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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1189 ***
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+
+
+
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should
+strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each
+in the other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a
+snake by a woodside. At the risk of spoiling my story and of being taken
+for a coxcomb, I state my intention at the outset.
+
+I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it
+fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in
+part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are
+superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select
+from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry.
+
+In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances
+obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard
+those airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats; and for
+the first few miles I discovered abundance of excellent reasons for
+justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A young fellow, apparently in
+somewhat better circumstances, who came to take the seat beside me
+from preference, listened to my reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An
+approximate nearness of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common
+love of fresh air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the
+coach was lumbering along,--these things, together with an indescribable
+magnetic something, drew us before long into one of those short-lived
+traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with the more complacency
+because the intercourse is by its very nature transient, and makes no
+implicit demands upon the future.
+
+We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women and love.
+Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such matters, we proceeded
+naturally to the topic of our lady-loves. Young as we both were, we
+still admired "the woman of a certain age," that is to say, the woman
+between thirty-five and forty. Oh! any poet who should have listened to
+our talk, for heaven knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have
+reaped a harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very
+tender confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections, our
+blushes, as we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an eloquence,
+a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must remain young, no
+doubt, to understand youth.
+
+Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the essential
+points of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at the very outset,
+that in theory and practice there was no such piece of driveling
+nonsense in this world as a certificate of birth; that plenty of women
+were younger at forty than many a girl of twenty; and, to come to the
+point, that a woman is no older than she looks.
+
+This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out, in all
+good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had portrayed our
+mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us, women of rank, women
+of taste, intellectual and clever; when we had endowed them with
+little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately fragrant skin, then came the
+admission--on his part that Madame Such-an-one was thirty-eight years
+old, and on mine that I worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if
+released on either side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences
+came thick and fast, when we found that we were in the same
+confraternity of love. It was which of us should overtop the other in
+sentiment.
+
+One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for an
+hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had prowled about
+her park to meet her one night. Out came all our follies in fact. If it
+is pleasant to remember past dangers, is it not at least as pleasant
+to recall past delights? We live through the joy a second time. We told
+each other everything, our perils, our great joys, our little pleasures,
+and even the humors of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted
+a cigar for him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day
+when we did not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him at
+the risk of ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better, or worse,
+if you will have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were adored by their
+husbands; these gentlemen were enslaved by the charm possessed by every
+woman who loves; and, with even supererogatory simplicity, afforded us
+that just sufficient spice of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how
+quickly the wind swept away our talk and our happy laughter!
+
+When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much interest, and
+truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero of a very serious
+love affair. Picture to yourselves a young man of middle height, but
+very well proportioned, a bright, expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes,
+moist lips, and white and even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor
+still overspread his delicately cut features, and there were faint dark
+circles about his eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add,
+furthermore, that he had white and shapely hands, of which he was as
+careful as a pretty woman should be; add that he seemed to be very well
+informed, and was decidedly clever, and it should not be difficult for
+you to imagine that my traveling companion was more than worthy of a
+countess. Indeed, many a girl might have wished for such a husband, for
+he was a Vicomte with an income of twelve or fifteen thousand livres,
+"to say nothing of expectations."
+
+About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My
+luckless comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of a
+newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the vehicle
+and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either miscalculated in
+some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do not know, but the coach
+fell over upon him, and he was crushed under it.
+
+We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the moans wrung
+from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give me a commission--a
+sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a dying man's last wish.
+Poor boy, all through his agony he was torturing himself in his young
+simplicity of heart with the thought of the painful shock to his
+mistress when she should suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He
+begged me to go myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a
+key which he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in
+the flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
+as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had scarcely
+given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his home at La
+Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters, which he conjured me
+to return to her--when he grew speechless in the middle of a sentence;
+but from his last gesture, I understood that the fatal key would be my
+passport in his mother's house. It troubled him that he was powerless to
+utter a single word to thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no
+doubt. He looked wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped
+in token of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
+only fatal accident caused by the overturn.
+
+"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+
+At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His mother was
+away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for me. Nevertheless, I
+had to assuage the grief of an old woman-servant, who staggered back at
+the tidings of her young master's death, and sank half-dead into a chair
+when she saw the blood-stained key. But I had another and more dreadful
+sorrow to think of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love;
+so I left the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the precious
+correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+
+The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and then
+there was some distance to walk across country. So it was not exactly an
+easy matter to deliver my message. For divers reasons into which I need
+not enter, I had barely sufficient money to take me to Moulins. However,
+my youthful enthusiasm determined to hasten thither on foot as fast
+as possible. Bad news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the
+chateau. I asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field
+paths of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
+The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I felt
+at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast numbers of
+romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds of situations in
+which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan, or, to observe the laws
+of romance, this _Juliette_, so passionately beloved of my traveling
+companion. I sketched out ingenious answers to the questions which she
+might be supposed to put to me. At every turn of a wood, in every
+beaten pathway, I rehearsed a modern version of the scene in which
+Sosie describes the battle to his lantern. To my shame be it said, I had
+thought at first of nothing but the part that _I_ was to play, of my
+own cleverness, of how I should demean myself; but now that I was in the
+country, an ominous thought flashed through my soul like a thunderbolt
+tearing its way through a veil of gray cloud.
+
+What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole thoughts were
+full of her young lover, who was looking forward hour by hour to a joy
+which no words can express, a woman who had been at a world of pains to
+invent plausible pretexts to draw him to her side. Yet, after all, it
+was a cruel deed of charity to be the messenger of death! So I hurried
+on, splashing and bemiring myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+
+Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly, and in
+a moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as your
+true country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a hurrying
+servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak to Mme. la
+Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in the English park
+which wound about the chateau with "Madame is out there----"
+
+"Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a couple of
+hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+
+In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed in a
+white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the throat, had
+overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She gave me a glance
+and vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+
+"Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+
+And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and dancing white
+frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me the way among the
+trees.
+
+I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the
+avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with
+the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves,
+and gave them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my
+coat carefully so as to exhibit the inner, always the least worn, side
+of the cloth, and finally had turned down the tops of my trousers over
+my boots, artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon
+toilet, I could hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate
+collector; but now when my thoughts travel back to that episode of my
+youth, I sometimes laugh at my own expense.
+
+Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the green
+walk, among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray of sunlight,
+I saw Juliette--Juliette and her husband. The pretty little girl
+held her mother by the hand, and it was easy to see that the lady had
+quickened her pace somewhat at the child's ambiguous phrase. Taken aback
+by the sight of a total stranger, who bowed with a tolerably awkward
+air, she looked at me with a coolly courteous expression and an adorable
+pout, in which I, who knew her secret, could read the full extent of
+her disappointment. I sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of the
+elegant phrases so laboriously prepared.
+
+This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come forward.
+Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give myself a
+countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble inquiries, asking
+whether the persons present were really M. le Comte and Mme. la
+Comtesse de Montpersan. These imbecilities gave me time to form my own
+conclusions at a glance, and, with a perspicacity rare at that age, to
+analyze the husband and wife whose solitude was about to be so rudely
+disturbed.
+
+The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of nobleman, the
+fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with
+stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made
+an even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of
+threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar.
+There was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the
+Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of
+the arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the
+unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816.
+As to countenance--a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+locks of scanty gray hair; as to character--an incredible mixture of
+homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and
+a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely
+led by his wife, yet imagines himself to be the master; apt to domineer
+in trifles, and to let more important things slip past unheeded--there
+you have the man!
+
+But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast between
+husband and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a flat, graceful
+figure and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty was she, that you
+would have feared to break some bone if you so much as touched her. She
+wore a white muslin dress, a rose-colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons
+in the pretty cap on her head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously
+by her shoulders and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of
+her awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths of
+the heart. Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her movements
+graceful, her foot charming. An experienced man of pleasure would not
+have given her more than thirty years, her forehead was so girlish.
+She had all the most transient delicate detail of youth in her face. In
+character she seemed to me to resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the
+Marquise de B----, two feminine types always fresh in the memory of any
+young man who has read Louvet's romance.
+
+In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course that
+would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and perhaps for
+the only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in what the special
+skill of courtiers and men of the world consists.
+
+I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days, that they
+have left me no time to distil all the least actions of daily life, and
+to do everything so that it falls in with those rules of etiquette and
+good taste which wither the most generous emotions.
+
+"M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a few words
+with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+
+He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her husband's
+secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+
+I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion. The
+effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection for his young
+collaborator was cordial enough, and this emboldened me to make reply as
+I did.
+
+"My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to break the
+news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first instance,
+as in duty bound. I could not, without first informing you, deliver
+a message to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted to me by an entire
+stranger; but this commission is a sort of sacred trust, a secret of
+which I have no power to dispose. From the high idea of your character
+which he gave me, I felt sure that you would not oppose me in the
+fulfilment of a dying request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to
+break the silence which is imposed upon me."
+
+At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded with
+a tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free field. We
+returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited to dinner. As we
+came up to the house, a grave and silent couple, Juliette stole a
+glance at us. Not a little surprised to find her husband contriving some
+frivolous excuse for leaving us together, she stopped short, giving me
+a glance--such a glance as women only can give you. In that look of
+hers there was the pardonable curiosity of the mistress of the house
+confronted with a guest dropped down upon her from the skies and
+innumerable doubts, certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by
+my youth and my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all
+the disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one are
+as nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and, above all,
+the thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected guest just now,
+when, no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy full solitude for her
+love. This mute eloquence I understood in her eyes, and all the pity and
+compassion in me made answer in a sad smile. I thought of her, as I had
+seen her for one moment, in the pride of her beauty; standing in the
+sunny afternoon in the narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and
+as that fair wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress
+a sigh.
+
+"Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey----, undertaken
+solely on your account."
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am come," I
+continued. Her face grew white.
+
+"You will not see him to-day."
+
+"Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+
+"Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself.... He intrusted me with
+secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never messenger could
+be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"How if he loved you no longer?"
+
+"Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing less
+than frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of shudder ran
+through her, and she reddened, and she gave me a wild, swift glance as
+she asked:
+
+"Is he alive?"
+
+Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that tone in
+her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy woman in helpless
+bewilderment.
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me the
+truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+
+I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of hers. She
+leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+
+"Madame, here comes your husband!"
+
+"Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of sight.
+
+"Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.--Come, monsieur."
+
+Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-room.
+Dinner was served with all the luxury which we have learned to expect in
+Paris. There were five covers laid, three for the Count and Countess and
+their little daughter; my own, which should have been HIS; and another
+for the canon of Saint-Denis, who said grace, and then asked:
+
+"Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+
+"Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily helped
+us to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with portentous
+speed.
+
+"Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you would
+behave more rationally."
+
+"Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous look.
+
+Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was
+eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with,
+"We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+
+I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears written
+so plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after me into the
+garden. The Count, for the sake of appearances, came as far as the
+threshold.
+
+"Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the
+least," but he did not offer to accompany us.
+
+We three--the canon, the housemaid, and I--hurried through the garden
+walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting, listening for
+an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we hurried along, I told
+the story of the fatal accident, and discovered how strongly the maid
+was attached to her mistress, for she took my secret dread far more
+seriously than the canon. We went along by the pools of water; all over
+the park we went; but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that
+she had passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of
+some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled that it
+was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a place that
+might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found
+Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in
+the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries--pudency
+even stronger than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but
+there was a more poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was
+nothing left in the world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her
+mistress submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
+maid could find nothing to say but "There! madame; there, there----"
+
+"What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon kept on
+exclaiming.
+
+At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room, gave
+orders that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one must be told
+that the Countess was suffering from a sick headache. Then we came down
+to the dining-room, the canon and I.
