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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!"






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