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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Honorine, 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: Honorine
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2006 [EBook #1683]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HONORINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              HONORINE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+                           Translated By
+                            Clara Bell
+
+
+
+                            DEDICATION
+
+                   To Monsieur Achille Deveria
+
+           An affectionate remembrance from the Author.
+
+
+
+                             HONORINE
+
+
+
+If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English
+have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps
+sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be
+found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of
+France outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and
+they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes
+but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a
+bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither
+grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for
+conversation, the "Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt
+apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of
+the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be
+met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little
+comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree.
+Emigration is counter to the instincts of the French nation. Many
+Frenchmen, of the kind here in question, have owned to pleasure at
+seeing the custom-house officers of their native land, which may seem
+the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.
+
+This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
+the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their native
+land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a pleasure
+hard to be understood by those who have never left the asphalt of the
+Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the left bank of the
+Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris again! Do you know what that
+means, O Parisians? It is to find--not indeed the cookery of the _Rocher
+de Cancale_ as Borel elaborates it for those who can appreciate it, for
+that exists only in the Rue Montorgueil--but a meal which reminds you of
+it! It is to find the wines of France, which out of France are to be
+regarded as myths, and as rare as the woman of whom I write! It is to
+find--not the most fashionable pleasantry, for it loses its aroma
+between Paris and the frontier--but the witty understanding, the
+critical atmosphere in which the French live, from the poet down to the
+artisan, from the duchess to the boy in the street.
+
+In 1836, when the Sardinian Court was residing at Genoa, two
+Parisians, more or less famous, could fancy themselves still in Paris
+when they found themselves in a palazzo, taken by the French
+Consul-General, on the hill forming the last fold of the Apennines
+between the gate of San Tomaso and the well-known lighthouse, which is
+to be seen in all the keepsake views of Genoa. This palazzo is one of
+the magnificent villas on which Genoese nobles were wont to spend
+millions at the time when the aristocratic republic was a power.
+
+If the early night is beautiful anywhere, it surely is at Genoa, after
+it has rained as it can rain there, in torrents, all the morning; when
+the clearness of the sea vies with that of the sky; when silence
+reigns on the quay and in the groves of the villa, and over the marble
+heads with yawning jaws, from which water mysteriously flows; when the
+stars are beaming; when the waves of the Mediterranean lap one after
+another like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by
+word. It must be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air
+brings fragrance to the lungs and to our day-dreams; when
+voluptuousness, made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your
+easy-chair; when, a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet,
+the town at your feet and fair woman opposite--such Boccaccio hours
+can be known only in Italy and on the shores of the Mediterranean.
+
+Imagine to yourself, round the table, the Marquis di Negro, a knight
+hospitaller to all men of talent on their travels, and the Marquis
+Damaso Pareto, two Frenchmen disguised as Genoese, a Consul-General
+with a wife as beautiful as a Madonna, and two silent children--silent
+because sleep has fallen on them--the French Ambassador and his wife,
+a secretary to the Embassy who believes himself to be crushed and
+mischievous; finally, two Parisians, who have come to take leave of
+the Consul's wife at a splendid dinner, and you will have the picture
+presented by the terrace of the villa about the middle of May--a
+picture in which the predominant figure was that of a celebrated
+woman, on whom all eyes centered now and again, the heroine of this
+improvised festival.
+
+One of the two Frenchmen was the famous landscape painter, Leon de
+Lora; the other a well known critic Claude Vignon. They had both come
+with this lady, one of the glories of the fair sex, Mademoiselle des
+Touches, known in the literary world by the name of Camille Maupin.
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches had been to Florence on business. With the
+charming kindness of which she is prodigal, she had brought with her
+Leon de Lora to show him Italy, and had gone on as far as Rome that he
+might see the Campagna. She had come by Simplon, and was returning by
+the Cornice road to Marseilles. She had stopped at Genoa, again on the
+landscape painter's account. The Consul-General had, of course, wished
+to do the honors of Genoa, before the arrival of the Court, to a woman
+whose wealth, name, and position recommend her no less than her
+talents. Camille Maupin, who knew her Genoa down to its smallest
+chapels, had left her landscape painter to the care of the diplomate
+and the two Genoese marquises, and was miserly of her minutes. Though
+the ambassador was a distinguished man of letters, the celebrated lady
+had refused to yield to his advances, dreading what the English call
+an exhibition; but she had drawn in the claws of her refusals when it
+was proposed that they should spend a farewell day at the Consul's
+villa. Leon de Lora had told Camille that her presence at the villa
+was the only return he could make to the Ambassador and his wife, the
+two Genoese noblemen, the Consul and his wife. So Mademoiselle des
+Touches had sacrificed one of those days of perfect freedom, which are
+not always to be had in Paris by those on whom the world has its eye.
+
+Now, the meeting being accounted for, it is easy to understand that
+etiquette had been banished, as well as a great many women even of the
+highest rank, who were curious to know whether Camille Maupin's manly
+talent impaired her grace as a pretty woman, and to see, in a word,
+whether the trousers showed below her petticoats. After dinner till
+nine o'clock, when a collation was served, though the conversation had
+been gay and grave by turns, and constantly enlivened by Leon de
+Lora's sallies--for he is considered the most roguish wit of Paris
+to-day--and by the good taste which will surprise no one after the
+list of guests, literature had scarcely been mentioned. However, the
+butterfly flittings of this French tilting match were certain to come
+to it, were it only to flutter over this essentially French subject.
+But before coming to the turn in the conversation which led the
+Consul-General to speak, it will not be out of place to give some
+account of him and his family.
+
+This diplomate, a man of four-and-thirty, who had been married about
+six years, was the living portrait of Lord Byron. The familiarity of
+that face makes a description of the Consul's unnecessary. It may,
+however, be noted that there was no affectation in his dreamy
+expression. Lord Byron was a poet, and the Consul was poetical; women
+know and recognize the difference, which explains without justifying
+some of their attachments. His handsome face, thrown into relief by a
+delightful nature, had captivated a Genoese heiress. A Genoese
+heiress! the expression might raise a smile at Genoa, where, in
+consequence of the inability of daughters to inherit, a woman is
+rarely rich; but Onorina Pedrotti, the only child of a banker without
+heirs male, was an exception. Notwithstanding all the flattering
+advances prompted by a spontaneous passion, the Consul-General had not
+seemed to wish to marry. Nevertheless, after living in the town for
+two years, and after certain steps taken by the Ambassador during his
+visits to the Genoese Court, the marriage was decided on. The young
+man withdrew his former refusal, less on account of the touching
+affection of Onorina Pedrotti than by reason of an unknown incident,
+one of those crises of private life which are so instantly buried
+under the daily tide of interests that, at a subsequent date, the most
+natural actions seem inexplicable.
+
+This involution of causes sometimes affects the most serious events of
+history. This, at any rate, was the opinion of the town of Genoa,
+where, to some women, the extreme reserve, the melancholy of the
+French Consul could be explained only by the word passion. It may be
+remarked, in passing, that women never complain of being the victims
+of a preference; they are very ready to immolate themselves for the
+common weal. Onorina Pedrotti, who might have hated the Consul if she
+had been altogether scorned, loved her _sposo_ no less, and perhaps
+more, when she know that he had loved. Women allow precedence in love
+affairs. All is well if other women are in question.
+
+A man is not a diplomate with impunity: the _sposo_ was as secret as
+the grave--so secret that the merchants of Genoa chose to regard the
+young Consul's attitude as premeditated, and the heiress might perhaps
+have slipped through his fingers if he had not played his part of a
+love-sick _malade imaginaire_. If it was real, the women thought it
+too degrading to be believed.
+
+Pedrotti's daughter gave him her love as a consolation; she lulled
+these unknown griefs in a cradle of tenderness and Italian caresses.
+
+Il Signor Pedrotti had indeed no reason to complain of the choice to
+which he was driven by his beloved child. Powerful protectors in Paris
+watched over the young diplomate's fortunes. In accordance with a
+promise made by the Ambassador to the Consul-General's father-in-law,
+the young man was created Baron and Commander of the Legion of Honor.
+Signor Pedrotti himself was made a Count by the King of Sardinia.
+Onorina's dower was a million of francs. As to the fortune of the Casa
+Pedrotti, estimated at two millions, made in the corn trade, the young
+couple came into it within six months of their marriage, for the first
+and last Count Pedrotti died in January 1831.
+
+Onorina Pedrotti is one of those beautiful Genoese women who, when
+they are beautiful, are the most magnificent creatures in Italy.
+Michael Angelo took his models in Genoa for the tomb of Giuliano.
+Hence the fulness and singular placing of the breast in the figures of
+Day and Night, which so many critics have thought exaggerated, but
+which is peculiar to the women of Liguria. A Genoese beauty is no
+longer to be found excepting under the mezzaro, as at Venice it is met
+with only under the _fazzioli_. This phenomenon is observed among all
+fallen nations. The noble type survives only among the populace, as
+after the burning of a town coins are found hidden in the ashes. And
+Onorina, an exception as regards her fortune, is no less an
+exceptional patrician beauty. Recall to mind the figure of Night which
+Michael Angelo has placed at the feet of the _Pensieroso_, dress her
+in modern garb, twist that long hair round the magnificent head, a
+little dark in complexion, set a spark of fire in those dreamy eyes,
+throw a scarf about the massive bosom, see the long dress, white,
+embroidered with flowers, imagine the statue sitting upright, with her
+arms folded like those of Mademoiselle Georges, and you will see
+before you the Consul's wife, with a boy of six, as handsome as a
+mother's desire, and a little girl of four on her knees, as beautiful
+as the type of childhood so laboriously sought out by the sculptor
+David to grace a tomb.
+
+This beautiful family was the object of Camille's secret study. It
+struck Mademoiselle des Touches that the Consul looked rather too
+absent-minded for a perfectly happy man.
+
+Although, throughout the day, the husband and wife had offered her the
+pleasing spectacle of complete happiness, Camille wondered why one of
+the most superior men she had ever met, and whom she had seen too in
+Paris drawing-rooms, remained as Consul-General at Genoa when he
+possessed a fortune of a hundred odd thousand francs a year. But, at
+the same time, she had discerned, by many of the little nothings which
+women perceive with the intelligence of the Arab sage in _Zadig_, that
+the husband was faithfully devoted. These two handsome creatures would
+no doubt love each other without a misunderstanding till the end of
+their days. So Camille said to herself alternately, "What is
+wrong?--Nothing is wrong," following the misleading symptoms of the
+Consul's demeanor; and he, it may be said, had the absolute calmness of
+Englishmen, of savages, of Orientals, and of consummate diplomatists.
+
+In discussing literature, they spoke of the perennial stock-in-trade
+of the republic of letters--woman's sin. And they presently found
+themselves confronted by two opinions: When a woman sins, is the man
+or the woman to blame? The three women present--the Ambassadress, the
+Consul's wife, and Mademoiselle des Touches, women, of course, of
+blameless reputations--were without pity for the woman. The men tried
+to convince these fair flowers of their sex that some virtues might
+remain in a woman after she had fallen.
+
+"How long are we going to play at hide-and-seek in this way?" said
+Leon de Lora.
+
+"_Cara vita_, go and put your children to bed, and send me by Gina the
+little black pocket-book that lies on my Boule cabinet," said the
+Consul to his wife.
+
+She rose without a reply, which shows that she loved her husband very
+truly, for she already knew French enough to understand that her
+husband was getting rid of her.
+
+"I will tell you a story in which I played a part, and after that we
+can discuss it, for it seems to me childish to practise with the
+scalpel on an imaginary body. Begin by dissecting a corpse."
+
+Every one prepared to listen, with all the greater readiness because
+they had all talked enough, and this is the moment to be chosen for
+telling a story. This, then, is the Consul-General's tale:--
+
+"When I was two-and-twenty, and had taken my degree in law, my old
+uncle, the Abbe Loraux, then seventy-two years old, felt it necessary
+to provide me with a protector, and to start me in some career. This
+excellent man, if not indeed a saint, regarded each year of his life
+as a fresh gift from God. I need not tell you that the father
+confessor of a Royal Highness had no difficulty in finding a place for
+a young man brought up by himself, his sister's only child. So one
+day, towards the end of the year 1824, this venerable old man, who for
+five years had been Cure of the White Friars at Paris, came up to the
+room I had in his house, and said:
+
+"'Get yourself dressed, my dear boy; I am going to introduce you to
+some one who is willing to engage you as secretary. If I am not
+mistaken, he may fill my place in the event of God's taking me to
+Himself. I shall have finished mass at nine o'clock; you have
+three-quarters of an hour before you. Be ready.'
+
+"'What, uncle! must I say good-bye to this room, where for four years
+I have been so happy?'
+
+"'I have no fortune to leave you,' said he.
+
+"'Have you not the reputation of your name to leave me, the memory of
+your good works----?'
+
+"'We need say nothing of that inheritance,' he replied, smiling. 'You
+do not yet know enough of the world to be aware that a legacy of that
+kind is hardly likely to be paid, whereas by taking you this morning
+to M. le Comte'--Allow me," said the Consul, interrupting himself, "to
+speak of my protector by his Christian name only, and to call him
+Comte Octave.--'By taking you this morning to M. le Comte Octave, I
+hope to secure you his patronage, which, if you are so fortunate as to
+please that virtuous statesman--as I make no doubt you can--will be
+worth, at least, as much as the fortune I might have accumulated for
+you, if my brother-in-law's ruin and my sister's death had not fallen
+on me like a thunder-bolt from a clear sky.'
+
+"'Are you the Count's director?'
+
+"'If I were, could I place you with him? What priest could be capable
+of taking advantage of the secrets which he learns at the tribunal of
+repentance? No; you owe this position to his Highness, the Keeper of
+the Seals. My dear Maurice, you will be as much at home there as in
+your father's house. The Count will give you a salary of two thousand
+four hundred francs, rooms in his house, and an allowance of twelve
+hundred francs in lieu of feeding you. He will not admit you to his
+table, nor give you a separate table, for fear of leaving you to the
+care of servants. I did not accept the offer when it was made to me
+till I was perfectly certain that Comte Octave's secretary was never
+to be a mere upper servant. You will have an immense amount of work,
+for the Count is a great worker; but when you leave him, you will be
+qualified to fill the highest posts. I need not warn you to be
+discreet; that is the first virtue of any man who hopes to hold public
+appointments.'
+
+"You may conceive of my curiosity. Comte Octave, at that time, held
+one of the highest legal appointments; he was in the confidence of
+Madame the Dauphiness, who had just got him made a State Minister; he
+led such a life as the Comte de Serizy, whom you all know, I think;
+but even more quietly, for his house was in the Marais, Rue Payenne,
+and he hardly ever entertained. His private life escaped public
+comment by its hermit-like simplicity and by constant hard work.
+
+"Let me describe my position to you in a few words. Having found in
+the solemn headmaster of the College Saint-Louis a tutor to whom my
+uncle delegated his authority, at the age of eighteen I had gone
+through all the classes; I left school as innocent as a seminarist,
+full of faith, on quitting Saint-Sulpice. My mother, on her deathbed,
+had made my uncle promise that I should not become a priest, but I was
+as pious as though I had to take orders. On leaving college, the Abbe
+Loraux took me into his house and made me study law. During the four
+years of study requisite for passing all the examinations, I worked
+hard, but chiefly at things outside the arid fields of jurisprudence.
+Weaned from literature as I had been at college, where I lived in the
+headmaster's house, I had a thirst to quench. As soon as I had read a
+few modern masterpieces, the works of all the preceding ages were
+greedily swallowed. I became crazy about the theatre, and for a long
+time I went every night to the play, though my uncle gave me only a
+hundred francs a month. This parsimony, to which the good old man was
+compelled by his regard for the poor, had the effect of keeping a
+young man's desires within reasonable limits.
+
+"When I went to live with Comte Octave I was not indeed an innocent,
+but I thought of my rare escapades as crimes. My uncle was so truly
+angelic, and I was so much afraid of grieving him, that in all those
+four years I had never spent a night out. The good man would wait till
+I came in to go to bed. This maternal care had more power to keep me
+within bounds than the sermons and reproaches with which the life of a
+young man is diversified in a puritanical home. I was a stranger to
+the various circles which make up the world of Paris society; I only
+knew some women of the better sort, and none of the inferior class but
+those I saw as I walked about, or in the boxes at the play, and then
+only from the depths of the pit where I sat. If, at that period, any
+one had said to me, 'You will see Canalis, or Camille Maupin,' I
+should have felt hot coals in my head and in my bowels. Famous people
+were to me as gods, who neither spoke, nor walked, nor ate like other
+mortals.
+
+"How many tales of the Thousand-and-one Nights are comprehended in the
+ripening of a youth! How many wonderful lamps must we have rubbed
+before we understand that the True Wonderful Lamp is either luck, or
+work, or genius. In some men this dream of the aroused spirit is but
+brief; mine has lasted until now! In those days I always went to sleep
+as Grand Duke of Tuscany,--as a millionaire,--as beloved by a
+princess,--or famous! So to enter the service of Comte Octave, and
+have a hundred louis a year, was entering on independent life. I had
+glimpses of some chance of getting into society, and seeking for what
+my heart desired most, a protectress, who would rescue me from the
+paths of danger, which a young man of two-and-twenty can hardly help
+treading, however prudent and well brought up he may be. I began to be
+afraid of myself.
+
+"The persistent study of other people's rights into which I had
+plunged was not always enough to repress painful imaginings. Yes,
+sometimes in fancy I threw myself into theatrical life; I thought I
+could be a great actor; I dreamed of endless triumphs and loves,
+knowing nothing of the disillusion hidden behind the curtain, as
+everywhere else--for every stage has its reverse behind the scenes. I
+have gone out sometimes, my heart boiling, carried away by an impulse
+to rush hunting through Paris, to attach myself to some handsome woman
+I might meet, to follow her to her door, watch her, write to her,
+throw myself on her mercy, and conquer her by sheer force of passion.
+My poor uncle, a heart consumed by charity, a child of seventy years,
+as clear-sighted as God, as guileless as a man of genius, no doubt
+read the tumult of my soul; for when he felt the tether by which he
+held me strained too tightly and ready to break, he would never fail
+to say, 'Here, Maurice, you too are poor! Here are twenty francs; go
+and amuse yourself, you are not a priest!' And if you could have seen
+the dancing light that gilded his gray eyes, the smile that relaxed
+his fine lips, puckering the corners of his mouth, the adorable
+expression of that august face, whose native ugliness was redeemed by
+the spirit of an apostle, you would understand the feeling which made
+me answer the Cure of White Friars only with a kiss, as if he had been
+my mother.
+
+"'In Comte Octave you will find not a master, but a friend,' said my
+uncle on the way to the Rue Payenne. 'But he is distrustful, or to be
+more exact, he is cautious. The statesman's friendship can be won only
+with time; for in spite of his deep insight and his habit of gauging
+men, he was deceived by the man you are succeeding, and nearly became
+a victim to his abuse of confidence. This is enough to guide you in
+your behavior to him.'
+
+"When we knocked at the enormous outer door of a house as large as the
+Hotel Carnavalet, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind, the
+sound rang as in a desert. While my uncle inquired of an old porter in
+livery if the Count were at home, I cast my eyes, seeing everything at
+once, over the courtyard where the cobblestones were hidden in the
+grass, the blackened walls where little gardens were flourishing above
+the decorations of the elegant architecture, and on the roof, as high
+as that of the Tuileries. The balustrade of the upper balconies was
+eaten away. Through a magnificent colonnade I could see a second court
+on one side, where were the offices; the door was rotting. An old
+coachman was there cleaning an old carriage. The indifferent air of
+this servant allowed me to assume that the handsome stables, where of
+old so many horses had whinnied, now sheltered two at most. The
+handsome facade of the house seemed to me gloomy, like that of a
+mansion belonging to the State or the Crown, and given up to some
+public office. A bell rang as we walked across, my uncle and I, from
+the porter's lodge--_Inquire of the Porter_ was still written over the
+door--towards the outside steps, where a footman came out in a livery
+like that of Labranche at the Theatre Francais in the old stock plays.
+A visitor was so rare that the servant was putting his coat on when he
+opened a glass door with small panes, on each side of which the smoke
+of a lamp had traced patterns on the walls.
+
+"A hall so magnificent as to be worthy of Versailles ended in a
+staircase such as will never again be built in France, taking up as
+much space as the whole of a modern house. As we went up the marble
+steps, as cold as tombstones, and wide enough for eight persons to
+walk abreast, our tread echoed under sonorous vaulting. The banister
+charmed the eye by its miraculous workmanship--goldsmith's work in
+iron--wrought by the fancy of an artist of the time of Henri III.
+Chilled as by an icy mantle that fell on our shoulders, we went
+through ante-rooms, drawing-rooms opening one out of the other, with
+carpetless parquet floors, and furnished with such splendid
+antiquities as from thence would find their way to the curiosity
+dealers. At last we reached a large study in a cross wing, with all
+the windows looking into an immense garden.
+
+"'Monsieur le Cure of the White Friars, and his nephew, Monsieur de
+l'Hostal,' said Labranche, to whose care the other theatrical servant
+had consigned us in the first ante-chamber.
+
+"Comte Octave, dressed in long trousers and a gray flannel morning
+coat, rose from his seat by a huge writing-table, came to the
+fireplace, and signed to me to sit down, while he went forward to take
+my uncle's hands, which he pressed.
+
+"'Though I am in the parish of Saint-Paul,' said he, 'I could
+scarcely have failed to hear of the Cure of the White Friars, and I am
+happy to make his acquaintance.'
+
+"'Your Excellency is most kind,' replied my uncle. 'I have brought to
+you my only remaining relation. While I believe that I am offering a
+good gift to your Excellency, I hope at the same time to give my
+nephew a second father.'
+
+"'As to that, I can only reply, Monsieur l'Abbe, when we shall have
+tried each other,' said Comte Octave. 'Your name?' he added to me.
+
+"'Maurice.'
+
+"'He has taken his doctor's degree in law,' my uncle observed.
+
+"'Very good, very good!' said the Count, looking at me from head to
+foot. 'Monsieur l'Abbe, I hope that for your nephew's sake in the
+first instance, and then for mine, you will do me the honor of dining
+here every Monday. That will be our family dinner, our family party.'
+
+"My uncle and the Count then began to talk of religion from the
+political point of view, of charitable institutes, the repression of
+crime, and I could at my leisure study the man on whom my fate would
+henceforth depend. The Count was of middle height; it was impossible
+to judge of his build on account of his dress, but he seemed to me to
+be lean and spare. His face was harsh and hollow; the features were
+refined. His mouth, which was rather large, expressed both irony and
+kindliness. His forehead perhaps too spacious, was as intimidating as
+that of a madman, all the more so from the contrast of the lower part
+of the face, which ended squarely in a short chin very near the lower
+lip. Small eyes, of turquoise blue, were as keen and bright as those
+of the Prince de Talleyrand--which I admired at a later time--and
+endowed, like the Prince's, with the faculty of becoming
+expressionless to the verge of gloom; and they added to the
+singularity of a face that was not pale but yellow. This complexion
+seemed to bespeak an irritable temper and violent passions. His hair,
+already silvered, and carefully dressed, seemed to furrow his head
+with streaks of black and white alternately. The trimness of this head
+spoiled the resemblance I had remarked in the Count to the wonderful
+monk described by Lewis after Schedoni in the _Confessional of the
+Black Penitents (The Italian)_, a superior creation, as it seems to
+me, to _The Monk_.
