Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Cousin Lisbeth,” she exclaimed, “my mother and I are avenged! that venomous snake is herself bitten — she is rotting in her bed!”

  “Hortense, at this moment you are not a Christian. You ought to pray to God to vouchsafe repentance to this wretched woman.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Betty, rising from her couch. “Are you speaking of Valerie?”

  “Yes,” replied Adeline; “she is past hope — dying of some horrible disease of which the mere description makes one shudder — — ”

  Lisbeth’s teeth chattered, a cold sweat broke out all over her; the violence of the shock showed how passionate her attachment to Valerie had been.

  “I must go there,” said she.

  “But the doctor forbids your going out.”

  “I do not care — I must go! — Poor Crevel! what a state he must be in; for he loves that woman.”

  “He is dying too,” replied Countess Steinbock. “Ah! all our enemies are in the devil’s clutches — ”

  “In God’s hands, my child — ”

  Lisbeth dressed in the famous yellow Indian shawl and her black velvet bonnet, and put on her boots; in spite of her relations’ remonstrances, she set out as if driven by some irresistible power.

  She arrived in the Rue Barbet a few minutes after Monsieur and Madame Hulot, and found seven physicians there, brought by Bianchon to study this unique case; he had just joined them. The physicians, assembled in the drawing-room, were discussing the disease; now one and now another went into Valerie’s room or Crevel’s to take a note, and returned with an opinion based on this rapid study.

  These princes of science were divided in their opinions. One, who stood alone in his views, considered it a case of poisoning, of private revenge, and denied its identity with the disease known in the Middle Ages. Three others regarded it as a specific deterioration of the blood and the humors. The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection. Bianchon produced Professor Duval’s analysis of the blood. The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in this medical dilemma.

  Lisbeth stood as if petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d’Aquin standing by her friend’s pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance. Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight. The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart. Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by the spirit of self-sacrifice, under its twofold aspect of the Spirit and the Flesh, was tending this horrible and atrocious creature, soothing her death-bed by its infinite benevolence and inexhaustible stores of mercy.

  The servants, in horror, refused to go into the room of either their master or mistress; they thought only of themselves, and judged their betters as righteously stricken. The smell was so foul that in spite of open windows and strong perfumes, no one could remain long in Valerie’s room. Religion alone kept guard there.

  How could a woman so clever as Valerie fail to ask herself to what end these two representatives of the Church remained with her? The dying woman had listened to the words of the priest. Repentance had risen on her darkened soul as the devouring malady had consumed her beauty. The fragile Valerie had been less able to resist the inroads of the disease than Crevel; she would be the first to succumb, and, indeed, had been the first attacked.

  “If I had not been ill myself, I would have come to nurse you,” said Lisbeth at last, after a glance at her friend’s sunken eyes. “I have kept my room this fortnight or three weeks; but when I heard of your state from the doctor, I came at once.”

  “Poor Lisbeth, you at least love me still, I see!” said Valerie. “Listen. I have only a day or two left to think, for I cannot say to live. You see, there is nothing left of me — I am a heap of mud! They will not let me see myself in a glass. — Well, it is no more than I deserve. Oh, if I might only win mercy, I would gladly undo all the mischief I have done.”

  “Oh!” said Lisbeth, “if you can talk like that, you are indeed a dead woman.”

  “Do not hinder this woman’s repentance, leave her in her Christian mind,” said the priest.

  “There is nothing left!” said Lisbeth in consternation. “I cannot recognize her eyes or her mouth! Not a feature of her is there! And her wit has deserted her! Oh, it is awful!”

  “You don’t know,” said Valerie, “what death is; what it is to be obliged to think of the morrow of your last day on earth, and of what is to be found in the grave. — Worms for the body — and for the soul, what? — Lisbeth, I know there is another life! And I am given over to terrors which prevent my feeling the pangs of my decomposing body. — I, who could laugh at a saint, and say to Crevel that the vengeance of God took every form of disaster. — Well, I was a true prophet. — Do not trifle with sacred things, Lisbeth; if you love me, repent as I do.”

  “I!” said Lisbeth. “I see vengeance wherever I turn in nature; insects even die to satisfy the craving for revenge when they are attacked. And do not these gentlemen tell us” — and she looked at the priest — ”that God is revenged, and that His vengeance lasts through all eternity?”

  The priest looked mildly at Lisbeth and said:

  “You, madame, are an atheist!”

  “But look what I have come to,” said Valerie.