+
+Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had
+scarcely given a thought to the Count since we left him under the
+peristyle; his indifference had surprised me, but my amazement increased
+when we came back and found him seated philosophically at table. He had
+eaten pretty nearly all the dinner, to the huge delight of his little
+daughter; the child was smiling at her father's flagrant infraction of
+the Countess' rules. The man's odd indifference was explained to me by
+a mild altercation which at once arose with the canon. The Count was
+suffering from some serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it
+was, but his medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and
+the ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal appetite,
+had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little space I had seen
+frank and undisguised human nature under two very different aspects, in
+such a sort that there was a certain grotesque element in the very midst
+of a most terrible tragedy.
+
+The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon racked his
+brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The lady's husband
+silently digested his dinner; content, apparently, with the Countess'
+rather vague explanation, sent through the maid, putting forward some
+feminine ailment as her excuse. We all went early to bed.
+
+As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my night's
+lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She heard my
+voice, and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but in vain--she
+could not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I withdrew. In spite of
+the painful agitation, which I had felt to the full as youth can feel, I
+fell asleep, tired out with my forced march.
+
+It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound of
+curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the Countess
+at the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my table fell full
+upon her face.
+
+"Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not know
+how I can live after that awful blow which struck me down a little while
+since; but just now I feel calm. I want to know everything."
+
+"What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her face
+contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural tones of her
+voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features filled me with dumb
+amazement.
+
+Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last glow of
+autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty
+remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding
+grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun
+had shone.
+
+I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without laying too
+much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her about our first
+day's journey, and how it had been filled with recollections of her and
+of love. And she listened eagerly, without shedding a tear, leaning her
+face towards me, as some zealous doctor might lean to watch any change
+in a patient's face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole
+heart to pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the
+first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity, and told
+her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told her how and
+why it was that he had given me this fatal message. Then her tears were
+dried by the fires that burned in the dark depths within her. She grew
+even paler. When I drew the letters from beneath my pillow and held them
+out to her, she took them mechanically; then, trembling from head to
+foot, she said in a hollow voice:
+
+"And _I_ burned all his letters!--I have nothing of him left!--Nothing!
+nothing!"
+
+She struck her hand against her forehead.
+
+"Madame----" I began.
+
+She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+
+"I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+
+And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very part
+of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her burning tears
+falling on your hands, you would know what gratitude is, when it follows
+so closely upon the benefit. Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter,
+a faint ray of happiness gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she
+grasped my hands in hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+
+"Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you
+love."
+
+She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+
+Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a dream; to
+make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look fruitlessly under
+my pillow for the packet of letters. There is no need to tell you how
+the next day went. I spent several hours of it with the Juliette whom my
+poor comrade had so praised to me. In her lightest words, her gestures,
+in all that she did and said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the
+delicacy of feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved,
+loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this earth.
+
+In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as Moulins
+with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+
+"Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to Paris, to
+remit a sum of money to M. de ---- (I forget the name), in the Rue du
+Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to send it as soon as
+possible."
+
+"Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took charge
+of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the expenses of
+my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my arrival, I went to
+the address indicated to repay the amount to M. de Montpersan's
+correspondent, did I understand the ingenious delicacy with which
+Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the genius of a loving woman
+revealed in such a way of lending, in her reticence with regard to a
+poverty easily guessed?
+
+And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who clung to
+you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you! _You_ must not
+die!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1189 ***
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+      The Message, by Honore de Balzac
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1189 ***</div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MESSAGE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Honore De Balzac
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Translated by Ellen Marriage
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MESSAGE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should strike
+      terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each in the
+      other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a snake by a
+      woodside. At the risk of spoiling my story and of being taken for a
+      coxcomb, I state my intention at the outset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it fails
+      to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in part owing
+      to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are superlatively
+      uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities
+      those which contain possibilities of poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances
+      obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard those
+      airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats; and for the first
+      few miles I discovered abundance of excellent reasons for justifying the
+      opinion of our neighbors. A young fellow, apparently in somewhat better
+      circumstances, who came to take the seat beside me from preference,
+      listened to my reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness
+      of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh air, and
+      of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach was lumbering along,&mdash;these
+      things, together with an indescribable magnetic something, drew us before
+      long into one of those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we
+      unbend with the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
+      nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women and love.
+      Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such matters, we proceeded
+      naturally to the topic of our lady-loves. Young as we both were, we still
+      admired "the woman of a certain age," that is to say, the woman between
+      thirty-five and forty. Oh! any poet who should have listened to our talk,
+      for heaven knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have reaped a
+      harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very tender
+      confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections, our blushes, as
+      we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an eloquence, a boyish
+      charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must remain young, no doubt, to
+      understand youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the essential points
+      of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at the very outset, that in
+      theory and practice there was no such piece of driveling nonsense in this
+      world as a certificate of birth; that plenty of women were younger at
+      forty than many a girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman
+      is no older than she looks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out, in all
+      good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had portrayed our
+      mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us, women of rank, women of
+      taste, intellectual and clever; when we had endowed them with little feet,
+      a satin, nay, a delicately fragrant skin, then came the admission&mdash;on
+      his part that Madame Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine
+      that I worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
+      side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and fast,
+      when we found that we were in the same confraternity of love. It was which
+      of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for an hour.
+      The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had prowled about her
+      park to meet her one night. Out came all our follies in fact. If it is
+      pleasant to remember past dangers, is it not at least as pleasant to
+      recall past delights? We live through the joy a second time. We told each
+      other everything, our perils, our great joys, our little pleasures, and
+      even the humors of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted a cigar
+      for him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day when we did
+      not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him at the risk of
+      ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better, or worse, if you will
+      have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were adored by their husbands; these
+      gentlemen were enslaved by the charm possessed by every woman who loves;
+      and, with even supererogatory simplicity, afforded us that just sufficient
+      spice of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how quickly the wind swept
+      away our talk and our happy laughter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much interest, and
+      truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero of a very serious love
+      affair. Picture to yourselves a young man of middle height, but very well
+      proportioned, a bright, expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes, moist lips,
+      and white and even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor still overspread
+      his delicately cut features, and there were faint dark circles about his
+      eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add, furthermore, that he
+      had white and shapely hands, of which he was as careful as a pretty woman
+      should be; add that he seemed to be very well informed, and was decidedly
+      clever, and it should not be difficult for you to imagine that my
+      traveling companion was more than worthy of a countess. Indeed, many a
+      girl might have wished for such a husband, for he was a Vicomte with an
+      income of twelve or fifteen thousand livres, "to say nothing of
+      expectations."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My luckless
+      comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of a newly-ploughed
+      field, instead of following the fortunes of the vehicle and clinging
+      tightly to the roof, as I did. He either miscalculated in some way, or he
+      slipped; how it happened, I do not know, but the coach fell over upon him,
+      and he was crushed under it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the moans wrung
+      from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give me a commission&mdash;a
+      sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a dying man's last wish. Poor
+      boy, all through his agony he was torturing himself in his young
+      simplicity of heart with the thought of the painful shock to his mistress
+      when she should suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to
+      go myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which he
+      wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the flesh, but
+      the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it as gently as
+      possible from the wound which it had made. He had scarcely given me the
+      necessary directions&mdash;I was to go to his home at La Charite-sur-Loire
+      for his mistress' love-letters, which he conjured me to return to her&mdash;when
+      he grew speechless in the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture,
+      I understood that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's
+      house. It troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
+      thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked wistfully
+      at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token of farewell, and his
+      head sank, and he died. His death was the only fatal accident caused by
+      the overturn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His mother was
+      away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for me. Nevertheless, I
+      had to assuage the grief of an old woman-servant, who staggered back at
+      the tidings of her young master's death, and sank half-dead into a chair
+      when she saw the blood-stained key. But I had another and more dreadful
+      sorrow to think of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love; so I
+      left the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the precious
+      correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and then
+      there was some distance to walk across country. So it was not exactly an
+      easy matter to deliver my message. For divers reasons into which I need
+      not enter, I had barely sufficient money to take me to Moulins. However,
+      my youthful enthusiasm determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as
+      possible. Bad news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the
+      chateau. I asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
+      of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back. The nearer
+      I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I felt at the idea of
+      my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast numbers of romantic fancies ran
+      in my head. I imagined all kinds of situations in which I might find this
+      Comtesse de Montpersan, or, to observe the laws of romance, this <i>Juliette</i>,
+      so passionately beloved of my traveling companion. I sketched out
+      ingenious answers to the questions which she might be supposed to put to
+      me. At every turn of a wood, in every beaten pathway, I rehearsed a modern
+      version of the scene in which Sosie describes the battle to his lantern.
+      To my shame be it said, I had thought at first of nothing but the part
+      that <i>I</i> was to play, of my own cleverness, of how I should demean
+      myself; but now that I was in the country, an ominous thought flashed
+      through my soul like a thunderbolt tearing its way through a veil of gray
+      cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole thoughts were
+      full of her young lover, who was looking forward hour by hour to a joy
+      which no words can express, a woman who had been at a world of pains to
+      invent plausible pretexts to draw him to her side. Yet, after all, it was
+      a cruel deed of charity to be the messenger of death! So I hurried on,
+      splashing and bemiring myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+      buildings at the further end&mdash;the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+      against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+      outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+      disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly, and in a
+      moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as your true
+      country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a hurrying
+      servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak to Mme. la
+      Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in the English park
+      which wound about the chateau with "Madame is out there&mdash;&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a couple of
+      hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed in a
+      white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the throat, had
+      overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She gave me a glance and
+      vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and dancing white
+      frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me the way among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the
+      avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with the
+      cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves, and gave
+      them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my coat
+      carefully so as to exhibit the inner, always the least worn, side of the
+      cloth, and finally had turned down the tops of my trousers over my boots,
+      artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon toilet, I could
+      hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate collector; but now
+      when my thoughts travel back to that episode of my youth, I sometimes
+      laugh at my own expense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the green walk,
+      among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray of sunlight, I saw
+      Juliette&mdash;Juliette and her husband. The pretty little girl held her
+      mother by the hand, and it was easy to see that the lady had quickened her
+      pace somewhat at the child's ambiguous phrase. Taken aback by the sight of
+      a total stranger, who bowed with a tolerably awkward air, she looked at me
+      with a coolly courteous expression and an adorable pout, in which I, who
+      knew her secret, could read the full extent of her disappointment. I
+      sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of the elegant phrases so
+      laboriously prepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come forward.
+      Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give myself a
+      countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble inquiries, asking whether
+      the persons present were really M. le Comte and Mme. la Comtesse de
+      Montpersan. These imbecilities gave me time to form my own conclusions at
+      a glance, and, with a perspicacity rare at that age, to analyze the
+      husband and wife whose solitude was about to be so rudely disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of nobleman, the
+      fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with
+      stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made an
+      even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of
+      threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar. There
+      was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the
+      Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the
+      arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the
+      unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As
+      to countenance&mdash;a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+      locks of scanty gray hair; as to character&mdash;an incredible mixture of
+      homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and a
+      total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely led
+      by his wife, yet imagines himself to be the master; apt to domineer in
+      trifles, and to let more important things slip past unheeded&mdash;there
+      you have the man!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast between husband
+      and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a flat, graceful figure
+      and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty was she, that you would have
+      feared to break some bone if you so much as touched her. She wore a white
+      muslin dress, a rose-colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons in the pretty
+      cap on her head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously by her
+      shoulders and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of her
+      awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths of the heart.
