The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

by Honoré de Balzac

  “He is saved!” cried the oldest of the doctors.

  Oh! What a word! What music! The heavens opened. And indeed, two hours later, Armand was coming back to life, but I was destroyed, I required the balm of joy so as not to fall into some illness. Dear God! With what horrible pains you attach the child to his mother! What nails you drive into our hearts to hold him in place! Was I then not yet mother enough, I who wept with joy on seeing that child’s first steps, on hearing him stammer out his first words? I who study him for hours at a time so as to properly perform my duties and learn the sweet trade of motherhood? What need was there to inflict these terrors, these horrible visions, on one who makes an idol of her child? As I write you this letter, our Armand is playing, shouting, laughing. And I am trying to discover the cause of that horrible childhood illness, remembering that I am pregnant. Is it teething? Is it some strange process at work in the brain? Do children who suffer convulsions have some manner of imperfection in their nervous systems? These ideas worry me as much for the present as for the future. Our country doctor thinks it a nervous excitement, set off by teething. I would give every one of my own teeth to see our little Armand’s come in safely. When I see one of those white pearls poking through his inflamed gum, I now break into a cold sweat. From the heroism that dear angel shows in his suffering, I know that he will have my character exactly; he gives me glances that break my heart. Medicine knows very little about the causes of that sort of paralysis, which ends as abruptly as it begins and can be neither cured nor prevented. Let me repeat, one thing alone is certain: the sight of a child in convulsions is a mother’s hell. How desperately I embrace him! Oh! how long I keep him on my arm when we go out walking! To make my torture all the more horrible, I was forced to endure that ordeal knowing I would deliver again in six weeks: I trembled for the child to come! Farewell, my dear, beloved Louise. Do not wish for children, that is my final word.

  41

  FROM BARONESS DE MACUMER TO VISCOUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE

  Paris

  Poor angel, Macumer and I have forgiven you all your meanness on learning of your ordeal. I shivered, I suffered as I read the details of that double torment, and now I am a little less sorry not to be a mother. Let me inform you at once of Louis’s promotion: he may now wear the rosette of the officer. You wanted a little girl; very likely you will have one, happy Renée! My brother’s wedding to Mademoiselle de Mortsauf was celebrated on our return. Our charming king, who is indeed a wonderfully good man, granted my brother succession to the charge of first gentleman of the chamber, which came to him from his father-in-law. “The charge must be passed on with the titles,” he told the Duke de Lenoncourt-Givry. He asked, however, that the Mortsauf family crest be placed back to back with the de Lenoncourts’ on the coat of arms.

  My father was a hundred times right. Without the aid of my inheritance, none of this would have happened. My father and mother came from Madrid for the wedding and will return after the party I shall be hosting tomorrow for the newlyweds. It will be a glittering gala. The Duke and Duchess de Soria are in Paris; their presence worries me a little. Maria Hérédia is certainly one of the most beautiful women in Europe, and I don’t like the way Felipe looks at her. I have thus doubled my love and tenderness for him. I take great care not to say “She would never have loved you like this!,” but those words are written in my every glance, my every move. God knows I am elegant and enticing enough. Madame de Maufrigneuse said to me yesterday, “Dear child, we can only lay down our arms to you.” I keep Felipe so amused that he will find his sister-in-law as stupid as a Spanish cow. I regret all the less not having produced a little Abencerrage in that the duchess will no doubt bear her child in Paris and will be unlovely to behold; if it is a boy, he will be named Felipe in honor of the exile. And so, by a curious twist of fate, I will be a godmother for a second time. Farewell, my dear. I will go to Chantepleurs early this year, for we spent an exorbitant sum on our travels; I leave toward the end of March to go and live economically in the Nivernais. In any event, Paris bores me. Felipe sighs no less than I for the beautiful solitude of our gardens, our fresh meadows, and our sand-spangled Loire, a river like no other. Chantepleurs will seem delicious after the pomp and vanity of Italy, for, after all, magnificence grows tedious and a lover’s gaze is more beautiful than any capo d’opera, any bel quadro![43] We will be expecting you, and I promise I will never be jealous of you again. You may fish about in my Macumer’s heart all you like, reel in his exclamations, haul his scruples to the surface: I place him in your hands with serene confidence. Felipe loves me all the more since that scene in Rome; he told me yesterday (he is looking over my shoulder) that his sister-in-law, the Maria of his youth, his onetime fiancée, Princess Hérédia, his first dream, was dull-witted. Oh! dear, I am worse than an opera girl, that insult tickled me pink. I observed to Felipe that she doesn’t speak French properly; she says essemple for exemple, san for cinq, sheu for je; she is beautiful, but she has no grace, she has not the slightest quickness of mind. When you pay her a compliment, she looks at you as if she’s not used to receiving them. His character being what it is, he would have left Maria after two months of marriage. The Duke de Soria, Don Fernand, is a very fine match for her; he is generous, but he is a spoiled child, one can see it. I could be cruel and make you laugh, but I say only what is true. A thousand tendernesses, my angel.

