The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

by Honoré de Balzac

  July 15

  My dear, after that morning, I redoubled my love for Gaston, and I have found him more tender than ever; he is so young! Twenty times, on waking, I am on the verge of asking him, “So you love me more than the woman on the rue de la Ville-l’Évêque?” But I say nothing, and I do not wish to examine the mystery of my silence.

  “You love children, don’t you?” I asked him.

  “Oh! I do, and we’ll have some!”

  “How?”

  “I’ve consulted all the best doctors, and to a man they advised me to go away on a two-month-long voyage.”

  “Gaston,” I told him, “if I were capable of loving a man who isn’t there, I would have stayed in the convent.”

  He began to laugh, whereas for my part, my dear, that word voyage had killed me. Oh! better to jump from my window than tumble down the staircase, struggling to catch myself on every step. Farewell, my angel; I have made my death gentle, elegant, but inevitable. My will has been written since yesterday. You may now come and see me, the sequestration is lifted. Run to me quickly to receive my farewells. Like my life, my death will be stamped with distinction and grace; I will die whole.

  Adieu, dear sister spirit, you whose affection has felt no disgust, no highs or lows, always caressing my heart like the steady light of the moon; we have not known the vivacities of love together, but neither have we both tasted its venomous bitterness. You have lived wisely. Adieu!

  55

  FROM COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE TO MADAME GASTON

  July 16

  My dear Louise, I am dispatching this letter by express courier before I hurry straight to the chalet. Calm yourself. I found your last letter so distraught that I thought I might, given the circumstances, tell Louis all: it was a matter of saving you from yourself. If, like yours, the methods we used were ignoble, the result is so happy that I know you will approve. I stooped so low as to bring in the police, but this is all a secret between us, you, and the prefect. Gaston is an angel! Here are the facts: His brother Louis Gaston died in Calcutta, in the service of a merchant company, just when he was about to come home to France rich, happy, and married. His marriage to the widow of an English trader had given him the most dazzling fortune. For ten years he worked to send his brother enough to live on, his brother whom he loved and whom he never told of his disappointments, so as not to distress him, but then the great house of Halmer abruptly declared bankruptcy, and the widow was ruined. It was a violent blow, and Louis Gaston was devastated. His declining spirits left illness the master of his body, and he succumbed in Bengal, where he had gone to liquidate what was left of his poor wife’s fortune. That loving captain had entrusted a first installment of three hundred thousand francs to a banker, with instructions to send it to his brother, but the banker soon followed Halmer into bankruptcy, and with that the last trace of his fortune was lost.

  Louis Gaston’s widow, that beautiful woman you take for a rival, arrived in Paris with two children—your nephews—and not a sou to her name. The sale of the mother’s jewels scarcely paid for the family’s boat fare. The widow learned of your husband’s former address, since it was given to the banker by Louis Gaston. Since your Gaston had vanished without notice, Madame Louis Gaston was sent to see d’Arthez, the only person who might know of his whereabouts. D’Arthez offered the young woman money enough for her needs, all the more generously in that four years earlier, just after your wedding, Louis Gaston had written d’Arthez to ask after his brother, knowing the two of them to be friends: he wanted d’Arthez to tell him how he might have that first installment safely delivered to Marie Gaston. D’Arthez had answered that Marie Gaston was now a rich man, thanks to his marriage to Baroness de Macumer. A handsome face, that wonderful gift handed them by their mother, had rescued the two brothers from poverty, in India as in Paris. Is that not a touching story? Naturally, d’Arthez soon wrote your husband to tell him what had happened to his sister-in-law and his nephews, informing him of the generous intentions the Gaston in India had shown for the Gaston in Paris, intentions aborted only by chance. As you must have imagined by now, your dear Gaston came running to Paris at once. There is the story of his first disappearance. In the past five years he has set aside fifty thousand francs from the revenue you forced him to accept; he used them to buy two bonds in his two nephews’ names, for an annual revenue of twelve hundred francs each. He then furnished the apartment where your sister-in-law lives, promising her three thousand francs every three months. Here, then, is the explanation for his theatrical endeavors, and his joy at his play’s success.

  As you see, Madame Gaston is not your rival; she bears her name quite legitimately. A man as noble and sensitive as Gaston had to keep this adventure hidden from you, fearing your generosity. Your husband does not consider what you gave him to be truly his. D’Arthez read me the letter in which Marie asked him to serve as a witness at your wedding: in that letter, he says that his happiness would be complete if only he had no debts for you to pay, if only he were rich. A virgin soul cannot repress such sentiments; they are or they are not, and when they are, their sting and their insistence are easily imagined. It is entirely understandable that Gaston wanted to secretly offer his brother’s widow a decent existence; she had after all given his brother a hundred thousand ecus from her own fortune. She is beautiful, her heart is good, her manners distinguished, but she has no wit. That woman is a mother: little surprise that I felt attached to her the moment I saw her, with one child in her arms and the other dressed like a lord’s baby. The words Everything for the children! are inscribed in the tiniest things she does. Far from being furious at your beloved Gaston, then, you have only new reasons to love him! I caught a glimpse of him; he is the most charming young man in Paris. Oh! yes, dear child, on seeing him I well understood how a woman might be mad about him, for his outward appearance is the very image of his beautiful soul. In your place, I would bring the widow and the two children out to the chalet, and build them a delicious little cottage; I would make them my children! Calm yourself, then, and prepare that surprise—a surprise of your own—for Gaston.

