The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

by Honoré de Balzac

  52

  FROM MADAME GASTON TO MADAME DE L’ESTORADE

  The Chalet

  Two years of silence have roused your curiosity, you ask why I’ve not written, but my dear Renée, there is no word, no sentence, no language to express my happiness. Our souls are strong enough to withstand it, there is no more to be said. Our happiness requires no effort; we agree about everything. In three years there has been not the slightest dissonance in that harmony, the tiniest disparity in the expression of our sentiments, the faintest discord in even our most trivial wishes. In short, my dear, not one of those thousand days has failed to bear its own special fruit, not one moment has been made anything but delicious by our fancies. Not only will our life never be monotonous—of that we are certain—but it will also perhaps never be long enough to contain all the poetry of our love, which is as fertile as nature and similarly varied. No, not one misunderstanding! We are even more drawn to each other than the very first day, and with every passing moment we find new reasons to love each other. Every evening, out for a stroll after dinner, we vow that we will soon go to Paris, out of curiosity, as one might say, “I’m going to see the sights in Switzerland.”

  “Really!” Gaston cries. “Such-and-such boulevard is being rebuilt, La Madeleine has been finished. We must go have a look.”

  And then, ah well, the next day we spend the morning in bed, take our breakfast in our room; noon comes, the weather is warm, we allow ourselves a little nap, and then he asks me to let him look at me, and he looks at me precisely as if I were a painting, lost in that contemplation—which is reciprocated, as you must have guessed. And with that tears come to our eyes, we think of our happiness and we tremble. I am still his mistress, which is to say that I seem to love less than I am loved. A delicious little deception! How endearing to a woman’s eye is the sight of sentiment quelling desire, how charming to see the master, still intimidated, stop where we will it! You asked me to describe him for you, but my Renée, one cannot possibly draw the portrait of a man one loves, one could never hold fast to the truth. And then, just between us, let us acknowledge without shame a sad, strange effect of our society’s mores: there is nothing so different as a man in public and a man in the private world of love. So great is the difference that you might never recognize the one in the other. The man who strikes the most graceful dancer’s most graceful poses to speak love to us one evening by the fireside may well turn out to have none of the secret graces a woman most desires. On the other hand, a man who seems ugly and gauche, ridiculously dressed in an ill-fitting black suit, often hides a lover with the true spirit of love, who will never be ridiculous in any posture, even those fatal to us women, for all our exterior beauties. To find in a man a mysterious harmony between what he seems and what he is, to find a man who in the secret life of marriage displays the kind of innate grace that cannot be given, that cannot be learned, that the ancient sculptors deployed in the chaste and voluptuous marriages of their statues, the innocent abandon that the ancient poets put into their verse, and which seems to find in nakedness still another adornment for the soul, the ideal that springs from us and derives from the world of harmonies, which is no doubt the genius of all things, that immense problem pondered by every woman’s imagination—well, Gaston is its living solution. Ah! my dear, I had no idea how powerful love, youth, wit, and beauty all rolled up together could be. My Gaston is never affected; elegance is instinctive, it grows without effort. When we go out for a quiet stroll in the woods, his arm around my waist, my hand on his shoulder, his body pressed to mine, our heads touching, we walk with precisely the same gait, at a regular pace so smooth and united that anyone who saw us pass by would take us for one single creature gliding over the sand of the alleyways, like Homer’s immortals. That same harmony marks our desires, our thoughts, our words. Sometimes, beneath the verdure still damp from a passing shower, the wet grass gleaming in the evening light, we have taken whole walks in perfect silence, simply listening to the falling droplets, marveling at the red glow draped over the treetops or daubed on the trunks by the setting sun. Our only thoughts were surely a secret, uncertain prayer, rising up to heaven like an apology for our happiness. Sometimes we cry out together at the same moment, seeing the path make a sudden turn up ahead and revealing a delicious prospect in the distance. If you knew all the sweetness and profundity there is in an almost timid kiss bestowed amid that sacred nature . . . it’s as if God made us only so that we might pray to Him in that way. And then we go back home, even more in love than before. In Paris, such a love between two spouses would seem an affront to society; one must partake of it as lovers do, in the secret depths of the woods.