  42

  FROM RENÉE TO LOUISE

  My little girl is two months old; my mother is the godmother and one of Louis’s old great-uncles the godfather of that little child, whose name is Jeanne-Athénaïs.

  As soon as I am able, I will leave to come and visit you at Chantepleurs, since you are not afraid of a nursing woman. Your godson sometimes speaks your name: he pronounces it Matoumer! for that is as close as he can come to the letter c. You will adore him; he has all his teeth and eats meat like a big boy, runs and scurries like a rat, but my anxious gaze is forever fixed on him. I despair that I will not have him at my side during my confinement, which will keep me closed up in my room for more than forty days, owing to certain precautions the doctors have prescribed. Alas! my child, one never gets used to labor! The same pains return, and the same fears. Nevertheless (do not show this letter to Felipe), there is a bit of me in that little girl, who will perhaps show up your Armand.

  My father thought Felipe was looking a bit thinner, and my dear darling as well. But the Duke and Duchess de Soria have gone on their way; there is nothing more to be jealous of! Are you hiding some secret sorrow from me? Your letter was neither as long nor as affectionately turned as the others. Is this one more little caprice of my dear capricious friend?

  I have written too much, my caretaker is scolding me for having written you, and Mademoiselle Athénaïs de l’Estorade would like her dinner. Farewell, then; write me nice long letters.

  43

  FROM MADAME DE MACUMER TO COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE

  For the first time in my life, dear Renée, I wept alone beneath a willow tree, on a wooden bench by my long pond at Chantepleurs, a delicious view that you will make lovelier still when you come, for merry children are the only thing missing. Your fruitfulness has forced me to consider myself, I who have no children after what will soon be three years of marriage. Oh! I thought, even if I had to suffer a hundred times more than Renée suffered as she gave birth to my godson, even if I had to see my child in convulsions, please, God, give me an angelic creature like that little Athénaïs, whom I am now picturing in my mind, beautiful as a sunlit day, for you have told me nothing of her! In that I recognized my Renée. You seem almost to have sensed my sorrows. Each time that my hopes are dashed, I fall prey to a black grief for several days. Sitting on that bench, I lost myself in the composition of melancholy elegies. When will I embroider little bonnets? When will I pick out the fabric for my baby’s clothes? When will I sew together pretty pieces of lace to wrap a little head? Am I then never to hear one of those charming creatures call me Mama, pull my dress
, rule over me? Will I never see the marks left in the sand by the wheels of a little carriage? Will I never pick up broken toys from my courtyard? Will I never visit the fancy-goods stores, as I have seen so many mothers do, to buy swords, dolls, tiny furniture? Will I never observe the growth of that life, that angel, who will be another Felipe, even more dearly loved than the first? I would like a son, so that I might learn how a man can be loved even more in a second incarnation than in the first. My gardens, my château feel empty and cold. A woman without children is a monstrosity; we are made only to be mothers. Oh! professor in corsets that you are, you have truly understood life. Sterility is indeed horrible in all things. My life is a little too like those pastoral love poems by Gessner or Florian, of which Rivarol said that one wishes there were a few lurking wolves.[44] I too want to devote myself! I sense within myself forces unknown to Felipe; if I am not soon a mother, I will have to do something rash. So I have just said to my relic of the Moors, whose eyes filled with tears; his only punishment was to hear himself called a sublime beast, not to be teased where his love is concerned.

  I sometimes find myself wanting to say novenas, to seek fruitfulness from some Madonna or curative water. Next winter I will consult the doctors. I am too furious with myself to say more to you. Farewell.