+
+"The Count was already shaved, having to attend early at the law
+courts. Two candelabra with four lights, screened by lamp-shades, were
+still burning at the opposite ends of the writing-table, and showed
+plainly that the magistrate rose long before daylight. His hands,
+which I saw when he took hold of the bell-pull to summon his servant,
+were extremely fine, and as white as a woman's.
+
+"As I tell you this story," said the Consul-General, interrupting
+himself, "I am altering the titles and the social position of this
+gentleman, while placing him in circumstances analogous to what his
+really were. His profession, rank, luxury, fortune, and style of
+living were the same; all these details are true, but I would not be
+false to my benefactor, nor to my usual habits of discretion.
+
+"Instead of feeling--as I really was, socially speaking--an insect in
+the presence of an eagle," the narrator went on after a pause, "I felt
+I know not what indefinable impression from the Count's appearance,
+which, however, I can now account for. Artists of genius" (and he
+bowed gracefully to the Ambassador, the distinguished lady, and the
+two Frenchmen), "real statesmen, poets, a general who has commanded
+armies--in short, all really great minds are simple, and their
+simplicity places you on a level with themselves.--You who are all of
+superior minds," he said, addressing his guests, "have perhaps
+observed how feeling can bridge over the distances created by society.
+If we are inferior to you in intellect, we can be your equals in
+devoted friendship. By the temperature--allow me the word--of our
+hearts I felt myself as near my patron as I was far below him in rank.
+In short, the soul has its clairvoyance; it has presentiments of
+suffering, grief, joy, antagonism, or hatred in others.
+
+"I vaguely discerned the symptoms of a mystery, from recognizing in
+the Count the same effects of physiognomy as I had observed in my
+uncle. The exercise of virtue, serenity of conscience, and purity of
+mind had transfigured my uncle, who from being ugly had become quite
+beautiful. I detected a metamorphosis of a reverse kind in the Count's
+face; at the first glance I thought he was about fifty-five, but after
+an attentive examination I found youth entombed under the ice of a
+great sorrow, under the fatigue of persistent study, under the glowing
+hues of some suppressed passion. At a word from my uncle the Count's
+eyes recovered for a moment the softness of the periwinkle flower, and
+he had an admiring smile, which revealed what I believed to be his
+real age, about forty. These observations I made, not then but
+afterwards, as I recalled the circumstances of my visit.
+
+"The man-servant came in carrying a tray with his master's breakfast
+on it.
+
+"'I did not ask for breakfast,' remarked the Count; 'but leave it,
+and show monsieur to his rooms.'
+
+"I followed the servant, who led the way to a complete set of pretty
+rooms, under a terrace, between the great courtyard and the servants'
+quarters, over a corridor of communication between the kitchens and
+the grand staircase. When I returned to the Count's study, I
+overheard, before opening the door, my uncle pronouncing this judgment
+on me:
+
+"'He may do wrong, for he has strong feelings, and we are all liable
+to honorable mistakes; but he has no vices.'
+
+"'Well,' said the Count, with a kindly look, 'do you like yourself
+there? Tell me. There are so many rooms in this barrack that, if you
+were not comfortable, I could put you elsewhere.'
+
+"'At my uncle's I had but one room,' replied I.
+
+"'Well, you can settle yourself this evening,' said the Count, 'for
+your possessions, no doubt, are such as all students own, and a
+hackney coach will be enough to convey them. To-day we will all three
+dine together,' and he looked at my uncle.
+
+"A splendid library opened from the Count's study, and he took us in
+there, showing me a pretty little recess decorated with paintings,
+which had formerly served, no doubt, as an oratory.
+
+"'This is your cell,' said he. 'You will sit there when you have to
+work with me, for you will not be tethered by a chain;' and he
+explained in detail the kind and duration of my employment with him.
+As I listened I felt that he was a great political teacher.
+
+"It took me about a month to familiarize myself with people and
+things, to learn the duties of my new office, and accustom myself to
+the Count's methods. A secretary necessarily watches the man who makes
+use of him. That man's tastes, passions, temper, and manias become the
+subject of involuntary study. The union of their two minds is at once
+more and less than a marriage.
+
+"During these months the Count and I reciprocally studied each other.
+I learned with astonishment that Comte Octave was but thirty-seven
+years old. The merely superficial peacefulness of his life and the
+propriety of his conduct were the outcome not solely of a deep sense
+of duty and of stoical reflection; in my constant intercourse with
+this man--an extraordinary man to those who knew him well--I felt vast
+depths beneath his toil, beneath his acts of politeness, his mask of
+benignity, his assumption of resignation, which so closely resembled
+calmness that it is easy to mistake it. Just as when walking through
+forest-lands certain soils give forth under our feet a sound which
+enables us to guess whether they are dense masses of stone or a void;
+so intense egoism, though hidden under the flowers of politeness, and
+subterranean caverns eaten out by sorrow sound hollow under the
+constant touch of familiar life. It was sorrow and not despondency
+that dwelt in that really great soul. The Count had understood that
+actions, deeds, are the supreme law of social man. And he went on his
+way in spite of secret wounds, looking to the future with a tranquil
+eye, like a martyr full of faith.
+
+"His concealed sadness, the bitter disenchantment from which he
+suffered, had not led him into philosophical deserts of incredulity;
+this brave statesman was religious, without ostentation; he always
+attended the earliest mass at Saint-Paul's for pious workmen and
+servants. Not one of his friends, no one at Court, knew that he so
+punctually fulfilled the practice of religion. He was addicted to God
+as some men are addicted to a vice, with the greatest mystery. Thus
+one day I came to find the Count at the summit of an Alp of woe much
+higher than that on which many are who think themselves the most
+tried; who laugh at the passions and the beliefs of others because
+they have conquered their own; who play variations in every key of
+irony and disdain. He did not mock at those who still follow hope into
+the swamps whither she leads, nor those who climb a peak to be alone,
+nor those who persist in the fight, reddening the arena with their
+blood and strewing it with their illusions. He looked on the world as
+a whole; he mastered its beliefs; he listened to its complaining; he
+was doubtful of affection, and yet more of self-sacrifice; but this
+great and stern judge pitied them, or admired them, not with transient
+enthusiasm, but with silence, concentration, and the communion of a
+deeply-touched soul. He was a sort of catholic Manfred, and unstained
+by crime, carrying his choiceness into his faith, melting the snows by
+the fires of a sealed volcano, holding converse with a star seen by
+himself alone!
+
+"I detected many dark riddles in his ordinary life. He evaded my gaze
+not like a traveler who, following a path, disappears from time to
+time in dells or ravines according to the formation of the soil, but
+like a sharpshooter who is being watched, who wants to hide himself,
+and seeks a cover. I could not account for his frequent absences at
+the times when he was working the hardest, and of which he made no
+secret from me, for he would say, 'Go on with this for me,' and trust
+me with the work in hand.
+
+"This man, wrapped in the threefold duties of the statesman, the
+judge, and the orator, charmed me by a taste for flowers, which shows
+an elegant mind, and which is shared by almost all persons of
+refinement. His garden and his study were full of the rarest plants,
+but he always bought them half-withered. Perhaps it pleased him to see
+such an image of his own fate! He was faded like these dying flowers,
+whose almost decaying fragrance mounted strangely to his brain. The
+Count loved his country; he devoted himself to public interests with
+the frenzy of a heart that seeks to cheat some other passion; but the
+studies and work into which he threw himself were not enough for him;
+there were frightful struggles in his mind, of which some echoes
+reached me. Finally, he would give utterance to harrowing aspirations
+for happiness, and it seemed to me he ought yet to be happy; but what
+was the obstacle? Was there a woman he loved? This was a question I
+asked myself. You may imagine the extent of the circles of torment
+that my mind had searched before coming to so simple and so terrible a
+question. Notwithstanding his efforts, my patron did not succeed in
+stifling the movements of his heart. Under his austere manner, under
+the reserve of the magistrate, a passion rebelled, though coerced with
+such force that no one but I who lived with him ever guessed the
+secret. His motto seemed to be, 'I suffer, and am silent.' The escort
+of respect and admiration which attended him; the friendship of
+workers as valiant as himself--Grandville and Serizy, both presiding
+judges--had no hold over the Count: either he told them nothing, or
+they knew all. Impassible and lofty in public, the Count betrayed the
+man only on rare intervals when, alone in his garden or his study, he
+supposed himself unobserved; but then he was a child again, he gave
+course to the tears hidden beneath the toga, to the excitement which,
+if wrongly interpreted, might have damaged his credit for perspicacity
+as a statesman.
+
+"When all this had become to me a matter of certainty, Comte Octave
+had all the attractions of a problem, and won on my affection as much
+as though he had been my own father. Can you enter into the feeling of
+curiosity, tempered by respect? What catastrophe had blasted this
+learned man, who, like Pitt, had devoted himself from the age of
+eighteen to the studies indispensable to power, while he had no
+ambition; this judge, who thoroughly knew the law of nations,
+political law, civil and criminal law, and who could find in these a
+weapon against every anxiety, against every mistake; this profound
+legislator, this serious writer, this pious celibate whose life
+sufficiently proved that he was open to no reproach? A criminal could
+not have been more hardly punished by God than was my master; sorrow
+had robbed him of half his slumbers; he never slept more than four
+hours. What struggle was it that went on in the depths of these hours
+apparently so calm, so studious, passing without a sound or a murmur,
+during which I often detected him, when the pen had dropped from his
+fingers, with his head resting on one hand, his eyes like two fixed
+stars, and sometimes wet with tears? How could the waters of that
+living spring flow over the burning strand without being dried up by
+the subterranean fire? Was there below it, as there is under the sea,
+between it and the central fires of the globe, a bed of granite? And
+would the volcano burst at last?
+
+"Sometimes the Count would give me a look of that sagacious and
+keen-eyed curiosity by which one man searches another when he desires
+an accomplice; then he shunned my eye as he saw it open a mouth, so
+to speak, insisting on a reply, and seeming to say, 'Speak first!'
+Now and then Comte Octave's melancholy was surly and gruff. If these
+spurts of temper offended me, he could get over it without thinking of
+asking my pardon; but then his manners were gracious to the point of
+Christian humility.
+
+"When I became attached like a son to this man--to me such a mystery,
+but so intelligible to the outer world, to whom the epithet eccentric
+is enough to account for all the enigmas of the heart--I changed the
+state of the house. Neglect of his own interests was carried by the
+Count to the length of folly in the management of his affairs.
+Possessing an income of about a hundred and sixty thousand francs,
+without including the emoluments of his appointments--three of which
+did not come under the law against plurality--he spent sixty thousand,
+of which at least thirty thousand went to his servants. By the end of
+the first year I had got rid of all these rascals, and begged His
+Excellency to use his influence in helping me to get honest servants.
+By the end of the second year the Count, better fed and better served,
+enjoyed the comforts of modern life; he had fine horses, supplied by a
+coachman to whom I paid so much a month for each horse; his dinners on
+his reception days, furnished by Chevet at a price agreed upon, did
+him credit; his daily meals were prepared by an excellent cook found
+by my uncle, and helped by two kitchenmaids. The expenditure for
+housekeeping, not including purchases, was no more than thirty
+thousand francs a year; we had two additional men-servants, whose care
+restored the poetical aspect of the house; for this old palace,
+splendid even in its rust, had an air of dignity which neglect had
+dishonored.
+
+"'I am no longer astonished,' said he, on hearing of these results,
+'at the fortunes made by servants. In seven years I have had two
+cooks, who have become rich restaurant-keepers.'
+
+"Early in the year 1826 the Count had, no doubt, ceased to watch me,
+and we were as closely attached as two men can be when one is
+subordinate to the other. He had never spoken to me of my future
+prospects, but he had taken an interest, both as a master and as a
+father, in training me. He often required me to collect materials for
+his most arduous labors; I drew up some of his reports, and he
+corrected them, showing the difference between his interpretation of
+the law, his views and mine. When at last I had produced a document
+which he could give in as his own he was delighted; this satisfaction
+was my reward, and he could see that I took it so. This little
+incident produced an extraordinary effect on a soul which seemed so
+stern. The Count pronounced sentence on me, to use a legal phrase, as
+supreme and royal judge; he took my head in his hands, and kissed me
+on the forehead.
+
+"'Maurice,' he exclaimed, 'you are no longer my apprentice; I know
+not yet what you will be to me--but if no change occurs in my life,
+perhaps you will take the place of a son.'
+
+"Comte Octave had introduced me to the best houses in Paris, whither I
+went in his stead, with his servants and carriage, on the too frequent
+occasions when, on the point of starting, he changed his mind, and
+sent for a hackney cab to take him--Where?--that was the mystery. By
+the welcome I met with I could judge of the Count's feelings towards
+me, and the earnestness of his recommendations. He supplied all my
+wants with the thoughtfulness of a father, and with all the greater
+liberality because my modesty left it to him always to think of me.
+Towards the end of January 1827, at the house of the Comtesse de
+Serizy, I had such persistent ill-luck at play that I lost two
+thousand francs, and I would not draw them out of my savings. Next
+morning I asked myself, 'Had I better ask my uncle for the money, or
+put my confidence in the Count?'
+
+"I decided on the second alternative.
+
+"'Yesterday,' said I, when he was at breakfast, 'I lost persistently
+at play; I was provoked, and went on; I owe two thousand francs. Will
+you allow me to draw the sum on account of my year's salary?'
+
+"'No,' said he, with the sweetest smile; 'when a man plays in
+society, he must have a gambling purse. Draw six thousand francs; pay
+your debts. Henceforth we must go halves; for since you are my
+representative on most occasions, your self-respect must not be made
+to suffer for it.'
+
+"I made no speech of thanks. Thanks would have been superfluous
+between us. This shade shows the character of our relations. And yet
+we had not yet unlimited confidence in each other; he did not open to
+me the vast subterranean chambers which I had detected in his secret
+life; and I, for my part, never said to him, 'What ails you? From what
+are you suffering?'
+
+"What could he be doing during those long evenings? He would often
+come in on foot or in a hackney cab when I returned in a carriage--I,
+his secretary! Was so pious a man a prey to vices hidden under
+hypocrisy? Did he expend all the powers of his mind to satisfy a
+jealousy more dexterous than Othello's? Did he live with some woman
+unworthy of him? One morning, on returning from I have forgotten what
+shop, where I had just paid a bill, between the Church of Saint-Paul
+and the Hotel de Ville, I came across Comte Octave in such eager
+conversation with an old woman that he did not see me. The appearance
+of this hag filled me with strange suspicions, suspicions that were
+all the better founded because I never found that the Count invested
+his savings. Is it not shocking to think of? I was constituting myself
+my patron's censor. At that time I knew that he had more than six
+hundred thousand francs to invest; and if he had bought securities of
+any kind, his confidence in me was so complete in all that concerned
+his pecuniary interests, that I certainly should have known it.
+
+"Sometimes, in the morning, the Count took exercise in his garden, to
+and fro, like a man to whom a walk is the hippogryph ridden by dreamy
+melancholy. He walked and walked! And he rubbed his hands enough to
+rub the skin off. And then, if I met him unexpectedly as he came to
+the angle of a path, I saw his face beaming. His eyes, instead of the
+hardness of a turquoise, had that velvety softness of the blue
+periwinkle, which had so much struck me on the occasion of my first
+visit, by reason of the astonishing contrast in the two different
+looks; the look of a happy man, and the look of an unhappy man. Two or
+three times at such a moment he had taken me by the arm and led me on;
+then he had said, 'What have you come to ask?' instead of pouring out
+his joy into my heart that opened to him. But more often, especially
+since I could do his work for him and write his reports, the unhappy
+man would sit for hours staring at the goldfish that swarmed in a
+handsome marble basin in the middle of the garden, round which grew an
+amphitheatre of the finest flowers. He, an accomplished statesman,
+seemed to have succeeded in making a passion of the mechanical
+amusement of crumbling bread to fishes.
+
+"This is how the drama was disclosed of this second inner life, so
+deeply ravaged and storm-tossed, where, in a circle overlooked by
+Dante in his _Inferno_, horrible joys had their birth."
+
+The Consul-General paused.
+
+
+
+"On a certain Monday," he resumed, "as chance would have it, M. le
+President de Grandville and M. de Serizy (at that time Vice-President
+of the Council of State) had come to hold a meeting at Comte Octave's
+house. They formed a committee of three, of which I was the secretary.
+The Count had already got me the appointment of Auditor to the Council
+of State. All the documents requisite for their inquiry into the
+political matter privately submitted to these three gentlemen were
+laid out on one of the long tables in the library. MM. de Grandville
+and de Serizy had trusted to the Count to make the preliminary
+examination of the papers relating to the matter. To avoid the
+necessity for carrying all the papers to M. de Serizy, as president of
+the commission, it was decided that they should meet first in the Rue
+Payenne. The Cabinet at the Tuileries attached great importance to
+this piece of work, of which the chief burden fell on me--and to which
+I owed my appointment, in the course of that year, to be Master of
+Appeals.
+
+"Though the Comtes de Grandville and de Serizy, whose habits were much
+the same as my patron's, never dined away from home, we were still
+discussing the matter at a late hour, when we were startled by the
+man-servant calling me aside to say, 'MM. the Cures of Saint-Paul and
+of the White Friars have been waiting in the drawing-room for two
+hours.'
+
+"It was nine o'clock.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen, you find yourselves compelled to dine with
+priests,' said Comte Octave to his colleagues. 'I do not know whether
+Grandville can overcome his horror of a priest's gown----'
+
+"'It depends on the priest.'
+
+"'One of them is my uncle, and the other is the Abbe Gaudron,' said
+I. 'Do not be alarmed; the Abbe Fontanon is no longer second priest at
+Saint-Paul----'
+
+"'Well, let us dine,' replied the President de Grandville. 'A bigot
+frightens me, but there is no one so cheerful as a truly pious man.'
+
+"We went into the drawing-room. The dinner was delightful. Men of real
+information, politicians to whom business gives both consummate
+experience and the practice of speech, are admirable story-tellers,
+when they tell stories. With them there is no medium; they are either
+heavy, or they are sublime. In this delightful sport Prince Metternich
+is as good as Charles Nodier. The fun of a statesman, cut in facets
+like a diamond, is sharp, sparkling, and full of sense. Being sure
+that the proprieties would be observed by these three superior men, my
+uncle allowed his wit full play, a refined wit, gentle, penetrating,
+and elegant, like that of all men who are accustomed to conceal their
+thoughts under the black robe. And you may rely upon it, there was
+nothing vulgar nor idle in this light talk, which I would compare, for
+its effect on the soul, to Rossini's music.
+
+"The Abbe Gaudron was, as M. de Grandville said, a Saint Peter rather
+than a Saint Paul, a peasant full of faith, as square on his feet as
+he was tall, a sacerdotal of whose ignorance in matters of the world
+and of literature enlivened the conversation by guileless amazement
+and unexpected questions. They came to talking of one of the plague
+spots of social life, of which we were just now speaking--adultery. My
+uncle remarked on the contradiction which the legislators of the Code,
+still feeling the blows of the revolutionary storm, had established
+between civil and religious law, and which he said was at the root of
+all the mischief.
+
+"'In the eyes of the Church,' said he, 'adultery is a crime; in those
+of your tribunals it is a misdemeanor. Adultery drives to the police
+court in a carriage instead of standing at the bar to be tried.
+Napoleon's Council of State, touched with tenderness towards erring
+women, was quite inefficient. Ought they not in this case to have
+harmonized the civil and the religious law, and have sent the guilty
+wife to a convent, as of old?'
+
+"'To a convent!' said M. de Serizy. 'They must first have created
+convents, and in those days monasteries were being turned into
+barracks. Besides, think of what you say, M. l'Abbe--give to God what
+society would have none of?'
+
+"'Oh!' said the Comte de Grandville, 'you do not know France. They
+were obliged to leave the husband free to take proceedings: well,
+there are not ten cases of adultery brought up in a year.'
+
+"'M. l'Abbe preaches for his own saint, for it was Jesus Christ who
+invented adultery,' said Comte Octave. 'In the East, the cradle of the
+human race, woman was merely a luxury, and there was regarded as a
+chattel; no virtues were demanded of her but obedience and beauty. By
+exalting the soul above the body, the modern family in Europe--a
+daughter of Christ--invented indissoluble marriage, and made it a
+sacrament.'
+
+"'Ah! the Church saw the difficulties,' exclaimed M. de Grandville.
+
+"'This institution has given rise to a new world,' the Count went on
+with a smile. 'But the practices of that world will never be that of a
+climate where women are marriageable at seven years of age, and more
+than old at five-and-twenty. The Catholic Church overlooked the needs
+of half the globe.--So let us discuss Europe only.
+
+"'Is woman our superior or our inferior? That is the real question so
+far as we are concerned. If woman is our inferior, by placing her on
+so high a level as the Church does, fearful punishments for adultery
+were needful. And formerly that was what was done. The cloister or
+death sums up early legislation. But since then practice has modified
+the law, as is always the case. The throne served as a hotbed for
+adultery, and the increase of this inviting crime marks the decline of
+the dogmas of the Catholic Church. In these days, in cases where the
+Church now exacts no more than sincere repentance from the erring
+wife, society is satisfied with a brand-mark instead of an execution.
+The law still condemns the guilty, but it no longer terrifies them. In
+short, there are two standards of morals: that of the world, and that
+of the Code. Where the Code is weak, as I admit with our dear Abbe,
+the world is audacious and satirical. There are so few judges who
+would not gladly have committed the fault against which they hurl the
+rather stolid thunders of their "Inasmuch." The world, which gives the
+lie to the law alike in its rejoicings, in its habits, and in its
+pleasures, is severer than the Code and the Church; the world punishes
+a blunder after encouraging hypocrisy. The whole economy of the law on
+marriage seems to me to require reconstruction from the bottom to the
+top. The French law would be perfect perhaps if it excluded daughters
+from inheriting.'
+
+"'We three among us know the question very thoroughly,' said the
+Comte de Grandville with a laugh. 'I have a wife I cannot live with.
+Serizy has a wife who will not live with him. As for you, Octave,
+yours ran away from you. So we three represent every case of the
+conjugal conscience, and, no doubt, if ever divorce is brought in
+again, we shall form the committee.'
+
+"Octave's fork dropped on his glass, broke it, and broke his plate. He
+had turned as pale as death, and flashed a thunderous glare at M. de
+Grandville, by which he hinted at my presence, and which I caught.
+
+"'Forgive me, my dear fellow. I did not see Maurice,' the President
+went on. 'Serizy and I, after being the witnesses to your marriage,
+became your accomplices; I did not think I was committing an
+indiscretion in the presence of these two venerable priests.'
+
+"M. de Serizy changed the subject by relating all he had done to
+please his wife without ever succeeding. The old man concluded that it
+was impossible to regulate human sympathies and antipathies; he
+maintained that social law was never more perfect than when it was
+nearest to natural law. Now Nature takes no account of the affinities
+of souls; her aim is fulfilled by the propagation of the species.
+Hence, the Code, in its present form, was wise in leaving a wide
+latitude to chance. The incapacity of daughters to inherit so long as
+there were male heirs was an excellent provision, whether to hinder
+the degeneration of the race, or to make households happier by
+abolishing scandalous unions and giving the sole preference to moral
+qualities and beauty.
+
+"'But then,' he exclaimed, lifting his hand with a gesture of
+disgust, 'how are we to perfect legislation in a country which insists
+on bringing together seven or eight hundred legislators!--After all,
+if I am sacrificed,' he added, 'I have a child to succeed me.'
+
+"'Setting aside all the religious question,' my uncle said, 'I would
+remark to your Excellency that Nature only owes us life, and that it
+is society that owes us happiness. Are you a father?' asked my uncle.