  Gaston, my dear, has the medium build found in all men of great energy, neither fat nor thin, beautifully proportioned, vigorous and solid; his movements are nimble, he jumps a ditch with the ease of a wild animal. No matter his position, he has a sort of innate sense that allows him to keep his balance, a rare thing among men given to deep thought. Although his hair and eyes are dark, his skin is quite white. His jet-black hair contrasts strikingly with the pallor of his neck and brow. He has the melancholy visage of a Louis XIII. He has grown out his mustachios and his royale,[10] but I had him shave off his sideburns and beard: that has become common. His saintlike poverty kept him pure for me, unmarked by the scars that spoil so many young men. He has magnificent teeth, he is as healthy as a horse. His blue eyes, so piercing but for me so magnetically gentle, flash like a lightning bolt when his soul is inflamed. Like all strong, powerfully intelligent people, he has an even temperament that would surprise you as it surprised me. Many wives have confided to me the unhappiness in their homes, but those changeable moods, those anxieties and regrets of men who are not happy with themselves, who do not want or do not know how to age, who still harbor who knows what eternal sad reminders of their wild youth, their veins full of poison, whose gaze always conceals a sadness in its depths, who lash out to hide their insecurity, who sell you an hour of tranquillity at the cost of a whole day of unpleasantness, who take their vengeance on women for their own unlovability, who conceive a secret hatred for our beauty—youth knows nothing of those sorrows, they are peculiar to ill-matched marriages. Oh! my dear, only marry Athénaïs to a young man. If you knew the sustenance I find in that constant smile, forever varied by a keen and sensitive mind, a smile that speaks, with loving thoughts and unspoken gratitude nestling in its corners, forever uniting joys past and present! Nothing is ever forgotten between him and me. We have made the slightest things of nature accomplices in our felicity: everything is alive, everything speaks to us of ourselves in those magnificent woods. A mossy old oak, near the gatehouse on the road, reminds us that we once sat down to rest in its shade, where Gaston told me of the moss at our feet, its history, and from those mosses we ascended, one science to the next, to the very ends of the earth. There is such a kinship between our two minds that I believe they are two editions of a single work. As you see, I’ve grown literary. It is a habit or a gift for us both to see each thing in its entirety, to grasp all it contains; again and again we reveal the purity of that inner sensibility to each other, and it is a pleasure that never palls. We have come to see this oneness of mind as an expression of love, and should it ever fail us, that would be for us what infidelity is for any other marriage.

  My life is full of pleasures, but no doubt you would find it excessively given over to labor. First of all, my dear, know that Louise-Armande-Marie de Chaulieu makes up her own room. Never would I allow some mercenary hand, some unknown woman or girl to violate the sanctity of my bedchamber (literary indeed!). My religion reveres even the smallest objects required for its worship. This is not jealousy; it is simple respect for oneself. I keep up my room with the same care a young woman in love might devote to her finery. I am as meticulous as an old spinster. My powder room is not a disorderly jumble but a delicious boudoir. My attentions have anticipated every eventuality. At any moment the master, the sovereign may enter; h
is eye will not be offended, nor surprised nor disenchanted: flowers, perfumes, elegance, everything pleases the eye. While he lies sleeping in the morning, I rise at first light—he has yet to catch me in the act—and slip into that powder room, where, well-taught by my mother’s inventions, I wash away the lingering traces of sleep with splashes of cold water. When we sleep, our skin is less stimulated and so performs its functions less perfectly; it grows warm, it exudes a sort of fog visible to a mite’s eye, a sort of atmosphere. A woman emerges from beneath the dripping washcloth as a young girl. There, perhaps, is the explanation for the myth of Venus emerging from the waters. Water thus gives me the piquant charms of dawn; I comb and perfume my hair, and after that fastidious toilette I slip like a garden snake back into bed, so that on waking the master will find me as fresh as a spring morning. He is charmed by that freshness, like a newly opened flower, and has no idea how it came to be. Later comes my daytime toilette, seen to by my chambermaid in a dressing room. And, as you must already suspect, there is also the bedtime toilette. Three times a day, then, I make myself up for my husband—sometimes four, but that, my dear, has to do with certain other myths of antiquity.