  44

  FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

  Paris, 1829

  What, my dear, a year with no letter? . . . I am a little put out. Do you believe that your Louis, who has come to see me nearly every other day, is any replacement for you? It is not enough for me to know you’re not ill and your affairs are going well: I want your sentiments and your ideas just as I offer you mine, even if it means being scolded or criticized or misunderstood, for I love you. I am deeply concerned by your silence and your retreat to the countryside, when you could be here reveling in the parliamentary triumphs of Count de l’Estorade, whose diligence and gift for speechifying have earned him some influence, and who will no doubt be placed in a very high position after the session. Do you perhaps spend all your time writing up instructions for him? Numa was not so distant from his Egeria.[45] Why have you not seized the opportunity to visit Paris? I could have been enjoying your company for the past four months. Louis told me yesterday that you would be coming to join him, and that you would deliver your third child here, you rabbit! After many questions, sighs, and laments, Louis, wily diplomat though he be, came out and told me that his great-uncle, Athénaïs’s godfather, is very ill. And I have every confidence that you, ever the good mother, will know just how to vaunt the député’s successes and obtain an advantageous legacy from your husband’s last maternal relative. Fear not, my Renée, the de Lenoncourts, the de Chaulieus, Madame de Macumer’s entire salon are working to further Louis’s ambitions. Martinac will very likely appoint him to the Court of Audit. But if you do not tell me why you are staying in the provinces, I will be angry. Do you not want to be recognized as the real political genius in the house of l’Estorade? Do you want to cultivate the uncle as you oversee his will? Do you fear you will be less a mother in Paris? Oh! how I would like to know if you simply prefer not to make your first appearance in society as a pregnant woman, you coquette! Farewell.

  45

  FROM RENÉE TO LOUISE

  You complain of my silence; have you forgotten the two little ones in my care, and I in their thrall? But you have indeed discovered a few of my reasons for keeping to my house. Apart from our precious uncle’s condition, I did not want to drag a four-year-old boy and a little girl not far from three off to Paris while I am pregnant. I did not want to encumber your life and your household with such a family, I did not want to appear to my disadvantage in the glittering world you reign over, and I have a horror of furnished rooms and hotels. On learning that his great-nephew had been named officer, Louis’s great-uncle made me a present of half of his savings, two hundred thousand francs, so that we might buy a house in Paris; Louis has been given the task of finding one in your neighborhood. My mother has given me some thirty thousand francs to furnish it. I will be in my own home when I come to Paris for the session. And I will try to prove in every way worthy of my dear soeur d’élection, no pun intended.[46]

  I thank you for having so well helped Louis on his way, but despite the esteem shown him by Messieurs de Bourmont and de Polignac, who want him in their new ultra-Royalist ministry, I would prefer to have him less in the public eye: he would be too vulnerable there. I prefer a place in the Court of Audit, for its permanence. Our affairs here will be in very good hands, and once our steward has been fully filled in I will come and assist Louis in Paris, fear not.

  As for writing you long letters, how can I at present? This one, in which I hope to depict the events of an ordinary day in my life, will sit on my writing table for a week. Armand may well use it to make paper hens, of which he has whole regiments lined up on the rug, or little boats for the fleets that ply his bathwater. But I need recount for you only one day in my life, for each is like the next, and there are only two states of affairs: the children are well, or the children are not. For me, here in this lonely bastide, minutes are quite literally hours or hours minutes, depending on the children’s state. Delicious hours to myself can be found only when they are napping, when I am not busy rocking the one and telling stories to the other to put them to sleep. Once they are sleeping close by me, I tell myself: Now there is nothing to fear. For, my angel, all day long mothers invent dangers. The moment they no longer have their children before them, then suddenly there are razors Armand has stolen to play with, or a flame catching hold of his frock, a slowworm that might bite him, a tumble as he is running that might cause an abscess on his head, basins in which he might drown. As you see, motherhood is a series of poems, some sweet, others frightful. No hour goes by without its joys and its terrors. But then comes the evening, and the moment when I sit in my room and spin out their destinies in my daydreaming mind. Their life is then lit by the smiles of the angels I see at their bedside. Sometimes Armand calls for me in his sleep, and unbeknownst to him I come and kiss his brow, and then his sister’s feet, gazing at them both in all their beauty. Those are my parties! Yesterday I believe it was our guardian angel who made me race frantically to Athénaïs’s cradle in the middle of the night, for her head was not propped up high enough, and our little Armand had thrown off all his covers, his feet purple with cold. “Oh! little Mother!” he said as he woke, and he gave me a kiss. There, my dear, is what I call a nocturnal love scene.