONESS DE MACUMER

  December 1825

  Madame,

  My wife did not want you to learn by an ordinary printed announcement of an event that has filled us with joy. She has given birth to a strong, healthy son, and we will delay his baptism until you return to Chantepleurs. It is our hope that you will continue on to La Crampade and become our firstborn’s godmother. In that anticipation, I have just had his birth recorded under the name Armand-Louis de l’Estorade. Our dear Renée suffered a good deal, but with angelic patience. You know her: she was supported in that first trial of motherhood by her certainty of the happiness she was giving us all. Without falling into the faintly ridiculous exaggerations of fathers who are fathers for the first time, I can assure you that little Armand is a very handsome boy, but you will have no difficulty believing it when I tell you he has Renée’s features and eyes. That is a sign of good sense in itself. Now that the doctor and the obstetrician have assured us that Renée is out of danger—for she is nursing, the child took readily to the breast, the milk is abundant, nature is so powerful in her!—my father and I can abandon ourselves to our joy. Madame, that joy is so great, so strong, so complete, it so animates the entire household, it has so changed my dear wife’s existence, that for the sake of your happiness I hope you will very soon experience it for yourself. Renée has had rooms prepared for you; I do wish they were more worthy of our guests, but you will be received here with fraternal cordiality, if not great luxury.

  Renée has told me, madame, of the aid you intend to give us, and I am all the more eager to seize this occasion to thank you in that the timing is opportune. The birth of my son has convinced my father to make the sort of sacrifices to which old men resolve themselves with difficulty: he has just bought two new tracts of land. La Crampade is now an estate with an annual revenue of thirty thousand francs. My father will seek the king’s permission to establish it as a majorat, but if you obtain for him the title you alluded to in your last letter you will already have done much for your godson.

  As for me, I will take your advice solely so that you might be reunited with Renée while the assembly is in session. I am studying seriously, trying to develop some useful area of expertise. But nothing will encourage me more than the knowledge that you are the protector of my little Armand. Promise us, then, to come and play the role of a good fairy—you who are so beautiful and so gracious, so fine and so wise—for my eldest son. In so doing, madame, you will add undying gratitude to the respectful affection with which I have the honor to be

  your very humble and very obedient servant,

  Louis de

  30

  FROM LOUISE DE MACUMER TO RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE

  January 1826

  Macumer woke me just now with your husband’s letter, my angel. Let me begin by saying yes. We will leave for Chantepleurs toward the end of April. It will be one pleasure on another for me to travel, to see you, and to be the godmother of your first child, but I want Macumer as his godfather. I would find Catholic alliance with any other man odious. Ah! if you’d seen the look on his face when I told him that, you would know how deeply that angel loves me.

  “I am all the more eager to leave with you for La Crampade, Felipe,” I told him, “in that we will perhaps have a child there. I too want to be a mother . . . although between a child and you I would have a great deal on my hands. To begin with, if I saw you prefer any other creature to me, even my own son, I can’t say what would happen. Medea may well have been right. Those ancients knew a thing or two!”

  He laughed. And so, dear doe, you’ve had the fruit without the flowers, and I have the flowers without the fruit. The contrast of our two destinies goes on. We are philosophical enough to seek the meaning and moral of that one day. Bah! I have been married only ten months, and we must agree, there is no such thing as time wasted.

  We lead the frivolous but full life of happy people. The days always seem too short. Seeing me back in its midst disguised as a wife, Parisian society found Baroness de Macumer far more beautiful than Louise de Chaulieu: happy love is a cosmetic in itself. When, in the beautiful sunlight and beautiful frost of a January day, the trees on the Champs-Élysées abloom with sparkling white sprays, Felipe and I drive past in our coupé before all of Paris, together where we were apart only last year, then thousands of thoughts fill my mind, and I fear I am being a little too insolent, as you suggested in your last letter.

  If I know nothing of the joys of motherhood, you will tell me of them, and I will be a mother through you, but if you want my opinion, nothing compares to the pleasures of love. You will think me very odd, but ten times in ten months I have found myself hoping to die at thirty, when life is at its most splendid, the roses of love in full bloom, amid pleasure and desire, to go away sated, never disappointed, having lived my whole life in the sunshine, the ether, and perhaps even killed by love itself, my crown still intact, not a single leaf missing, my illusions unbetrayed. Imagine what it must be to have a young heart in an old body, to see only cold, mute faces where once everyone smiled at you, even those of no consequence, to be a respectable lady. . . it is a very foretaste of hell.