  We have our work, as well. We take a great interest in our flowers, in the magnificent productions of our greenhouses, in our trees. We are serious botanists, we love flowers with a passion, they fill our chalet. Our lawns are always green, our flower beds as carefully tended as the richest banker’s gardens. Nothing could be as beautiful as our grounds. We are exceedingly fond of fruit, we carefully watch over our walled gardens, our hotbeds, our fans and espaliers. Nonetheless, lest these bucolic occupations fail to satisfy my beloved’s mind, I have advised him to use this silence and solitude to finish a few of the plays he began as a starving young writer, for they are truly beautiful. In all of literature, drama alone can be put aside and taken up again, for it profits from long reflection and does not require the masterful fashioning high style demands. One cannot write dialogue at every moment; it requires eloquence, understatements, and quips that the mind bears in the same way that a plant bears its flowers, and one finds them more by awaiting them than by seeking them. I quite like that hunt for ideas. I am my Gaston’s collaborator, and so I never leave his side, even when he is wandering the vast fields of the imagination. Can you guess now how I fill the long winter nights?

  We are such undemanding masters that we have had no cause to speak one word of reproach or complaint to our domestics since our wedding. When they were asked about us, they had the presence of mind to dissemble, passing us off as a lady’s maid and a personal secretary, our masters away on a long voyage. Certain that they will not be refused, they never go out without asking permission, and in any case they are happy here and understand that their situation will never change except by their own fault. We allow the gardeners to sell our excess fruits and vegetables. Our milkmaid does the same with the milk, cream, and fresh butter. We reserve only the finest of everything for ourselves. They are entirely happy with their profits, and we enjoy an abundance that no amount of money could buy in that grasping old Paris, where a single fine peach costs the equivalent of a hundred francs’ interest income. There is a method to all this, my dear: I want to be Gaston’s entire world; Paris is an amusing place, and so it is essential that my husband not be bored in this solitude. I thought I was jealous when I was loved and allowed myself to be loved, but today I feel the jealousy of a woman who loves—genuine jealousy, in other words. I tremble at every glance from him that strikes me as indifferent. Now and then I say to myself “Suppose he stopped loving me? . . .” and I shiver. Oh! before him I am exactly like the Christian soul before God.

  Alas! my Renée, I still have no children. No doubt a time will come when the sentiments of a father and mother are required to enliven this retreat, when we both feel a need to see little gowns, little cloaks, little brown or blond heads jumping and running through our flower beds and alleyways. Oh! what a monstrous thing are flowers without fruit. The memory of your beautiful family makes me ache. My life has retracted, where yours has grown and expanded. Love is a deeply selfish thing, whereas motherhood multiplies our emotions. I fully felt that difference as I read your good, tender letter. I envied your happiness, seeing you living in three different hearts! Yes, you are happy: you have patiently followed the laws of society, whereas I am outside of everything. Loving and beloved children are a woman’s sole consolation for the loss of her beauty. Soon I will be thirty, the age at which a woman begins to whisper terrible laments to herself. If I am still beautiful, I nonetheless foresee the day when femininity will wane, and then what will become of me? When I am forty he will not be; he will still be young, and I will be old. When that thought pierces my heart, I sit at his feet for an hour, making him swear that he will tell me the moment he finds his love for me dwindling. But he is a child, he swears at once, as if his love would never fade, and he is so handsome that . . . I believe you understand! Farewell, dear angel, will we go so many years again without writing each other? Happiness is tedious to tell of; perhaps that explains why lovers find Dante greater in his Paradiso than in his Inferno. I am no Dante, I am only your friend, and I have no wish to bore you. But you can write me, for in your children you have a varied happiness that grows without end, whereas mine. . . . Let us speak no more of this, I send you a thousand tendernesses.