  56

  FROM MADAME GASTON TO COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE

  Ah! my beloved friend, hear the terrible, fatal, insolent words spoken by the imbecile Lafayette to his master, his king: Too late![11] Oh, my life, my beautiful life! What doctor will give it back to me? I have dealt myself a fatal blow. Alas! was I not a mere will-o’-the-wisp of a woman, destined to flicker out after a brief burst of light? My eyes are two torrents of tears, and . . . I can only weep in his absence . . . I flee him, and he seeks me. I keep my despair entirely to myself. Dante forgot my torment in his Inferno. Come and see me die, will you?

  57

  FROM COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE TO COUNT DE L’ESTORADE

  The Chalet, August 7

  My friend, take the children and leave for Provence without me; I will stay with Louise, who has only days to live. I owe myself to her and her husband, who might well lose his senses, I fear.

  Since that note I told you of, which sent me racing with doctors to Ville-d’Avray, I have not left that charming woman’s side and have had no chance to write you, for this is my fifteenth night here.

  I arrived to find her with Gaston, radiant and elegant, a smile on her face, happy. What a sublime lie! Those two beautiful children had had a long talk. For a moment I was fooled by her brave face, like Gaston, but Louise pressed my hand and whispered in my ear, “I’m dying; we mustn’t let him know.” An icy cold gripped me as I found her hand burning hot, her cheeks colored only by rouge. I applauded myself for my prudence: so as to cause no alarm, I had thought to tell the doctors to go walking in the woods until I sent for them.

  “Leave us,” she said to Gaston. “Two women who have spent five years apart have many secrets to confide, and no doubt Renée has something she’d like to tell me in private.”

  Once we were alone, she threw herself into my arms, unable to hold back her tears. “What is
it?” I asked her. “In any case, I have brought you the finest surgeon and the finest doctor of the Hôtel-Dieu, along with Bianchon; in fact, there are four of them.”

  “Oh! if they can save me, if there is still time, let them come!” she cried. “The same emotion that compelled me to die now compels me to live.”

  “But what have you done?”

  “I’ve spent the past several days giving myself a serious case of consumption.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I made myself sweat at night, then ran down to the pond as the dew was falling. Gaston is convinced I have a cold, and I’m dying.”

  “Send him to Paris; I’ll go for the doctors myself,” I said, running like a madwoman to the place where I had left them.

  Alas! my friend, on finishing their examination, not one of those wise men could give me the slightest reason for hope; they believe that Louise will be dead when the leaves fall. That sweet creature’s constitution served her plans singularly well: she had a predisposition to illness, and her actions exacerbated it. She could have lived a long life, but in just a few days she put herself beyond help. I will not tell you my feelings on hearing that unappealable verdict. As you know, I have lived my life as much in Louise as in myself. I sat motionless, stunned and lost, making no move to show those cruel doctors out. My face bathed in tears, I spent I know not how long in tortured meditations. A heavenly voice roused me from my torpor with the words “So I’m doomed,” spoken by Louise as she put her hand on my shoulder.

  She pulled me to my feet and led me into her little salon. “Stay with me,” she said with an imploring gaze. “I want no despair around me; above all, I want to deceive him, and I am strong enough to do it. I am full of energy and youth; I will die on my feet. As for me, do not pity me, I am dying just as I often wished: at thirty, young, beautiful, whole. And I would have made him unhappy, I can see it. I am caught in the snares of my love, like a doe strangling itself as it struggles against its captivity; of the two of us, I am the doe . . . and all too wild. My senseless jealousy has already stung his heart and made him unhappy. When the day came that my suspicions met only with indifference, the reward forever lying in wait for jealousy, when that day came . . . I would die. I’ve got what I wanted out of life. There are some who have spent sixty years at the controls of this world and have lived only two, whereas I seem no older than thirty, but in fact I have sixty years of love behind me. Thus, for me, for him, this is a happy ending. It’s different for you and me: you’re losing a sister who loves you, and that loss cannot be repaired. You alone, here, must weep for my death.

  “My death,” she went on, after a long pause during which I saw her only through the veil of my tears, “brings with it a cruel lesson. My dear professor in corsets is right: marriage must not be founded in passion, nor even in love. Yours is a beautiful and a noble existence, you’ve followed your path, loving your Louis ever more; whereas if one begins married life with fierce ardor, it can only wane. Twice I have been wrong, and twice Death will have come to snatch away my happiness with its fleshless hand. It stole from me the most noble and devoted of men; today, it steals me from the most handsome, most charming, most poetic husband in the world. On the other hand, I will have known by turns the beau ideal of the soul and the body. Felipe’s soul tamed his body and changed it; in Gaston, heart, mind, and beauty are all equal rivals. I die a woman adored, what more could I want? . . . To make my peace with God, whom I have perhaps neglected and toward whom I will soar full of love, asking Him to give me back those two angels in heaven. I would find paradise empty without them. I set a dreadful example: I am an exception. Here, given the impossibility of meeting a Felipe or a Gaston in this world, the law of society joins up with the law of nature. Yes, woman is a weak creature who must, through marriage, sacrifice all her will to man, who in return owes her the sacrifice of his egoism. The complaints and rebellions our sex has injected into these modern times are pure foolishness, earning us the rank of children so many philosophers have ascribed to us.”