  Felipe and I had our first quarrel on that subject. I wanted him to be strong enough to kill me when I am thirty, as I sleep, unsuspecting, so that I might pass from one dream into another. The monster refused. I threatened to leave him alone in the world, and he went pale, poor child! That great minister has become a true babe in arms, my dear. It is incredible how much youthfulness and simplicity he was hiding. Now that I think aloud with him just as I did with you, now that we tell each other all, we are forever surprised by each other.

  My dear, the two lovers, Felipe and Louise, want to send a present to the new mother. We’d like to have something made that would please you. Tell me frankly what you desire, then, for we have no taste for those surprises so dear to the bourgeoisie. We want to continually remind you of us with some adorable memento, something you will find useful every day and which will not lose its luster over time. Our happiest and most intimate meal is breakfast, for then we are alone; I thus thought of sending you a special service, known as a breakfast service, whose ornaments would be little children. If you appr
ove, let me know me promptly. If I am to bring it to you, I must order it, and the artisans of Paris are like lazy kings. That will be my offering to Lucina.[40]

  Farewell, dear nurse, I wish you all the pleasures of motherhood, and I am eager to read your first letter, in which you will tell me all, will you not? That obstetrician sends a shiver down my spine. The word fairly leapt out from your husband’s letter, not at my eyes but at my heart. Poor Renée, a child costs us dearly, doesn’t it? I will be sure to tell that godson of mine how much he must love you. A thousand tendernesses, my angel.

  31

  FROM RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE TO LOUISE DE MACUMER

  It will soon be five months since my delivery, and, dear soul, I have not found one moment to write you. When you are a mother, you will find more forgiveness for me than you have, for you have punished me a little with the scarcity of your letters. Write me, my dear darling! Tell me your pleasures, paint your happiness in the most vivid colors, do not spare the ultramarine, and have no fear of offending me, for I am happy, and happier than you will ever imagine.

  I went with great ceremony to the parish church for an end-of-confinement Mass, as is the custom in old Provençal families. The two grandfathers, Louis’s father and my own, offered me their arms. Oh! never have I knelt down before God with such consuming gratitude. I have so many things to tell you, so many sentiments to depict, that I cannot think where to begin, but one radiant memory arises from that morass of confusion: the prayer I offered in that church!

  When—there in the very spot where I knelt as a girl, doubting in life, in my future—I found myself metamorphosed into a joyous mother, I thought I saw the Virgin on the altar nodding and showing me the holy infant, who seemed to be smiling at me! With what a sacred effusion of celestial love I held out our little Armand for the curé’s blessing, who sprinkled him with holy water in anticipation of the baptism proper. But you will already have pictured the two of us, my Armand and me.

  My child—here I am calling you my child! But that is indeed the sweetest word there is in the heart, in the mind, on the lips of a mother. So, my dear child, for the two months before my delivery I drifted listlessly through our gardens, drained, wearied by the weight of that burden I never realized was so precious and sweet, for all those two months’ torments. I was so full of apprehensions and dark forebodings that curiosity could not drown them out: I tried to talk sense to myself, I assured myself that there is nothing to fear in what nature wants, I tried to cheer myself with the reflection that I would be a mother. Alas! I felt nothing in my heart, even as my thoughts were full of that child, who was giving me some rather vigorous kicks; no doubt, my dear, one can relish those kicks when one has had a child before, but when one first feels them, those thrashings of an unknown life bring more shock than pleasure. I speak only for myself, I who am neither insincere nor melodramatic, I whose fruit came more from God—for it is God who gives children—than from a cherished man. But let us forget those past sorrows, which I am convinced will never come again.

  When the crisis came, I summoned up such endurance, I had girded myself for such horrible pains, that I am told I withstood the cruel ordeal wonderfully well. There came a moment, my darling, something like an hour, when I surrendered to a prostration whose effects were those of a dream. I felt as if I were two things at once: a strained, torn, tortured vessel and a soul at peace. In that strange state, pain blossomed like a crown above my head. I felt as if an enormous rose had sprouted from the top of my skull, growing ever larger, enveloping me. The air was suffused with the color of that blood-drenched flower. I could see nothing but red. Having reached the point where a separation seems to want to take place between body and soul, I felt a sudden explosion of pain, of a sort that convinced me my final hour had come. I let out a horrible scream, and then I found a new strength against these new pains. That awful clamor was suddenly silenced inside me by the sweet song of the little creature’s silvery cries. No, nothing can paint that moment for you; I felt as if the entire world was crying out with me, that there was nothing in the world but shrieking and pain, and then that child’s small cry stilled it all.