+      Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her movements graceful, her
+      foot charming. An experienced man of pleasure would not have given her
+      more than thirty years, her forehead was so girlish. She had all the most
+      transient delicate detail of youth in her face. In character she seemed to
+      me to resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the Marquise de B&mdash;&mdash;,
+      two feminine types always fresh in the memory of any young man who has
+      read Louvet's romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course that
+      would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and perhaps for the
+      only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in what the special skill of
+      courtiers and men of the world consists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days, that they
+      have left me no time to distil all the least actions of daily life, and to
+      do everything so that it falls in with those rules of etiquette and good
+      taste which wither the most generous emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a few words
+      with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+      unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her husband's
+      secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion. The
+      effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection for his young
+      collaborator was cordial enough, and this emboldened me to make reply as I
+      did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to break the
+      news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first instance, as
+      in duty bound. I could not, without first informing you, deliver a message
+      to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted to me by an entire stranger; but
+      this commission is a sort of sacred trust, a secret of which I have no
+      power to dispose. From the high idea of your character which he gave me, I
+      felt sure that you would not oppose me in the fulfilment of a dying
+      request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to break the silence which is
+      imposed upon me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded with a
+      tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free field. We
+      returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited to dinner. As we
+      came up to the house, a grave and silent couple, Juliette stole a glance
+      at us. Not a little surprised to find her husband contriving some
+      frivolous excuse for leaving us together, she stopped short, giving me a
+      glance&mdash;such a glance as women only can give you. In that look of
+      hers there was the pardonable curiosity of the mistress of the house
+      confronted with a guest dropped down upon her from the skies and
+      innumerable doubts, certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by my
+      youth and my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all the
+      disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one are as
+      nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and, above all, the
+      thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected guest just now, when,
+      no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy full solitude for her love. This
+      mute eloquence I understood in her eyes, and all the pity and compassion
+      in me made answer in a sad smile. I thought of her, as I had seen her for
+      one moment, in the pride of her beauty; standing in the sunny afternoon in
+      the narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and as that fair
+      wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey&mdash;&mdash;,
+      undertaken solely on your account."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Sir!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am come," I
+      continued. Her face grew white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You will not see him to-day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself.... He intrusted me with
+      secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never messenger could
+      be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is the matter with him?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How if he loved you no longer?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing less than
+      frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of shudder ran through
+      her, and she reddened, and she gave me a wild, swift glance as she asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is he alive?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that tone in
+      her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy woman in helpless
+      bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, madame."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me the
+      truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of hers. She
+      leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Madame, here comes your husband!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.&mdash;Come, monsieur."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-room. Dinner
+      was served with all the luxury which we have learned to expect in Paris.
+      There were five covers laid, three for the Count and Countess and their
+      little daughter; my own, which should have been HIS; and another for the
+      canon of Saint-Denis, who said grace, and then asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily helped us
+      to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with portentous speed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you would
+      behave more rationally."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was
+      eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with,
+      "We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears written so
+      plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after me into the garden.
+      The Count, for the sake of appearances, came as far as the threshold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the least,"
+      but he did not offer to accompany us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We three&mdash;the canon, the housemaid, and I&mdash;hurried through the
+      garden walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting, listening
+      for an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we hurried along, I
+      told the story of the fatal accident, and discovered how strongly the maid
+      was attached to her mistress, for she took my secret dread far more
+      seriously than the canon. We went along by the pools of water; all over
+      the park we went; but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that she
+      had passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of some
+      outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled that it was
+      scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a place that might have
+      been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found Juliette. With
+      the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in the hay, hiding
+      her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries&mdash;pudency even stronger
+      than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more
+      poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
+      world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress submitting
+      with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The maid could find
+      nothing to say but "There! madame; there, there&mdash;&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon kept on
+      exclaiming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room, gave orders
+      that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one must be told that the
+      Countess was suffering from a sick headache. Then we came down to the
+      dining-room, the canon and I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had scarcely
+      given a thought to the Count since we left him under the peristyle; his
+      indifference had surprised me, but my amazement increased when we came
+      back and found him seated philosophically at table. He had eaten pretty
+      nearly all the dinner, to the huge delight of his little daughter; the
+      child was smiling at her father's flagrant infraction of the Countess'
+      rules. The man's odd indifference was explained to me by a mild
+      altercation which at once arose with the canon. The Count was suffering
+      from some serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it was, but his
+      medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and the ferocious
+      hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal appetite, had overpowered
+      all human sensibilities. In that little space I had seen frank and
+      undisguised human nature under two very different aspects, in such a sort
+      that there was a certain grotesque element in the very midst of a most
+      terrible tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon racked his
+      brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The lady's husband
+      silently digested his dinner; content, apparently, with the Countess'
+      rather vague explanation, sent through the maid, putting forward some
+      feminine ailment as her excuse. We all went early to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my night's
+      lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She heard my voice,
+      and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but in vain&mdash;she could
+      not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I withdrew. In spite of the
+      painful agitation, which I had felt to the full as youth can feel, I fell
+      asleep, tired out with my forced march.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound of
+      curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the Countess at
+      the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my table fell full upon
+      her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not know how I
+      can live after that awful blow which struck me down a little while since;
+      but just now I feel calm. I want to know everything."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her face
+      contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural tones of her
+      voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features filled me with dumb
+      amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last glow of
+      autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty
+      remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding grief;
+      it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun had
+      shone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without laying too
+      much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her about our first
+      day's journey, and how it had been filled with recollections of her and of
+      love. And she listened eagerly, without shedding a tear, leaning her face
+      towards me, as some zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a
+      patient's face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to
+      pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the first
+      delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity, and told her of
+      the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told her how and why it was
+      that he had given me this fatal message. Then her tears were dried by the
+      fires that burned in the dark depths within her. She grew even paler. When
+      I drew the letters from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she
+      took them mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a
+      hollow voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And <i>I</i> burned all his letters!&mdash;I have nothing of him left!&mdash;Nothing!
+      nothing!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She struck her hand against her forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Madame&mdash;&mdash;" I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very part of
+      him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her burning tears
+      falling on your hands, you would know what gratitude is, when it follows
+      so closely upon the benefit. Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a
+      faint ray of happiness gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she
+      grasped my hands in hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you
+      love."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a dream; to
+      make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look fruitlessly under my
+      pillow for the packet of letters. There is no need to tell you how the
+      next day went. I spent several hours of it with the Juliette whom my poor
+      comrade had so praised to me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all
+      that she did and said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy
+      of feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved, loving, and
+      self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as Moulins with
+      me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+      inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+      obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to Paris, to
+      remit a sum of money to M. de &mdash;&mdash; (I forget the name), in the
+      Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to send it as soon as
+      possible."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took charge of a
+      rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the expenses of my journey
+      back to Paris; and only when, on my arrival, I went to the address
+      indicated to repay the amount to M. de Montpersan's correspondent, did I
+      understand the ingenious delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was
+      not all the genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in
+      her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who clung to
+      you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you! <i>You</i> must
+      not die!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1189 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Message
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: February 20, 2010 [EBook #1189]
+Last Updated: April 3, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MESSAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MESSAGE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Honore De Balzac
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Translated by Ellen Marriage
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MESSAGE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should strike
+      terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each in the
+      other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a snake by a
+      woodside. At the risk of spoiling my story and of being taken for a
+      coxcomb, I state my intention at the outset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it fails
+      to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in part owing
+      to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are superlatively
+      uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities
+      those which contain possibilities of poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances
+      obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard those
+      airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats; and for the first
+      few miles I discovered abundance of excellent reasons for justifying the
+      opinion of our neighbors. A young fellow, apparently in somewhat better
+      circumstances, who came to take the seat beside me from preference,
+      listened to my reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness
+      of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh air, and
+      of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach was lumbering along,&mdash;these
+      things, together with an indescribable magnetic something, drew us before
+      long into one of those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we
+      unbend with the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
+      nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women and love.
+      Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such matters, we proceeded
+      naturally to the topic of our lady-loves. Young as we both were, we still
+      admired "the woman of a certain age," that is to say, the woman between
+      thirty-five and forty. Oh! any poet who should have listened to our talk,
+      for heaven knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have reaped a
+      harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very tender
+      confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections, our blushes, as
+      we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an eloquence, a boyish
+      charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must remain young, no doubt, to
+      understand youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the essential points
+      of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at the very outset, that in
+      theory and practice there was no such piece of driveling nonsense in this
+      world as a certificate of birth; that plenty of women were younger at
+      forty than many a girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman
+      is no older than she looks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out, in all
+      good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had portrayed our
+      mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us, women of rank, women of
+      taste, intellectual and clever; when we had endowed them with little feet,
+      a satin, nay, a delicately fragrant skin, then came the admission&mdash;on
+      his part that Madame Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine
+      that I worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
+      side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and fast,
+      when we found that we were in the same confraternity of love. It was which
+      of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for an hour.
+      The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had prowled about her
+      park to meet her one night. Out came all our follies in fact. If it is
+      pleasant to remember past dangers, is it not at least as pleasant to
+      recall past delights? We live through the joy a second time. We told each
+      other everything, our perils, our great joys, our little pleasures, and
+      even the humors of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted a cigar
+      for him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day when we did
+      not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him at the risk of
+      ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better, or worse, if you will
+      have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were adored by their husbands; these
+      gentlemen were enslaved by the charm possessed by every woman who loves;
+      and, with even supererogatory simplicity, afforded us that just sufficient
+      spice of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how quickly the wind swept
+      away our talk and our happy laughter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much interest, and
+      truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero of a very serious love
+      affair. Picture to yourselves a young man of middle height, but very well
+      proportioned, a bright, expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes, moist lips,
+      and white and even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor still overspread
+      his delicately cut features, and there were faint dark circles about his
+      eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add, furthermore, that he
+      had white and shapely hands, of which he was as careful as a pretty woman
+      should be; add that he seemed to be very well informed, and was decidedly
+      clever, and it should not be difficult for you to imagine that my
+      traveling companion was more than worthy of a countess. Indeed, many a
+      girl might have wished for such a husband, for he was a Vicomte with an
+      income of twelve or fifteen thousand livres, "to say nothing of
+      expectations."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My luckless
+      comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of a newly-ploughed
+      field, instead of following the fortunes of the vehicle and clinging
+      tightly to the roof, as I did. He either miscalculated in some way, or he
+      slipped; how it happened, I do not know, but the coach fell over upon him,
+      and he was crushed under it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the moans wrung
+      from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give me a commission&mdash;a
+      sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a dying man's last wish. Poor
+      boy, all through his agony he was torturing himself in his young
+      simplicity of heart with the thought of the painful shock to his mistress
+      when she should suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to
+      go myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which he
+      wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the flesh, but
+      the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it as gently as
+      possible from the wound which it had made. He had scarcely given me the
+      necessary directions&mdash;I was to go to his home at La Charite-sur-Loire
+      for his mistress' love-letters, which he conjured me to return to her&mdash;when
+      he grew speechless in the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture,
+      I understood that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's
+      house. It troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
+      thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked wistfully
+      at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token of farewell, and his
+      head sank, and he died. His death was the only fatal accident caused by
+      the overturn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His mother was
+      away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for me. Nevertheless, I
+      had to assuage the grief of an old woman-servant, who staggered back at
+      the tidings of her young master's death, and sank half-dead into a chair
+      when she saw the blood-stained key. But I had another and more dreadful
+      sorrow to think of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love; so I
+      left the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the precious
+      correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and then
+      there was some distance to walk across country. So it was not exactly an
+      easy matter to deliver my message. For divers reasons into which I need
+      not enter, I had barely sufficient money to take me to Moulins. However,
+      my youthful enthusiasm determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as
+      possible. Bad news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the
+      chateau. I asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
+      of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back. The nearer
+      I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I felt at the idea of
+      my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast numbers of romantic fancies ran
+      in my head. I imagined all kinds of situations in which I might find this
+      Comtesse de Montpersan, or, to observe the laws of romance, this <i>Juliette</i>,
+      so passionately beloved of my traveling companion. I sketched out
+      ingenious answers to the questions which she might be supposed to put to
+      me. At every turn of a wood, in every beaten pathway, I rehearsed a modern
+      version of the scene in which Sosie describes the battle to his lantern.