  “And where did you get this gangrene?” asked the old maid, unmoved from her peasant incredulity.

  “I had a letter from Henri which leaves me in no doubt as to my fate. He has murdered me. And — just when I meant to live honestly — to die an object of disgust!

  “Lisbeth, give up all notions of revenge. Be kind to that family to whom I have left by my will everything I can dispose of. Go, child, though you are the only creature who, at this hour, does not avoid me with horror — go, I beseech you, and leave me. — I have only time to make my peace with God!”

  “She is wandering in her wits,” said Lisbeth to herself, as she left the room.

  The strongest affection known, that of a woman for a woman, had not such heroic constancy as the Church. Lisbeth, stifled by the miasma, went away. She found the physicians still in consultation. But Bianchon’s opinion carried the day, and the only question now was how to try the remedies.

  “At any rate, we shall have a splendid post-mortem,” said one of his opponents, “and there will be two cases to enable us to make comparisons.”

  Lisbeth went in again with Bianchon, who went up to the sick woman without seeming aware of the malodorous atmosphere.

  “Madame,” said he, “we intend to try a powerful remedy which may save you — ”

  “And if you save my life,” said she, “shall I be as good-looking as ever?”

  “Possibly,” said the judicious physician.

  “I know your possibly,” said Valerie. “I shall look like a woman who has fallen into the fire! No, leave me to the Church. I can please no one now but God. I will try to be reconciled to Him, and that will be my last flirtation; yes, I must try to come round God!”

  “That is my poor Valerie’s last jest; that is all herself!” said Lisbeth in tears.

  Lisbeth thought it her duty to go into Crevel’s room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting about a yard away from the stricken man’s bed.

  “Lisbeth,” said he, “they will not tell me what state my wife is in; you have just seen her — how is she?”

  “She is better; she says she is saved,” replied Lisbeth, allowing herself this play on the word to soothe Crevel’s mind.

  “That is well,” said the Mayor. “I feared lest I had been the cause of her illness. A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself. — If I should lose her, what would become of me? On my honor, my children, I worship that woman.”

  He sat up in bed and tried to assume his favorite positio
n.

  “Oh, Papa!” cried Celestine, “if only you could be well again, I would make friends with my stepmother — I make a vow!”

  “Poor little Celestine!” said Crevel, “come and kiss me.”

  Victorin held back his wife, who was rushing forward.

  “You do not know, perhaps,” said the lawyer gently, “that your disease is contagious, monsieur.”

  “To be sure,” replied Crevel. “And the doctors are quite proud of having rediscovered in me some long lost plague of the Middle Ages, which the Faculty has had cried like lost property — it is very funny!”

  “Papa,” said Celestine, “be brave, and you will get the better of this disease.”

  “Be quite easy, my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris,” said he, with monstrous composure. “And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages — you see, what a flow of words I have! — Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my children, I am a man of strong mind.”

  “Papa, promise me to admit the Church — ”

  “Never,” replied Crevel. “What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution; I have not Baron Holbach’s wit, but I have his strength of mind. I am more Regence than ever, more Musketeer, Abbe Dubois, and Marechal de Richelieu! By the Holy Poker! — My wife, who is wandering in her head, has just sent me a man in a gown — to me! the admirer of Beranger, the friend of Lisette, the son of Voltaire and Rousseau. — The doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued me — ’You saw Monsieur l’Abbe?’ said he. — Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor — see, like this,” and he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively — ”and I said:

  “The slave was here,

  He showed his order, but he nothing gained.

  “His order is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit. I admire that passage — I cannot say of his life, but of his death — the passage — another joke! — The passage from life to death — the Passage Montesquieu!”

  Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite independent of the results. Can it be that the fortitude which upholds a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly walks to the scaffold?

  By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

  On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and without a word Victorin Hulot gave him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel’s desk.

  Young Madame Hulot inherited the estate of Presles and thirty thousand francs a year.

  Madame Crevel had bequeathed a sum of three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. Her scrofulous boy Stanislas was to inherit, at his majority, the Hotel Crevel and eighty thousand francs a year.

  Among the many noble associations founded in Paris by Catholic charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have formed a voluntary but illicit union. Legislators, who draw large revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which benefits by the notary’s profits, affect to overlook the fact that three-fourths of the poorer class cannot afford fifteen francs for the marriage-contract. The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body, gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the poor. As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of Government would have to be dislocated to induce the authorities to relax their demands. The registrar’s office is deaf and dumb.