+
+"'And I--have I any children?' said Comte Octave in a hollow voice,
+and his tone made such an impression that there was no more talk of
+wives or marriage.
+
+"When coffee had been served, the two Counts and the two priests stole
+away, seeing that poor Octave had fallen into a fit of melancholy
+which prevented his noticing their disappearance. My patron was
+sitting in an armchair by the fire, in the attitude of a man crushed.
+
+"'You now know the secret of my life, said he to me on noticing that
+we were alone. 'After three years of married life, one evening when I
+came in I found a letter in which the Countess announced her flight.
+The letter did not lack dignity, for it is in the nature of women to
+preserve some virtues even when committing that horrible sin.--The
+story is now that my wife went abroad in a ship that was wrecked; she
+is supposed to be dead. I have lived alone for seven years!--Enough
+for this evening, Maurice. We will talk of my situation when I have
+grown used to the idea of speaking of it to you. When we suffer from a
+chronic disease, it needs time to become accustomed to improvement.
+That improvement often seems to be merely another aspect of the
+complaint.'
+
+"I went to bed greatly agitated; for the mystery, far from being
+explained, seemed to me more obscure than ever. I foresaw some strange
+drama indeed, for I understood that there could be no vulgar
+difference between the woman that Count could choose and such a
+character as his. The events which had driven the Countess to leave a
+man so noble, so amiable, so perfect, so loving, so worthy to be
+loved, must have been singular, to say the least. M. de Grandville's
+remark had been like a torch flung into the caverns over which I had
+so long been walking; and though the flame lighted them but dimly, my
+eyes could perceive their wide extent! I could imagine the Count's
+sufferings without knowing their depths or their bitterness. That
+sallow face, those parched temples, those overwhelming studies, those
+moments of absentmindedness, the smallest details of the life of this
+married bachelor, all stood out in luminous relief during the hour of
+mental questioning, which is, as it were, the twilight before sleep,
+and to which any man would have given himself up, as I did.
+
+"Oh! how I loved my poor master! He seemed to me sublime. I read a
+poem of melancholy, I saw perpetual activity in the heart I had
+accused of being torpid. Must not supreme grief always come at last to
+stagnation? Had this judge, who had so much in his power, ever
+revenged himself? Was he feeding himself on her long agony? Is it not
+a remarkable thing in Paris to keep anger always seething for ten
+years? What had Octave done since this great misfortune--for the
+separation of husband and wife is a great misfortune in our day, when
+domestic life has become a social question, which it never was of old?
+
+"We allowed a few days to pass on the watch, for great sorrows have a
+diffidence of their own; but at last, one evening, the Count said in a
+grave voice:
+
+"'Stay.'
+
+
+
+"This, as nearly as may be, is his story.
+
+"'My father had a ward, rich and lovely, who was sixteen at the time
+when I came back from college to live in this old house. Honorine, who
+had been brought up by my mother, was just awakening to life. Full of
+grace and of childish ways, she dreamed of happiness as she would have
+dreamed of jewels; perhaps happiness seemed to her the jewel of the
+soul. Her piety was not free from puerile pleasures; for everything,
+even religion, was poetry to her ingenuous heart. She looked to the
+future as a perpetual fete. Innocent and pure, no delirium had
+disturbed her dream. Shame and grief had never tinged her cheek nor
+moistened her eye. She did not even inquire into the secret of her
+involuntary emotions on a fine spring day. And then, she felt that she
+was weak and destined to obedience, and she awaited marriage without
+wishing for it. Her smiling imagination knew nothing of the
+corruption--necessary perhaps--which literature imparts by depicting the
+passions; she knew nothing of the world, and was ignorant of all the
+dangers of society. The dear child had suffered so little that she had
+not even developed her courage. In short, her guilelessness would have
+led her to walk fearless among serpents, like the ideal figure of
+Innocence a painter once created. We lived together like two brothers.
+
+"'At the end of a year I said to her one day, in the garden of this
+house, by the basin, as we stood throwing crumbs to the fish:
+
+"'"Would you like that we should be married? With me you could do
+whatever you please, while another man would make you unhappy."
+
+"'"Mamma," said she to my mother, who came out to join us, "Octave
+and I have agreed to be married----"
+
+"'"What! at seventeen?" said my mother. "No, you must wait eighteen
+months; and if eighteen months hence you like each other, well, your
+birth and fortunes are equal, you can make a marriage which is
+suitable, as well as being a love match."
+
+"'When I was six-and-twenty, and Honorine nineteen, we were married.
+Our respect for my father and mother, old folks of the Bourbon Court,
+hindered us from making this house fashionable, or renewing the
+furniture; we lived on, as we had done in the past, as children.
+However, I went into society; I initiated my wife into the world of
+fashion; and I regarded it as one of my duties to instruct her.
+
+"'I recognized afterwards that marriages contracted under such
+circumstances as ours bear in themselves a rock against which many
+affections are wrecked, many prudent calculations, many lives. The
+husband becomes a pedagogue, or, if you like, a professor, and love
+perishes under the rod which, sooner or later, gives pain; for a young
+and handsome wife, at once discreet and laughter-loving, will not
+accept any superiority above that with which she is endowed by nature.
+Perhaps I was in the wrong? During the difficult beginnings of a
+household I, perhaps, assumed a magisterial tone? On the other hand, I
+may have made the mistake of trusting too entirely to that artless
+nature; I kept no watch over the Countess, in whom revolt seemed to me
+impossible? Alas! neither in politics nor in domestic life has it yet
+been ascertained whether empires and happiness are wrecked by too much
+confidence or too much severity! Perhaps again, the husband failed to
+realize Honorine's girlish dreams? Who can tell, while happy days
+last, what precepts he has neglected?'
+
+"I remember only the broad outlines of the reproaches the Count
+addressed to himself, with all the good faith of an anatomist seeking
+the cause of a disease which might be overlooked by his brethren; but
+his merciful indulgence struck me then as really worthy of that of
+Jesus Christ when He rescued the woman taken in adultery.
+
+"'It was eighteen months after my father's death--my mother followed
+him to the tomb in a few months--when the fearful night came which
+surprised me by Honorine's farewell letter. What poetic delusion had
+seduced my wife? Was it through her senses? Was it the magnetism of
+misfortune or of genius? Which of these powers had taken her by storm
+or misled her?--I would not know. The blow was so terrible, that for a
+month I remained stunned. Afterwards, reflection counseled me to
+continue in ignorance, and Honorine's misfortunes have since taught me
+too much about all these things.--So far, Maurice, the story is
+commonplace enough; but one word will change it all: I love Honorine,
+I have never ceased to worship her. From the day when she left me I
+have lived on memory; one by one I recall the pleasures for which
+Honorine no doubt had no taste.
+
+"'Oh!' said he, seeing the amazement in my eyes, 'do not make a hero
+of me, do not think me such a fool, as the Colonel of the Empire would
+say, as to have sought no diversion. Alas, my boy! I was either too
+young or too much in love; I have not in the whole world met with
+another woman. After frightful struggles with myself, I tried to
+forget; money in hand, I stood on the very threshold of infidelity,
+but there the memory of Honorine rose before me like a white statue.
+As I recalled the infinite delicacy of that exquisite skin, through
+which the blood might be seen coursing and the nerves quivering; as I
+saw in fancy that ingenuous face, as guileless on the eve of my
+sorrows as on the day when I said to her, "Shall we marry?" as I
+remembered a heavenly fragrance, the very odor of virtue, and the
+light in her eyes, the prettiness of her movements, I fled like a man
+preparing to violate a tomb, who sees emerging from it the
+transfigured soul of the dead. At consultations, in Court, by night, I
+dream so incessantly of Honorine that only by excessive strength of
+mind do I succeed in attending to what I am doing and saying. This is
+the secret of my labors.
+
+"'Well, I felt no more anger with her than a father can feel on
+seeing his beloved child in some danger it has imprudently rushed
+into. I understood that I had made a poem of my wife--a poem I
+delighted in with such intoxication, that I fancied she shared the
+intoxication. Ah! Maurice, an indiscriminating passion in a husband is
+a mistake that may lead to any crime in a wife. I had no doubt left
+all the faculties of this child, loved as a child, entirely
+unemployed; I had perhaps wearied her with my love before the hour of
+loving had struck for her! Too young to understand that in the
+constancy of the wife lies the germ of the mother's devotion, she
+mistook this first test of marriage for life itself, and the
+refractory child cursed life, unknown to me, nor daring to complain to
+me, out of sheer modesty perhaps! In so cruel a position she would be
+defenceless against any man who stirred her deeply.--And I, so wise a
+judge as they say--I, who have a kind heart, but whose mind was
+absorbed--I understood too late these unwritten laws of the woman's
+code, I read them by the light of the fire that wrecked my roof. Then
+I constituted my heart a tribunal by virtue of the law, for the law
+makes the husband a judge: I acquitted my wife, and I condemned
+myself. But love took possession of me as a passion, the mean,
+despotic passion which comes over some old men. At this day I love the
+absent Honorine as a man of sixty loves a woman whom he must possess
+at any cost, and yet I feel the strength of a young man. I have the
+insolence of the old man and the reserve of a boy.--My dear fellow,
+society only laughs at such a desperate conjugal predicament. Where it
+pities a lover, it regards a husband as ridiculously inept; it makes
+sport of those who cannot keep the woman they have secured under the
+canopy of the Church, and before the Maire's scarf of office. And I
+had to keep silence.
+
+"'Serizy is happy. His indulgence allows him to see his wife; he can
+protect and defend her; and, as he adores her, he knows all the
+perfect joys of a benefactor whom nothing can disturb, not even
+ridicule, for he pours it himself on his fatherly pleasures. "I remain
+married only for my wife's sake," he said to me one day on coming out
+of court.
+
+"'But I--I have nothing; I have not even to face ridicule, I who live
+solely on a love which is starving! I who can never find a word to say
+to a woman of the world! I who loathe prostitution! I who am faithful
+under a spell!--But for my religious faith, I should have killed
+myself. I have defied the gulf of hard work; I have thrown myself into
+it, and come out again alive, fevered, burning, bereft of sleep!----'
+
+"I cannot remember all the words of this eloquent man, to whom passion
+gave an eloquence indeed so far above that of the pleader that, as I
+listened to him, I, like him, felt my cheeks wet with tears. You may
+conceive of my feelings when, after a pause, during which we dried
+them away, he finished his story with this revelation:--
+
+"'This is the drama of my soul, but it is not the actual living drama
+which is at this moment being acted in Paris! The interior drama
+interests nobody. I know it; and you will one day admit that it is so,
+you, who at this moment shed tears with me; no one can burden his
+heart or his skin with another's pain. The measure of our sufferings
+is in ourselves.--You even understand my sorrows only by very vague
+analogy. Could you see me calming the most violent frenzy of despair
+by the contemplation of a miniature in which I can see and kiss her
+brow, the smile on her lips, the shape of her face, can breathe the
+whiteness of her skin; which enables me almost to feel, to play with
+the black masses of her curling hair?--Could you see me when I leap
+with hope--when I writhe under the myriad darts of despair--when I
+tramp through the mire of Paris to quell my irritation by fatigue? I
+have fits of collapse comparable to those of a consumptive patient,
+moods of wild hilarity, terrors as of a murderer who meets a sergeant
+of police. In short, my life is a continual paroxysm of fears, joy,
+and dejection.
+
+"'As to the drama--it is this. You imagine that I am occupied with
+the Council of State, the Chamber, the Courts, Politics.--Why, dear
+me, seven hours at night are enough for all that, so much are my
+faculties overwrought by the life I lead! Honorine is my real concern.
+To recover my wife is my only study; to guard her in her cage, without
+her suspecting that she is in my power; to satisfy her needs, to
+supply the little pleasure she allows herself, to be always about her
+like a sylph without allowing her to see or to suspect me, for if she
+did, the future would be lost,--that is my life, my true life.--For
+seven years I have never gone to bed without going first to see the
+light of her night-lamp, or her shadow on the window curtains.
+
+"'She left my house, choosing to take nothing but the dress she wore
+that day. The child carried her magnanimity to the point of folly!
+Consequently, eighteen months after her flight she was deserted by her
+lover, who was appalled by the cold, cruel, sinister, and revolting
+aspect of poverty--the coward! The man had, no doubt, counted on the
+easy and luxurious life in Switzerland or Italy which fine ladies
+indulge in when they leave their husbands. Honorine has sixty thousand
+francs a year of her own. The wretch left the dear creature expecting
+an infant, and without a penny. In the month of November 1820 I found
+means to persuade the best _accoucheur_ in Paris to play the part of a
+humble suburban apothecary. I induced the priest of the parish in
+which the Countess was living to supply her needs as though he were
+performing an act of charity. Then to hide my wife, to secure her
+against discovery, to find her a housekeeper who would be devoted to
+me and be my intelligent confidante--it was a task worthy of Figaro!
+You may suppose that to discover where my wife had taken refuge I had
+only to make up my mind to it.
+
+"'After three months of desperation rather than despair, the idea of
+devoting myself to Honorine with God only in my secret, was one of
+those poems which occur only to the heart of a lover through life and
+death! Love must have its daily food. And ought I not to protect this
+child, whose guilt was the outcome of my imprudence, against fresh
+disaster--to fulfil my part, in short, as a guardian angel?--At the
+age of seven months her infant died, happily for her and for me. For
+nine months more my wife lay between life and death, deserted at the
+time when she most needed a manly arm; but this arm,' said he, holding
+out his own with a gesture of angelic dignity, 'was extended over her
+head. Honorine was nursed as she would have been in her own home.
+When, on her recovery, she asked how and by whom she had been assisted,
+she was told--"By the Sisters of Charity in the neighborhood--by the
+Maternity Society--by the parish priest, who took an interest in her."
+
+"'This woman, whose pride amounts to a vice, has shown a power of
+resistance in misfortune, which on some evenings I call the obstinacy
+of a mule. Honorine was bent on earning her living. My wife works! For
+five years past I have lodged her in the Rue Saint-Maur, in a charming
+little house, where she makes artificial flowers and articles of
+fashion. She believes that she sells the product of her elegant
+fancywork to a shop, where she is so well paid that she makes twenty
+francs a day, and in these six years she had never had a moment's
+suspicion. She pays for everything she needs at about the third of its
+value, so that on six thousand francs a year she lives as if she had
+fifteen thousand. She is devoted to flowers, and pays a hundred crowns
+to a gardener, who costs me twelve hundred in wages, and sends me in a
+bill for two thousand francs every three months. I have promised the
+man a market-garden with a house on it close to the porter's lodge in
+the Rue Saint-Maur. I hold this ground in the name of a clerk of the
+law courts. The smallest indiscretion would ruin the gardener's
+prospects. Honorine has her little house, a garden, and a splendid
+hothouse, for a rent of five hundred francs a year. There she lives
+under the name of her housekeeper, Madame Gobain, the old woman of
+impeccable discretion whom I was so lucky as to find, and whose
+affection Honorine has won. But her zeal, like that of the gardener,
+is kept hot by the promise of reward at the moment of success. The
+porter and his wife cost me dreadfully dear for the same reasons.
+However, for three years Honorine has been happy, believing that she
+owes to her own toil all the luxury of flowers, dress, and comfort.
+
+"'Oh! I know what you are about to say,' cried the Count, seeing a
+question in my eyes and on my lips. 'Yes, yes; I have made the
+attempt. My wife was formerly living in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
+One day when, from what Gobain told me, I believed in some chance of a
+reconciliation, I wrote by post a letter, in which I tried to
+propitiate my wife--a letter written and re-written twenty times! I
+will not describe my agonies. I went from the Rue Payenne to the Rue
+de Reuilly like a condemned wretch going from the Palais de Justice to
+his execution, but he goes on a cart, and I was on foot. It was
+dark--there was a fog; I went to meet Madame Gobain, who was to come and
+tell me what my wife had done. Honorine, on recognizing my writing, had
+thrown the letter into the fire without reading it.--"Madame Gobain,"
+she had exclaimed, "I leave this to-morrow."
+
+"'What a dagger-stroke was this to a man who found inexhaustible
+pleasure in the trickery by which he gets the finest Lyons velvet at
+twelve francs a yard, a pheasant, a fish, a dish of fruit, for a tenth
+of their value, for a woman so ignorant as to believe that she is
+paying ample wages with two hundred and fifty francs to Madame Gobain,
+a cook fit for a bishop.
+
+"'You have sometimes found me rubbing my hands in the enjoyment of a
+sort of happiness. Well, I had just succeeded in some ruse worthy of
+the stage. I had just deceived my wife--I had sent her by a purchaser
+of wardrobes an Indian shawl, to be offered to her as the property of
+an actress who had hardly worn it, but in which I--the solemn lawyer
+whom you know--had wrapped myself for a night! In short, my life at
+this day may be summed up in the two words which express the extremes
+of torment--I love, and I wait! I have in Madame Gobain a faithful spy
+on the heart I worship. I go every evening to chat with the old woman,
+to hear from her all that Honorine has done during the day, the
+lightest word she has spoken, for a single exclamation might betray to
+me the secrets of that soul which is wilfully deaf and dumb. Honorine
+is pious; she attends the Church services and prays, but she has never
+been to confession or taken the Communion; she foresees what a priest
+would tell her. She will not listen to the advice, to the injunction,
+that she should return to me. This horror of me overwhelms me, dismays
+me, for I have never done her the smallest harm. I have always been
+kind to her. Granting even that I may have been a little hasty when
+teaching her, that my man's irony may have hurt her legitimate girlish
+pride, is that a reason for persisting in a determination which only
+the most implacable hatred could have inspired? Honorine has never
+told Madame Gobain who she is; she keeps absolute silence as to her
+marriage, so that the worthy and respectable woman can never speak a
+word in my favor, for she is the only person in the house who knows my
+secret. The others know nothing; they live under the awe caused by the
+name of the Prefect of Police, and their respect for the power of a
+Minister. Hence it is impossible for me to penetrate that heart; the
+citadel is mine, but I cannot get into it. I have not a single means
+of action. An act of violence would ruin me for ever.
+
+"'How can I argue against reasons of which I know nothing? Should I
+write a letter, and have it copied by a public writer, and laid before
+Honorine? But that would be to run the risk of a third removal. The
+last cost me fifty thousand francs. The purchase was made in the first
+instance in the name of the secretary whom you succeeded. The unhappy
+man, who did not know how lightly I sleep, was detected by me in the
+act of opening a box in which I had put the private agreement; I
+coughed, and he was seized with a panic; next day I compelled him to
+sell the house to the man in whose name it now stands, and I turned
+him out.
+
+"'If it were not that I feel all my noblest faculties as a man
+satisfied, happy, expansive; if the part I am playing were not that of
+divine fatherhood; if I did not drink in delight by every pore, there
+are moments when I should believe that I was a monomaniac. Sometimes
+at night I hear the jingling bells of madness. I dread the violent
+transitions from a feeble hope, which sometimes shines and flashes up,
+to complete despair, falling as low as man can fall. A few days since
+I was seriously considering the horrible end of the story of Lovelace
+and Clarissa Harlowe, and saying to myself, if Honorine were the
+mother of a child of mine, must she not necessarily return under her
+husband's roof?
+
+"'And I have such complete faith in a happy future, that ten months
+ago I bought and paid for one of the handsomest houses in the Faubourg
+Saint-Honore. If I win back Honorine, I will not allow her to see this
+house again, nor the room from which she fled. I mean to place my idol
+in a new temple, where she may feel that life is altogether new. That
+house is being made a marvel of elegance and taste. I have been told
+of a poet who, being almost mad with love for an actress, bought the
+handsomest bed in Paris without knowing how the actress would reward
+his passion. Well, one of the coldest of lawyers, a man who is
+supposed to be the gravest adviser of the Crown, was stirred to the
+depths of his heart by that anecdote. The orator of the Legislative
+Chamber can understand the poet who fed his ideal on material
+possibilities. Three days before the arrival of Maria Louisa, Napoleon
+flung himself on his wedding bed at Compiegne. All stupendous passions
+have the same impulses. I love as a poet--as an emperor!'
+
+"As I heard the last words, I believed that Count Octave's fears were
+realized; he had risen, and was walking up and down, and
+gesticulating, but he stopped as if shocked by the vehemence of his
+own words.
+
+"'I am very ridiculous,' he added, after a long pause, looking at me,
+as if craving a glance of pity.
+
+"'No, monsieur, you are very unhappy.'
+
+"'Ah yes!' said he, taking up the thread of his confidences. 'From
+the violence of my speech you may, you must believe in the intensity
+of a physical passion which for nine years has absorbed all my
+faculties; but that is nothing in comparison with the worship I feel
+for the soul, the mind, the heart, all in that woman; the enchanting
+divinities in the train of Love, with whom we pass our life, and who
+form the daily poem of a fugitive delight. By a phenomenon of
+retrospection I see now the graces of Honorine's mind and heart, to
+which I paid little heed in the time of my happiness--like all who are
+happy. From day to day I have appreciated the extent of my loss,
+discovering the exquisite gifts of that capricious and refractory
+young creature who has grown so strong and so proud under the heavy
+hand of poverty and the shock of the most cowardly desertion. And that
+heavenly blossom is fading in solitude and hiding!--Ah! The law of
+which we were speaking,' he went on with bitter irony, 'the law is a
+squad of gendarmes--my wife seized and dragged away by force! Would
+not that be to triumph over a corpse? Religion has no hold on her; she
+craves its poetry, she prays, but she does not listen to the
+commandments of the Church. I, for my part, have exhausted everything
+in the way of mercy, of kindness, of love; I am at my wits' end. Only
+one chance of victory is left to me; the cunning and patience with
+which bird-catchers at last entrap the wariest birds, the swiftest,
+the most capricious, and the rarest. Hence, Maurice, when M. de
+Grandville's indiscretion betrayed to you the secret of my life, I
+ended by regarding this incident as one of the decrees of fate, one of
+the utterances for which gamblers listen and pray in the midst of
+their most impassioned play. . . . Have you enough affection for me to
+show me romantic devotion?'
+
+"'I see what you are coming to, Monsieur le Comte,' said I,
+interrupting him; 'I guess your purpose. Your first secretary tried to
+open your deed box. I know the heart of your second--he might fall in
+love with your wife. And can you devote him to destruction by sending
+him into the fire? Can any one put his hand into a brazier without
+burning it?'
+
+"'You are a foolish boy,' replied the Count. 'I will send you well
+gloved. It is no secretary of mine that will be lodged in the Rue
+Saint-Maur in the little garden-house which I have at his disposal. It
+is my distant cousin, Baron de l'Hostal, a lawyer high in
+office . . ."
+
+"After a moment of silent surprise, I heard the gate bell ring, and a
+carriage came into the courtyard. Presently the footman announced
+Madame de Courteville and her daughter. The Count had a large family
+connection on his mother's side. Madame de Courteville, his cousin,
+was the widow of a judge on the bench of the Seine division, who had
+left her a daughter and no fortune whatever. What could a woman of
+nine-and-twenty be in comparison with a young girl of twenty, as
+lovely as imagination could wish for an ideal mistress?
+
+"'Baron, and Master of Appeals, till you get something better, and
+this old house settled on her,--would not you have enough good reasons
+for not falling in love with the Countess?' he said to me in a
+whisper, as he took me by the hand and introduced me to Madame de
+Courteville and her daughter.
+
+"I was dazzled, not so much by these advantages of which I had never
+dreamed, but by Amelie de Courteville, whose beauty was thrown into
+relief by one of those well-chosen toilets which a mother can achieve
+for a daughter when she wants to see her married.