+      To my shame be it said, I had thought at first of nothing but the part
+      that <i>I</i> was to play, of my own cleverness, of how I should demean
+      myself; but now that I was in the country, an ominous thought flashed
+      through my soul like a thunderbolt tearing its way through a veil of gray
+      cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole thoughts were
+      full of her young lover, who was looking forward hour by hour to a joy
+      which no words can express, a woman who had been at a world of pains to
+      invent plausible pretexts to draw him to her side. Yet, after all, it was
+      a cruel deed of charity to be the messenger of death! So I hurried on,
+      splashing and bemiring myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+      buildings at the further end&mdash;the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+      against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+      outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+      disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly, and in a
+      moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as your true
+      country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a hurrying
+      servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak to Mme. la
+      Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in the English park
+      which wound about the chateau with "Madame is out there&mdash;&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a couple of
+      hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed in a
+      white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the throat, had
+      overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She gave me a glance and
+      vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and dancing white
+      frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me the way among the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the
+      avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with the
+      cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves, and gave
+      them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my coat
+      carefully so as to exhibit the inner, always the least worn, side of the
+      cloth, and finally had turned down the tops of my trousers over my boots,
+      artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon toilet, I could
+      hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate collector; but now
+      when my thoughts travel back to that episode of my youth, I sometimes
+      laugh at my own expense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the green walk,
+      among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray of sunlight, I saw
+      Juliette&mdash;Juliette and her husband. The pretty little girl held her
+      mother by the hand, and it was easy to see that the lady had quickened her
+      pace somewhat at the child's ambiguous phrase. Taken aback by the sight of
+      a total stranger, who bowed with a tolerably awkward air, she looked at me
+      with a coolly courteous expression and an adorable pout, in which I, who
+      knew her secret, could read the full extent of her disappointment. I
+      sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of the elegant phrases so
+      laboriously prepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come forward.
+      Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give myself a
+      countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble inquiries, asking whether
+      the persons present were really M. le Comte and Mme. la Comtesse de
+      Montpersan. These imbecilities gave me time to form my own conclusions at
+      a glance, and, with a perspicacity rare at that age, to analyze the
+      husband and wife whose solitude was about to be so rudely disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of nobleman, the
+      fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with
+      stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made an
+      even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of
+      threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar. There
+      was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the
+      Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the
+      arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the
+      unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As
+      to countenance&mdash;a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+      locks of scanty gray hair; as to character&mdash;an incredible mixture of
+      homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and a
+      total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely led
+      by his wife, yet imagines himself to be the master; apt to domineer in
+      trifles, and to let more important things slip past unheeded&mdash;there
+      you have the man!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast between husband
+      and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a flat, graceful figure
+      and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty was she, that you would have
+      feared to break some bone if you so much as touched her. She wore a white
+      muslin dress, a rose-colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons in the pretty
+      cap on her head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously by her
+      shoulders and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of her
+      awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths of the heart.
+      Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her movements graceful, her
+      foot charming. An experienced man of pleasure would not have given her
+      more than thirty years, her forehead was so girlish. She had all the most
+      transient delicate detail of youth in her face. In character she seemed to
+      me to resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the Marquise de B&mdash;&mdash;,
+      two feminine types always fresh in the memory of any young man who has
+      read Louvet's romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course that
+      would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and perhaps for the
+      only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in what the special skill of
+      courtiers and men of the world consists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days, that they
+      have left me no time to distil all the least actions of daily life, and to
+      do everything so that it falls in with those rules of etiquette and good
+      taste which wither the most generous emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a few words
+      with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+      unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her husband's
+      secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion. The
+      effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection for his young
+      collaborator was cordial enough, and this emboldened me to make reply as I
+      did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to break the
+      news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first instance, as
+      in duty bound. I could not, without first informing you, deliver a message
+      to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted to me by an entire stranger; but
+      this commission is a sort of sacred trust, a secret of which I have no
+      power to dispose. From the high idea of your character which he gave me, I
+      felt sure that you would not oppose me in the fulfilment of a dying
+      request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to break the silence which is
+      imposed upon me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded with a
+      tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free field. We
+      returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited to dinner. As we
+      came up to the house, a grave and silent couple, Juliette stole a glance
+      at us. Not a little surprised to find her husband contriving some
+      frivolous excuse for leaving us together, she stopped short, giving me a
+      glance&mdash;such a glance as women only can give you. In that look of
+      hers there was the pardonable curiosity of the mistress of the house
+      confronted with a guest dropped down upon her from the skies and
+      innumerable doubts, certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by my
+      youth and my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all the
+      disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one are as
+      nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and, above all, the
+      thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected guest just now, when,
+      no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy full solitude for her love. This
+      mute eloquence I understood in her eyes, and all the pity and compassion
+      in me made answer in a sad smile. I thought of her, as I had seen her for
+      one moment, in the pride of her beauty; standing in the sunny afternoon in
+      the narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and as that fair
+      wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey&mdash;&mdash;,
+      undertaken solely on your account."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Sir!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am come," I
+      continued. Her face grew white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You will not see him to-day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself.... He intrusted me with
+      secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never messenger could
+      be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is the matter with him?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How if he loved you no longer?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing less than
+      frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of shudder ran through
+      her, and she reddened, and she gave me a wild, swift glance as she asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is he alive?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that tone in
+      her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy woman in helpless
+      bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, madame."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me the
+      truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of hers. She
+      leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Madame, here comes your husband!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.&mdash;Come, monsieur."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-room. Dinner
+      was served with all the luxury which we have learned to expect in Paris.
+      There were five covers laid, three for the Count and Countess and their
+      little daughter; my own, which should have been HIS; and another for the
+      canon of Saint-Denis, who said grace, and then asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily helped us
+      to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with portentous speed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you would
+      behave more rationally."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was
+      eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with,
+      "We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears written so
+      plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after me into the garden.
+      The Count, for the sake of appearances, came as far as the threshold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the least,"
+      but he did not offer to accompany us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We three&mdash;the canon, the housemaid, and I&mdash;hurried through the
+      garden walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting, listening
+      for an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we hurried along, I
+      told the story of the fatal accident, and discovered how strongly the maid
+      was attached to her mistress, for she took my secret dread far more
+      seriously than the canon. We went along by the pools of water; all over
+      the park we went; but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that she
+      had passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of some
+      outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled that it was
+      scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a place that might have
+      been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found Juliette. With
+      the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in the hay, hiding
+      her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries&mdash;pudency even stronger
+      than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more
+      poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
+      world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress submitting
+      with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The maid could find
+      nothing to say but "There! madame; there, there&mdash;&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon kept on
+      exclaiming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room, gave orders
+      that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one must be told that the
+      Countess was suffering from a sick headache. Then we came down to the
+      dining-room, the canon and I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had scarcely
+      given a thought to the Count since we left him under the peristyle; his
+      indifference had surprised me, but my amazement increased when we came
+      back and found him seated philosophically at table. He had eaten pretty
+      nearly all the dinner, to the huge delight of his little daughter; the
+      child was smiling at her father's flagrant infraction of the Countess'
+      rules. The man's odd indifference was explained to me by a mild
+      altercation which at once arose with the canon. The Count was suffering
+      from some serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it was, but his
+      medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and the ferocious
+      hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal appetite, had overpowered
+      all human sensibilities. In that little space I had seen frank and
+      undisguised human nature under two very different aspects, in such a sort
+      that there was a certain grotesque element in the very midst of a most
+      terrible tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon racked his
+      brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The lady's husband
+      silently digested his dinner; content, apparently, with the Countess'
+      rather vague explanation, sent through the maid, putting forward some
+      feminine ailment as her excuse. We all went early to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my night's
+      lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She heard my voice,
+      and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but in vain&mdash;she could
+      not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I withdrew. In spite of the
+      painful agitation, which I had felt to the full as youth can feel, I fell
+      asleep, tired out with my forced march.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound of
+      curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the Countess at
+      the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my table fell full upon
+      her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not know how I
+      can live after that awful blow which struck me down a little while since;
+      but just now I feel calm. I want to know everything."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her face
+      contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural tones of her
+      voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features filled me with dumb
+      amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last glow of
+      autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty
+      remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding grief;
+      it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun had
+      shone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without laying too
+      much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her about our first
+      day's journey, and how it had been filled with recollections of her and of
+      love. And she listened eagerly, without shedding a tear, leaning her face
+      towards me, as some zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a
+      patient's face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to
+      pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the first
+      delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity, and told her of
+      the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told her how and why it was
+      that he had given me this fatal message. Then her tears were dried by the
+      fires that burned in the dark depths within her. She grew even paler. When
+      I drew the letters from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she
+      took them mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a
+      hollow voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And <i>I</i> burned all his letters!&mdash;I have nothing of him left!&mdash;Nothing!
+      nothing!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She struck her hand against her forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Madame&mdash;&mdash;" I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very part of
+      him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her burning tears
+      falling on your hands, you would know what gratitude is, when it follows
+      so closely upon the benefit. Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a
+      faint ray of happiness gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she
+      grasped my hands in hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you
+      love."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a dream; to
+      make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look fruitlessly under my
+      pillow for the packet of letters. There is no need to tell you how the
+      next day went. I spent several hours of it with the Juliette whom my poor
+      comrade had so praised to me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all
+      that she did and said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy
+      of feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved, loving, and
+      self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as Moulins with
+      me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+      inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+      obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to Paris, to
+      remit a sum of money to M. de &mdash;&mdash; (I forget the name), in the
+      Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to send it as soon as
+      possible."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took charge of a
+      rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the expenses of my journey
+      back to Paris; and only when, on my arrival, I went to the address
+      indicated to repay the amount to M. de Montpersan's correspondent, did I
+      understand the ingenious delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was
+      not all the genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in
+      her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who clung to
+      you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you! <i>You</i> must
+      not die!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Message
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: February, 1998  [Etext #1189]
+Posting Date: February 20, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MESSAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+
+
+
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should
+strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each
+in the other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a
+snake by a woodside. At the risk of spoiling my story and of being taken
+for a coxcomb, I state my intention at the outset.
+
+I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it
+fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in
+part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are
+superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select
+from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry.
+
+In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances
+obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard
+those airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats; and for
+the first few miles I discovered abundance of excellent reasons for
+justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A young fellow, apparently in
+somewhat better circumstances, who came to take the seat beside me
+from preference, listened to my reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An
+approximate nearness of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common
+love of fresh air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the
+coach was lumbering along,--these things, together with an indescribable
+magnetic something, drew us before long into one of those short-lived
+traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with the more complacency
+because the intercourse is by its very nature transient, and makes no
+implicit demands upon the future.
+
+We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women and love.
+Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such matters, we proceeded
+naturally to the topic of our lady-loves. Young as we both were, we
+still admired "the woman of a certain age," that is to say, the woman
+between thirty-five and forty. Oh! any poet who should have listened to
+our talk, for heaven knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have
+reaped a harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very
+tender confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections, our
+blushes, as we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an eloquence,
+a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must remain young, no
+doubt, to understand youth.