  Then the Church, too, receives a duty on marriages. In France the Church depends largely on such revenues; even in the House of God it traffics in chairs and kneeling stools in a way that offends foreigners; though it cannot have forgotten the anger of the Saviour who drove the money-changers out of the Temple. If the Church is so loath to relinquish its dues, it must be supposed that these dues, known as Vestry dues, are one of its sources of maintenance, and then the fault of the Church is the fault of the State.

  The co-operation of these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty francs, the lowest figure for which the Notary, the Registrar, the Mayor and the Church will unite two citizens of Paris. Madame de la Chanterie’s fund, founded to restore poor households to their religious and legal status, hunts up such couples, and with all the more success because it helps them in their poverty before attacking their unlawful union.

  As soon as Madame Hulot had recovered, she returned to her occupations. And then it was that the admirable Madame de la Chanterie came to beg that Adeline would add the legalization of these voluntary unions to the other good works of which she was the instrument.

  One of the Baroness’ first efforts in this cause was made in the ominous-looking district, formerly known as la Petite Pologne — Little Poland — bounded by the Rue du Rocher, Rue de la Pepiniere, and Rue de Miromenil. There exists there a sort of offshoot of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. To give an idea of this part of the town, it is enough to say that the landlords of some of the houses tenanted by working men without work, by dangerous characters, and by the very poor employed in unhealthy toil, dare not demand their rents, and can find no bailiffs bold enough to evict insolvent lodgers. At the present time speculating builders, who are fast changing the aspect of this corner of Paris, and covering the waste ground lying between the Rue d’Amsterdam and the Rue Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants; for the trowel is a more civilizing agent than is generally supposed. By erecting substantial and handsome houses, with porters at the doors, by bordering the streets with footwalks and shops, speculation, while raising the rents, disperses the squalid class, families bereft of furniture, and lodgers that cannot pay. And so these districts are cleared of such objectionable residents, and the dens vanish into which the police never venture but under the sanction of the law.

  In June 1844, the purlieus of the Place de Laborde were still far from inviting. The genteel pedestrian, who by chance should turn out of the Rue de la Pepiniere into one of those dreadful side-streets, would have been dismayed to see how vile a bohemia dwelt cheek by jowl with the aristocracy. In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who are to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words “Ecrivain Public” written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.

  While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled in the Passage du Soleil — Sun Alley — a spot of which the name is one of the antitheses dear to the Parisian, for the passage is especially dark. This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as such fitters always are, but l
ong since established in Paris. These people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la Chanterie. In a few months comfort had taken the place of poverty, and Religion had found a home in hearts which once had cursed Heaven with the energy peculiar to Italian stove-fitters. So one of Madame Hulot’s first visits was to this family.

  She was pleased at the scene that presented itself to her eyes at the back of the house where these worthy folks lived in the Rue Saint-Lazare, not far from the Rue du Rocher. High above the stores and workshops, now well filled, where toiled a swarm of apprentices and workmen — all Italians from the valley of Domo d’Ossola — the master’s family occupied a set of rooms, which hard work had blessed with abundance. The Baroness was hailed like the Virgin Mary in person.

  After a quarter of an hour’s questioning, Adeline, having to wait for the father to inquire how his business was prospering, pursued her saintly calling as a spy by asking whether they knew of any families needing help.

  “Ah, dear lady, you who could save the damned from hell!” said the Italian wife, “there is a girl quite near here to be saved from perdition.”

  “A girl well known to you?” asked the Baroness.

  “She is the granddaughter of a master my husband formerly worked for, who came to France in 1798, after the Revolution, by name Judici. Old Judici, in Napoleon’s time, was one of the principal stove-fitters in Paris; he died in 1819, leaving his son a fine fortune. But the younger Judici wasted all his money on bad women; till, at last, he married one who was sharper than the rest, and she had this poor little girl, who is just turned fifteen.”

  “And what is wrong with her?” asked Adeline, struck by the resemblance between this Judici and her husband.

  “Well, madame, this child, named Atala, ran away from her father, and came to live close by here with an old German of eighty at least, named Vyder, who does odd jobs for people who cannot read and write. Now, if this old sinner, who bought the child of her mother, they say for fifteen hundred francs, would but marry her, as he certainly has not long to live, and as he is said to have some few thousand of francs a year — well, the poor thing, who is a sweet little angel, would be out of mischief, and above want, which must be the ruin of her.”