+
+"But I will not talk of myself," said the Consul after a pause.
+
+"Three weeks later I went to live in the gardener's cottage, which had
+been cleaned, repaired, and furnished with the celerity which is
+explained by three words: Paris; French workmen; money! I was as much
+in love as the Count could possibly desire as a security. Would the
+prudence of a young man of five-and-twenty be equal to the part I was
+undertaking, involving a friend's happiness? To settle that matter, I
+may confess that I counted very much on my uncle's advice; for I had
+been authorized by the Count to take him into confidence in any case
+where I deemed his interference necessary. I engaged a garden; I
+devoted myself to horticulture; I worked frantically, like a man whom
+nothing can divert, turning up the soil of the market-garden, and
+appropriating the ground to the culture of flowers. Like the maniacs
+of England, or of Holland, I gave it out that I was devoted to one
+kind of flower, and especially grew dahlias, collecting every variety.
+You will understand that my conduct, even in the smallest details, was
+laid down for me by the Count, whose whole intellectual powers were
+directed to the most trifling incidents of the tragi-comedy enacted in
+the Rue Saint-Maur. As soon as the Countess had gone to bed, at about
+eleven at night, Octave, Madame Gobain, and I sat in council. I heard
+the old woman's report to the Count of his wife's least proceedings
+during the day. He inquired into everything: her meals, her
+occupations, her frame of mind, her plans for the morrow, the flowers
+she proposed to imitate. I understood what love in despair may be when
+it is the threefold passion of the heart, the mind, and the senses.
+Octave lived only for that hour.
+
+"During two months, while my work in the garden lasted, I never set
+eyes on the little house where my fair neighbor dwelt. I had not even
+inquired whether I had a neighbor, though the Countess' garden was
+divided from mine by a paling, along which she had planted cypress
+trees already four feet high. One fine morning Madame Gobain announced
+to her mistress, as a disastrous piece of news, the intention,
+expressed by an eccentric creature who had become her neighbor, of
+building a wall between the two gardens, at the end of the year. I
+will say nothing of the curiosity which consumed me to see the
+Countess! The wish almost extinguished my budding love for Amelie de
+Courteville. My scheme for building a wall was indeed a dangerous
+threat. There would be no more fresh air for Honorine, whose garden
+would then be a sort of narrow alley shut in between my wall and her
+own little house. This dwelling, formerly a summer villa, was like a
+house of cards; it was not more than thirty feet deep, and about a
+hundred feet long. The garden front, painted in the German fashion,
+imitated a trellis with flowers up to the second floor, and was really
+a charming example of the Pompadour style, so well called rococo. A
+long avenue of limes led up to it. The gardens of the pavilion and my
+plot of ground were in the shape of a hatchet, of which this avenue
+was the handle. My wall would cut away three-quarters of the hatchet.
+
+"The Countess was in despair.
+
+"'My good Gobain,' said she, 'what sort of man is this florist?'
+
+"'On my word,' said the housekeeper, 'I do not know whether it will
+be possible to tame him. He seems to have a horror of women. He is the
+nephew of a Paris cure. I have seen the uncle but once; a fine old man
+of sixty, very ugly, but very amiable. It is quite possible that this
+priest encourages his nephew, as they say in the neighborhood, in his
+love of flowers, that nothing worse may happen----'
+
+"'Why--what?'
+
+"'Well, your neighbor is a little cracked!' said Gobain, tapping her
+head!
+
+"Now a harmless lunatic is the only man whom no woman ever distrusts
+in the matter of sentiment. You will see how wise the Count had been
+in choosing this disguise for me.
+
+"'What ails him then?' asked the Countess.
+
+"'He has studied too hard,' replied Gobain; 'he has turned
+misanthropic. And he has his reasons for disliking women--well, if you
+want to know all that is said about him----'
+
+"'Well,' said Honorine, 'madmen frighten me less than sane folks; I
+will speak to him myself! Tell him that I beg him to come here. If I
+do not succeed, I will send for the cure.'
+
+"The day after this conversation, as I was walking along my graveled
+path, I caught sight of the half-opened curtains on the first floor of
+the little house, and of a woman's face curiously peeping out. Madame
+Gobain called me. I hastily glanced at the Countess' house, and by a
+rude shrug expressed, 'What do I care for your mistress!'
+
+"'Madame,' said Gobain, called upon to give an account of her errand,
+'the madman bid me leave him in peace, saying that even a charcoal
+seller is master in his own premises, especially when he has no wife.'
+
+"'He is perfectly right,' said the Countess.
+
+"'Yes, but he ended by saying, "I will go," when I told him that he
+would greatly distress a lady living in retirement, who found her
+greatest solace in growing flowers.'
+
+"Next day a signal from Gobain informed me that I was expected. After
+the Countess' breakfast, when she was walking to and fro in front of
+her house, I broke out some palings and went towards her. I had
+dressed myself like a countryman, in an old pair of gray flannel
+trousers, heavy wooden shoes, and shabby shooting coat, a peaked cap
+on my head, a ragged bandana round my neck, hands soiled with mould,
+and a dibble in my hand.
+
+"'Madame,' said the housekeeper, 'this good man is your neighbor.'
+
+"The Countess was not alarmed. I saw at last the woman whom her own
+conduct and her husband's confidences had made me so curious to meet.
+It was in the early days of May. The air was pure, the weather serene;
+the verdure of the first foliage, the fragrance of spring formed a
+setting for this creature of sorrow. As I then saw Honorine I
+understood Octave's passion and the truthfulness of his description,
+'A heavenly flower!'
+
+"Her pallor was what first struck me by its peculiar tone of white--for
+there are as many tones of white as of red or blue. On looking at the
+Countess, the eye seemed to feel that tender skin, where the blood
+flowed in the blue veins. At the slightest emotion the blood mounted
+under the surface in rosy flushes like a cloud. When we met, the
+sunshine, filtering through the light foliage of the acacias, shed on
+Honorine the pale gold, ambient glory in which Raphael and Titian, alone
+of all painters, have been able to enwrap the Virgin. Her brown eyes
+expressed both tenderness and vivacity; their brightness seemed
+reflected in her face through the long downcast lashes. Merely by
+lifting her delicate eyelids, Honorine could cast a spell; there was so
+much feeling, dignity, terror, or contempt in her way of raising or
+dropping those veils of the soul. She could freeze or give life by a
+look. Her light-brown hair, carelessly knotted on her head, outlined a
+poet's brow, high, powerful, and dreamy. The mouth was wholly
+voluptuous. And to crown all by a grace, rare in France, though common
+in Italy, all the lines and forms of the head had a stamp of nobleness
+which would defy the outrages of time.
+
+"Though slight, Honorine was not thin, and her figure struck me as
+being one that might revive love when it believed itself exhausted.
+She perfectly represented the idea conveyed by the word _mignonne_,
+for she was one of those pliant little women who allow themselves to
+be taken up, petted, set down, and taken up again like a kitten. Her
+small feet, as I heard them on the gravel, made a light sound
+essentially their own, that harmonized with the rustle of her dress,
+producing a feminine music which stamped itself on the heart, and
+remained distinct from the footfall of a thousand other women. Her
+gait bore all the quarterings of her race with so much pride, that, in
+the street, the least respectful working man would have made way for
+her. Gay and tender, haughty and imposing, it was impossible to
+understand her, excepting as gifted with these apparently incompatible
+qualities, which, nevertheless, had left her still a child. But it was
+a child who might be as strong as an angel; and, like the angel, once
+hurt in her nature, she would be implacable.
+
+"Coldness on that face must no doubt be death to those on whom her
+eyes had smiled, for whom her set lips had parted, for those whose
+soul had drunk in the melody of that voice, lending to her words the
+poetry of song by its peculiar intonation. Inhaling the perfume of
+violets that accompanied her, I understood how the memory of this wife
+had arrested the Count on the threshold of debauchery, and how
+impossible it would be ever to forget a creature who really was a
+flower to the touch, a flower to the eye, a flower of fragrance, a
+heavenly flower to the soul. . . . Honorine inspired devotion,
+chivalrous devotion, regardless of reward. A man on seeing her must
+say to himself:
+
+"'Think, and I will divine your thought; speak, and I will obey. If
+my life, sacrificed in torments, can procure you one day's happiness,
+take my life, I will smile like a martyr at the stake, for I shall
+offer that day to God, as a token to which a father responds on
+recognizing a gift to his child.' Many women study their expression,
+and succeed in producing effects similar to those which would have
+struck you at first sight of the Countess; only, in her, it was all
+the outcome of a delightful nature, that inimitable nature went at
+once to the heart. If I tell you all this, it is because her soul, her
+thoughts, the exquisiteness of her heart, are all we are concerned
+with, and you would have blamed me if I had not sketched them for you.
+
+"I was very near forgetting my part as a half-crazy lout, clumsy, and
+by no means chivalrous.
+
+"'I am told, madame, that you are fond of flowers?'
+
+"'I am an artificial flower-maker,' said she. 'After growing flowers,
+I imitate them, like a mother who is artist enough to have the
+pleasure of painting her children. . . . That is enough to tell you
+that I am poor and unable to pay for the concession I am anxious to
+obtain from you?'
+
+"'But how,' said I, as grave as a judge, 'can a lady of such rank as
+yours would seem to be, ply so humble a calling? Have you, like me,
+good reasons for employing your fingers so as to keep your brains from
+working?'
+
+"'Let us stick to the question of the wall,' said she, with a smile.
+
+"'Why, we have begun at the foundations,' said I. 'Must not I know
+which of us ought to yield to the other in behalf of our suffering,
+or, if you choose, of our mania?--Oh! what a charming clump of
+narcissus! They are as fresh as this spring morning!'
+
+"I assure you, she had made for herself a perfect museum of flowers
+and shrubs, which none might see but the sun, and of which the
+arrangement had been prompted by the genius of an artist; the most
+heartless of landlords must have treated it with respect. The masses
+of plants, arranged according to their height, or in single clumps,
+were really a joy to the soul. This retired and solitary garden
+breathed comforting scents, and suggested none but sweet thoughts and
+graceful, nay, voluptuous pictures. On it was set that inscrutable
+sign-manual, which our true character stamps on everything, as soon as
+nothing compels us to obey the various hypocrisies, necessary as they
+are, which Society insists on. I looked alternately at the mass of
+narcissus and at the Countess, affecting to be far more in love with
+the flowers than with her, to carry out my part.
+
+"'So you are very fond of flowers?' said she.
+
+"'They are,' I replied, 'the only beings that never disappoint our
+cares and affection.' And I went on to deliver such a diatribe while
+comparing botany and the world, that we ended miles away from the
+dividing wall, and the Countess must have supposed me to be a wretched
+and wounded sufferer worthy of her pity. However, at the end of half
+an hour my neighbor naturally brought me back to the point; for women,
+when they are not in love, have all the cold blood of an experienced
+attorney.
+
+"'If you insist on my leaving the paling,' said I, 'you will learn
+all the secrets of gardening that I want to hide; I am seeking to grow
+a blue dahlia, a blue rose; I am crazy for blue flowers. Is not blue
+the favorite color of superior souls? We are neither of us really at
+home; we might as well make a little door of open railings to unite
+our gardens. . . . You, too, are fond of flowers; you will see mine, I
+shall see yours. If you receive no visitors at all, I, for my part,
+have none but my uncle, the Cure of the White Friars.'
+
+"'No,' said she, 'I will give you the right to come into my garden,
+my premises at any hour. Come and welcome; you will always be admitted
+as a neighbor with whom I hope to keep on good terms. But I like my
+solitude too well to burden it with any loss of independence.'
+
+"'As you please,' said I, and with one leap I was over the paling.
+
+"'Now, of what use would a door be?' said I, from my own domain,
+turning round to the Countess, and mocking her with a madman's gesture
+and grimace.
+
+"For a fortnight I seemed to take no heed of my neighbor. Towards the
+end of May, one lovely evening, we happened both to be out on opposite
+sides of the paling, both walking slowly. Having reached the end, we
+could not help exchanging a few civil words; she found me in such deep
+dejection, lost in such painful meditations, that she spoke to me of
+hopefulness, in brief sentences that sounded like the songs with which
+nurses lull their babies. I then leaped the fence, and found myself
+for the second time at her side. The Countess led me into the house,
+wishing to subdue my sadness. So at last I had penetrated the
+sanctuary where everything was in harmony with the woman I have tried
+to describe to you.
+
+"Exquisite simplicity reigned there. The interior of the little house
+was just such a dainty box as the art of the eighteenth century
+devised for the pretty profligacy of a fine gentleman. The
+dining-room, on the ground floor, was painted in fresco, with garlands
+of flowers, admirably and marvelously executed. The staircase was
+charmingly decorated in monochrome. The little drawing-room, opposite
+the dining-room, was very much faded; but the Countess had hung it
+with panels of tapestry of fanciful designs, taken off old screens. A
+bath-room came next. Upstairs there was but one bedroom, with a
+dressing-room, and a library which she used as her workroom. The
+kitchen was beneath in the basement on which the house was raised, for
+there was a flight of several steps outside. The balustrade of a
+balcony in garlands a la Pompadour concealed the roof; only the lead
+cornices were visible. In this retreat one was a hundred leagues from
+Paris.
+
+"But for the bitter smile which occasionally played on the beautiful
+red lips of this pale woman, it would have been possible to believe
+that this violet buried in her thicket of flowers was happy. In a few
+days we had reached a certain degree of intimacy, the result of our
+close neighborhood and of the Countess' conviction that I was
+indifferent to women. A look would have spoilt all, and I never
+allowed a thought of her to be seen in my eyes. Honorine chose to
+regard me as an old friend. Her manner to me was the outcome of a kind
+of pity. Her looks, her voice, her words, all showed that she was a
+hundred miles away from the coquettish airs which the strictest virtue
+might have allowed under such circumstances. She soon gave me the
+right to go into the pretty workshop where she made her flowers, a
+retreat full of books and curiosities, as smart as a boudoir where
+elegance emphasized the vulgarity of the tools of her trade. The
+Countess had in the course of time poetized, as I may say, a thing
+which is at the antipodes to poetry--a manufacture.
+
+"Perhaps of all the work a woman can do, the making of artificial
+flowers is that of which the details allow her to display most grace.
+For coloring prints she must sit bent over a table and devote herself,
+with some attention, to this half painting. Embroidering tapestry, as
+diligently as a woman must who is to earn her living by it, entails
+consumption or curvature of the spine. Engraving music is one of the
+most laborious, by the care, the minute exactitude, and the
+intelligence it demands. Sewing and white embroidery do not earn
+thirty sous a day. But the making of flowers and light articles of
+wear necessitates a variety of movements, gestures, ideas even, which
+do not take a pretty woman out of her sphere; she is still herself;
+she may chat, laugh, sing, or think.
+
+"There was certainly a feeling for art in the way in which the
+Countess arranged on a long deal table the myriad-colored petals which
+were used in composing the flowers she was to produce. The saucers of
+color were of white china, and always clean, arranged in such order
+that the eye could at once see the required shade in the scale of
+tints. Thus the aristocratic artist saved time. A pretty little
+cabinet with a hundred tiny drawers, of ebony inlaid with ivory,
+contained the little steel moulds in which she shaped the leaves and
+some forms of petals. A fine Japanese bowl held the paste, which was
+never allowed to turn sour, and it had a fitted cover with a hinge so
+easy that she could lift it with a finger-tip. The wire, of iron and
+brass, lurked in a little drawer of the table before her.
+
+"Under her eyes, in a Venetian glass, shaped like a flower-cup on its
+stem, was the living model she strove to imitate. She had a passion
+for achievement; she attempted the most difficult things, close
+racemes, the tiniest corollas, heaths, nectaries of the most
+variegated hues. Her hands, as swift as her thoughts, went from the
+table to the flower she was making, as those of an accomplished
+pianist fly over the keys. Her fingers seemed to be fairies, to use
+Perrault's expression, so infinite were the different actions of
+twisting, fitting, and pressure needed for the work, all hidden under
+grace of movement, while she adapted each motion to the result with
+the lucidity of instinct.
+
+"I could not tire of admiring her as she shaped a flower from the
+materials sorted before her, padding the wire stem and adjusting the
+leaves. She displayed the genius of a painter in her bold attempts;
+she copied faded flowers and yellowing leaves; she struggled even with
+wildflowers, the most artless of all, and the most elaborate in their
+simplicity.
+
+"'This art,' she would say, 'is in its infancy. If the women of Paris
+had a little of the genius which the slavery of the harem brings out
+in Oriental women, they would lend a complete language of flowers to
+the wreaths they wear on their head. To please my own taste as an
+artist I have made drooping flowers with leaves of the hue of
+Florentine bronze, such as are found before or after the winter. Would
+not such a crown on the head of a young woman whose life is a failure
+have a certain poetical fitness? How many things a woman might express
+by her head-dress! Are there not flowers for drunken Bacchantes,
+flowers for gloomy and stern bigots, pensive flowers for women who are
+bored? Botany, I believe, may be made to express every sensation and
+thought of the soul, even the most subtle.'
+
+"She would employ me to stamp out the leaves, cut up material, and
+prepare wires for the stems. My affected desire for occupation made me
+soon skilful. We talked as we worked. When I had nothing to do, I read
+new books to her, for I had my part to keep up as a man weary of life,
+worn out with griefs, gloomy, sceptical, and soured. My person led to
+adorable banter as to my purely physical resemblance--with the
+exception of his club foot--to Lord Byron. It was tacitly acknowledged
+that her own troubles, as to which she kept the most profound silence,
+far outweighed mine, though the causes I assigned for my misanthropy
+might have satisfied Young or Job.
+
+"I will say nothing of the feelings of shame which tormented me as I
+inflicted on my heart, like the beggars in the street, false wounds to
+excite the compassion of that enchanting woman. I soon appreciated the
+extent of my devotedness by learning to estimate the baseness of a
+spy. The expressions of sympathy bestowed on me would have comforted
+the greatest grief. This charming creature, weaned from the world, and
+for so many years alone, having, besides love, treasures of kindliness
+to bestow, offered these to me with childlike effusiveness and such
+compassion as would inevitably have filled with bitterness any
+profligate who should have fallen in love with her; for, alas, it was
+all charity, all sheer pity. Her renunciation of love, her dread of
+what is called happiness for women, she proclaimed with equal
+vehemence and candor. These happy days proved to me that a woman's
+friendship is far superior to her love.
+
+"I suffered the revelations of my sorrows to be dragged from me with
+as many grimaces as a young lady allows herself before sitting down to
+the piano, so conscious are they of the annoyance that will follow. As
+you may imagine, the necessity for overcoming my dislike to speak had
+induced the Countess to strengthen the bonds of our intimacy; but she
+found in me so exact a counterpart of her own antipathy to love, that
+I fancied she was well content with the chance which had brought to
+her desert island a sort of Man Friday. Solitude was perhaps beginning
+to weigh on her. At the same time, there was nothing of the coquette
+in her; nothing survived of the woman; she did not feel that she had a
+heart, she told me, excepting in the ideal world where she found
+refuge. I involuntarily compared these two lives--hers and the
+Count's:--his, all activity, agitation, and emotion; hers, all
+inaction, quiescence, and stagnation. The woman and the man were
+admirably obedient to their nature. My misanthropy allowed me to utter
+cynical sallies against men and women both, and I indulged in them,
+hoping to bring Honorine to the confidential point; but she was not to
+be caught in any trap, and I began to understand that mulish obstinacy
+which is commoner among women than is generally supposed.
+
+"'The Orientals are right,' I said to her one evening, 'when they
+shut you up and regard you merely as the playthings of their pleasure.
+Europe has been well punished for having admitted you to form an
+element of society and for accepting you on an equal footing. In my
+opinion, woman is the most dishonorable and cowardly being to be
+found. Nay, and that is where her charm lies. Where would be the
+pleasure of hunting a tame thing? When once a woman has inspired a
+man's passion, she is to him for ever sacred; in his eyes she is
+hedged round by an imprescriptible prerogative. In men gratitude for
+past delights is eternal. Though he should find his mistress grown old
+or unworthy, the woman still has rights over his heart; but to you
+women the man you have loved is as nothing to you; nay, more, he is
+unpardonable in one thing--he lives on! You dare not own it, but you
+all have in your hearts the feeling which that popular calumny called
+tradition ascribes to the Lady of the Tour de Nesle: "What a pity it
+is that we cannot live on love as we live on fruit, and that when we
+have had our fill, nothing should survive but the remembrance of
+pleasure!"'
+
+"'God has, no doubt, reserved such perfect bliss for Paradise,' said
+she. 'But,' she added, 'if your argument seems to you very witty, to
+me it has the disadvantage of being false. What can those women be who
+give themselves up to a succession of loves?' she asked, looking at me
+as the Virgin in Ingres' picture looks at Louis XIII. offering her his
+kingdom.
+
+"'You are an actress in good faith,' said I, 'for you gave me a look
+just now which would make the fame of an actress. Still, lovely as you
+are, you have loved; _ergo_, you forget.'
+
+"'I!' she exclaimed, evading my question, 'I am not a woman. I am a
+nun, and seventy-two years old!'
+
+"'Then, how can you so positively assert that you feel more keenly
+than I? Sorrow has but one form for women. The only misfortunes they
+regard are disappointments of the heart.'
+
+"She looked at me sweetly, and, like all women when stuck between the
+issues of a dilemma, or held in the clutches of truth, she persisted,
+nevertheless, in her wilfulness.
+
+"'I am a nun,' she said, 'and you talk to me of the world where I
+shall never again set foot.'
+
+"'Not even in thought?' said I.
+
+"'Is the world so much to be desired?' she replied. 'Oh! when my mind
+wanders, it goes higher. The angel of perfection, the beautiful angel
+Gabriel, often sings in my heart. If I were rich, I should work, all
+the same, to keep me from soaring too often on the many-tinted wings
+of the angel, and wandering in the world of fancy. There are
+meditations which are the ruin of us women! I owe much peace of mind
+to my flowers, though sometimes they fail to occupy me. On some days I
+find my soul invaded by a purposeless expectancy; I cannot banish some
+idea which takes possession of me, which seems to make my fingers
+clumsy. I feel that some great event is impending, that my life is
+about to change; I listen vaguely, I stare into the darkness, I have
+no liking for my work, and after a thousand fatigues I find life once
+more--everyday life. Is this a warning from heaven? I ask myself----'
+
+"After three months of this struggle between two diplomates, concealed
+under the semblance of youthful melancholy, and a woman whose disgust
+of life made her invulnerable, I told the Count that it was impossible
+to drag this tortoise out of her shell; it must be broken. The evening
+before, in our last quite friendly discussion, the Countess had
+exclaimed:
+
+"'Lucretia's dagger wrote in letters of blood the watchword of
+woman's charter: _Liberty!_'
+
+"From that moment the Count left me free to act.
+
+"'I have been paid a hundred francs for the flowers and caps I made
+this week!' Honorine exclaimed gleefully one Saturday evening when I
+went to visit her in the little sitting-room on the ground floor,
+which the unavowed proprietor had had regilt.
+
+"It was ten o'clock. The twilight of July and a glorious moon lent us
+their misty light. Gusts of mingled perfumes soothed the soul; the
+Countess was clinking in her hand the five gold pieces given to her by
+a supposititious dealer in fashionable frippery, another of Octave's
+accomplices found for him by a judge, M. Popinot.
+
+"'I earn my living by amusing myself,' said she; 'I am free, when
+men, armed with their laws, have tried to make us slaves. Oh, I have
+transports of pride every Saturday! In short, I like M. Gaudissart's
+gold pieces as much as Lord Byron, your double, liked Mr. Murray's.'