  I was returned to my big bed, which felt like paradise, though I was exceedingly weak. I saw three or four joyous faces around me, tears in their eyes; they showed me the child. My dear, I cried out in horror. “What a little monkey!” I said. “Are you sure that’s a child?” I rolled onto my side, distressed to feel no more a mother than that.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” said my mother, who had volunteered to watch over me, “you’ve given birth to the most beautiful child in the world. Don’t torment your imagination; you must devote all your thoughts to becoming an animal, you must make of yourself nothing other than a cow, grazing to make milk.”

  Hearing these words, I drifted off to sleep with the firm intention of letting nature take me in hand. Oh! my angel, how divine it was to wake from all those pains, those tangled feelings, those first days when all is dark, raw, and unclear. That darkness was soon brightened by a sensation whose pleasure surpassed that of my child’s first cry. My heart, my soul, my being, an unknown me came to life in its once gray, aching shell, just as a flower erupts from its seed on hearing the shining call of the sun. The little monster took my breast and suckled, and with that, fiat lux!, suddenly I was a mother. Here is happiness, joy, ineffable joy, though it is not without its pains. Oh! my jealous beauty, how you will savor a joy that is known only to us, to the child, and to God. That little thing knows nothing in this world but the breast. That glowing point is all there is, he loves it with all his strength, he thinks of nothing but that font of life, he comes to it, then turns away to sleep, then wakes to come to it once more. There is inexpressible love in his lips, and when they cling to it, they cause a pain and a pleasure at once, a pleasure so strong as to be pain, or a pain that becomes a pleasure; I do not know how to make you understand a sensation that spreads from the breast into me and then on to the very sources of life, for from that central point a thousand beams seem to radiate, exalting heart and soul alike. Giving birth is nothing; to nurse is to give birth at every moment. Oh! Louise, no lover’s caress can rival those little pink hands so gently roaming over us, clinging to life. Oh! the child’s gaze, turning from our breast to our eyes and back again! The dreams that come into our minds as we watch him clutching his treasure with his lips! It is as much mental as physical: it draws on our blood and our intelligence, it satisfies us far beyond our desires. I relived the glorious feeling of hearing his first cry, which was for me what the first ray of sunlight was for the earth, as I felt my milk filling his mouth; I relived it again when he first looked into my eyes; I have just relived it once more as I saw his first smile and so treasured his first thought. For he laughed, my dear. That laugh, that gaze, that bite, that cry, those four ecstasies have no end; they go to the very depths of the heart, and they stir strings they alone can stir! The spheres must cleave to God as a child cleaves to every fiber of his mother: God is an enormous mother’s heart. Nothing can be seen or sensed in conception, nor even in pregnancy, but nursing, my Louise, is a happiness that never ends. One sees what becomes of the milk, it becomes flesh, it blooms at the tips of those sweet little fingers, so like flowers, and every bit as delicate; it grows in the fine, transparent fingernails, it unravels into hair, it tosses and wriggles in the feet. Oh! there is a whole language in a child’s feet. It is with them that the child first expresses himself. Oh, Louise, nursing is a transformation you can see hour by hour, dazzling to the eye. It is not with your ears but with your heart that you hear the child’s cries; you understand the smile in his eyes or on his lips or in his wriggling feet as if God had written letters of fire in the air for you! Nothing in the world can interest you now. The father? You would kill him if he dared wake the child. You are this child’s entire world unto yourself, just as the child is yours! You are so certain that your life is shared, you are so generously rewarded for the trouble you go to and the pains
you endure, for pains there are, may God spare you a fissure of the breast! That wound, reopening with every touch of those pink lips, so slow to heal, so painful that you might lose your mind were it not for the joy of seeing the child’s mouth dripping with milk, is one of the most appalling punishments that can be inflicted on beauty. My Louise, reflect on that, it affects only the tenderest and most delicate skin.