Calyste, whose candid face revealed his satisfaction, admitted his love for Beatrix, which was all that Conti wanted to discover. There is no man in the world, however blase or depraved he may be, whose love will not flame up again the moment he sees it threatened by a rival. He may wish to leave a woman, but he will never willingly let her leave him. When a pair of lovers get to this extremity, both the man and the woman strive for priority of action, so deep is the wound to their vanity. Questioned by the composer, Calyste related all that had happened during the last three weeks at Les Touches, delighted to find that Conti, who concealed his fury under an appearance of charming good-humor, took it all in good part.
“Come, let us go upstairs,” said the latter. “Women are so distrustful; those two will wonder how we can sit here together without tearing each other’s hair out; they are even capable of coming down to listen. I’ll serve you faithfully, my dear boy. You’ll see me rough and jealous with the marquise; I shall seem to suspect her; there’s no better way to drive a woman to betray you. You will be happy, and I shall be free. Seem to pity that angel for belonging to a man without delicacy; show her a tear — for you can weep, you are still young. I, alas! can weep no more; and that’s a great advantage lost.”
Calyste and Conti went up to Camille’s salon. The composer, begged by his young rival to sing, gave them that greatest of musical masterpieces viewed as execution, the famous “Pria che spunti l’aurora,” which Rubini himself never attempted without trembling, and which had often been Conti’s triumph. Never was his singing more extraordinary than on this occasion, when so many feelings were contending in his breast. Calyste was in ecstasy. As Conti sang the first words of the cavatina, he looked intently at the marquise, giving to those words a cruel signification which was fully understood. Camille, who accompanied him, guessed the order thus conveyed, which bowed the head of the luckless Beatrix. She looked at Calyste, and felt sure that the youth had fallen into some trap in spite of her advice. This conviction became certainty when the evidently happy Breton came up to bid Beatrix good-night, kissing her hand, and pressing it with a little air of happy confidence.
By the time Calyste had reached Guerande, the servants were packing Conti’s travelling-carriage, and “by dawn,” as the song had said, the composer was carrying Beatrix away with Camille’s horses to the first relay. The morning twilight enabled Madame de Rochefide to see Guerande, its towers, whitened by the dawn, shining out upon the still dark sky. Melancholy thoughts possessed her; she was leaving there one of the sweetest flowers of all her life, — a pure love, such as a young girl dreams of; the only true love she had ever known or was ever to conceive of. The woman of the world obeyed the laws of the world; she sacrificed love to their demands just as many women sacrifice it to religion or to duty. Sometimes mere pride can rise in acts as high as virtue. Read thus, this history is that of many women.
The next morning Calyste went to Les Touches about mid-day. When he reached the spot from which, the day before, he had seen Beatrix watching for him at the window, he saw Camille, who instantly ran down to him. She met him at the foot of the staircase and told the cruel truth in one word, —
“Gone!”
“Beatrix?” asked Calyste, thunderstruck.
“You have been duped by Conti; you told me nothing, and I could do nothing for you.”
She led the poor fellow to her little salon, where he flung himself on the divan where he had so often seen the marquise, and burst into tears. Felicite smoked her hookah and said nothing, knowing well that no words or thoughts are capable of arresting the first anguish of such pain, which is always deaf and dumb. Calyste, unable even to think, much less to choose a course, sat there all day in a state of complete torpidity. Just before dinner was served, Camille tried to say a few words, after begging him, very earnestly, to listen to her.