+
+"'This is not becoming in a woman,' said I.
+
+"'Pooh! Am I a woman? I am a boy gifted with a soft soul, that is
+all; a boy whom no woman can torture----'
+
+"'Your life is the negation of your whole being,' I replied. 'What?
+You, on whom God has lavished His choicest treasures of love and
+beauty, do you never wish----'
+
+"'For what?' said she, somewhat disturbed by a speech which, for the
+first time, gave the lie to the part I had assumed.
+
+"'For a pretty little child, with curling hair, running, playing
+among the flowers, like a flower itself of life and love, and calling
+you mother!'
+
+"I waited for an answer. A too prolonged silence led me to perceive
+the terrible effect of my words, though the darkness at first
+concealed it. Leaning on her sofa, the Countess had not indeed
+fainted, but frozen under a nervous attack of which the first chill,
+as gentle as everything that was part of her, felt, as she afterwards
+said, like the influence of a most insidious poison. I called Madame
+Gobain, who came and led away her mistress, laid her on her bed,
+unlaced her, undressed her, and restored her, not to life, it is true,
+but to the consciousness of some dreadful suffering. I meanwhile
+walked up and down the path behind the house, weeping, and doubting my
+success. I only wished to give up this part of the bird-catcher which
+I had so rashly assumed. Madame Gobain, who came down and found me
+with my face wet with tears, hastily went up again to say to the
+Countess:
+
+"'What has happened, madame? Monsieur Maurice is crying like a
+child.'
+
+"Roused to action by the evil interpretation that might be put on our
+mutual behavior, she summoned superhuman strength to put on a wrapper
+and come down to me.
+
+"'You are not the cause of this attack,' said she. 'I am subject to
+these spasms, a sort of cramp of the heart----'
+
+"'And will you not tell me of your troubles?' said I, in a voice
+which cannot be affected, as I wiped away my tears. 'Have you not just
+now told me that you have been a mother, and have been so unhappy as
+to lose your child?'
+
+"'Marie!' she called as she rang the bell. Gobain came in.
+
+"'Bring lights and some tea,' said she, with the calm decision of a
+Mylady clothed in the armor of pride by the dreadful English training
+which you know too well.
+
+"When the housekeeper had lighted the tapers and closed the shutters,
+the Countess showed me a mute countenance; her indomitable pride and
+gravity, worthy of a savage, had already reasserted their mastery. She
+said:
+
+"'Do you know why I like Lord Byron so much? It is because he
+suffered as animals do. Of what use are complaints when they are not
+an elegy like Manfred's, nor bitter mockery like Don Juan's, nor a
+reverie like Childe Harold's? Nothing shall be known of me. My heart
+is a poem that I lay before God.'
+
+"'If I chose----' said I.
+
+"'If?' she repeated.
+
+"'I have no interest in anything,' I replied, 'so I cannot be
+inquisitive; but, if I chose, I could know all your secrets by
+to-morrow.'
+
+"'I defy you!' she exclaimed, with ill-disguised uneasiness.
+
+"'Seriously?'
+
+"'Certainly,' said she, tossing her head. 'If such a crime is
+possible, I ought to know it.'
+
+"'In the first place, madame,' I went on, pointing to her hands,
+'those pretty fingers, which are enough to show that you are not a
+mere girl--were they made for toil? Then you call yourself Madame
+Gobain, you, who, in my presence the other day on receiving a letter,
+said to Marie: "Here, this is for you?" Marie is the real Madame
+Gobain; so you conceal your name behind that of your housekeeper.--Fear
+nothing, madame, from me. You have in me the most devoted friend you
+will ever have: Friend, do you understand me? I give this word its
+sacred and pathetic meaning, so profaned in France, where we apply it to
+our enemies. And your friend, who will defend you against everything,
+only wishes that you should be as happy as such a woman ought to be. Who
+can tell whether the pain I have involuntarily caused you was not a
+voluntary act?'
+
+"'Yes,' replied she with threatening audacity, 'I insist on it. Be
+curious, and tell me all that you can find out about me; but,' and she
+held up her finger, 'you must also tell me by what means you obtain
+your information. The preservation of the small happiness I enjoy here
+depends on the steps you take.'
+
+"'That means that you will fly----'
+
+"'On wings!' she cried, 'to the New World----'
+
+"'Where you will be at the mercy of the brutal passions you will
+inspire,' said I, interrupting her. 'Is it not the very essence of
+genius and beauty to shine, to attract men's gaze, to excite desires
+and evil thoughts? Paris is a desert with Bedouins; Paris is the only
+place in the world where those who must work for their livelihood can
+hide their life. What have you to complain of? Who am I? An additional
+servant--M. Gobain, that is all. If you have to fight a duel, you may
+need a second.'
+
+"'Never mind; find out who I am. I have already said that I insist.
+Now, I beg that you will,' she went on, with the grace which you
+ladies have at command," said the Consul, looking at the ladies.
+
+"'Well, then, to-morrow, at the same hour, I will tell you what I may
+have discovered,' replied I. 'But do not therefore hate me! Will you
+behave like other women?'
+
+"'What do other women do?'
+
+"'They lay upon us immense sacrifices, and when we have made them,
+they reproach us for it some time later as if it were an injury.'
+
+"'They are right if the thing required appears to be a sacrifice!'
+replied she pointedly.
+
+"'Instead of sacrifices, say efforts and----'
+
+"'It would be an impertinence,' said she.
+
+"'Forgive me,' said I. 'I forget that woman and the Pope are
+infallible.'
+
+"'Good heavens!' said she after a long pause, 'only two words would
+be enough to destroy the peace so dearly bought, and which I enjoy
+like a fraud----'
+
+"She rose and paid no further heed to me.
+
+"'Where can I go?' she said. 'What is to become of me?--Must I leave
+this quiet retreat, that I had arranged with such care to end my days
+in?'
+
+"'To end your days!' exclaimed I with visible alarm. 'Has it never
+struck you that a time would come when you could no longer work, when
+competition will lower the price of flowers and articles of
+fashion----?'
+
+"'I have already saved a thousand crowns,' she said.
+
+"'Heavens! what privations such a sum must represent!' I exclaimed.
+
+"'Leave me,' said she, 'till to-morrow. This evening I am not myself;
+I must be alone. Must I not save my strength in case of disaster? For,
+if you should learn anything, others besides you would be informed,
+and then--Good-night,' she added shortly, dismissing me with an
+imperious gesture.
+
+"'The battle is to-morrow, then,' I replied with a smile, to keep up
+the appearance of indifference I had given to the scene. But as I went
+down the avenue I repeated the words:
+
+"'The battle is to-morrow.'
+
+"Octave's anxiety was equal to Honorine's. The Count and I remained
+together till two in the morning, walking to and fro by the trenches
+of the Bastille, like two generals who, on the eve of a battle,
+calculate all the chances, examine the ground, and perceive that the
+victory must depend on an opportunity to be seized half-way through
+the fight. These two divided beings would each lie awake, one in the
+hope, the other in agonizing dread of reunion. The real dramas of life
+are not in circumstances, but in feelings; they are played in the
+heart, or, if you please, in that vast realm which we ought to call
+the Spiritual World. Octave and Honorine moved and lived altogether in
+the world of lofty spirits.
+
+"I was punctual. At ten next evening I was, for the first time, shown
+into a charming bedroom furnished with white and blue--the nest of
+this wounded dove. The Countess looked at me, and was about to speak,
+but was stricken dumb by my respectful demeanor.
+
+"'Madame la Comtesse,' said I with a grave smile.
+
+"The poor woman, who had risen, dropped back into her chair and
+remained there, sunk in an attitude of grief, which I should have
+liked to see perpetuated by a great painter.
+
+"'You are,' I went on, 'the wife of the noblest and most highly
+respected of men; of a man who is acknowledged to be great, but who is
+far greater in his conduct to you than he is in the eyes of the world.
+You and he are two lofty natures.--Where do you suppose yourself to be
+living?' I asked her.
+
+"'In my own house,' she replied, opening her eyes with a wide stare
+of astonishment.
+
+"'In Count Octave's,' I replied. 'You have been tricked. M.
+Lenormand, the usher of the Court, is not the real owner; he is only a
+screen for your husband. The delightful seclusion you enjoy is the
+Count's work, the money you earn is paid by him, and his protection
+extends to the most trivial details of your existence. Your husband
+has saved you in the eyes of the world; he has assigned plausible
+reasons for your disappearance; he professes to hope that you were not
+lost in the wreck of the _Cecile_, the ship in which you sailed for
+Havana to secure the fortune to be left to you by an old aunt, who
+might have forgotten you; you embarked, escorted by two ladies of her
+family and an old man-servant. The Count says that he has sent agents
+to various spots, and received letters which give him great hopes. He
+takes as many precautions to hide you from all eyes as you take
+yourself. In short, he obeys you . . .'
+
+"'That is enough,' she said. 'I want to know but one thing more. From
+whom have you obtained all these details?'
+
+"'Well, madame, my uncle got a place for a penniless youth as
+secretary to the Commissary of police in this part of Paris. That
+young man told me everything. If you leave this house this evening,
+however stealthily, your husband will know where you are gone, and his
+care will follow you everywhere.--How could a woman so clever as you
+are believe that shopkeepers buy flowers and caps as dear as they sell
+them? Ask a thousand crowns for a bouquet, and you will get it. No
+mother's tenderness was ever more ingenious than your husband's! I
+have learned from the porter of this house that the Count often comes
+behind the fence when all are asleep, to see the glimmer of your
+nightlight! Your large cashmere shawl cost six thousand francs--your
+old-clothes-seller brings you, as second hand, things fresh from the
+best makers. In short, you are living here like Venus in the toils of
+Vulcan; but you are alone in your prison by the devices of a sublime
+magnanimity, sublime for seven years past, and at every hour.'
+
+"The Countess was trembling as a trapped swallow trembles while, as
+you hold it in your hand, it strains its neck to look about it with
+wild eyes. She shook with a nervous spasm, studying me with a defiant
+look. Her dry eyes glittered with a light that was almost hot: still,
+she was a woman! The moment came when her tears forced their way, and
+she wept--not because she was touched, but because she was helpless;
+they were tears of desperation. She had believed herself independent
+and free; marriage weighed on her as the prison cell does on the
+captive.
+
+"'I will go!' she cried through her tears. 'He forces me to it; I
+will go where no one certainly will come after me.'
+
+"'What,' I said, 'you would kill yourself?--Madame, you must have
+some very powerful reasons for not wishing to return to Comte Octave.'
+
+"'Certainly I have!'
+
+"'Well, then, tell them to me; tell them to my uncle. In us you will
+find two devoted advisers. Though in the confessional my uncle is a
+priest, he never is one in a drawing-room. We will hear you; we will
+try to find a solution of the problems you may lay before us; and if
+you are the dupe or the victim of some misapprehension, perhaps we can
+clear the matter up. Your soul, I believe, is pure; but if you have
+done wrong, your fault is fully expiated. . . . At any rate, remember
+that in me you have a most sincere friend. If you should wish to evade
+the Count's tyranny, I will find you the means; he shall never find
+you.'
+
+"'Oh! there is always a convent!' said she.
+
+"'Yes. But the Count, as Minister of State, can procure your
+rejection by every convent in the world. Even though he is powerful, I
+will save you from him--; but--only when you have demonstrated to me
+that you cannot and ought not to return to him. Oh! do not fear that
+you would escape his power only to fall into mine,' I added, noticing
+a glance of horrible suspicion, full of exaggerated dignity. 'You
+shall have peace, solitude, and independence; in short, you shall be
+as free and as little annoyed as if you were an ugly, cross old maid.
+I myself would never be able to see you without your consent.'
+
+"'And how? By what means?'
+
+"'That is my secret. I am not deceiving you, of that you may be sure.
+Prove to me that this is the only life you can lead, that it is
+preferable to that of the Comtesse Octave, rich, admired, in one of
+the finest houses in Paris, beloved by her husband, a happy
+mother . . . and I will decide in your favor.'
+
+"'But,' said she, 'will there never be a man who understands me?'
+
+"'No. And that is why I appeal to religion to decide between us. The
+Cure of the White Friars is a saint, seventy-five years of age. My
+uncle is not a Grand Inquisitor, he is Saint John; but for you he will
+be Fenelon--the Fenelon who said to the Duc de Bourgogne: 'Eat a calf
+on a Friday by all means, monseigneur. But be a Christian.'
+
+"'Nay, nay, monsieur, the convent is my last hope and my only refuge.
+There is none but God who can understand me. No man, not Saint
+Augustine himself, the tenderest of the Fathers of the Church, could
+enter into the scruples of my conscience, which are to me as the
+circles of Dante's hell, whence there is no escape. Another than my
+husband, a different man, however unworthy of the offering, has had
+all my love. No, he has not had it, for he did not take it; I gave it
+him as a mother gives her child a wonderful toy, which it breaks. For
+me there never could be two loves. In some natures love can never be
+on trial; it is, or it is not. When it comes, when it rises up, it is
+complete.--Well, that life of eighteen months was to me a life of
+eighteen years; I threw into it all the faculties of my being, which
+were not impoverished by their effusiveness; they were exhausted by
+that delusive intimacy in which I alone was genuine. For me the cup of
+happiness is not drained, nor empty; and nothing can refill it, for it
+is broken. I am out of the fray; I have no weapons left. Having thus
+utterly abandoned myself, what am I?--the leavings of a feast. I had
+but one name bestowed on me, Honorine, as I had but one heart. My
+husband had the young girl, a worthless lover had the woman--there is
+nothing left!--Then let myself be loved! that is the great idea you
+mean to utter to me. Oh! but I still am something, and I rebel at the
+idea of being a prostitute! Yes, by the light of the conflagration I
+saw clearly; and I tell you--well, I could imagine surrendering to
+another man's love, but to Octave's?--No, never.'
+
+"'Ah! you love him,' I said.
+
+"'I esteem him, respect him, venerate him; he never has done me the
+smallest hurt; he is kind, he is tender; but I can never more love
+him. However,' she went on, 'let us talk no more of this. Discussion
+makes everything small. I will express my notions on this subject in
+writing to you, for at this moment they are suffocating me; I am
+feverish, my feet are standing in the ashes of my Paraclete. All that
+I see, these things which I believed I had earned by my labor, now
+remind me of everything I wish to forget. Ah! I must fly from hence as
+I fled from my home.'
+
+"'Where will you go?' I asked. 'Can a woman exist unprotected? At
+thirty, in all the glory of your beauty, rich in powers of which you
+have no suspicion, full of tenderness to be bestowed, are you prepared
+to live in the wilderness where I could hide you?--Be quite easy. The
+Count, who for nine years has never allowed himself to be seen here,
+will never go there without your permission. You have his sublime
+devotion of nine years as a guarantee for your tranquillity. You may
+therefore discuss the future in perfect confidence with my uncle and
+me. My uncle has as much influence as a Minister of State. So compose
+yourself; do not exaggerate your misfortune. A priest whose hair has
+grown white in the exercise of his functions is not a boy; you will be
+understood by him to whom every passion has been confided for nearly
+fifty years now, and who weighs in his hands the ponderous heart of
+kings and princes. If he is stern under his stole, in the presence of
+your flowers he will be as tender as they are, and as indulgent as his
+Divine Master.'
+
+"I left the Countess at midnight; she was apparently calm, but
+depressed, and had some secret purpose which no perspicacity could
+guess. I found the Count a few paces off, in the Rue Saint-Maur. Drawn
+by an irresistible attraction, he had quitted the spot on the
+Boulevards where we had agreed to meet.
+
+"'What a night my poor child will go through!' he exclaimed, when I
+had finished my account of the scene that had just taken place.
+'Supposing I were to go to her!' he added; 'supposing she were to see
+me suddenly?'
+
+"'At this moment she is capable of throwing herself out of the
+window,' I replied. 'The Countess is one of those Lucretias who could
+not survive any violence, even if it were done by a man into whose
+arms she could throw herself.'
+
+"'You are young,' he answered; 'you do not know that in a soul tossed
+by such dreadful alternatives the will is like waters of a lake lashed
+by a tempest; the wind changes every instant, and the waves are driven
+now to one shore, now to the other. During this night the chances are
+quite as great that on seeing me Honorine might rush into my arms as
+that she would throw herself out of the window.'
+
+"'And you would accept the equal chances,' said I.
+
+"'Well, come,' said he, 'I have at home, to enable me to wait till
+to-morrow, a dose of opium which Desplein prepared for me to send me
+to sleep without any risk!'
+
+"Next day at noon Gobain brought me a letter, telling me that the
+Countess had gone to bed at six, worn out with fatigue, and that,
+having taken a soothing draught prepared by the chemist, she had now
+fallen asleep.
+
+"This is her letter, of which I kept a copy--for you, mademoiselle,"
+said the Consul, addressing Camille, "know all the resources of art,
+the tricks of style, and the efforts made in their compositions by
+writers who do not lack skill; but you will acknowledge that
+literature could never find such language in its assumed pathos; there
+is nothing so terrible as truth. Here is the letter written by this
+woman, or rather by this anguish:--
+
+"'MONSIEUR MAURICE,--
+
+"'I know all your uncle would say to me; he is not better informed
+than my own conscience. Conscience is the interpreter of God to man. I
+know that if I am not reconciled to Octave, I shall be damned; that is
+the sentence of religious law. Civil law condemns me to obey, cost
+what it may. If my husband does not reject me, the world will regard
+me as pure, as virtuous, whatever I may have done. Yes, that much is
+sublime in marriage; society ratifies the husband's forgiveness; but
+it forgets that the forgiveness must be accepted. Legally,
+religiously, and from the world's point of view I ought to go back to
+Octave. Keeping only to the human aspect of the question, is it not
+cruel to refuse him happiness, to deprive him of children, to wipe his
+name out of the Golden Book and the list of peers? My sufferings, my
+repugnance, my feelings, all my egoism--for I know that I am an
+egoist--ought to be sacrificed to the family. I shall be a mother; the
+caresses of my child will wipe away many tears! I shall be very happy; I
+certainly shall be much looked up to. I shall ride, haughty and wealthy,
+in a handsome carriage! I shall have servants and a fine house, and be
+the queen of as many parties as there are weeks in the year. The world
+will receive me handsomely. I shall not have to climb up again to the
+heaven of aristocracy, I shall never have come down from it. So God, the
+law, society are all in accord.
+
+"'"What are you rebelling against?" I am asked from the height of
+heaven, from the pulpit, from the judge's bench, and from the throne,
+whose august intervention may at need be invoked by the Count. Your
+uncle, indeed, at need, would speak to me of a certain celestial grace
+which will flood my heart when I know the pleasure of doing my duty.
+
+"'God, the law, the world, and Octave all wish me to live, no doubt.
+Well, if there is no other difficulty, my reply cuts the knot: I will
+not live. I will become white and innocent again; for I will lie in my
+shroud, white with the blameless pallor of death. This is not in the
+least "mulish obstinacy." That mulish obstinacy of which you jestingly
+accused me is in a woman the result of confidence, of a vision of the
+future. Though my husband, sublimely generous, may forget all, I shall
+not forget. Does forgetfulness depend on our will? When a widow
+re-marries, love makes a girl of her; she marries a man she loves. But
+I cannot love the Count. It all lies in that, do not you see?
+
+"'Every time my eyes met his I should see my sin in them, even when
+his were full of love. The greatness of his generosity would be the
+measure of the greatness of my crime. My eyes, always uneasy, would be
+for ever reading an invisible condemnation. My heart would be full of
+confused and struggling memories; marriage can never move me to the
+cruel rapture, the mortal delirium of passion. I should kill my
+husband by my coldness, by comparisons which he would guess, though
+hidden in the depths of my conscience. Oh! on the day when I should
+read a trace of involuntary, even of suppressed reproach in a furrow
+on his brow, in a saddened look, in some imperceptible gesture,
+nothing could hold me: I should be lying with a fractured skull on the
+pavement, and find that less hard than my husband. It might be my own
+over-susceptibility that would lead me to this horrible but welcome
+death; I might die the victim of an impatient mood in Octave caused by
+some matter of business, or be deceived by some unjust suspicion.
+Alas! I might even mistake some proof of love for a sign of contempt!
+
+"'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I
+doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly
+unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known
+raptures branded on me with fire, which are my shame, but which I
+cannot forget.
+
+"'Have I shown you enough of my heart? No one, monsieur, can convince
+me that love may be renewed, for I neither can nor will accept love
+from any one. A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty
+wife is like a flower that had been walked over. You, who are a
+florist, you know whether it is ever possible to restore the broken
+stem, to revive the faded colors, to make the sap flow again in the
+tender vessels of which the whole vegetative function lies in their
+perfect rigidity. If some botanist should attempt the operation, could
+his genius smooth out the folds of the bruised corolla? If he could
+remake a flower, he would be God! God alone can remake me! I am
+drinking the bitter cup of expiation; but as I drink it I painfully
+spell out this sentence: Expiation is not annihilation.
+
+"'In my little house, alone, I eat my bread soaked in tears; but no
+one sees me eat nor sees me weep. If I go back to Octave, I must give
+up my tears--they would offend him. Oh! monsieur, how many virtues
+must a woman tread under foot, not to give herself, but to restore
+herself to a betrayed husband? Who could count them? God alone; for He
+alone can know and encourage the horrible refinements at which the
+angels must turn pale. Nay, I will go further. A woman has courage in
+the presence of her husband if he knows nothing; she shows a sort of
+fierce strength in her hypocrisy; she deceives him to secure him
+double happiness. But common knowledge is surely degrading. Supposing
+I could exchange humiliation for ecstasy? Would not Octave at last
+feel that my consent was sheer depravity? Marriage is based on esteem,
+on sacrifices on both sides; but neither Octave nor I could esteem
+each other the day after our reunion. He would have disgraced me by a
+love like that of an old man for a courtesan, and I should for ever
+feel the shame of being a chattel instead of a lady. I should
+represent pleasure, and not virtue, in his house. These are the bitter
+fruits of such a sin. I have made myself a bed where I can only toss
+on burning coals, a sleepless pillow.
+
+"'Here, when I suffer, I bless my sufferings; I say to God, "I thank
+Thee!" But in my husband's house I should be full of terror, tasting
+joys to which I have no right.
+
+"'All this, monsieur, is not argument; it is the feeling of a soul
+made vast and hollow by seven years of suffering. Finally, must I make
+a horrible confession? I shall always feel at my bosom the lips of a
+child conceived in rapture and joy, and in the belief in happiness, of
+a child I nursed for seven months, that I shall bear in my womb all
+the days of my life. If other children should draw their nourishment
+from me, they would drink in tears mingling with the milk, and turning
+it sour. I seem a light thing, you regard me as a child--Ah yes! I
+have a child's memory, the memory which returns to us on the verge of
+the tomb. So, you see, there is not a situation in that beautiful life
+to which the world and my husband's love want to recall me, which is
+not a false position, which does not cover a snare or reveal a
+precipice down which I must fall, torn by pitiless rocks. For five
+years now I have been wandering in the sandy desert of the future
+without finding a place convenient to repent in, because my soul is
+possessed by true repentance.
+
+"'Religion has its answers ready to all this, and I know them by
+heart. This suffering, these difficulties, are my punishment, she
+says, and God will give me strength to endure them. This, monsieur, is
+an argument to certain pious souls gifted with an energy which I have
+not. I have made my choice between this hell, where God does not
+forbid my blessing Him, and the hell that awaits me under Count
+Octave's roof.