+
+Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the essential
+points of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at the very outset,
+that in theory and practice there was no such piece of driveling
+nonsense in this world as a certificate of birth; that plenty of women
+were younger at forty than many a girl of twenty; and, to come to the
+point, that a woman is no older than she looks.
+
+This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out, in all
+good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had portrayed our
+mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us, women of rank, women
+of taste, intellectual and clever; when we had endowed them with
+little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately fragrant skin, then came the
+admission--on his part that Madame Such-an-one was thirty-eight years
+old, and on mine that I worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if
+released on either side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences
+came thick and fast, when we found that we were in the same
+confraternity of love. It was which of us should overtop the other in
+sentiment.
+
+One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for an
+hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had prowled about
+her park to meet her one night. Out came all our follies in fact. If it
+is pleasant to remember past dangers, is it not at least as pleasant
+to recall past delights? We live through the joy a second time. We told
+each other everything, our perils, our great joys, our little pleasures,
+and even the humors of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted
+a cigar for him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day
+when we did not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him at
+the risk of ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better, or worse,
+if you will have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were adored by their
+husbands; these gentlemen were enslaved by the charm possessed by every
+woman who loves; and, with even supererogatory simplicity, afforded us
+that just sufficient spice of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how
+quickly the wind swept away our talk and our happy laughter!
+
+When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much interest, and
+truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero of a very serious
+love affair. Picture to yourselves a young man of middle height, but
+very well proportioned, a bright, expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes,
+moist lips, and white and even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor
+still overspread his delicately cut features, and there were faint dark
+circles about his eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add,
+furthermore, that he had white and shapely hands, of which he was as
+careful as a pretty woman should be; add that he seemed to be very well
+informed, and was decidedly clever, and it should not be difficult for
+you to imagine that my traveling companion was more than worthy of a
+countess. Indeed, many a girl might have wished for such a husband, for
+he was a Vicomte with an income of twelve or fifteen thousand livres,
+"to say nothing of expectations."
+
+About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My
+luckless comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of a
+newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the vehicle
+and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either miscalculated in
+some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do not know, but the coach
+fell over upon him, and he was crushed under it.
+
+We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the moans wrung
+from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give me a commission--a
+sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a dying man's last wish.
+Poor boy, all through his agony he was torturing himself in his young
+simplicity of heart with the thought of the painful shock to his
+mistress when she should suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He
+begged me to go myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a
+key which he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in
+the flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
+as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had scarcely
+given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his home at La
+Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters, which he conjured me
+to return to her--when he grew speechless in the middle of a sentence;
+but from his last gesture, I understood that the fatal key would be my
+passport in his mother's house. It troubled him that he was powerless to
+utter a single word to thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no
+doubt. He looked wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped
+in token of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
+only fatal accident caused by the overturn.
+
+"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+
+At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His mother was
+away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for me. Nevertheless, I
+had to assuage the grief of an old woman-servant, who staggered back at
+the tidings of her young master's death, and sank half-dead into a chair
+when she saw the blood-stained key. But I had another and more dreadful
+sorrow to think of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love;
+so I left the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the precious
+correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+
+The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and then
+there was some distance to walk across country. So it was not exactly an
+easy matter to deliver my message. For divers reasons into which I need
+not enter, I had barely sufficient money to take me to Moulins. However,
+my youthful enthusiasm determined to hasten thither on foot as fast
+as possible. Bad news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the
+chateau. I asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field
+paths of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
+The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I felt
+at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast numbers of
+romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds of situations in
+which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan, or, to observe the laws
+of romance, this _Juliette_, so passionately beloved of my traveling
+companion. I sketched out ingenious answers to the questions which she
+might be supposed to put to me. At every turn of a wood, in every
+beaten pathway, I rehearsed a modern version of the scene in which
+Sosie describes the battle to his lantern. To my shame be it said, I had
+thought at first of nothing but the part that _I_ was to play, of my
+own cleverness, of how I should demean myself; but now that I was in the
+country, an ominous thought flashed through my soul like a thunderbolt
+tearing its way through a veil of gray cloud.
+
+What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole thoughts were
+full of her young lover, who was looking forward hour by hour to a joy
+which no words can express, a woman who had been at a world of pains to
+invent plausible pretexts to draw him to her side. Yet, after all, it
+was a cruel deed of charity to be the messenger of death! So I hurried
+on, splashing and bemiring myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+
+Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly, and in
+a moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as your
+true country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a hurrying
+servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak to Mme. la
+Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in the English park
+which wound about the chateau with "Madame is out there----"
+
+"Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a couple of
+hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+
+In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed in a
+white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the throat, had
+overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She gave me a glance
+and vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+
+"Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+
+And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and dancing white
+frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me the way among the
+trees.
+
+I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the
+avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with
+the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves,
+and gave them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my
+coat carefully so as to exhibit the inner, always the least worn, side
+of the cloth, and finally had turned down the tops of my trousers over
+my boots, artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon
+toilet, I could hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate
+collector; but now when my thoughts travel back to that episode of my
+youth, I sometimes laugh at my own expense.
+
+Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the green
+walk, among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray of sunlight,
+I saw Juliette--Juliette and her husband. The pretty little girl
+held her mother by the hand, and it was easy to see that the lady had
+quickened her pace somewhat at the child's ambiguous phrase. Taken aback
+by the sight of a total stranger, who bowed with a tolerably awkward
+air, she looked at me with a coolly courteous expression and an adorable
+pout, in which I, who knew her secret, could read the full extent of
+her disappointment. I sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of the
+elegant phrases so laboriously prepared.
+
+This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come forward.
+Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give myself a
+countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble inquiries, asking
+whether the persons present were really M. le Comte and Mme. la
+Comtesse de Montpersan. These imbecilities gave me time to form my own
+conclusions at a glance, and, with a perspicacity rare at that age, to
+analyze the husband and wife whose solitude was about to be so rudely
+disturbed.
+
+The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of nobleman, the
+fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with
+stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made
+an even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of
+threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar.
+There was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the
+Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of
+the arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the
+unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816.
+As to countenance--a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+locks of scanty gray hair; as to character--an incredible mixture of
+homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and
+a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely
+led by his wife, yet imagines himself to be the master; apt to domineer
+in trifles, and to let more important things slip past unheeded--there
+you have the man!
+
+But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast between
+husband and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a flat, graceful
+figure and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty was she, that you
+would have feared to break some bone if you so much as touched her. She
+wore a white muslin dress, a rose-colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons
+in the pretty cap on her head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously
+by her shoulders and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of
+her awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths of
+the heart. Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her movements
+graceful, her foot charming. An experienced man of pleasure would not
+have given her more than thirty years, her forehead was so girlish.
+She had all the most transient delicate detail of youth in her face. In
+character she seemed to me to resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the
+Marquise de B----, two feminine types always fresh in the memory of any
+young man who has read Louvet's romance.
+
+In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course that
+would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and perhaps for
+the only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in what the special
+skill of courtiers and men of the world consists.
+
+I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days, that they
+have left me no time to distil all the least actions of daily life, and
+to do everything so that it falls in with those rules of etiquette and
+good taste which wither the most generous emotions.
+
+"M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a few words
+with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+
+He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her husband's
+secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+
+I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion. The
+effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection for his young
+collaborator was cordial enough, and this emboldened me to make reply as
+I did.
+
+"My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to break the
+news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first instance,
+as in duty bound. I could not, without first informing you, deliver
+a message to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted to me by an entire
+stranger; but this commission is a sort of sacred trust, a secret of
+which I have no power to dispose. From the high idea of your character
+which he gave me, I felt sure that you would not oppose me in the
+fulfilment of a dying request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to
+break the silence which is imposed upon me."
+
+At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded with
+a tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free field. We
+returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited to dinner. As we
+came up to the house, a grave and silent couple, Juliette stole a
+glance at us. Not a little surprised to find her husband contriving some
+frivolous excuse for leaving us together, she stopped short, giving me
+a glance--such a glance as women only can give you. In that look of
+hers there was the pardonable curiosity of the mistress of the house
+confronted with a guest dropped down upon her from the skies and
+innumerable doubts, certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by
+my youth and my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all
+the disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one are
+as nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and, above all,
+the thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected guest just now,
+when, no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy full solitude for her
+love. This mute eloquence I understood in her eyes, and all the pity and
+compassion in me made answer in a sad smile. I thought of her, as I had
+seen her for one moment, in the pride of her beauty; standing in the
+sunny afternoon in the narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and
+as that fair wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress
+a sigh.
+
+"Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey----, undertaken
+solely on your account."
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am come," I
+continued. Her face grew white.
+
+"You will not see him to-day."
+
+"Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+
+"Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself.... He intrusted me with
+secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never messenger could
+be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"How if he loved you no longer?"
+
+"Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing less
+than frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of shudder ran
+through her, and she reddened, and she gave me a wild, swift glance as
+she asked:
+
+"Is he alive?"
+
+Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that tone in
+her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy woman in helpless
+bewilderment.
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me the
+truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+
+I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of hers. She
+leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+
+"Madame, here comes your husband!"
+
+"Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of sight.
+
+"Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.--Come, monsieur."
+
+Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-room.
+Dinner was served with all the luxury which we have learned to expect in
+Paris. There were five covers laid, three for the Count and Countess and
+their little daughter; my own, which should have been HIS; and another
+for the canon of Saint-Denis, who said grace, and then asked:
+
+"Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+
+"Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily helped
+us to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with portentous
+speed.
+
+"Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you would
+behave more rationally."
+
+"Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous look.
+
+Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was
+eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with,
+"We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+
+I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears written
+so plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after me into the
+garden. The Count, for the sake of appearances, came as far as the
+threshold.
+
+"Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the
+least," but he did not offer to accompany us.
+
+We three--the canon, the housemaid, and I--hurried through the garden
+walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting, listening for
+an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we hurried along, I told
+the story of the fatal accident, and discovered how strongly the maid
+was attached to her mistress, for she took my secret dread far more
+seriously than the canon. We went along by the pools of water; all over
+the park we went; but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that
+she had passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of
+some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled that it
+was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a place that
+might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found
+Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in
+the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries--pudency
+even stronger than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but
+there was a more poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was
+nothing left in the world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her
+mistress submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
+maid could find nothing to say but "There! madame; there, there----"
+
+"What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon kept on
+exclaiming.
+
+At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room, gave
+orders that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one must be told
+that the Countess was suffering from a sick headache. Then we came down
+to the dining-room, the canon and I.
+
+Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had
+scarcely given a thought to the Count since we left him under the
+peristyle; his indifference had surprised me, but my amazement increased
+when we came back and found him seated philosophically at table. He had
+eaten pretty nearly all the dinner, to the huge delight of his little
+daughter; the child was smiling at her father's flagrant infraction of
+the Countess' rules. The man's odd indifference was explained to me by
+a mild altercation which at once arose with the canon. The Count was
+suffering from some serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it
+was, but his medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and
+the ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal appetite,
+had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little space I had seen
+frank and undisguised human nature under two very different aspects, in
+such a sort that there was a certain grotesque element in the very midst
+of a most terrible tragedy.
+
+The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon racked his
+brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The lady's husband
+silently digested his dinner; content, apparently, with the Countess'
+rather vague explanation, sent through the maid, putting forward some
+feminine ailment as her excuse. We all went early to bed.
+
+As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my night's
+lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She heard my
+voice, and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but in vain--she
+could not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I withdrew. In spite of
+the painful agitation, which I had felt to the full as youth can feel, I
+fell asleep, tired out with my forced march.
+
+It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound of
+curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the Countess
+at the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my table fell full
+upon her face.
