Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst species of egoist (for there are some amiable forms of the vice), he felt a delicacy in leaving him. Honest natures cannot easily break the ties that bind them, especially if they have tied them voluntarily. The secretary was therefore still living in domestic relations with the poet when Modeste’s letter arrived, — in such relations, be it said, as involved a perpetual sacrifice of his feelings. La Briere admitted the frankness with which Canalis had laid himself bare before him. Moreover, the defects of the man, who will always be considered a great poet during his lifetime and flattered as Martmontel was flattered, were only the wrong side of his brilliant qualities. Without his vanity and his magniloquence it is possible that he might never have acquired the sonorous elocution which is so useful and even necessary an instrument in political life. His cold-bloodedness touched at certain points on rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation had a lining of generosity. Results, we must remember, are to the profit of society; motives concern God.

  But after the arrival of Modeste’s letter Ernest deceived himself no longer as to Canalis. The pair had just finished breakfast and were talking together in the poet’s study, which was on the ground-floor of a house standing back in a court-yard, and looked into a garden.

  “There!” exclaimed Canalis, “I was telling Madame de Chaulieu the other day that I ought to bring out another poem; I knew admiration was running short, for I have had no anonymous letters for a long time.”

  “Is it from an unknown woman?”

  “Unknown? yes! — a D’Este, in Havre; evidently a feigned name.”

  Canalis passed the letter to La Briere. The little poem, with all its hidden enthusiasms, in short, poor Modeste’s heart, was disdainfully handed over, with the gesture of a spoiled dandy.

  “It is a fine thing,” said the lawyer, “to have the power to attract such feelings; to force a poor woman to step out of the habits which nature, education, and the world dictate to her, to break through conventions. What privileges genius wins! A letter such as this, written by a young girl — a genuine young girl — without hidden meanings, with real enthusiasm — ”

  “Well, what?” said Canalis.

  “Why, a man might suffer as much as Tasso and yet feel recompensed,” cried La Briere.

  “So he might, my dear fellow, by a first letter of that kind, and even a second; but how about the thirtieth? And suppose you find out that these young enthusiasts are little jades? Or imagine a poet rushing along the brilliant path in search of her, and finding at the end of it an old Englishwoman sitting on a mile-stone and offering you her hand! Or suppose this post-office angel should really be a rather ugly girl in quest of a husband? Ah, my boy! the effervescence then goes down.”

  “I begin to perceive,” said La Briere, smiling, “that there is something poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling flowers.”

  “And then,” resumed Canalis, “all these women, even when they are simple-minded, have ideals, and you can’t satisfy them. They never say to themselves that a poet is a vain man, as I am accused of being; they can’t conceive what it is for an author to be at the mercy of a feverish excitement, which makes him disagreeable and capricious; they want him always grand, noble; it never occurs to them that genius is a disease, or that Nathan lives with Florine; that D’Arthez is too fat, and Joseph Bridau is too thin; that Beranger limps, and that their own particular deity may have the snuffles! A Lucien de Rubempre, poet and cupid, is a phoenix. And why should I go in search of compliments only to pull the string of a shower-bath of horrid looks from some disillusioned female?”

  “Then the true poet,” said La Briere, “ought to remain hidden, like God, in the centre of his worlds, and be only seen in his own creations.”

  “Glory would cost too dear in that case,” answered Canalis. “There is some good in life. As for that letter,” he added, taking a cup of tea, “I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet she does not hide in the corner boxes, like a duchess in love with an actor; she feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection enough, and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem: ‘I am the nymph Calypso, enamored of Telemachus.’ Mystery and feigned names are the resources of little minds. For my part I no longer answer masks — ”

  “I should love a woman who came to seek me,” cried La Briere. “To all you say I reply, my dear Canalis, that it cannot be an ordinary girl who aspires to a distinguished man; such a girl has too little trust, too much vanity; she is too faint-hearted. Only a star, a — ”

  “ — princess!” cried Canalis, bursting into a shout of laughter; “only a princess can descend to him. My dear fellow, that doesn’t happen once in a hundred years. Such a love is like that flower that blossoms every century. Princesses, let me tell you, if they are young, rich, and beautiful, have something else to think of; they are surrounded like rare plants by a hedge of fools, well-bred idiots as hollow as elder-bushes! My dream, alas! the crystal of my dream, garlanded from hence to the Correze with roses — ah! I cannot speak of it — it is in fragments at my feet, and has long been so. No, no, all anonymous letters are begging letters; and what sort of begging? Write yourself to that young woman, if you suppose her young and pretty, and you’ll find out. There is nothing like experience. As for me, I can’t reasonably be expected to love every woman; Apollo, at any rate he of Belvedere, is a delicate consumptive who must take care of his health.”