+
+"'One word more. If I were still a girl, with the experience I now
+have, my husband is the man I should choose; but that is the very
+reason of my refusal. I could not bear to blush before that man. What!
+I should be always on my knees, he always standing upright; and if we
+were to exchange positions, I should scorn him! I will not be better
+treated by him in consequence of my sin. The angel who might venture
+under such circumstances on certain liberties which are permissible
+when both are equally blameless, is not on earth; he dwells in heaven!
+Octave is full of delicate feeling, I know; but even in his soul
+(which, however generous, is a man's soul after all) there is no
+guarantee for the new life I should lead with him.
+
+"'Come then, and tell me where I may find the solitude, the peace,
+the silence, so kindly to irreparable woes, which you promised me.'
+
+"After making this copy of the letter to preserve it complete, I went
+to the Rue Payenne. Anxiety had conquered the power of opium. Octave
+was walking up and down his garden like a madman.
+
+"'Answer that!' said I, giving him his wife's letter. 'Try to
+reassure the modesty of experience. It is rather more difficult than
+conquering the modesty of ignorance, which curiosity helps to betray.'
+
+"'She is mine!' cried the Count, whose face expressed joy as he went
+on reading the letter.
+
+"He signed to me with his hand to leave him to himself. I understood
+that extreme happiness and extreme pain obey the same laws; I went in
+to receive Madame de Courteville and Amelie, who were to dine with the
+Count that day. However handsome Mademoiselle de Courteville might be,
+I felt, on seeing her once more, that love has three aspects, and that
+the women who can inspire us with perfect love are very rare. As I
+involuntarily compared Amelie with Honorine, I found the erring wife
+more attractive than the pure girl. To Honorine's heart fidelity had
+not been a duty, but the inevitable; while Amelie would serenely
+pronounce the most solemn promises without knowing their purport or to
+what they bound her. The crushed, the dead woman, so to speak, the
+sinner to be reinstated, seemed to me sublime; she incited the special
+generosities of a man's nature; she demanded all the treasures of the
+heart, all the resources of strength; she filled his life and gave the
+zest of a conflict to happiness; whereas Amelie, chaste and confiding,
+would settle down into the sphere of peaceful motherhood, where the
+commonplace must be its poetry, and where my mind would find no
+struggle and no victory.
+
+"Of the plains of Champagne and the snowy, storm-beaten but sublime
+Alps, what young man would choose the chalky, monotonous level? No;
+such comparisons are fatal and wrong on the threshold of the Mairie.
+Alas! only the experience of life can teach us that marriage excludes
+passion, that a family cannot have its foundation on the tempests of
+love. After having dreamed of impossible love, with its infinite
+caprices, after having tasted the tormenting delights of the ideal, I
+saw before me modest reality. Pity me, for what could be expected! At
+five-and-twenty I did not trust myself; but I took a manful
+resolution.
+
+"I went back to the Count to announce the arrival of his relations,
+and I saw him grown young again in the reflected light of hope.
+
+"'What ails you, Maurice?' said he, struck by my changed expression.
+
+"'Monsieur le Comte----'
+
+"'No longer Octave? You, to whom I shall owe my life, my
+happiness----'
+
+"'My dear Octave, if you should succeed in bringing the Countess back
+to her duty, I have studied her well'--(he looked at me as Othello
+must have looked at Iago when Iago first contrived to insinuate a
+suspicion into the Moor's mind)--'she must never see me again; she
+must never know that Maurice was your secretary. Never mention my name
+to her, or all will be undone. . . . You have got me an appointment as
+Maitre des Requetes--well, get me instead some diplomatic post abroad,
+a consulship, and do not think of my marrying Amelie.--Oh! do not be
+uneasy,' I added, seeing him draw himself up, 'I will play my part to
+the end.'
+
+"'Poor boy!' said he, taking my hand, which he pressed, while he kept
+back the tears that were starting to his eyes.
+
+"'You gave me the gloves,' I said, laughing, 'but I have not put them
+on; that is all.'
+
+"We then agreed as to what I was to do that evening at Honorine's
+house, whither I presently returned. It was now August; the day had
+been hot and stormy, but the storm hung overhead, the sky was like
+copper; the scent of the flowers was heavy, I felt as if I were in an
+oven, and caught myself wishing that the Countess might have set out
+for the Indies; but she was sitting on a wooden bench shaped like a
+sofa, under an arbor, in a loose dress of white muslin fastened with
+blue bows, her hair unadorned in waving bands over her cheeks, her
+feet on a small wooden stool, and showing a little way beyond her
+skirt. She did not rise; she showed me with her hand to the seat by
+her side, saying:
+
+"'Now, is not life at a deadlock for me?'
+
+"'Life as you have made it, I replied. 'But not the life I propose to
+make for you; for, if you choose, you may be very happy. . . .'
+
+"'How?' said she; her whole person was a question.
+
+"'Your letter is in the Count's hands.'
+
+"Honorine started like a frightened doe, sprang to a few paces off,
+walked down the garden, turned about, remained standing for some
+minutes, and finally went in to sit alone in the drawing-room, where I
+joined her, after giving her time to get accustomed to the pain of
+this poniard thrust.
+
+"'You--a friend? Say rather a traitor! A spy, perhaps, sent by my
+husband.'
+
+"Instinct in women is as strong as the perspicacity of great men.
+
+"'You wanted an answer to your letter, did you not? And there was but
+one man in the world who could write it. You must read the reply, my
+dear Countess; and if after reading it you still find that your life
+is a deadlock, the spy will prove himself a friend; I will place you
+in a convent whence the Count's power cannot drag you. But, before
+going there, let us consider the other side of the question. There is
+a law, alike divine and human, which even hatred affects to obey, and
+which commands us not to condemn the accused without hearing his
+defence. Till now you have passed condemnation, as children do, with
+your ears stopped. The devotion of seven years has its claims. So you
+must read the answer your husband will send you. I have forwarded to
+him, through my uncle, a copy of your letter, and my uncle asked him
+what his reply would be if his wife wrote him a letter in such terms.
+Thus you are not compromised. He will himself bring the Count's
+answer. In the presence of that saintly man, and in mine, out of
+respect for your own dignity, you must read it, or you will be no
+better than a wilful, passionate child. You must make this sacrifice
+to the world, to the law, and to God.'
+
+"As she saw in this concession no attack on her womanly resolve, she
+consented. All the labor or four or five months had been building up
+to this moment. But do not the Pyramids end in a point on which a bird
+may perch? The Count had set all his hopes on this supreme instant,
+and he had reached it.
+
+"In all my life I remember nothing more formidable than my uncle's
+entrance into that little Pompadour drawing-room, at ten that evening.
+The fine head, with its silver hair thrown into relief by the entirely
+black dress, and the divinely calm face, had a magical effect on the
+Comtesse Honorine; she had the feeling of cool balm on her wounds, and
+beamed in the reflection of that virtue which gave light without
+knowing it.
+
+"'Monsieur the Cure of the White Friars,' said old Gobain.
+
+"'Are you come, uncle, with a message of happiness and peace?' said
+I.
+
+"'Happiness and peace are always to be found in obedience to the
+precepts of the Church,' replied my uncle, and he handed the Countess
+the following letter:--
+
+"'MY DEAR HONORINE,--
+
+"'If you had but done me the favor of trusting me, if you had read
+the letter I wrote to you five years since, you would have spared
+yourself five years of useless labor, and of privations which have
+grieved me deeply. In it I proposed an arrangement of which the
+stipulations will relieve all your fears, and make our domestic life
+possible. I have much to reproach myself with, and in seven years of
+sorrow I have discovered all my errors. I misunderstood marriage. I
+failed to scent danger when it threatened you. An angel was in the
+house. The Lord bid me guard it well! The Lord has punished me for my
+audacious confidence.
+
+"'You cannot give yourself a single lash without striking me. Have
+mercy on me, my dear Honorine. I so fully appreciated your
+susceptibilities that I would not bring you back to the old house in
+the Rue Payenne, where I can live without you, but which I could not
+bear to see again with you. I am decorating, with great pleasure,
+another house, in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, to which, in hope, I
+conduct not a wife whom I owe to her ignorance of life, and secured to
+me by law, but a sister who will allow me to press on her brow such a
+kiss as a father gives the daughter he blesses every day.
+
+"'Will you bereave me of the right I have conquered from your
+despair--that of watching more closely over your needs, your pleasures,
+your life even? Women have one heart always on their side, always
+abounding in excuses--their mother's; you never knew any mother but my
+mother, who would have brought you back to me. But how is it that you
+never guessed that I had for you the heart of a mother, both of my
+mother and of your own? Yes, dear, my affection is neither mean nor
+grasping; it is one of those which will never let any annoyance last
+long enough to pucker the brow of the child it worships. What can you
+think of the companion of your childhood, Honorine, if you believe him
+capable of accepting kisses given in trembling, of living between
+delight and anxiety? Do not fear that you will be exposed to the laments
+of a suppliant passion; I would not want you back until I felt certain
+of my own strength to leave you in perfect freedom.
+
+"'Your solitary pride has exaggerated the difficulties. You may, if
+you will, look on at the life of a brother, or of a father, without
+either suffering or joy; but you will find neither mockery nor
+indifference, nor have any doubt as to his intentions. The warmth of
+the atmosphere in which you live will be always equable and genial,
+without tempests, without a possible squall. If, later, when you feel
+secure that you are as much at home as in your own little house, you
+desire to try some other elements of happiness, pleasures, or
+amusements, you can expand their circle at your will. The tenderness
+of a mother knows neither contempt nor pity. What is it? Love without
+desire. Well, in me admiration shall hide every sentiment in which you
+might see an offence.
+
+"'Thus, living side by side, we may both be magnanimous. In you the
+kindness of a sister, the affectionate thoughtfulness of a friend,
+will satisfy the ambition of him who wishes to be your life's
+companion; and you may measure his tenderness by the care he will take
+to conceal it. Neither you nor I will be jealous of the past, for we
+may each acknowledge that the other has sense enough to look only
+straight forward.
+
+"'Thus you will be at home in your new house exactly as you are in
+the Rue Saint-Maur; unapproachable, alone, occupied as you please,
+living by your own law; but having in addition the legitimate
+protection, of which you are now exacting the most chivalrous labors
+of love, with the consideration which lends so much lustre to a woman,
+and the fortune which will allow of your doing many good works.
+Honorine, when you long for an unnecessary absolution, you have only
+to ask for it; it will not be forced upon you by the Church or by the
+Law; it will wait on your pride, on your own impulsion. My wife might
+indeed have to fear all the things you dread; but not my friend and
+sister, towards whom I am bound to show every form and refinement of
+politeness. To see you happy is enough happiness for me; I have proved
+this for the seven years past. The guarantee for this, Honorine, is to
+be seen in all the flowers made by you, carefully preserved, and
+watered by my tears. Like the _quipos_, the tally cords of the
+Peruvians, they are the record of our sorrows.
+
+"'If this secret compact does not suit you, my child, I have begged
+the saintly man who takes charge of this letter not to say a word in
+my behalf. I will not owe your return to the terrors threatened by the
+Church, nor to the bidding of the Law. I will not accept the simple
+and quiet happiness that I ask from any one but yourself. If you
+persist in condemning me to the lonely life, bereft even of a
+fraternal smile, which I have led for nine years, if you remain in
+your solitude and show no sign, my will yields to yours. Understand me
+perfectly: you shall be no more troubled that you have been until this
+day. I will get rid of the crazy fellow who has meddled in your
+concerns, and has perhaps caused you some annoyance . . .'
+
+"'Monsieur,' said Honorine, folding up the letter, which she placed
+in her bosom, and looking at my uncle, 'thank you very much. I will
+avail myself of Monsieur le Comte's permission to remain here----'
+
+"'Ah!' I exclaimed.
+
+"This exclamation made my uncle look at me uneasily, and won from the
+Countess a mischievous glance, which enlightened me as to her motives.
+
+"Honorine had wanted to ascertain whether I were an actor, a bird
+snarer; and I had the melancholy satisfaction of deceiving her by my
+exclamation, which was one of those cries from the heart which women
+understand so well.
+
+"'Ah, Maurice,' said she, 'you know how to love.'
+
+"The light that flashed in my eyes was another reply which would have
+dissipated the Countess' uneasiness if she still had any. Thus the
+Count found me useful to the very last.
+
+"Honorine then took out the Count's letter again to finish reading it.
+My uncle signed to me, and I rose.
+
+"'Let us leave the Countess,' said he.
+
+"'You are going already Maurice?' she said, without looking at me.
+
+"She rose, and still reading, followed us to the door. On the
+threshold she took my hand, pressed it very affectionately, and said,
+'We shall meet again . . .'
+
+"'No,' I replied, wringing her hand, so that she cried out. 'You love
+your husband. I leave to-morrow.'
+
+"And I rushed away, leaving my uncle, to whom she said:
+
+"'Why, what is the matter with your nephew?'
+
+"The good Abbe completed my work by pointing to his head and heart, as
+much as to say, 'He is mad, madame; you must forgive him!' and with
+all the more truth, because he really thought it.
+
+"Six days after, I set out with an appointment as vice-consul in
+Spain, in a large commercial town, where I could quickly qualify to
+rise in the career of a consul, to which I now restricted my ambition.
+After I had established myself there, I received this letter from the
+Count:--
+
+"'MY DEAR MAURICE,--
+
+"'If I were happy, I should not write to you, but I have entered on a
+new life of suffering. I have grown young again in my desires, with
+all the impatience of a man of forty, and the prudence of a
+diplomatist, who has learned to moderate his passion. When you left I
+had not yet been admitted to the _pavillon_ in the Rue Saint-Maur, but
+a letter had promised me that I should have permission--the mild and
+melancholy letter of a woman who dreaded the agitations of a meeting.
+After waiting for more than a month, I made bold to call, and desired
+Gobain to inquire whether I could be received. I sat down in a chair
+in the avenue near the lodge, my head buried in my hands, and there I
+remained for almost an hour.
+
+"'"Madame had to dress," said Gobain, to hide Honorine's hesitancy
+under a pride of appearance which was flattering to me.
+
+"'During a long quarter of an hour we both of us were possessed by an
+involuntary nervous trembling as great as that which seizes a speaker
+on the platform, and we spoke to each other sacred phrases, like those
+of persons taken by surprise who "make believe" a conversation.
+
+"'"You see, Honorine," said I, my eyes full of tears, "the ice is
+broken, and I am so tremulous with happiness that you must forgive the
+incoherency of my language. It will be so for a long time yet."
+
+"'"There is no crime in being in love with your wife," said she with
+a forced smile.
+
+"'"Do me the favor," said I, "no longer to work as you do. I have
+heard from Madame Gobain that for three weeks you have been living on
+your savings; you have sixty thousand francs a year of your own, and
+if you cannot give me back your heart, at least do not abandon your
+fortune to me."
+
+"'"I have long known your kindness," said she.
+
+"'"Though you should prefer to remain here," said I, "and to
+preserve your independence; though the most ardent love should find no
+favor in your eyes, still, do not toil."
+
+"'I gave her three certificates for twelve thousand francs a year
+each; she took them, opened them languidly, and after reading them
+through she gave me only a look as my reward. She fully understood
+that I was not offering her money, but freedom.
+
+"'"I am conquered," said she, holding out her hand, which I kissed.
+"Come and see me as often as you like."
+
+"'So she had done herself a violence in receiving me. Next day I
+found her armed with affected high spirits, and it took two months of
+habit before I saw her in her true character. But then it was like a
+delicious May, a springtime of love that gave me ineffable bliss; she
+was no longer afraid; she was studying me. Alas! when I proposed that
+she should go to England to return ostensibly to me, to our home, that
+she should resume her rank and live in our new residence, she was
+seized with alarm.
+
+"'"Why not live always as we are?" she said.
+
+"'I submitted without saying a word.
+
+"'"Is she making an experiment?" I asked myself as I left her. On my
+way from my own house to the Rue Saint-Maur thoughts of love had
+swelled in my heart, and I had said to myself, like a young man, "This
+evening she will yield."
+
+"'All my real or affected force was blown to the winds by a smile, by a
+command from those proud, calm eyes, untouched by passion. I remembered
+the terrible words you once quoted to me, "Lucretia's dagger wrote in
+letters of blood the watchword of woman's charter--Liberty!" and they
+froze me. I felt imperatively how necessary to me was Honorine's
+consent, and how impossible it was to wring it from her. Could she guess
+the storms that distracted me when I left as when I came?
+
+"'At last I painted my situation in a letter to her, giving up the
+attempt to speak of it. Honorine made no answer, and she was so sad
+that I made as though I had not written. I was deeply grieved by the
+idea that I could have distressed her; she read my heart and forgave
+me. And this was how. Three days ago she received me, for the first
+time, in her own blue-and-white room. It was bright with flowers,
+dressed, and lighted up. Honorine was in a dress that made her
+bewitching. Her hair framed that face that you know in its light
+curls; and in it were some sprays of Cape heath; she wore a white
+muslin gown, a white sash with long floating ends. You know what she
+is in such simplicity, but that day she was a bride, the Honorine of
+long past days. My joy was chilled at once, for her face was terribly
+grave; there were fires beneath the ice.
+
+"'"Octave," she said, "I will return as your wife when you will. But
+understand clearly that this submission has its dangers. I can be
+resigned----"
+
+"'I made a movement.
+
+"'"Yes," she went on, "I understand: resignation offends you, and
+you want what I cannot give--Love. Religion and pity led me to
+renounce my vow of solitude; you are here!" She paused.
+
+"'"At first," she went on, "you asked no more. Now you demand your
+wife. Well, here I give you Honorine, such as she is, without
+deceiving you as to what she will be.--What shall I be? A mother? I
+hope it. Believe me, I hope it eagerly. Try to change me; you have my
+consent; but if I should die, my dear, do not curse my memory, and do
+not set down to obstinacy what I should call the worship of the Ideal,
+if it were not more natural to call the indefinable feeling which must
+kill me the worship of the Divine! The future will be nothing to me;
+it will be your concern; consult your own mind."
+
+"'And she sat down in the calm attitude you used to admire, and
+watched me turning pale with the pain she had inflicted. My blood ran
+cold. On seeing the effect of her words she took both my hands, and,
+holding them in her own, she said:
+
+"'"Octave, I do love you, but not in the way you wish to be loved. I
+love your soul. . . . Still, understand that I love you enough to die
+in your service like an Eastern slave, and without a regret. It will
+be my expiation."
+
+"'She did more; she knelt before me on a cushion, and in a spirit of
+sublime charity she said:
+
+"'"And perhaps I shall not die!"
+
+"'For two months now I have been struggling with myself. What shall I
+do? My heart is too full; I therefore seek a friend, and send out this
+cry, "What shall I do?"'
+
+"I did not answer this letter. Two months later the newspapers
+announced the return on board an English vessel of the Comtesse
+Octave, restored to her family after adventures by land and sea,
+invented with sufficient probability to arouse no contradiction.
+
+"When I moved to Genoa I received a formal announcement of the happy
+event of the birth of a son to the Count and Countess. I held that
+letter in my hand for two hours, sitting on this terrace--on this
+bench. Two months after, urged by Octave, by M. de Grandville, and
+Monsieur de Serizy, my kind friends, and broken by the death of my
+uncle, I agreed to take a wife.
+
+"Six months after the revolution of July I received this letter, which
+concludes the story of this couple:--
+
+"'MONSIEUR MAURICE,--I am dying though I am a mother--perhaps because
+I am a mother. I have played my part as a wife well; I have deceived
+my husband. I have had happiness not less genuine than the tears shed
+by actresses on the stage. I am dying for society, for the family, for
+marriage, as the early Christians died for God! I know not of what I
+am dying, and I am honestly trying to find out, for I am not perverse;
+but I am bent on explaining my malady to you--you who brought that
+heavenly physician your uncle, at whose word I surrendered. He was my
+director; I nursed him in his last illness, and he showed me the way
+to heaven, bidding me persevere in my duty.
+
+"'And I have done my duty.
+
+"'I do not blame those who forget. I admire them as strong and
+necessary natures; but I have the malady of memory! I have not been
+able twice to feel that love of the heart which identifies a woman
+with the man she loves. To the last moment, as you know, I cried to
+your heart, in the confessional, and to my husband, "Have mercy!" But
+there was no mercy. Well, and I am dying, dying with stupendous
+courage. No courtesan was ever more gay than I. My poor Octave is
+happy; I let his love feed on the illusions of my heart. I throw all
+my powers into this terrible masquerade; the actress is applauded,
+feasted, smothered in flowers; but the invisible rival comes every day
+to seek its prey--a fragment of my life. I am rent and I smile. I
+smile on two children, but it is the elder, the dead one, that will
+triumph! I told you so before. The dead child calls me, and I am going
+to him.
+
+"'The intimacy of marriage without love is a position in which my
+soul feels degraded every hour. I can never weep or give myself up to
+dreams but when I am alone. The exigencies of society, the care of my
+child, and that of Octave's happiness never leave me a moment to
+refresh myself, to renew my strength, as I could in my solitude. The
+incessant need for watchfulness startles my heart with constant
+alarms. I have not succeeded in implanting in my soul the sharp-eared
+vigilance that lies with facility, and has the eyes of a lynx. It is
+not the lip of one I love that drinks my tears and kisses them; my
+burning eyes are cooled with water, and not with tender lips. It is my
+soul that acts a part, and that perhaps is why I am dying! I lock up
+my griefs with so much care that nothing is to be seen of it; it must
+eat into something, and it has attacked my life.
+
+"'I said to the doctors, who discovered my secret, "Make me die of
+some plausible complaint, or I shall drag my husband with me."
+
+"'So it is quite understood by M. Desplein, Bianchon, and myself that I
+am dying of the softening of some bone which science has fully
+described. Octave believes that I adore him, do you understand? So I am
+afraid lest he should follow me. I now write to beg you in that case to
+be the little Count's guardian. You will find with this a codicil in
+which I have expressed my wish; but do not produce it excepting in case
+of need, for perhaps I am fatuously vain. My devotion may perhaps leave
+Octave inconsolable but willing to live.--Poor Octave! I wish him a
+better wife than I am, for he deserves to be well loved.
+
+"'Since my spiritual spy is married, I bid him remember what the
+florist of the Rue Saint-Maur hereby bequeaths to him as a lesson: May
+your wife soon be a mother! Fling her into the vulgarest materialism
+of household life; hinder her from cherishing in her heart the
+mysterious flower of the Ideal--of that heavenly perfection in which I
+believed, that enchanted blossom with glorious colors, and whose
+perfume disgusts us with reality. I am a Saint-Theresa who has not
+been suffered to live on ecstasy in the depths of a convent, with the
+Holy Infant, and a spotless winged angel to come and go as she wished.
+
+"'You saw me happy among my beloved flowers. I did not tell you all:
+I saw love budding under your affected madness, and I concealed from
+you my thoughts, my poetry; I did not admit you to my kingdom of
+beauty. Well, well; you will love my child for love of me if he should
+one day lose his poor father. Keep my secrets as the grave will keep
+them. Do not mourn for me; I have been dead this many a day, if Saint
+Bernard was right in saying that where there is no more love there is
+no more life.'"
+
+"And the Countess died," said the Consul, putting away the letters and
+locking the pocket-book.
+
+"Is the Count still living?" asked the Ambassador, "for since the
+revolution of July he has disappeared from the political stage."
+
+"Do you remember, Monsieur de Lora," said the Consul-General, "having
+seen me going to the steamboat with----"
+
+"A white-haired man! an old man?" said the painter.