“Friend,” she said, “you caused me the bitterest suffering, and I had not, like you, a beautiful young life before me in which to heal myself. For me, life has no longer any spring, nor my soul a love. So, to find consolation, I have had to look above. Here, in this room, the day before Beatrix came here, I drew you her portrait; I did not do her injustice, or you might have thought me jealous. I wanted you to know her as she is, for that would have kept you safe. Listen now to the full truth. Madame de Rochefide is wholly unworthy of you. The scandal of her fall was not necessary; she did the thing deliberately in order to play a part in the eyes of society. She is one of those women who prefer the celebrity of a scandal to tranquil happiness; they fly in the face of society to obtain the fatal alms of a rebuke; they desire to be talked about at any cost. Beatrix was eaten up with vanity. Her fortune and her wit had not given her the feminine royalty that she craved; they had not enabled her to reign supreme over a salon. She then bethought herself of seeking the celebrity of the Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. But the world, after all, is just; it gives the homage of its interest to real feelings only. Beatrix playing comedy was judged to be a second-rate actress. There was no reason whatever for her flight; the sword of Damocles was not suspended over her head; she is neither sincere, nor loving, nor tender; if she were, would she have gone away with Conti this morning?”
Camille talked long and eloquently; but this last effort to open Calyste’s eyes was useless, and she said no more when he expressed to her by a gesture his absolute belief in Beatrix.
She forced him to come down into the dining-room and sit there while she dined; though he himself was unable to swallow food. It is only during extreme youth that these contractions of the bodily functions occur. Later, the organs have acquired, as it were, fixed habits, and are hardened. The reaction of the mental and moral system upon the physical is not enough to produce a mortal illness unless the physical system retains its primitive purity. A man resists the violent grief that kills a youth, less by the greater weakness of his affection than by the greater strength of his organs.
Therefore Mademoiselle des Touches was greatly alarmed by the calm, resigned attitude which Calyste took after his burst of tears had subsided. Before he left her, he asked permission to go into Beatrix’s bedroom, where he had seen her on the night of her illness, and there he laid his head on the pillow where hers had lain.
“I am committing follies,” he said, grasping Camille’s hand, and bidding her good-night in deep dejection.
He returned home, found the usual company at mouche, and passed the remainder of the evening sitting beside his mother. The rector, the Chevalier du Halga, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel all knew of Madame de Rochefide’s departure, and were rejoicing in it. Calyste would now return to them; and all three watched him cautiously. No one in that old manor-house was capable of imagining the result of a first love, the love of youth in a heart so simple and so true as that of Calyste.
XVI. SICKNESS UNTO DEATH
For several days Calyste went regularly to Les Touches. He paced round and round the lawn, where he had sometimes walked with Beatrix on his arm. He often went to Croisic to stand upon that fateful rock, or lie for hours in the bush of box; for, by studying the footholds on the sides of the fissure, he had found a means of getting up and down.
These solitary trips, his silence, his gravity, made his mother very anxious. After about two weeks, during which time this conduct, like that of a caged animal, lasted, this poor lover, caged in his despair, ceased to cross the bay; he had scarcely strength to drag himself along the road from Guerande to the spot where he had seen Beatrix watching from her window. The family, delighted at the departure of “those Parisians,” to use a term of the provinces, saw nothing fatal or diseased about the lad. The two old maids and the rector, pursuing their scheme, had kept Charlotte de Kergarouet, who nightly played off her little coquetries on Calyste, obtaining in return nothing better than advice in playing mouche. During these long evenings, Calyste sat between his mother and the little Breton girl, observed by the rector and Charlotte’s aunt, who discussed his greater or l
ess depression as they walked home together. Their simple minds mistook the lethargic indifference of the hapless youth for submission to their plans. One evening when Calyste, wearied out, went off suddenly to bed, the players dropped their cards upon the table and looked at each other as the young man closed the door of his chamber. One and all had listened to the sound of his receding steps with anxiety.
“Something is the matter with Calyste,” said the baroness, wiping her eyes.
“Nothing is the matter,” replied Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel; “but you should marry him at once.”
“Do you believe that marriage would divert his mind?” asked the chevalier.
Charlotte looked reprovingly at Monsieur du Halga, whom she now began to think ill-mannered, depraved, immoral, without religion, and very ridiculous about his dog, — opinions which her aunt, defending the old sailor, combated.