+
+"Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not know
+how I can live after that awful blow which struck me down a little while
+since; but just now I feel calm. I want to know everything."
+
+"What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her face
+contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural tones of her
+voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features filled me with dumb
+amazement.
+
+Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last glow of
+autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty
+remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding
+grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun
+had shone.
+
+I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without laying too
+much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her about our first
+day's journey, and how it had been filled with recollections of her and
+of love. And she listened eagerly, without shedding a tear, leaning her
+face towards me, as some zealous doctor might lean to watch any change
+in a patient's face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole
+heart to pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the
+first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity, and told
+her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told her how and
+why it was that he had given me this fatal message. Then her tears were
+dried by the fires that burned in the dark depths within her. She grew
+even paler. When I drew the letters from beneath my pillow and held them
+out to her, she took them mechanically; then, trembling from head to
+foot, she said in a hollow voice:
+
+"And _I_ burned all his letters!--I have nothing of him left!--Nothing!
+nothing!"
+
+She struck her hand against her forehead.
+
+"Madame----" I began.
+
+She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+
+"I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+
+And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very part
+of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her burning tears
+falling on your hands, you would know what gratitude is, when it follows
+so closely upon the benefit. Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter,
+a faint ray of happiness gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she
+grasped my hands in hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+
+"Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you
+love."
+
+She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+
+Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a dream; to
+make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look fruitlessly under
+my pillow for the packet of letters. There is no need to tell you how
+the next day went. I spent several hours of it with the Juliette whom my
+poor comrade had so praised to me. In her lightest words, her gestures,
+in all that she did and said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the
+delicacy of feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved,
+loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this earth.
+
+In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as Moulins
+with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+
+"Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to Paris, to
+remit a sum of money to M. de ---- (I forget the name), in the Rue du
+Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to send it as soon as
+possible."
+
+"Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took charge
+of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the expenses of
+my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my arrival, I went to
+the address indicated to repay the amount to M. de Montpersan's
+correspondent, did I understand the ingenious delicacy with which
+Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the genius of a loving woman
+revealed in such a way of lending, in her reticence with regard to a
+poverty easily guessed?
+
+And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who clung to
+you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you! _You_ must not
+die!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: The Message
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: April 3, 2005 [EBook #1189]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MESSAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE MESSAGE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+                           Translated by
+                           Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+
+                   To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+
+
+
+
+
+I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which
+should strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to
+take refuge each in the other's heart, as two children cling
+together at the sight of a snake by a woodside. At the risk of
+spoiling my story and of being taken for a coxcomb, I state my
+intention at the outset.
+
+I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if
+it fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own
+fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in
+real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half
+of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities
+of poetry.
+
+In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my
+finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you
+know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the
+best seats; and for the first few miles I discovered abundance of
+excellent reasons for justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A
+young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who
+came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
+reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of
+age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh
+air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
+was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
+indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
+those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
+the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
+nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
+
+We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women
+and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such
+matters, we proceeded naturally to the topic of our lady-loves.
+Young as we both were, we still admired "the woman of a certain
+age," that is to say, the woman between thirty-five and forty.
+Oh! any poet who should have listened to our talk, for heaven
+knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have reaped a
+harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very
+tender confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections,
+our blushes, as we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an
+eloquence, a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must
+remain young, no doubt, to understand youth.
+
+Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the
+essential points of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at
+the very outset, that in theory and practice there was no such
+piece of driveling nonsense in this world as a certificate of
+birth; that plenty of women were younger at forty than many a
+girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman is no
+older than she looks.
+
+This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out,
+in all good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had
+portrayed our mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us,
+women of rank, women of taste, intellectual and clever; when we
+had endowed them with little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately
+fragrant skin, then came the admission--on his part that Madame
+Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
+worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
+side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
+fast, when we found that we were in the same confraternity of
+love. It was which of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
+
+One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for
+an hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had
+prowled about her park to meet her one night. Out came all our
+follies in fact. If it is pleasant to remember past dangers, is
+it not at least as pleasant to recall past delights? We live
+through the joy a second time. We told each other everything, our
+perils, our great joys, our little pleasures, and even the humors
+of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted a cigar for
+him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day when
+we did not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him
+at the risk of ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better,
+or worse, if you will have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were
+adored by their husbands; these gentlemen were enslaved by the
+charm possessed by every woman who loves; and, with even
+supererogatory simplicity, afforded us that just sufficient spice
+of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how quickly the wind
+swept away our talk and our happy laughter!
+
+When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much
+interest, and truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero
+of a very serious love affair. Picture to yourselves a young man
+of middle height, but very well proportioned, a bright,
+expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes, moist lips, and white and
+even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor still overspread his
+delicately cut features, and there were faint dark circles about
+his eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add,
+furthermore, that he had white and shapely hands, of which he was
+as careful as a pretty woman should be; add that he seemed to be
+very well informed, and was decidedly clever, and it should not
+be difficult for you to imagine that my traveling companion was
+more than worthy of a countess. Indeed, many a girl might have
+wished for such a husband, for he was a Vicomte with an income of
+twelve or fifteen thousand livres, "to say nothing of
+expectations."
+
+About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My
+luckless comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of
+a newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the
+vehicle and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either
+miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
+not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
+under it.
+
+We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
+moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
+me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
+dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
+torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
+thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
+suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
+myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
+he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
+flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
+as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
+scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
+home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
+which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
+the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture, I understood
+that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's house. It
+troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
+thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked
+wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token
+of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
+only fatal accident caused by the overturn.
+
+"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+
+At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His
+mother was away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for
+me. Nevertheless, I had to assuage the grief of an old
+woman-servant, who staggered back at the tidings of her young
+master's death, and sank half-dead into a chair when she saw the
+blood-stained key. But I had another and more dreadful sorrow to
+think of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love; so I
+left the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the
+precious correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+
+The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and
+then there was some distance to walk across country. So it was
+not exactly an easy matter to deliver my message. For divers
+reasons into which I need not enter, I had barely sufficient
+money to take me to Moulins. However, my youthful enthusiasm
+determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as possible. Bad
+news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the chateau. I
+asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
+of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
+The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I
+felt at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast
+numbers of romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds
+of situations in which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan,
+or, to observe the laws of romance, this _Juliette_, so
+passionately beloved of my traveling companion. I sketched out
+ingenious answers to the questions which she might be supposed to
+put to me. At every turn of a wood, in every beaten pathway, I
+rehearsed a modern version of the scene in which Sosie describes
+the battle to his lantern. To my shame be it said, I had thought
+at first of nothing but the part that _I_ was to play, of my own
+cleverness, of how I should demean myself; but now that I was in
+the country, an ominous thought flashed through my soul like a
+thunderbolt tearing its way through a veil of gray cloud.
+
+What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole
+thoughts were full of her young lover, who was looking forward
+hour by hour to a joy which no words can express, a woman who had
+been at a world of pains to invent plausible pretexts to draw him
+to her side. Yet, after all, it was a cruel deed of charity to be
+the messenger of death! So I hurried on, splashing and bemiring
+myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+
+Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly,
+and in a moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as
+your true country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a
+hurrying servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak
+to Mme. la Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in
+the English park which wound about the chateau with "Madame is
+out there----"
+
+"Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a
+couple of hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+
+In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed
+in a white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the
+throat, had overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She
+gave me a glance and vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+
+"Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+
+And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and
+dancing white frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me
+the way among the trees.
+
+I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in
+the avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my
+trousers with the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the
+sleeves themselves, and gave them a final cleansing rub one
+against the other. I buttoned my coat carefully so as to exhibit
+the inner, always the least worn, side of the cloth, and finally
+had turned down the tops of my trousers over my boots,
+artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon toilet,
+I could hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate
+collector; but now when my thoughts travel back to that episode
+of my youth, I sometimes laugh at my own expense.
+
+Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the
+green walk, among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray
+of sunlight, I saw Juliette--Juliette and her husband. The pretty
+little girl held her mother by the hand, and it was easy to see
+that the lady had quickened her pace somewhat at the child's
+ambiguous phrase. Taken aback by the sight of a total stranger,
+who bowed with a tolerably awkward air, she looked at me with a
+coolly courteous expression and an adorable pout, in which I, who
+knew her secret, could read the full extent of her disappointment.
+I sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of the elegant
+phrases so laboriously prepared.
+
+This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come
+forward. Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give
+myself a countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble
+inquiries, asking whether the persons present were really M. le
+Comte and Mme. la Comtesse de Montpersan. These imbecilities gave
+me time to form my own conclusions at a glance, and, with a
+perspicacity rare at that age, to analyze the husband and wife
+whose solitude was about to be so rudely disturbed.
+
+The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of
+nobleman, the fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He
+wore big shoes with stout soles to them. I put the shoes first
+advisedly, for they made an even deeper impression upon me than a
+seedy black coat, a pair of threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat,
+or a crumpled shirt collar. There was a touch of the magistrate
+in the man, a good deal more of the Councillor of the Prefecture,
+all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the
+local autocrat, and the soured temper of the unsuccessful
+candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As to
+countenance--a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+locks of scanty gray hair; as to character--an incredible mixture
+of homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing
+ways, and a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who
+is almost entirely led by his wife, yet imagines himself to be
+the master; apt to domineer in trifles, and to let more important
+things slip past unheeded--there you have the man!
+
+But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast
+between husband and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a
+flat, graceful figure and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty
+was she, that you would have feared to break some bone if you so
+much as touched her. She wore a white muslin dress, a
+rose-colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons in the pretty cap on
+her head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously by her
+shoulders and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of
+her awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths
+of the heart. Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her
+movements graceful, her foot charming. An experienced man of
+pleasure would not have given her more than thirty years, her
+forehead was so girlish. She had all the most transient delicate
+detail of youth in her face. In character she seemed to me to
+resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the Marquise de B----, two
+feminine types always fresh in the memory of any young man who
+has read Louvet's romance.
+
+In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course
+that would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and
+perhaps for the only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in
+what the special skill of courtiers and men of the world
+consists.
+
+I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days,
+that they have left me no time to distil all the least actions of
+daily life, and to do everything so that it falls in with those
+rules of etiquette and good taste which wither the most generous
+emotions.
+
+"M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a
+few words with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+
+He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her
+husband's secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+
+I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion.
+The effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection
+for his young collaborator was cordial enough, and this
+emboldened me to make reply as I did.
+
+"My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to
+break the news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first
+instance, as in duty bound. I could not, without first informing
+you, deliver a message to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted
+to me by an entire stranger; but this commission is a sort of
+sacred trust, a secret of which I have no power to dispose. From
+the high idea of your character which he gave me, I felt sure
+that you would not oppose me in the fulfilment of a dying
+request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to break the silence
+which is imposed upon me."
+
+At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded
+with a tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free
+field. We returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited
+to dinner. As we came up to the house, a grave and silent couple,
+Juliette stole a glance at us. Not a little surprised to find her
+husband contriving some frivolous excuse for leaving us together,
+she stopped short, giving me a glance--such a glance as women
+only can give you. In that look of hers there was the pardonable
+curiosity of the mistress of the house confronted with a guest
+dropped down upon her from the skies and innumerable doubts,
+certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by my youth and
+my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all the
+disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one
+are as nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and,
+above all, the thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected
+guest just now, when, no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy
+full solitude for her love. This mute eloquence I understood in
+her eyes, and all the pity and compassion in me made answer in a
+sad smile. I thought of her, as I had seen her for one moment, in
+the pride of her beauty; standing in the sunny afternoon in the
+narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and as that fair
+wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress a
+sigh.