+
+"An old man of forty-five, going in search of health and amusement in
+Southern Italy. That old man was my poor friend, my patron, passing
+through Genoa to take leave of me and place his will in my hands. He
+appoints me his son's guardian. I had no occasion to tell him of
+Honorine's wishes."
+
+"Does he suspect himself of murder?" said Mademoiselle des Touches to
+the Baron de l'Hostal.
+
+"He suspects the truth," replied the Consul, "and that is what is
+killing him. I remained on board the steam packet that was to take him
+to Naples till it was out of the roadstead; a small boat brought me
+back. We sat for some little time taking leave of each other--for
+ever, I fear. God only knows how much we love the confidant of our
+love when she who inspired it is no more.
+
+"'That man,' said Octave, 'holds a charm and wears an aureole.' the
+Count went to the prow and looked down on the Mediterranean. It
+happened to be fine, and, moved no doubt by the spectacle, he spoke
+these last words: 'Ought we not, in the interests of human nature, to
+inquire what is the irresistible power which leads us to sacrifice an
+exquisite creature to the most fugitive of all pleasures, and in spite
+of our reason? In my conscience I heard cries. Honorine was not alone
+in her anguish. And yet I would have it! . . . I am consumed by
+remorse. In the Rue Payenne I was dying of the joys I had not; now I
+shall die in Italy of the joys I have had. . . . Wherein lay the
+discord between two natures, equally noble, I dare assert?'"
+
+For some minutes profound silence reigned on the terrace.
+
+Then the Consul, turning to the two women, asked, "Was she virtuous?"
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches rose, took the Consul's arm, went a few steps
+away, and said to him:
+
+"Are not men wrong too when they come to us and make a young girl a
+wife while cherishing at the bottom of their heart some angelic image,
+and comparing us to those unknown rivals, to perfections often
+borrowed from a remembrance, and always finding us wanting?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, you would be right if marriage were based on passion;
+and that was the mistake of those two, who will soon be no more.
+Marriage with heart-deep love on both sides would be Paradise."
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches turned from the Consul, and was immediately
+joined by Claude Vignon, who said in her ear:
+
+"A bit of a coxcomb is M. de l'Hostal."
+
+"No," replied she, whispering to Claude these words: "for he has not
+yet guessed that Honorine would have loved him.--Oh!" she exclaimed,
+seeing the Consul's wife approaching, "his wife was listening! Unhappy
+man!"
+
+Eleven was striking by all the clocks, and the guests went home on
+foot along the seashore.
+
+"Still, that is not life," said Mademoiselle des Touches. "That woman
+was one of the rarest, and perhaps the most extraordinary exceptions
+in intellect--a pearl! Life is made up of various incidents, of pain
+and pleasure alternately. The Paradise of Dante, that sublime
+expression of the ideal, that perpetual blue, is to be found only in
+the soul; to ask it of the facts of life is a luxury against which
+nature protests every hour. To such souls as those the six feet of a
+cell, and the kneeling chair are all they need."
+
+"You are right," said Leon de Lora; "but good-for-nothing as I may be,
+I cannot help admiring a woman who is capable, as that one was, of
+living by the side of a studio, under a painter's roof, and never
+coming down, nor seeing the world, nor dipping her feet in the street
+mud."
+
+"Such a thing has been known--for a few months," said Claude Vignon,
+with deep irony.
+
+"Comtesse Honorine is not unique of her kind," replied the Ambassador
+to Mademoiselle des Touches. "A man, nay, and a politician, a bitter
+writer, was the object of such a passion; and the pistol shot which
+killed him hit not him alone; the woman who loved lived like a nun
+ever after."
+
+"Then there are yet some great souls in this age!" said Camille
+Maupin, and she stood for some minutes pensively leaning on the
+balustrade of the quay.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Bauvan, Comte Octave de
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Magic Skin
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Desplein
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cousin Pons
+  Lost Illusions
+  The Thirteen
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Fontanon, Abbe
+  A Second Home
+  The Government Clerks
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Gaudissart, Felix
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Cousin Pons
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Gaudissart the Great
+
+Gaudron, Abbe
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Start in Life
+
+Granville, Vicomte de (later Comte)
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  A Second Home
+  Farewell (Adieu)
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Lora, Leon de
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Start in Life
+  Pierre Grassou
+  Cousin Betty
+  Beatrix
+
+Loraux, Abbe
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Cesar Birotteau
+
+Popinot, Jean-Jules
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Middle Classes
+
+Serizy, Comte Hugret de
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des
+  Beatrix
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Beatrix
+  The Muse of the Department
+
+Vignon, Claude
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Honorine
+  Beatrix
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Honorine, by Honore de Balzac
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+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HONORINE ***
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diff --git a/old/20061210-1683.zip b/old/20061210-1683.zip
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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Honorine, by Honore de Balzac**
+#59 in our series by Balzac
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
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+Honorine
+
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+Translated by Clara Bell
+
+March, 1998  [Etext #1683]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Honorine, by Honore de Balzac**
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+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+and John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+
+
+
+
+
+HONORINE
+
+by HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+Translated By
+Clara Bell
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+To Monsieur Achille Deveria
+
+An affectionate remembrance from the Author.
+
+
+
+
+HONORINE
+
+
+
+If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English
+have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps
+sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be
+found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of
+France outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and
+they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes
+but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a
+bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither
+grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for
+conversation, the "Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt
+apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of
+the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be
+met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little
+comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree.
+Emigration is counter to the instincts of the French nation. Many
+Frenchmen, of the kind here in question, have owned to pleasure at
+seeing the custom-house officers of their native land, which may seem
+the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.
+
+This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
+the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their
+native land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a
+pleasure hard to be understood by those who have never left the
+asphalt of the Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the
+left bank of the Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris again! Do
+you know what that means, O Parisians? It is to find--not indeed the
+cookery of the /Rocher de Cancale/ as Borel elaborates it for those
+who can appreciate it, for that exists only in the Rue Montorgueil--
+but a meal which reminds you of it! It is to find the wines of France,
+which out of France are to be regarded as myths, and as rare as the
+woman of whom I write! It is to find--not the most fashionable
+pleasantry, for it loses its aroma between Paris and the frontier--but
+the witty understanding, the critical atmosphere in which the French
+live, from the poet down to the artisan, from the duchess to the boy
+in the street.
+
+In 1836, when the Sardinian Court was residing at Genoa, two
+Parisians, more or less famous, could fancy themselves still in Paris
+when they found themselves in a palazzo, taken by the French Consul-
+General, on the hill forming the last fold of the Apennines between
+the gate of San Tomaso and the well-known lighthouse, which is to be
+seen in all the keepsake views of Genoa. This palazzo is one of the
+magnificent villas on which Genoese nobles were wont to spend millions
+at the time when the aristocratic republic was a power.
+
+If the early night is beautiful anywhere, it surely is at Genoa, after
+it has rained as it can rain there, in torrents, all the morning; when
+the clearness of the sea vies with that of the sky; when silence
+reigns on the quay and in the groves of the villa, and over the marble
+heads with yawning jaws, from which water mysteriously flows; when the
+stars are beaming; when the waves of the Mediterranean lap one after
+another like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by
+word. It must be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air
+brings fragrance to the lungs and to our day-dreams; when
+voluptuousness, made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your
+easy-chair; when, a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet,
+the town at your feet and fair woman opposite--such Boccaccio hours
+can be known only in Italy and on the shores of the Mediterranean.
+
+Imagine to yourself, round the table, the Marquis di Negro, a knight
+hospitaller to all men of talent on their travels, and the Marquis
+Damaso Pareto, two Frenchmen disguised as Genoese, a Consul-General
+with a wife as beautiful as a Madonna, and two silent children--silent
+because sleep has fallen on them--the French Ambassador and his wife,
+a secretary to the Embassy who believes himself to be crushed and
+mischievous; finally, two Parisians, who have come to take leave of
+the Consul's wife at a splendid dinner, and you will have the picture
+presented by the terrace of the villa about the middle of May--a
+picture in which the predominant figure was that of a celebrated
+woman, on whom all eyes centered now and again, the heroine of this
+improvised festival.
+
+One of the two Frenchmen was the famous landscape painter, Leon de
+Lora; the other a well known critic Claude Vignon. They had both come
+with this lady, one of the glories of the fair sex, Mademoiselle des
+Touches, known in the literary world by the name of Camille Maupin.
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches had been to Florence on business. With the
+charming kindness of which she is prodigal, she had brought with her
+Leon de Lora to show him Italy, and had gone on as far as Rome that he
+might see the Campagna. She had come by Simplon, and was returning by
+the Cornice road to Marseilles. She had stopped at Genoa, again on the
+landscape painter's account. The Consul-General had, of course, wished
+to do the honors of Genoa, before the arrival of the Court, to a woman
+whose wealth, name, and position recommend her no less than her
+talents. Camille Maupin, who knew her Genoa down to its smallest
+chapels, had left her landscape painter to the care of the diplomate
+and the two Genoese marquises, and was miserly of her minutes. Though
+the ambassador was a distinguished man of letters, the celebrated lady
+had refused to yield to his advances, dreading what the English call
+an exhibition; but she had drawn in the claws of her refusals when it
+was proposed that they should spend a farewell day at the Consul's
+villa. Leon de Lora had told Camille that her presence at the villa
+was the only return he could make to the Ambassador and his wife, the
+two Genoese noblemen, the Consul and his wife. So Mademoiselle des
+Touches had sacrificed one of those days of perfect freedom, which are
+not always to be had in Paris by those on whom the world has its eye.
+
+Now, the meeting being accounted for, it is easy to understand that
+etiquette had been banished, as well as a great many women even of the
+highest rank, who were curious to know whether Camille Maupin's manly
+talent impaired her grace as a pretty woman, and to see, in a word,
+whether the trousers showed below her petticoats. After dinner till
+nine o'clock, when a collation was served, though the conversation had
+been gay and grave by turns, and constantly enlivened by Leon de
+Lora's sallies--for he is considered the most roguish wit of Paris
+to-day--and by the good taste which will surprise no one after the
+list of guests, literature had scarcely been mentioned. However, the
+butterfly flittings of this French tilting match were certain to come
+to it, were it only to flutter over this essentially French subject.
+But before coming to the turn in the conversation which led the
+Consul-General to speak, it will not be out of place to give some
+account of him and his family.
+
+This diplomate, a man of four-and-thirty, who had been married about
+six years, was the living portrait of Lord Byron. The familiarity of
+that face makes a description of the Consul's unnecessary. It may,
+however, be noted that there was no affectation in his dreamy
+expression. Lord Byron was a poet, and the Consul was poetical; women
+know and recognize the difference, which explains without justifying
+some of their attachments. His handsome face, thrown into relief by a
+delightful nature, had captivated a Genoese heiress. A Genoese
+heiress! the expression might raise a smile at Genoa, where, in
+consequence of the inability of daughters to inherit, a woman is
+rarely rich; but Onorina Pedrotti, the only child of a banker without
+heirs male, was an exception. Notwithstanding all the flattering
+advances prompted by a spontaneous passion, the Consul-General had not
+seemed to wish to marry. Nevertheless, after living in the town for
+two years, and after certain steps taken by the Ambassador during his
+visits to the Genoese Court, the marriage was decided on. The young
+man withdrew his former refusal, less on account of the touching
+affection of Onorina Petrotti than by reason of an unknown incident,
+one of those crises of private life which are so instantly buried
+under the daily tide of interests that, at a subsequent date, the most
+natural actions seem inexplicable.
+
+This involution of causes sometimes affects the most serious events of
+history. This, at any rate, was the opinion of the town of Genoa,
+where, to some women, the extreme reserve, the melancholy of the
+French Consul could be explained only by the word passion. It may be
+remarked, in passing, that women never complain of being the victims
+of a preference; they are very ready to immolate themselves for the
+common weal. Onorina Pedrotti, who might have hated the Consul if she
+had been altogether scorned, loved her /sposo/ no less, and perhaps
+more, when she know that he had loved. Women allow precedence in love
+affairs. All is well if other women are in question.
+
+A man is not a diplomate with impunity: the /sposo/ was as secret as
+the grave--so secret that the merchants of Genoa chose to regard the
+young Consul's attitude as premeditated, and the heiress might perhaps
+have slipped through his fingers if he had not played his part of a
+love-sick /malade imaginaire/. If it was real, the women thought it
+too degrading to be believed.
+
+Pedrotti's daughter gave him her love as a consolation; she lulled
+these unknown griefs in a cradle of tenderness and Italian caresses.
+
+Il Signor Pedrotti had indeed no reason to complain of the choice to
+which he was driven by his beloved child. Powerful protectors in Paris
+watched over the young diplomate's fortunes. In accordance with a
+promise made by the Ambassador to the Consul-General's father-in-law,
+the young man was created Baron and Commander of the Legion of Honor.
+Signor Pedrotti himself was made a Count by the King of Sardinia.
+Onorina's dower was a million of francs. As to the fortune of the Casa
+Pedrotti, estimated at two millions, made in the corn trade, the young
+couple came into it within six months of their marriage, for the first
+and last Count Pedrotti died in January 183l.
+
+Onorina Pedrotti is one of those beautiful Genoese women who, when
+they are beautiful, are the most magnificent creatures in Italy.
+Michael Angelo took his models in Genoa for the tomb of Giuliano.
+Hence the fulness and singular placing of the breast in the figures of
+Day and Night, which so many critics have thought exaggerated, but
+which is peculiar to the women of Liguria. A Genoese beauty is no
+longer to be found excepting under the mezzaro, as at Venice it is met
+with only under the /fazzioli/. This phenomenon is observed among all
+fallen nations. The noble type survives only among the populace, as
+after the burning of a town coins are found hidden in the ashes. And
+Onorina, an exception as regards her fortune, is no less an
+exceptional patrician beauty. Recall to mind the figure of Night which
+Michael Angelo has placed at the feet of the /Pensieroso/, dress her
+in modern garb, twist that long hair round the magnificent head, a
+little dark in complexion, set a spark of fire in those dreamy eyes,
+throw a scarf about the massive bosom, see the long dress, white,
+embroidered with flowers, imagine the statue sitting upright, with her
+arms folded like those of Mademoiselle Georges, and you will see
+before you the Consul's wife, with a boy of six, as handsome as a
+mother's desire, and a little girl of four on her knees, as beautiful
+as the type of childhood so laboriously sought out by the sculptor
+David to grace a tomb.
+
+This beautiful family was the object of Camille's secret study. It
+struck Mademoiselle des Touches that the Consul looked rather too
+absent-minded for a perfectly happy man.
+
+Although, throughout the day, the husband and wife had offered her the
+pleasing spectacle of complete happiness, Camille wondered why one of
+the most superior men she had ever met, and whom she had seen too in
+Paris drawing-rooms, remained as Consul-General at Genoa when he
+possessed a fortune of a hundred odd thousand francs a year. But, at
+the same time, she had discerned, by many of the little nothings which
+women perceive with the intelligence of the Arab sage in /Zadig/, that
+the husband was faithfully devoted. These two handsome creatures would
+no doubt love each other without a misunderstanding till the end of
+their days. So Camille said to herself alternately, "What is wrong?--
+Nothing is wrong," following the misleading symptoms of the Consul's
+demeanor; and he, it may be said, had the absolute calmness of
+Englishmen, of savages, of Orientals, and of consummate diplomatists.
+
+In discussing literature, they spoke of the perennial stock-in-trade
+of the republic of letters--woman's sin. And they presently found
+themselves confronted by two opinions: When a woman sins, is the man
+or the woman to blame? The three women present--the Ambassadress, the
+Consul's wife, and Mademoiselle des Touches, women, of course, of
+blameless reputations--were without pity for the woman. The men tried
+to convince these fair flowers of their sex that some virtues might
+remain in a woman after she had fallen.
+
+"How long are we going to play at hide-and-seek in this way?" said
+Leon de Lora.
+
+"/Cara vita/, go and put your children to bed, and send me by Gina the
+little black pocket-book that lies on my Boule cabinet," said the
+Consul to his wife.
+
+She rose without a reply, which shows that she loved her husband very
+truly, for she already knew French enough to understand that her
+husband was getting rid of her.
+
+"I will tell you a story in which I played a part, and after that we
+can discuss it, for it seems to me childish to practise with the
+scalpel on an imaginary body. Begin by dissecting a corpse."
+
+Every one prepared to listen, with all the greater readiness because
+they had all talked enough, and this is the moment to be chosen for
+telling a story. This, then, is the Consul-General's tale:--
+
+"When I was two-and-twenty, and had taken my degree in law, my old
+uncle, the Abbe Loraux, then seventy-two years old, felt it necessary
+to provide me with a protector, and to start me in some career. This
+excellent man, if not indeed a saint, regarded each year of his life
+as a fresh gift from God. I need not tell you that the father
+confessor of a Royal Highness had no difficulty in finding a place for
+a young man brought up by himself, his sister's only child. So one
+day, towards the end of the year 1824, this venerable old man, who for
+five years had been Cure of the White Friars at Paris, came up to the
+room I had in his house, and said:
+
+" 'Get yourself dressed, my dear boy; I am going to introduce you to
+some one who is willing to engage you as secretary. If I am not
+mistaken, he may fill my place in the event of God's taking me to
+Himself. I shall have finished mass at nine o'clock; you have three-
+quarters of an hour before you. Be ready.'
+
+" 'What, uncle! must I say good-bye to this room, where for four years
+I have been so happy?'
+
+" 'I have no fortune to leave you,' said he.
+
+" 'Have you not the reputation of your name to leave me, the memory of
+your good works----?'
+
+" 'We need say nothing of that inheritance,' he replied, smiling. 'You
+do not yet know enough of the world to be aware that a legacy of that
+kind is hardly likely to be paid, whereas by taking you this morning
+to M. le Comte'--Allow me," said the Consul, interrupting himself, "to
+speak of my protector by his Christian name only, and to call him
+Comte Octave.--'By taking you this morning to M. le Comte Octave, I
+hope to secure you his patronage, which, if you are so fortunate as to
+please that virtuous statesman--as I make no doubt you can--will be
+worth, at least, as much as the fortune I might have accumulated for
+you, if my brother-in-law's ruin and my sister's death had not fallen
+on me like a thunder-bolt from a clear sky.'
+
+" 'Are you the Count's director?'
+
+" 'If I were, could I place you with him? What priest could be capable
+of taking advantage of the secrets which he learns at the tribunal of
+repentance? No; you owe this position to his Highness, the Keeper of
+the Seals. My dear Maurice, you will be as much at home there as in
+your father's house. The Count will give you a salary of two thousand
+four hundred francs, rooms in his house, and an allowance of twelve
+hundred francs in lieu of feeding you. He will not admit you to his
+table, nor give you a separate table, for fear of leaving you to the
+care of servants. I did not accept the offer when it was made to me
+till I was perfectly certain that Comte Octave's secretary was never
+to be a mere upper servant. You will have an immense amount of work,
+for the Count is a great worker; but when you leave him, you will be
+qualified to fill the highest posts. I need not warn you to be
+discreet; that is the first virtue of any man who hopes to hold public
+appointments.'
+
+"You may conceive of my curiosity. Comte Octave, at that time, held
+one of the highest legal appointments; he was in the confidence of
+Madame the Dauphiness, who had just got him made a State Minister; he
+led such a life as the Comte de Serizy, whom you all know, I think;
+but even more quietly, for his house was in the Marais, Rue Payenne,
+and he hardly ever entertained. His private life escaped public
+comment by its hermit-like simplicity and by constant hard work.
+
+"Let me describe my position to you in a few words. Having found in
+the solemn headmaster of the College Saint-Louis a tutor to whom my
+uncle delegated his authority, at the age of eighteen I had gone
+through all the classes; I left school as innocent as a seminarist,
+full of faith, on quitting Saint-Sulpice. My mother, on her deathbed,
+had made my uncle promise that I should not become a priest, but I was
+as pious as though I had to take orders. On leaving college, the Abbe
+Loraux took me into his house and made me study law. During the four
+years of study requisite for passing all the examinations, I worked
+hard, but chiefly at things outside the arid fields of jurisprudence.
+Weaned from literature as I had been at college, where I lived in the
+headmaster's house, I had a thirst to quench. As soon as I had read a
+few modern masterpieces, the works of all the preceding ages were
+greedily swallowed. I became crazy about the theatre, and for a long
+time I went every night to the play, though my uncle gave me only a
+hundred francs a month. This parsimony, to which the good old man was
+compelled by his regard for the poor, had the effect of keeping a
+young man's desires within reasonable limits.
+
+"When I went to live with Comte Octave I was not indeed an innocent,
+but I thought of my rare escapades as crimes. My uncle was so truly
+angelic, and I was so much afraid of grieving him, that in all those
+four years I had never spent a night out. The good man would wait till
+I came in to go to bed. This maternal care had more power to keep me
+within bounds than the sermons and reproaches with which the life of a
+young man is diversified in a puritanical home. I was a stranger to
+the various circles which make up the world of Paris society; I only
+knew some women of the better sort, and none of the inferior class but
+those I saw as I walked about, or in the boxes at the play, and then
+only from the depths of the pit where I sat. If, at that period, any
+one had said to me, 'You will see Canalis, or Camille Maupin,' I
+should have felt hot coals in my head and in my bowels. Famous people
+were to me as gods, who neither spoke, nor walked, nor ate like other
+mortals.
+
+"How many tales of the Thousand-and-one Nights are comprehended in the
+ripening of a youth! How many wonderful lamps must we have rubbed
+before we understand that the True Wonderful Lamp is either luck, or
+work, or genius. In some men this dream of the aroused spirit is but
+brief; mine has lasted until now! In those days I always went to sleep
+as Grand Duke of Tuscany,--as a millionaire,--as beloved by a
+princess,--or famous! So to enter the service of Comte Octave, and
+have a hundred louis a year, was entering on independent life. I had
+glimpses of some chance of getting into society, and seeking for what
+my heart desired most, a protectress, who would rescue me from the
+paths of danger, which a young man of two-and-twenty can hardly help
+treading, however prudent and well brought up he may be. I began to be
+afraid of myself.
+
+"The persistent study of other people's rights into which I had
+plunged was not always enough to repress painful imaginings. Yes,
+sometimes in fancy I threw myself into theatrical life; I thought I
+could be a great actor; I dreamed of endless triumphs and loves,
+knowing nothing of the disillusion hidden behind the curtain, as
+everywhere else--for every stage has its reverse behind the scenes. I
+have gone out sometimes, my heart boiling, carried away by an impulse
+to rush hunting through Paris, to attach myself to some handsome woman
+I might meet, to follow her to her door, watch her, write to her,
+throw myself on her mercy, and conquer her by sheer force of passion.
+My poor uncle, a heart consumed by charity, a child of seventy years,
+as clear-sighted as God, as guileless as a man of genius, no doubt
+read the tumult of my soul; for when he felt the tether by which he
+held me strained too tightly and ready to break, he would never fail
+to say, 'Here, Maurice, you too are poor! Here are twenty francs; go
+and amuse yourself, you are not a priest!' And if you could have seen
+the dancing light that gilded his gray eyes, the smile that relaxed
+his fine lips, puckering the corners of his mouth, the adorable
+expression of that august face, whose native ugliness was redeemed by
+the spirit of an apostle, you would understand the feeling which made
+me answer the Cure of White Friars only with a kiss, as if he had been
+my mother.
+
+" 'In Comte Octave you will find not a master, but a friend,' said my
+uncle on the way to the Rue Payenne. 'But he is distrustful, or to be
+more exact, he is cautious. The statesman's friendship can be won only
+with time; for in spite of his deep insight and his habit of gauging
+men, he was deceived by the man you are succeeding, and nearly became
+a victim to his abuse of confidence. This is enough to guide you in
+your behavior to him.'