“I shall lecture Calyste to-morrow morning,” said the baron, whom the others had thought asleep. “I do not wish to go out of this world without seeing my grandson, a little pink and white Guenic with a Breton cap on his head.”
“Calyste doesn’t say a word,” said old Zephirine, “and there’s no making out what’s the matter with him. He doesn’t eat; I don’t see what he lives on. If he gets his meals at Les Touches, the devil’s kitchen doesn’t nourish him.”
“He is in love,” said the chevalier, risking that opinion very timidly.
“Come, come, old gray-beard, you’ve forgotten to put in your stake!” cried Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel. “When you begin to think of your young days you forget everything.”
“Come to breakfast to-morrow,” said old Zephirine to her friend Jacqueline; “my brother will have had a talk with his son, and we can settle the matter finally. One nail, you know, drives out another.”
“Not among Bretons,” said the chevalier.
The next day Calyste saw Charlotte, as she arrived dressed with unusual care, just after the baron had given him, in the dining-room, a discourse on matrimony, to which he could make no answer. He now knew the ignorance of his father and mother and all their friends; he had gathered the fruits of the tree of knowledge, and knew himself to be as much isolated as if he did not speak the family language. He merely requested his father to give him a few days’ grace. The old baron rubbed his hands with joy, and gave fresh life to the baroness by whispering in her ear what he called the good news.
Breakfast was gay; Charlotte, to whom the baron had given a hint, was sparkling. After the meal was over, Calyste went out upon the portico leading to the garden, followed by Charlotte; he gave her his arm and led her to the grotto. Their parents and friends were at the window, looking at them with a species of tenderness. Presently Charlotte, uneasy at her suitor’s silence, looked back and saw them, which gave her an opportunity of beginning the conversation by saying to Calyste, —
“They are watching us.”
“They cannot hear us,” he replied.
“True; but they see us.”
“Let us sit down, Charlotte,” replied Calyste, gently taking her hand.
“Is it true that your banner used formerly to float from that twisted column?” asked Charlotte, with a sense that the house was already hers; how comfortable she should be there! what a happy sort of life! “You will make some changes inside the house, won’t you, Calyste?” she said.
“I shall not have time, my dear Charlotte,” said the young man, taking her hands and kissing them. “I am going now to tell you my secret. I love too well a person whom you have seen, and who loves me, to be able to make the happiness of any other woman; though I know that from our childhood you and I have been destined for each other by our friends.”
“But she is married, Calyste.”
“I shall wait,” replied the young man.
“And I, too,” said Charlotte, her eyes filling with tears. “You cannot long love a woman like that, who, they say, has gone off with a singer — ”
“Marry, my dear Charlotte,” said Calyste, interrupting her. “With the fortune your aunt intends to give you, which is enormous for Brittany, you can choose some better man than I. You could marry a titled man. I have brought you here, not to tell you what you already knew, but to entreat you, in the name of our childish friendship, to take this rupture upon yourself, and say that you have rejected me. Say that you do not wish to marry a man whose heart is not free; and thus I shall be spared at least the sense that I have done you public wrong. You do not know, Charlotte, how heavy a burden life now is to me. I cannot bear the slightest struggle; I am weakened like a man whose vital spark is gone, whose soul has left him. If it were not for the grief I should cause my mother, I would have flung myself before now into the sea; I have not returned to the rocks at Croisic since the day that temptation became almost irresistible. Do not speak of this to any one. Good-bye, Charlotte.”
He took the young girl’s head and kissed her hair; then he left the garden by the postern-gate and fled to Les Touches, where he stayed near Camille till past midnight. On returning home, at one in the morning, he found his mother awaiting him with her worsted-work. He entered softly, clasped her hand in his, and said, —
“Is Charlotte gone?”
“She goes to-morrow, with her aunt, in despair, both of them,” answered the baroness. “Come to Ireland with me, my Calyste.”