+
+"Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey----,
+undertaken solely on your account."
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am
+come," I continued. Her face grew white.
+
+"You will not see him to-day."
+
+"Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+
+"Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself. . . . He intrusted
+me with secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never
+messenger could be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"How if he loved you no longer?"
+
+"Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing
+less than frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of
+shudder ran through her, and she reddened, and she gave me a
+wild, swift glance as she asked:
+
+"Is he alive?"
+
+Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that
+tone in her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy
+woman in helpless bewilderment.
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me
+the truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+
+I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of
+hers. She leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+
+"Madame, here comes your husband!"
+
+"Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of
+sight.
+
+"Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.--Come,
+monsieur."
+
+Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the
+dining-room. Dinner was served with all the luxury which we have
+learned to expect in Paris. There were five covers laid, three for
+the Count and Countess and their little daughter; my own, which
+should have been HIS; and another for the canon of Saint-Denis,
+who said grace, and then asked:
+
+"Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+
+"Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily
+helped us to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with
+portentous speed.
+
+"Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you
+would behave more rationally."
+
+"Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous
+look.
+
+Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count
+was eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid
+came in with, "We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+
+I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears
+written so plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after
+me into the garden. The Count, for the sake of appearances, came
+as far as the threshold.
+
+"Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the
+least," but he did not offer to accompany us.
+
+We three--the canon, the housemaid, and I--hurried through the
+garden walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting,
+listening for an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we
+hurried along, I told the story of the fatal accident, and
+discovered how strongly the maid was attached to her mistress,
+for she took my secret dread far more seriously than the canon.
+We went along by the pools of water; all over the park we went;
+but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that she had
+passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of
+some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled
+that it was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a
+place that might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and
+there we found Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had
+buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden
+those dreadful cries--pudency even stronger than grief. She was
+sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant,
+more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
+world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress
+submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
+maid could find nothing to say but "There! madame; there,
+there----"
+
+"What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon
+kept on exclaiming.
+
+At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room,
+gave orders that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one
+must be told that the Countess was suffering from a sick
+headache. Then we came down to the dining-room, the canon and I.
+
+Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had
+scarcely given a thought to the Count since we left him under the
+peristyle; his indifference had surprised me, but my amazement
+increased when we came back and found him seated philosophically
+at table. He had eaten pretty nearly all the dinner, to the huge
+delight of his little daughter; the child was smiling at her
+father's flagrant infraction of the Countess' rules. The man's
+odd indifference was explained to me by a mild altercation which
+at once arose with the canon. The Count was suffering from some
+serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it was, but his
+medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and the
+ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal
+appetite, had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little
+space I had seen frank and undisguised human nature under two
+very different aspects, in such a sort that there was a certain
+grotesque element in the very midst of a most terrible tragedy.
+
+The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon
+racked his brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The
+lady's husband silently digested his dinner; content, apparently,
+with the Countess' rather vague explanation, sent through the
+maid, putting forward some feminine ailment as her excuse. We all
+went early to bed.
+
+As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my
+night's lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She
+heard my voice, and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but
+in vain--she could not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I
+withdrew. In spite of the painful agitation, which I had felt to
+the full as youth can feel, I fell asleep, tired out with my
+forced march.
+
+It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound
+of curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the
+Countess at the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my
+table fell full upon her face.
+
+"Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not
+know how I can live after that awful blow which struck me down a
+little while since; but just now I feel calm. I want to know
+everything."
+
+"What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her
+face contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural
+tones of her voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features
+filled me with dumb amazement.
+
+Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last
+glow of autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of
+their beauty remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter
+and exceeding grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place
+through which the sun had shone.
+
+I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without
+laying too much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her
+about our first day's journey, and how it had been filled with
+recollections of her and of love. And she listened eagerly,
+without shedding a tear, leaning her face towards me, as some
+zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a patient's
+face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to
+pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the
+first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity,
+and told her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told
+her how and why it was that he had given me this fatal message.
+Then her tears were dried by the fires that burned in the dark
+depths within her. She grew even paler. When I drew the letters
+from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she took them
+mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a
+hollow voice:
+
+"And _I_ burned all his letters!--I have nothing of him left!
+--Nothing! nothing!"
+
+She struck her hand against her forehead.
+
+"Madame----" I began.
+
+She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+
+"I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+
+And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very
+part of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her
+burning tears falling on your hands, you would know what
+gratitude is, when it follows so closely upon the benefit. Her
+eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a faint ray of happiness
+gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she grasped my hands in
+hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+
+"Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her
+whom you love."
+
+She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+
+Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a
+dream; to make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look
+fruitlessly under my pillow for the packet of letters. There is
+no need to tell you how the next day went. I spent several hours
+of it with the Juliette whom my poor comrade had so praised to
+me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all that she did and
+said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy of
+feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved,
+loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this
+earth.
+
+In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as
+Moulins with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+
+"Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to
+Paris, to remit a sum of money to M. de ---- (I forget the name),
+in the Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to
+send it as soon as possible."
+
+"Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took
+charge of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the
+expenses of my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my
+arrival, I went to the address indicated to repay the amount to
+M. de Montpersan's correspondent, did I understand the ingenious
+delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the
+genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in
+her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?
+
+And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who
+clung to you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you!
+_You_ must not die!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Message, by Honore de Balzac
+
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diff --git a/old/old/20050403-1189.zip b/old/old/20050403-1189.zip
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diff --git a/old/old/msage10.txt b/old/old/msage10.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,859 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Message, by Honore' de Balzac
+Translation by Ellen Marriage
+#2 in our series of Balzac
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
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+The Message
+
+by Honore' de Balzac
+
+Translation by Ellen Marriage
+
+February, 1998  [Etext #1189]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Message, by Honore' de Balzac
+******This file should be named msage10.txt or msage10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, msage11.txt.
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+Typed and first proof by Dagny.
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+BY
+
+HONORE` DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+Translated By
+Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+
+To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto
+
+
+
+
+
+I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which
+should strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to
+take refuge each in the other's heart, as two children cling
+together at the sight of a snake by a woodside. At the risk of
+spoiling my story and of being taken for a coxcomb, I state my
+intention at the outset.
+
+I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if
+it fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own
+fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in
+real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half
+of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities
+of poetry.
+
+In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my
+finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you
+know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the
+best seats; and for the first few miles I discovered abundance of
+excellent reasons for justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A
+young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who
+came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
+reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of
+age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh
+air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
+was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
+indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
+those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
+the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
+nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
+
+We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women
+and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such
+matters, we proceeded naturally to the topic of our lady-loves.
+Young as we both were, we still admired "the woman of a certain
+age," that is to say, the woman between thirty-five and forty. 
+Oh! any poet who should have listened to our talk, for heaven
+knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have reaped a
+harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very
+tender confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections,
+our blushes, as we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an
+eloquence, a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must
+remain young, no doubt, to understand youth.
+
+Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the
+essential points of passion. We had laid it down as an axiom at
+the very outset, that in theory and practice there was no such
+piece of driveling nonsense in this world as a certificate of
+birth; that plenty of women were younger at forty than many a
+girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman is no
+older than she looks.
+
+This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out,
+in all good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had
+portrayed our mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us,
+women of rank, women of taste, intellectual and clever; when we
+had endowed them with little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately
+fragrant skin, then came the admission--on his part that Madame
+Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
+worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
+side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
+fast, when we found that we were in the same confraternity of
+love. It was which of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
+
+One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for
+an hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had
+prowled about her park to meet her one night. Out came all our
+follies in fact. If it is pleasant to remember past dangers, is
+it not at least as pleasant to recall past delights? We live
+through the joy a second time. We told each other everything, our
+perils, our great joys, our little pleasures, and even the humors
+of the situation. My friend's countess had lighted a cigar for
+him; mine made chocolate for me, and wrote to me every day when
+we did not meet; his lady had come to spend three days with him
+at the risk of ruin to her reputation; mine had done even better,
+or worse, if you will have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were
+adored by their husbands; these gentlemen were enslaved by the
+charm possessed by every woman who loves; and, with even
+supererogatory simplicity, afforded us that just sufficient spice
+of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how quickly the wind
+swept away our talk and our happy laughter!
+
+When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much
+interest, and truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero
+of a very serious love affair. Picture to yourselves a young man
+of middle height, but very well proportioned, a bright,
+expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes, moist lips, and white and
+even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor still overspread his
+delicately cut features, and there were faint dark circles about
+his eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add,
+furthermore, that he had white and shapely hands, of which he was
+as careful as a pretty woman should be; add that he seemed to be
+very well informed, and was decidedly clever, and it should not
+be difficult for you to imagine that my traveling companion was
+more than worthy of a countess. Indeed, many a girl might have
+wished for such a husband, for he was a Vicomte with an income of
+twelve or fifteen thousand livres, "to say nothing of
+expectations."
+
+About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My
+luckless comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of
+a newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the
+vehicle and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either
+miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
+not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
+under it.
+
+We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
+moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
+me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
+dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
+torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
+thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
+suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
+myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
+he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
+flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
+as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
+scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
+home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
+which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
+the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture, I understood
+that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's house. It
+troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
+thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked
+wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token
+of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
+only fatal accident caused by the overturn.
+
+"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
+
+At La Charite, I executed the poor fellow's dying wishes. His
+mother was away from home, which in a manner was fortunate for
+me. Nevertheless, I had to assuage the grief of an old woman-
+servant, who staggered back at the tidings of her young master's
+death, and sank half-dead into a chair when she saw the blood-
+stained key. But I had another and more dreadful sorrow to think
+of, the sorrow of a woman who had lost her last love; so I left
+the old woman to her prosopopeia, and carried off the precious
+correspondence, carefully sealed by my friend of the day.
+
+The Countess' chateau was some eight leagues beyond Moulins, and
+then there was some distance to walk across country. So it was
+not exactly an easy matter to deliver my message. For divers
+reasons into which I need not enter, I had barely sufficient
+money to take me to Moulins. However, my youthful enthusiasm
+determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as possible. Bad
+news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the chateau. I
+asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
+of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
+The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I
+felt at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast
+numbers of romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds
+of situations in which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan,
+or, to observe the laws of romance, this Juliette, so
+passionately beloved of my traveling companion. I sketched out
+ingenious answers to the questions which she might be supposed to
+put to me. At every turn of a wood, in every beaten pathway, I
+rehearsed a modern version of the scene in which Sosie describes
+the battle to his lantern. To my shame be it said, I had thought
+at first of nothing but the part that _I_ was to play, of my own
+cleverness, of how I should demean myself; but now that I was in
+the country, an ominous thought flashed through my soul like a
+thunderbolt tearing its way through a veil of gray cloud.
+
+What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole
+thoughts were full of her young lover, who was looking forward
+hour by hour to a joy which no words can express, a woman who had
+been at a world of pains to invent plausible pretexts to draw him
+to her side. Yet, after all, it was a cruel deed of charity to be
+the messenger of death! So I hurried on, splashing and bemiring
+myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
+
+Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
+buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
+against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
+outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
+disconcerted me, and routed all my plans; but I went in boldly,
+and in a moment found myself between a couple of dogs, barking as
+your true country-bred animal can bark. The sound brought out a
+hurrying servant-maid; who, when informed that I wished to speak
+to Mme. la Comtesse, waved a hand towards the masses of trees in
+the English park which wound about the chateau with "Madame is
+out there----"
+
+"Many thanks," said I ironically. I might have wandered for a
+couple of hours in the park with her "out there" to guide me.
+
+In the meantime, a pretty little girl, with curling hair, dressed
+in a white frock, a rose-colored sash, and a broad frill at the
+throat, had overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She
+gave me a glance and vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:
+
+"Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"
+
+And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and
+dancing white frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me
+the way among the trees.