  She went on in this way, with the gentle voice you know so well, saying the most sensible things in the most elegant manner, until Gaston came in, bringing his sister-in-law from Paris, along with the two children and the English maid, as Louise had asked.

  “There are my pretty executioners,” she said, seeing her two nephews. “Is my mistake not perfectly understandable? How they resemble their uncle!”

  She was charming with the elder Madame Gaston, urging her to think of the chalet as her own home, and she welcomed her to it with the true Chaulieu politesse, which she possesses to the highest degree. I immediately wrote the Duchess and Duke de Chaulieu, and the Duke de Rhétoré and the Duke de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and Madeleine too. I did well. The next day, exhausted from these exertions, Louise could not go out walking; indeed, she only rose from her bed to put in an appearance at dinner. Madeleine de Lenoncourt arrived that evening, along with her two brothers and her mother. Gone was the chill Louise’s marriage had created between her and her family. Since that evening, Louise’s father and two brothers have ridden out each morning, and the two duchesses spend every evening at the chalet. Death unites people no less than it parts them, it puts all petty passions to rest. Louise is sublimely gracious, reasonable, charming, witty, and sensitive. Until the end, she is showing the elegance she is known for, offering us all the treasures of the wit that made her a queen of Paris.

  “I want to be pretty even in my coffin,” she told me, with the smile that is hers alone, as she lay down in the bed where she has been languishing these past fifteen days.

  There is no sign of illness in her room: the syrups, the gums, all the trappings of modern medicine are carefully hidden away.

  “Am I not having a beautiful death?” she said yesterday to the curé of Sèvres, to whom she has told everything.

  We are all enjoying her greedily. Forewarned of her death by so many fears and terrible realizations, Gaston does not lack courage, but he is stricken; I would not be surprised to see him naturally follow his wife. Yesterday, as we were out walking around the little pond, he said to me, “I must be a father to those two children,” and he nodded toward his sister-in-law, who was there with her nephews. “But, although I will do nothing to take my leave of this world, promise that you will be a second mother to them, and that you will allow your husband to accept the unofficial guardianship I will entrust to him, along with my sister-in-law.” He said this without the slightest pomp, in the manner of a man who knows he is lost. His beaming face returns Louise’s bright smiles; I alone am under no illusion. He has summoned a courage equal to hers. Louise wanted to see her godson, but I am not sorry that he is in Provence: she might have shown him a generosity that would have discomfited me.

  Farewell, my friend.

  August 25 (her name day)

  Yesterday evening Louise was delirious for a few moments, but it was a truly elegant delirium, proving that people of good mind do not go mad in the manner of commoners or fools. In a muted voice she sang a few Italian arias, from I Puritani, La Sonnambula, and Mosè in Egitto. We all sat in silence around the bed, with tears in our eyes, even her brother Rhétoré, so plain was it that her soul was escaping her. She could no longer see us! All her grace was still there in the charms of that quiet, divinely sweet song. Her final agony began in the night. Just now, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I awakened her myself; she was feeling a bit stronger, she wanted to sit in her window, she asked for Gaston’s hand. . . . Then, my friend, the most charming angel we will ever see on this earth left us only her body. Given extreme unction last night, unbeknownst to Gaston, who managed to sleep a little during that terrible ceremony, she wanted me to read the De profundis to her in French, while she sat and gazed on the beautiful nature she had created for herself. She silently said the words along with me, pressing her husband’s hand as he knelt on the other side of the armchair.

  August 26

  My heart is broken. I hav
e just gone for a last look at her, in her shroud. She has gone pale, tinged here and there with violet. Oh! I want to see my children! My children! Bring me my children!

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

  PART ONE

  1. Logically, the year should be 1825 (Louise entered the convent in 1816 and was there for nine years), but the date of the seventh letter tells us that this one must have been written in 1823. Balzac’s novels teem with minor inconsistencies of this sort; this is the last one that will be noted here.

  2. As very young children, the Siamese twins Helen and Judith, sometimes known simply as the “Hungarian sisters,” were exhibited as objects of fascination and curiosity throughout early eighteenth-century Europe, but at the age of six Judith was paralyzed by a stroke, and they entered a convent to live out their days. They died within minutes of each other at age twenty-two.

  3. Louise-Françoise de la Vallière was a longtime mistress of Louis XIV; in 1674, seeing that she had been supplanted by a new favorite—Madame de Montespan, who will be alluded to a few paragraphs further on—she became a Carmelite nun under the name Louise de la Miséricorde.