  “But when a woman writes to you in this way her excuse must certainly be in her consciousness that she is able to eclipse in tenderness and beauty every other woman,” said Ernest, “and I should think you might feel some curiosity — ”

  “Ah,” said Canalis, “permit me, my juvenile friend, to abide by the beautiful duchess who is all my joy.”

  “You are right, you are right!” cried Ernest. However, the young secretary read and re-read Modeste’s letter, striving to guess the mind of its hidden writer.

  “There is not the least fine-writing here,” he said, “she does not even talk of your genius; she speaks to your heart. In your place I should feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty, — this proposed agreement — ”

  “Then, sign it!” cried Canalis, laughing; “answer the letter and go to the end of the adventure yourself. You shall tell me the results three months hence — if the affair lasts so long.”

  Four days later Modeste received the following letter, written on extremely fine paper, protected by two envelopes, and sealed with the arms of Canalis.

  Mademoiselle, — The admiration for fine works (allowing that my

  books are such) implies something so lofty and sincere as to

  protect you from all light jesting, and to justify before the

  sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me.

  But first I must thank you for the pleasure which such proofs of

  sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them, — for the maker

  of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic

  worth of their writings, — so readily does self-esteem lend itself

  to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an

  unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of

  criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience,

  even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.

  Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower

  of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in

  the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you

  have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that

  might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet

  of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;

  they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish,

  ambitious, dissipated; and, believ
e me, no matter how imposing

  innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with

  many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your

  affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be

  interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought

  that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not

  suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am

  deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding

  you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,

  one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual

  carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous

  imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,

  perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where

  you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which

  drives all poetry from the manuscript?

  But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life

  you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose

  mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can

  equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that

  no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,

  what will you gain, — you, a young girl, brought up to be the

  virtuous mother of a family, — if you learn to comprehend the

  terrible agitations of a poet’s life in this dreadful capital,

  which may be defined by one sentence, — the hell in which men love.

  If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl

  thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and

  write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of

  degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one

  of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?

  Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within

  you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,

  alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too

  much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.

  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,

  tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

  But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you

  have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious

  ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet

  of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what

  every pure young girl should be, — a good woman, the virtuous

  mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can

  make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound

  a woman’s proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no

  experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before

  she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,

  to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such

  qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.

  Hear the whole truth, — do I not owe it to you in return for your

  intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great

  renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man

  to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore

  poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He

  becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we

  say: “I thought her far more lovely.” She has not warranted the

  portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter, — the

  fairy whose name is Imagination.

  Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a

  sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the

  burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears

  them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now

  when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will

  suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a

  distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining

  summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world

  of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once

  admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.

  I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised

  entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can

  take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing

  from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an

  unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.

  Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all

  women, even those who are disguised and masked.

  So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an imagination on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one, — fancying all things, except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep?

  All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air. The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness of the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. “Ah, there is the poet!” thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing the wheezing voice of the outer world.

  “He is right, and I am wrong,” she said to herself. “But who could ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but one of Moliere’s old men?”

  When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, “flagrante delicto,” she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been misguided, — partly by her reading, partly by her sister’s sorrows, and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life, — was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the hearts of young girls.

  CHAPTER VIII. BLADE TO BLADE

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

  Monsieur, — You are certainly a great poet, and you are something

  more, — an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a

  young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you

  enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following

  question?

  Would you have wr
itten the letter I now hold in answer to mine,

  — would your ideas, your language have been the same, — had some

  one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.

  d’Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a

  master?

  Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with

  yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing

  that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your

  confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an

  answer to your first letter.

  Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do

  homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to

  remain always,

  Your humble servant, O. d’Este M.

  When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have settled the matter in a single phrase, “The girl is a little hussy.” But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways energetically.