+
+I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in
+the avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my
+trousers with the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the
+sleeves themselves, and gave them a final cleansing rub one
+against the other. I buttoned my coat carefully so as to exhibit
+the inner, always the least worn, side of the cloth, and finally
+had turned down the tops of my trousers over my boots,
+artistically cleaned in the grass. Thanks to this Gascon toilet,
+I could hope that the lady would not take me for the local rate
+collector; but now when my thoughts travel back to that episode
+of my youth, I sometimes laugh at my own expense.
+
+Suddenly, just as I was composing myself, at a turning in the
+green walk, among a wilderness of flowers lighted up by a hot ray
+of sunlight, I saw Juliette--Juliette and her husband. The pretty
+little girl held her mother by the hand, and it was easy to see
+that the lady had quickened her pace somewhat at the child's
+ambiguous phrase. Taken aback by the sight of a total stranger,
+who bowed with a tolerably awkward air, she looked at me with a
+coolly courteous expression and an adorable pout, in which I, who
+knew her secret, could read the full extent of her
+disappointment. I sought, but sought in vain, to remember any of
+the elegant phrases so laboriously prepared.
+
+This momentary hesitation gave the lady's husband time to come
+forward. Thoughts by the myriad flitted through my brain. To give
+myself a countenance, I got out a few sufficiently feeble
+inquiries, asking whether the persons present were really M. le
+Comte and Mme. la Comtesse de Montpersan. These imbecilities gave
+me time to form my own conclusions at a glance, and, with a
+perspicacity rare at that age, to analyze the husband and wife
+whose solitude was about to be so rudely disturbed.
+
+The husband seemed to be a specimen of a certain type of
+nobleman, the fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He
+wore big shoes with stout soles to them. I put the shoes first
+advisedly, for they made an even deeper impression upon me than a
+seedy black coat, a pair of threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat,
+or a crumpled shirt collar. There was a touch of the magistrate
+in the man, a good deal more of the Councillor of the Prefecture,
+all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the
+local autocrat, and the soured temper of the unsuccessful
+candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As to
+countenance--a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek
+locks of scanty gray hair; as to character--an incredible mixture
+of homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing
+ways, and a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who
+is almost entirely led by his wife, yet imagines himself to be
+the master; apt to domineer in trifles, and to let more important
+things slip past unheeded--there you have the man!
+
+But the Countess! Ah, how sharp and startling the contrast
+between husband and wife! The Countess was a little woman, with a
+flat, graceful figure and enchanting shape; so fragile, so dainty
+was she, that you would have feared to break some bone if you so
+much as touched her. She wore a white muslin dress, a rose-
+colored sash, and rose-colored ribbons in the pretty cap on her
+head; her chemisette was moulded so deliciously by her shoulders
+and the loveliest rounded contours, that the sight of her
+awakened an irresistible desire of possession in the depths of
+the heart. Her eyes were bright and dark and expressive, her
+movements graceful, her foot charming. An experienced man of
+pleasure would not have given her more than thirty years, her
+forehead was so girlish. She had all the most transient delicate
+detail of youth in her face. In character she seemed to me to
+resemble the Comtesse de Lignolles and the Marquise de B----, two
+feminine types always fresh in the memory of any young man who
+has read Louvet's romance.
+
+In a moment I saw how things stood, and took a diplomatic course
+that would have done credit to an old ambassador. For once, and
+perhaps for the only time in my life, I used tact, and knew in
+what the special skill of courtiers and men of the world
+consists.
+
+I have had so many battles to fight since those heedless days,
+that they have left me no time to distil all the least actions of
+daily life, and to do everything so that it falls in with those
+rules of etiquette and good taste which wither the most generous
+emotions.
+
+"M. le Comte," I said with an air of mystery, "I should like a
+few words with you," and I fell back a pace or two.
+
+He followed my example. Juliette left us together, going away
+unconcernedly, like a wife who knew that she can learn her
+husband's secrets as soon as she chooses to know them.
+
+I told the Count briefly of the death of my traveling companion.
+The effect produced by my news convinced me that his affection
+for his young collaborator was cordial enough, and this
+emboldened me to make reply as I did.
+
+"My wife will be in despair," cried he; "I shall be obliged to
+break the news of this unhappy event with great caution."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, "I addressed myself to you in the first
+instance, as in duty bound. I could not, without first informing
+you, deliver a message to Mme. la Comtesse, a message intrusted
+to me by an entire stranger; but this commission is a sort of
+sacred trust, a secret of which I have no power to dispose. From
+the high idea of your character which he gave me, I felt sure
+that you would not oppose me in the fulfilment of a dying
+request. Mme. la Comtesse will be at liberty to break the silence
+which is imposed upon me."
+
+At this eulogy, the Count swung his head very amiably, responded
+with a tolerably involved compliment, and finally left me a free
+field. We returned to the house. The bell rang, and I was invited
+to dinner. As we came up to the house, a grave and silent couple,
+Juliette stole a glance at us. Not a little surprised to find her
+husband contriving some frivolous excuse for leaving us together,
+she stopped short, giving me a glance--such a glance as women
+only can give you. In that look of hers there was the pardonable
+curiosity of the mistress of the house confronted with a guest
+dropped down upon her from the skies and innumerable doubts,
+certainly warranted by the state of my clothes, by my youth and
+my expression, all singularly at variance; there was all the
+disdain of the adored mistress, in whose eyes all men save one
+are as nothing; there were involuntary tremors and alarms; and,
+above all, the thought that it was tiresome to have an unexpected
+guest just now, when, no doubt, she had been scheming to enjoy
+full solitude for her love. This mute eloquence I understood in
+her eyes, and all the pity and compassion in me made answer in a
+sad smile. I thought of her, as I had seen her for one moment, in
+the pride of her beauty; standing in the sunny afternoon in the
+narrow alley with the flowers on either hand; and as that fair
+wonderful picture rose before my eyes, I could not repress a
+sigh.
+
+"Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey----,
+undertaken solely on your account."
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am
+come," I continued. Her face grew white.
+
+"You will not see him to-day."
+
+"Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
+
+"Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself. . . . He intrusted
+me with secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never
+messenger could be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"How if he loved you no longer?"
+
+"Oh! that is impossible!" she cried, and a faint smile, nothing
+less than frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of
+shudder ran through her, and she reddened, and she gave me a
+wild, swift glance as she asked:
+
+"Is he alive?"
+
+Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that
+tone in her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy
+woman in helpless bewilderment.
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!" she cried.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me
+the truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense."
+
+I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of
+hers. She leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
+
+"Madame, here comes your husband!"
+
+"Have I a husband?" and with those words she fled away out of
+sight.
+
+"Well," cried the Count, "dinner is growing cold.--Come,
+monsieur."
+
+Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-
+room. Dinner was served with all the luxury which we have learned
+to expect in Paris. There were five covers laid, three for the
+Count and Countess and their little daughter; my own, which
+should have been HIS; and another for the canon of Saint-Denis,
+who said grace, and then asked:
+
+"Why, where can our dear Countess be?"
+
+"Oh! she will be here directly," said the Count. He had hastily
+helped us to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with
+portentous speed.
+
+"Oh! nephew," exclaimed the canon, "if your wife were here, you
+would behave more rationally."
+
+"Papa will make himself ill!" said the child with a mischievous
+look.
+
+Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count
+was eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid
+came in with, "We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!"
+
+I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears
+written so plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after
+me into the garden. The Count, for the sake of appearances, came
+as far as the threshold.
+
+"Don't go, don't go!" called he. "Don't trouble yourselves in the
+least," but he did not offer to accompany us.
+
+We three--the canon, the housemaid, and I--hurried through the
+garden walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting,
+listening for an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we
+hurried along, I told the story of the fatal accident, and
+discovered how strongly the maid was attached to her mistress,
+for she took my secret dread far more seriously than the canon.
+We went along by the pools of water; all over the park we went;
+but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that she had
+passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of
+some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled
+that it was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a
+place that might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and
+there we found Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had
+buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden
+those dreadful cries--pudency even stronger than grief. She was
+sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant,
+more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
+world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress
+submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
+maid could find nothing to say but "There! madame; there,
+there----"
+
+"What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon
+kept on exclaiming.
+
+At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room,
+gave orders that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one
+must be told that the Countess was suffering from a sick
+headache. Then we came down to the dining-room, the canon and I.
+
+Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had
+scarcely given a thought to the Count since we left him under the
+peristyle; his indifference had surprised me, but my amazement
+increased when we came back and found him seated philosophically
+at table. He had eaten pretty nearly all the dinner, to the huge
+delight of his little daughter; the child was smiling at her
+father's flagrant infraction of the Countess' rules. The man's
+odd indifference was explained to me by a mild altercation which
+at once arose with the canon. The Count was suffering from some
+serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it was, but his
+medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and the
+ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal
+appetite, had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little
+space I had seen frank and undisguised human nature under two
+very different aspects, in such a sort that there was a certain
+grotesque element in the very midst of a most terrible tragedy.
+
+The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon
+racked his brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The
+lady's husband silently digested his dinner; content, apparently,
+with the Countess' rather vague explanation, sent through the
+maid, putting forward some feminine ailment as her excuse. We all
+went early to bed.
+
+As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my
+night's lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She
+heard my voice, and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but
+in vain--she could not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I
+withdrew. In spite of the painful agitation, which I had felt to
+the full as youth can feel, I fell asleep, tired out with my
+forced march.
+
+It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound
+of curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the
+Countess at the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my
+table fell full upon her face.
+
+"Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?" she asked. "I do not
+know how I can live after that awful blow which struck me down a
+little while since; but just now I feel calm. I want to know
+everything."
+
+"What calm!" I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her
+face contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural
+tones of her voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features
+filled me with dumb amazement.
+
+Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman's last
+glow of autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of
+their beauty remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter
+and exceeding grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place
+through which the sun had shone.
+
+I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without
+laying too much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her
+about our first day's journey, and how it had been filled with
+recollections of her and of love. And she listened eagerly,
+without shedding a tear, leaning her face towards me, as some
+zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a patient's
+face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to
+pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the
+first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity,
+and told her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told
+her how and why it was that he had given me this fatal message.
+Then her tears were dried by the fires that burned in the dark
+depths within her. She grew even paler. When I drew the letters
+from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she took them
+mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a
+hollow voice:
+
+"And _I_ burned all his letters!--I have nothing of him left!--
+Nothing! nothing!"
+
+She struck her hand against her forehead.
+
+"Madame----" I began.
+
+She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.
+
+"I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."
+
+And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very
+part of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her
+burning tears falling on your hands, you would know what
+gratitude is, when it follows so closely upon the benefit. Her
+eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a faint ray of happiness
+gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she grasped my hands in
+hers, and said, in a choking voice:
+
+"Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her
+whom you love."
+
+She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
+
+Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a
+dream; to make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look
+fruitlessly under my pillow for the packet of letters. There is
+no need to tell you how the next day went. I spent several hours
+of it with the Juliette whom my poor comrade had so praised to
+me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all that she did and
+said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy of
+feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved,
+loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this
+earth.
+
+In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as
+Moulins with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
+
+"Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
+inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
+obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to
+Paris, to remit a sum of money to M. de ---- (I forget the name),
+in the Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to
+send it as soon as possible."
+
+"Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took
+charge of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the
+expenses of my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my
+arrival, I went to the address indicated to repay the amount to
+M. de Montpersan's correspondent, did I understand the ingenious
+delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the
+genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in
+her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?
+
+And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who
+clung to you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you!
+YOU must not die!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Message, by Honore' de Balzac
+
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