  53

  FROM MADAME DE L’ESTORADE TO MADAME GASTON

  My dear Louise, I have read and reread your letter, and the more I fill my thoughts with it, the more I consider you less a woman than a child; you have not changed, you are forgetting what I have told you a thousand times: Love is a theft inflicted by the social on the natural. It is by its nature so evanescent that society changes its essence, and so noble souls try to make a man of that child, but then Love becomes, as you yourself say, a monstrosity. Society, my dear, wanted to be fruitful. By substituting long-lived sentiments for the ephemeral folly of nature, it created the greatest human invention: the Family, the eternal foundation of all Societies. It sacrificed both man and woman to that task, for—let us make no mistake—the father of a family gives his energy, his strength, all his fortune to his wife. Is it not the wife who profits from every sacrifice? Luxury, wealth, is it not all for her? And the glory, the elegance, the sweetness, all the finery of the house? Oh! my angel, once again you have gravely misunderstood life. Being adored is a young girl’s ambition, meant to last a few springtimes, but it cannot be the ambition of a wife and a mother. Perhaps, as a sop to her vanity, a wife need only know that she could cause herself to be adored, should she choose. If you would be a wife and a mother, then come back to Paris. Let me tell you again that you will lose yourself to happiness as others lose themselves to sorrow. Those things that never weary us—silence, bread, air—are faultless because they are without taste; by exciting our desires, things full of flavor wear them down in the end. Listen to me, my child! Today, even if I could be loved by a man who inspired in me the same love you feel for Gaston, I would find the strength to remain faithful to my cherished duties and my sweet family. For the heart of a woman, my angel, motherhood is one of those simple, natural, fertile, inexhaustible things, like the very basics of life. I remember having one day, soon to be fourteen years ago, embraced Devotion as a shipwrecked sailor desperately clings to the mast; today, looking back on the whole of my existence, I would once again choose that sentiment as my guiding principle, for it is the surest and most fruitful of all. The example of your life, founded on a relentless egoism, however hidden behind the poetry of the heart, has only strengthened my conviction. I will never again say these things to you, but I had to say them one last time on learning that your happiness has not yet succumbed to the most punishing of all tests.

  Your life in the country, the object of my meditations, has suggested another observation I must share with you. For the body as for the heart, our life is composed of certain regular movements. Any excess introduced into that system causes plea
sure or pain, but pleasure and pain are essentially fleeting fevers of the soul, which cannot long be endured. If we make of excess our very life, are we not living in a state of permanent illness? You are doing just that, by maintaining as a passion what should become, through marriage, a pure and unwavering force. Yes, my angel, today I see it: a household’s glory lies nowhere other than in that deep, serene mutual familiarity, that sharing of goods and ills for which it is so often mocked by vulgar pleasantries. Oh! how great are those words of the Duchess de Sully, the wife of the great Sully, to whom it was said that her husband, however grave he seemed, was not above having a mistress. “It is very simple,” she answered, “I am the honor of the house, and I will not be a courtesan.” More pleasure-mad than tender, you want to be both the wife and the mistress. With the soul of Héloïse and the sensibilities of Saint Teresa, you bask in voluptuous excesses that the law unwittingly allows; in a word, you are depraving the institution of marriage. Yes, you who judged me so severely, who thought me immoral when I accepted the means to be happy on the eve of my marriage, today you deserve the rebukes you addressed to me then, for you bend everything to your purpose. What! you want to submit both nature and society to your whim? You remain just as you are, you do not make of yourself what a woman must be. You still have the wants and demands of a girl, and you introduce the most exacting, the most mercantile calculations into your passion; do you not sell your finery for a very dear price? How little trust you must feel, to take such precautions! Oh! dear Louise, if you could only know the joys of the pains mothers endure to be good and tender to their family! My natural independence and pride resolved into a sweet melancholy, which the pleasures of motherhood dissipated as they repaid it. Yes, the day was difficult, but the evening will be pure and serene. I fear that it will be quite the opposite for you.