“Many a time I have thought of flying there — ”
“Ah!” cried the baroness.
“With Beatrix,” he added.
Some days after Charlotte’s departure, Calyste joined the Chevalier du Halga in his daily promenade on the mall with his little dog. They sat down in the sunshine on a bench, where the young man’s eyes could wander from the vanes of Les Touches to the rocks of Croisic, against which the waves were playing and dashing their white foam. Calyste was thin and pale; his strength was diminishing, and he was conscious at times of little shudders at regular intervals, denoting fever. His eyes, surrounded by dark circles, had that singular brilliancy which a fixed idea gives to the eyes of hermits and solitary souls, or the ardor of contest to those of the strong fighters of our present civilization. The chevalier was the only person with whom he could exchange a few ideas. He had divined in that old man an apostle of his own religion; he recognized in his soul the vestiges of an eternal love.
“Have you loved many women in your life?” he asked him on the second occasion, when, as seamen say, they sailed in company along the mall.
“Only one,” replied Du Halga.
“Was she free?”
“No,” exclaimed the chevalier. “Ah! how I suffered! She was the wife of my best friend, my protector, my chief — but we loved each other so!”
“Did she love you?” said Calyste.
“Passionately,” replied the chevalier, with a fervency not usual with him.
“You were happy?”
“Until her death; she died at the age of forty-nine, during the emigration, at St. Petersburg, the climate of which killed her. She must be very cold in her coffin. I have often thought of going there to fetch her, and lay her in our dear Brittany, near to me! But she lies in my heart.”
The chevalier brushed away his tears. Calyste took his hand and pressed it.
“I care for this little dog more than for life itself,” said the old man, pointing to Thisbe. “The little darling is precisely like the one she held on her knees and stroked with her beautiful hands. I never look at Thisbe but what I see the hands of Madame l’Amirale.”
“Did you see Madame de Rochefide?” asked Calyste.
“No,” replied the chevalier. “It is sixty-eight years since I have looked at any woman with attention — except your mother, who has something of Madame l’Amirale’s complexion.”
Three days later, the chevalier said to Calyste, on the mall, —
“My child, I have a hundred and forty louis laid by. When you know where Madame de Rochefide is, come and get them and follow her.”
Calyste thanked the old m
an, whose existence he envied. But now, from day to day, he grew morose; he seemed to love no one; all things hurt him; he was gentle and kind to his mother only. The baroness watched with ever increasing anxiety the progress of his madness; she alone was able, by force of prayer and entreaty, to make him swallow food. Toward the end of October the sick lad ceased to go even to the mall in search of the chevalier, who now came vainly to the house to tempt him out with the coaxing wisdom of an old man.
“We can talk of Madame de Rochefide,” he would say. “I’ll tell you my first adventure.”
“Your son is ill,” he said privately to the baroness, on the day he became convinced that all such efforts were useless.
Calyste replied to questions about his health that he was perfectly well; but like all young victims of melancholy, he took pleasure in the thought of death. He no longer left the house, but sat in the garden on a bench, warming himself in the pale and tepid sunshine, alone with his one thought, and avoiding all companionship.
Soon after the day when Calyste ceased to go even to Les Touches, Felicite requested the rector of Guerande to come and see her. The assiduity with which the Abbe Grimont called every morning at Les Touches, and sometimes dined there, became the great topic of the town; it was talked of all over the region, and even reached Nantes. Nevertheless, the rector never missed a single evening at the hotel du Guenic, where desolation reigned. Masters and servants were all afflicted at Calyste’s increasing weakness, though none of them thought him in danger; how could it ever enter the minds of these good people that youth might die of love? Even the chevalier had no example of such a death among his memories of life and travel. They attributed Calyste’s thinness to want of food. His mother implored him to eat. Calyste endeavored to conquer his repugnance in order to comfort her; but nourishment taken against his will served only to increase the slow fever which was now consuming the beautiful young life.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 187