+
+"When we knocked at the enormous outer door of a house as large as the
+Hotel Carnavalet, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind, the
+sound rang as in a desert. While my uncle inquired of an old porter in
+livery if the Count were at home, I cast my eyes, seeing everything at
+once, over the courtyard where the cobblestones were hidden in the
+grass, the blackened walls where little gardens were flourishing above
+the decorations of the elegant architecture, and on the roof, as high
+as that of the Tuileries. The balustrade of the upper balconies was
+eaten away. Through a magnificent colonnade I could see a second court
+on one side, where were the offices; the door was rotting. An old
+coachman was there cleaning an old carriage. The indifferent air of
+this servant allowed me to assume that the handsome stables, where of
+old so many horses had whinnied, now sheltered two at most. The
+handsome facade of the house seemed to me gloomy, like that of a
+mansion belonging to the State or the Crown, and given up to some
+public office. A bell rang as we walked across, my uncle and I, from
+the porter's lodge--/Inquire of the Porter/ was still written over the
+door--towards the outside steps, where a footman came out in a livery
+like that of Labranche at the Theatre Francais in the old stock plays.
+A visitor was so rare that the servant was putting his coat on when he
+opened a glass door with small panes, on each side of which the smoke
+of a lamp had traced patterns on the walls.
+
+"A hall so magnificent as to be worthy of Versailles ended in a
+staircase such as will never again be built in France, taking up as
+much space as the whole of a modern house. As we went up the marble
+steps, as cold as tombstones, and wide enough for eight persons to
+walk abreast, our tread echoed under sonorous vaulting. The banister
+charmed the eye by its miraculous workmanship--goldsmith's work in
+iron--wrought by the fancy of an artist of the time of Henri III.
+Chilled as by an icy mantle that fell on our shoulders, we went
+through ante-rooms, drawing-rooms opening one out of the other, with
+carpetless parquet floors, and furnished with such splendid
+antiquities as from thence would find their way to the curiosity
+dealers. At last we reached a large study in a cross wing, with all
+the windows looking into an immense garden.
+
+" 'Monsieur le Cure of the White Friars, and his nephew, Monsieur de
+l'Hostal,' said Labranche, to whose care the other theatrical servant
+had consigned us in the first ante-chamber.
+
+"Comte Octave, dressed in long trousers and a gray flannel morning
+coat, rose from his seat by a huge writing-table, came to the
+fireplace, and signed to me to sit down, while he went forward to take
+my uncle's hands, which he pressed.
+
+" 'Though I am in the parish of Saint-Paul,' said he, 'I could
+scarcely have failed to hear of the Cure of the White Friars, and I am
+happy to make his acquaintance.'
+
+" 'Your Excellency is most kind,' replied my uncle. 'I have brought to
+you my only remaining relation. While I believe that I am offering a
+good gift to your Excellency, I hope at the same time to give my
+nephew a second father.'
+
+" 'As to that, I can only reply, Monsieur l'Abbe, when we shall have
+tried each other,' said Comte Octave. 'Your name?' he added to me.
+
+" 'Maurice.'
+
+" 'He has taken his doctor's degree in law,' my uncle observed.
+
+" 'Very good, very good!' said the Count, looking at me from head to
+foot. 'Monsieur l'Abbe, I hope that for your nephew's sake in the
+first instance, and then for mine, you will do me the honor of dining
+here every Monday. That will be our family dinner, our family party.'
+
+"My uncle and the Count then began to talk of religion from the
+political point of view, of charitable institutes, the repression of
+crime, and I could at my leisure study the man on whom my fate would
+henceforth depend. The Count was of middle height; it was impossible
+to judge of his build on account of his dress, but he seemed to me to
+be lean and spare. His face was harsh and hollow; the features were
+refined. His mouth, which was rather large, expressed both irony and
+kindliness. His forehead perhaps too spacious, was as intimidating as
+that of a madman, all the more so from the contrast of the lower part
+of the face, which ended squarely in a short chin very near the lower
+lip. Small eyes, of turquoise blue, were as keen and bright as those
+of the Prince de Talleyrand--which I admired at a later time--and
+endowed, like the Prince's, with the faculty of becoming
+expressionless to the verge of gloom; and they added to the
+singularity of a face that was not pale but yellow. This complexion
+seemed to bespeak an irritable temper and violent passions. His hair,
+already silvered, and carefully dressed, seemed to furrow his head
+with streaks of black and white alternately. The trimness of this head
+spoiled the resemblance I had remarked in the Count to the wonderful
+monk described by Lewis after Schedoni in the /Confessional of the
+Black Penitents (The Italian)/, a superior creation, as it seems to
+me, to /The Monk/.
+
+"The Count was already shaved, having to attend early at the law
+courts. Two candelabra with four lights, screened by lamp-shades, were
+still burning at the opposite ends of the writing-table, and showed
+plainly that the magistrate rose long before daylight. His hands,
+which I saw when he took hold of the bell-pull to summon his servant,
+were extremely fine, and as white as a woman's.
+
+"As I tell you this story," said the Consul-General, interrupting
+himself, "I am altering the titles and the social position of this
+gentleman, while placing him in circumstances analogous to what his
+really were. His profession, rank, luxury, fortune, and style of
+living were the same; all these details are true, but I would not be
+false to my benefactor, nor to my usual habits of discretion.
+
+"Instead of feeling--as I really was, socially speaking--an insect in
+the presence of an eagle," the narrator went on after a pause, "I felt
+I know not what indefinable impression from the Count's appearance,
+which, however, I can now account for. Artists of genius" (and he
+bowed gracefully to the Ambassador, the distinguished lady, and the
+two Frenchmen), "real statesmen, poets, a general who has commanded
+armies--in short, all really great minds are simple, and their
+simplicity places you on a level with themselves.--You who are all of
+superior minds," he said, addressing his guests, "have perhaps
+observed how feeling can bridge over the distances created by society.
+If we are inferior to you in intellect, we can be your equals in
+devoted friendship. By the temperature--allow me the word--of our
+hearts I felt myself as near my patron as I was far below him in rank.
+In short, the soul has its clairvoyance; it has presentiments of
+suffering, grief, joy, antagonism, or hatred in others.
+
+"I vaguely discerned the symptoms of a mystery, from recognizing in
+the Count the same effects of physiognomy as I had observed in my
+uncle. The exercise of virtue, serenity of conscience, and purity of
+mind had transfigured my uncle, who from being ugly had become quite
+beautiful. I detected a metamorphosis of a reverse kind in the Count's
+face; at the first glance I thought he was about fifty-five, but after
+an attentive examination I found youth entombed under the ice of a
+great sorrow, under the fatigue of persistent study, under the glowing
+hues of some suppressed passion. At a word from my uncle the Count's
+eyes recovered for a moment the softness of the periwinkle flower, and
+he had an admiring smile, which revealed what I believed to be his
+real age, about forty. These observations I made, not then but
+afterwards, as I recalled the circumstances of my visit.
+
+"The man-servant came in carrying a tray with his master's breakfast
+on it.
+
+" 'I did not ask for breakfast,' remarked the Count; 'but leave it,
+and show monsieur to his rooms.'
+
+"I followed the servant, who led the way to a complete set of pretty
+rooms, under a terrace, between the great courtyard and the servants'
+quarters, over a corridor of communication between the kitchens and
+the grand staircase. When I returned to the Count's study, I
+overheard, before opening the door, my uncle pronouncing this judgment
+on me:
+
+" 'He may do wrong, for he has strong feelings, and we are all liable
+to honorable mistakes; but he has no vices.'
+
+" 'Well,' said the Count, with a kindly look, 'do you like yourself
+there? Tell me. There are so many rooms in this barrack that, if you
+were not comfortable, I could put you elsewhere.'
+
+" 'At my uncle's I had but one room,' replied I.
+
+" 'Well, you can settle yourself this evening,' said the Count, 'for
+your possessions, no doubt, are such as all students own, and a
+hackney coach will be enough to convey them. To-day we will all three
+dine together,' and he looked at my uncle.
+
+"A splendid library opened from the Count's study, and he took us in
+there, showing me a pretty little recess decorated with paintings,
+which had formerly served, no doubt, as an oratory.
+
+" 'This is your cell,' said he. 'You will sit there when you have to
+work with me, for you will not be tethered by a chain;' and he
+explained in detail the kind and duration of my employment with him.
+As I listened I felt that he was a great political teacher.
+
+"It took me about a month to familiarize myself with people and
+things, to learn the duties of my new office, and accustom myself to
+the Count's methods. A secretary necessarily watches the man who makes
+use of him. That man's tastes, passions, temper, and manias become the
+subject of involuntary study. The union of their two minds is at once
+more and less than a marriage.
+
+"During these months the Count and I reciprocally studied each other.
+I learned with astonishment that Comte Octave was but thirty-seven
+years old. The merely superficial peacefulness of his life and the
+propriety of his conduct were the outcome not solely of a deep sense
+of duty and of stoical reflection; in my constant intercourse with
+this man--an extraordinary man to those who knew him well--I felt vast
+depths beneath his toil, beneath his acts of politeness, his mask of
+benignity, his assumption of resignation, which so closely resembled
+calmness that it is easy to mistake it. Just as when walking through
+forest-lands certain soils give forth under our feet a sound which
+enables us to guess whether they are dense masses of stone or a void;
+so intense egoism, though hidden under the flowers of politeness, and
+subterranean caverns eaten out by sorrow sound hollow under the
+constant touch of familiar life. It was sorrow and not despondency
+that dwelt in that really great soul. The Count had understood that
+actions, deeds, are the supreme law of social man. And he went on his
+way in spite of secret wounds, looking to the future with a tranquil
+eye, like a martyr full of faith.
+
+"His concealed sadness, the bitter disenchantment from which he
+suffered, had not led him into philosophical deserts of incredulity;
+this brave statesman was religious, without ostentation; he always
+attended the earliest mass at Saint-Paul's for pious workmen and
+servants. Not one of his friends, no one at Court, knew that he so
+punctually fulfilled the practice of religion. He was addicted to God
+as some men are addicted to a vice, with the greatest mystery. Thus
+one day I came to find the Count at the summit of an Alp of woe much
+higher than that on which many are who think themselves the most
+tried; who laugh at the passions and the beliefs of others because
+they have conquered their own; who play variations in every key of
+irony and disdain. He did not mock at those who still follow hope into
+the swamps whither she leads, nor those who climb a peak to be alone,
+nor those who persist in the fight, reddening the arena with their
+blood and strewing it with their illusions. He looked on the world as
+a whole; he mastered its beliefs; he listened to its complaining; he
+was doubtful of affection, and yet more of self-sacrifice; but this
+great and stern judge pitied them, or admired them, not with transient
+enthusiasm, but with silence, concentration, and the communion of a
+deeply-touched soul. He was a sort of catholic Manfred, and unstained
+by crime, carrying his choiceness into his faith, melting the snows by
+the fires of a sealed volcano, holding converse with a star seen by
+himself alone!
+
+"I detected many dark riddles in his ordinary life. He evaded my gaze
+not like a traveler who, following a path, disappears from time to
+time in dells or ravines according to the formation of the soil, but
+like a sharpshooter who is being watched, who wants to hide himself,
+and seeks a cover. I could not account for his frequent absences at
+the times when he was working the hardest, and of which he made no
+secret from me, for he would say, 'Go on with this for me,' and trust
+me with the work in hand.
+
+"This man, wrapped in the threefold duties of the statesman, the
+judge, and the orator, charmed me by a taste for flowers, which shows
+an elegant mind, and which is shared by almost all persons of
+refinement. His garden and his study were full of the rarest plants,
+but he always bought them half-withered. Perhaps it pleased him to see
+such an image of his own fate! He was faded like these dying flowers,
+whose almost decaying fragrance mounted strangely to his brain. The
+Count loved his country; he devoted himself to public interests with
+the frenzy of a heart that seeks to cheat some other passion; but the
+studies and work into which he threw himself were not enough for him;
+there were frightful struggles in his mind, of which some echoes
+reached me. Finally, he would give utterance to harrowing aspirations
+for happiness, and it seemed to me he ought yet to be happy; but what
+was the obstacle? Was there a woman he loved? This was a question I
+asked myself. You may imagine the extent of the circles of torment
+that my mind had searched before coming to so simple and so terrible a
+question. Notwithstanding his efforts, my patron did not succeed in
+stifling the movements of his heart. Under his austere manner, under
+the reserve of the magistrate, a passion rebelled, though coerced with
+such force that no one but I who lived with him ever guessed the
+secret. His motto seemed to be, 'I suffer, and am silent.' The escort
+of respect and admiration which attended him; the friendship of
+workers as valiant as himself--Grandville and Serizy, both presiding
+judges--had no hold over the Count: either he told them nothing, or
+they knew all. Impassible and lofty in public, the Count betrayed the
+man only on rare intervals when, alone in his garden or his study, he
+supposed himself unobserved; but then he was a child again, he gave
+course to the tears hidden beneath the toga, to the excitement which,
+if wrongly interpreted, might have damaged his credit for perspicacity
+as a statesman.
+
+"When all this had become to me a matter of certainty, Comte Octave
+had all the attractions of a problem, and won on my affection as much
+as though he had been my own father. Can you enter into the feeling of
+curiosity, tempered by respect? What catastrophe had blasted this
+learned man, who, like Pitt, had devoted himself from the age of
+eighteen to the studies indispensable to power, while he had no
+ambition; this judge, who thoroughly knew the law of nations,
+political law, civil and criminal law, and who could find in these a
+weapon against every anxiety, against every mistake; this profound
+legislator, this serious writer, this pious celibate whose life
+sufficiently proved that he was open to no reproach? A criminal could
+not have been more hardly punished by God than was my master; sorrow
+had robbed him of half his slumbers; he never slept more than four
+hours. What struggle was it that went on in the depths of these hours
+apparently so calm, so studious, passing without a sound or a murmur,
+during which I often detected him, when the pen had dropped from his
+fingers, with his head resting on one hand, his eyes like two fixed
+stars, and sometimes wet with tears? How could the waters of that
+living spring flow over the burning strand without being dried up by
+the subterranean fire? Was there below it, as there is under the sea,
+between it and the central fires of the globe, a bed of granite? And
+would the volcano burst at last?
+
+"Sometimes the Count would give me a look of that sagacious and keen-
+eyed curiosity by which one man searches another when he desires an
+accomplice; then he shunned my eye as he saw it open a mouth, so to
+speak, insisting on a reply, and seeming to say, 'Speak first!' Now
+and then Comte Octave's melancholy was surly and gruff. If these
+spurts of temper offended me, he could get over it without thinking of
+asking my pardon; but then his manners were gracious to the point of
+Christian humility.
+
+"When I became attached like a son to this man--to me such a mystery,
+but so intelligible to the outer world, to whom the epithet eccentric
+is enough to account for all the enigmas of the heart--I changed the
+state of the house. Neglect of his own interests was carried by the
+Count to the length of folly in the management of his affairs.
+Possessing an income of about a hundred and sixty thousand francs,
+without including the emoluments of his appointments--three of which
+did not come under the law against plurality--he spent sixty thousand,
+of which at least thirty thousand went to his servants. By the end of
+the first year I had got rid of all these rascals, and begged His
+Excellency to use his influence in helping me to get honest servants.
+By the end of the second year the Count, better fed and better served,
+enjoyed the comforts of modern life; he had fine horses, supplied by a
+coachman to whom I paid so much a month for each horse; his dinners on
+his reception days, furnished by Chevet at a price agreed upon, did
+him credit; his daily meals were prepared by an excellent cook found
+by my uncle, and helped by two kitchenmaids. The expenditure for
+housekeeping, not including purchases, was no more than thirty
+thousand francs a year; we had two additional men-servants, whose care
+restored the poetical aspect of the house; for this old palace,
+splendid even in its rust, had an air of dignity which neglect had
+dishonored.
+
+" 'I am no longer astonished,' said he, on hearing of these results,
+'at the fortunes made by servants. In seven years I have had two
+cooks, who have become rich restaurant-keepers.'
+
+"Early in the year 1826 the Count had, no doubt, ceased to watch me,
+and we were as closely attached as two men can be when one is
+subordinate to the other. He had never spoken to me of my future
+prospects, but he had taken an interest, both as a master and as a
+father, in training me. He often required me to collect materials for
+his most arduous labors; I drew up some of his reports, and he
+corrected them, showing the difference between his interpretation of
+the law, his views and mine. When at last I had produced a document
+which he could give in as his own he was delighted; this satisfaction
+was my reward, and he could see that I took it so. This little
+incident produced an extraordinary effect on a soul which seemed so
+stern. The Count pronounced sentence on me, to use a legal phrase, as
+supreme and royal judge; he took my head in his hands, and kissed me
+on the forehead.
+
+" 'Maurice,' he exclaimed, 'you are no longer my apprentice; I know
+not yet what you will be to me--but if no change occurs in my life,
+perhaps you will take the place of a son.'
+
+"Comte Octave had introduced me to the best houses in Paris, whither I
+went in his stead, with his servants and carriage, on the too frequent
+occasions when, on the point of starting, he changed his mind, and
+sent for a hackney cab to take him--Where?--that was the mystery. By
+the welcome I met with I could judge of the Count's feelings towards
+me, and the earnestness of his recommendations. He supplied all my
+wants with the thoughtfulness of a father, and with all the greater
+liberality because my modesty left it to him always to think of me.
+Towards the end of January 1827, at the house of the Comtesse de
+Serizy, I had such persistent ill-luck at play that I lost two
+thousand francs, and I would not draw them out of my savings. Next
+morning I asked myself, 'Had I better ask my uncle for the money, or
+put my confidence in the Count?'
+
+"I decided on the second alternative.
+
+" 'Yesterday,' said I, when he was at breakfast, 'I lost persistently
+at play; I was provoked, and went on; I owe two thousand francs. Will
+you allow me to draw the sum on account of my year's salary?'
+
+" 'No,' said he, with the sweetest smile; 'when a man plays in
+society, he must have a gambling purse. Draw six thousand francs; pay
+your debts. Henceforth we must go halves; for since you are my
+representative on most occasions, your self-respect must not be made
+to suffer for it.'
+
+"I made no speech of thanks. Thanks would have been superfluous
+between us. This shade shows the character of our relations. And yet
+we had not yet unlimited confidence in each other; he did not open to
+me the vast subterranean chambers which I had detected in his secret
+life; and I, for my part, never said to him, 'What ails you? From what
+are you suffering?'
+
+"What could he be doing during those long evenings? He would often
+come in on foot or in a hackney cab when I returned in a carriage--I,
+his secretary! Was so pious a man a prey to vices hidden under
+hypocrisy? Did he expend all the powers of his mind to satisfy a
+jealousy more dexterous than Othello's? Did he live with some woman
+unworthy of him? One morning, on returning from I have forgotten what
+shop, where I had just paid a bill, between the Church of Saint-Paul
+and the Hotel de Ville, I came across Comte Octave in such eager
+conversation with an old woman that he did not see me. The appearance
+of this hag filled me with strange suspicions, suspicions that were
+all the better founded because I never found that the Count invested
+his savings. Is it not shocking to think of? I was constituting myself
+my patron's censor. At that time I knew that he had more than six
+hundred thousand francs to invest; and if he had bought securities of
+any kind, his confidence in me was so complete in all that concerned
+his pecuniary interests, that I certainly should have known it.
+
+"Sometimes, in the morning, the Count took exercise in his garden, to
+and fro, like a man to whom a walk is the hippogryph ridden by dreamy
+melancholy. He walked and walked! And he rubbed his hands enough to
+rub the skin off. And then, if I met him unexpectedly as he came to
+the angle of a path, I saw his face beaming. His eyes, instead of the
+hardness of a turquoise, had that velvety softness of the blue
+periwinkle, which had so much struck me on the occasion of my first
+visit, by reason of the astonishing contrast in the two different
+looks; the look of a happy man, and the look of an unhappy man. Two or
+three times at such a moment he had taken me by the arm and led me on;
+then he had said, 'What have you come to ask?' instead of pouring out
+his joy into my heart that opened to him. But more often, especially
+since I could do his work for him and write his reports, the unhappy
+man would sit for hours staring at the goldfish that swarmed in a
+handsome marble basin in the middle of the garden, round which grew an
+amphitheatre of the finest flowers. He, an accomplished statesman,
+seemed to have succeeded in making a passion of the mechanical
+amusement of crumbling bread to fishes.
+
+"This is how the drama was disclosed of this second inner life, so
+deeply ravaged and storm-tossed, where, in a circle overlooked by
+Dante in his /Inferno/, horrible joys had their birth."
+
+The Consul-General paused.
+
+
+
+"On a certain Monday," he resumed, "as chance would have it, M. le
+President de Grandville and M. de Serizy (at that time Vice-President
+of the Council of State) had come to hold a meeting at Comte Octave's
+house. They formed a committee of three, of which I was the secretary.
+The Count had already got me the appointment of Auditor to the Council
+of State. All the documents requisite for their inquiry into the
+political matter privately submitted to these three gentlemen were
+laid out on one of the long tables in the library. MM. de Grandville
+and de Serizy had trusted to the Count to make the preliminary
+examination of the papers relating to the matter. To avoid the
+necessity for carrying all the papers to M. de Serizy, as president of
+the commission, it was decided that they should meet first in the Rue
+Payenne. The Cabinet at the Tuileries attached great importance to
+this piece of work, of which the chief burden fell on me--and to which
+I owed my appointment, in the course of that year, to be Master of
+Appeals.
+
+"Though the Comtes de Grandville and de Serizy, whose habits were much
+the same as my patron's, never dined away from home, we were still
+discussing the matter at a late hour, when we were startled by the
+man-servant calling me aside to say, 'MM. the Cures of Saint-Paul and
+of the White Friars have been waiting in the drawing-room for two
+hours.'
+
+"It was nine o'clock.
+
+" 'Well, gentlemen, you find yourselves compelled to dine with
+priests,' said Comte Octave to his colleagues. 'I do not know whether
+Grandville can overcome his horror of a priest's gown----'
+
+" 'It depends on the priest.'
+
+" 'One of them is my uncle, and the other is the Abbe Gaudron,' said
+I. 'Do not be alarmed; the Abbe Fontanon is no longer second priest at
+Saint-Paul----'
+
+" 'Well, let us dine,' replied the President de Grandville. 'A bigot
+frightens me, but there is no one so cheerful as a truly pious man.'
+
+"We went into the drawing-room. The dinner was delightful. Men of real
+information, politicians to whom business gives both consummate
+experience and the practice of speech, are admirable story-tellers,
+when they tell stories. With them there is no medium; they are either
+heavy, or they are sublime. In this delightful sport Prince Metternich
+is as good as Charles Nodier. The fun of a statesman, cut in facets
+like a diamond, is sharp, sparkling, and full of sense. Being sure
+that the proprieties would be observed by these three superior men, my
+uncle allowed his wit full play, a refined wit, gentle, penetrating,
+and elegant, like that of all men who are accustomed to conceal their
+thoughts under the black robe. And you may rely upon it, there was
+nothing vulgar nor idle in this light talk, which I would compare, for
+its effect on the soul, to Rossini's music.
+
+"The Abbe Gaudron was, as M. de Grandville said, a Saint Peter rather
+than a Saint Paul, a peasant full of faith, as square on his feet as
+he was tall, a sacerdotal of whose ignorance in matters of the world
+and of literature enlivened the conversation by guileless amazement
+and unexpected questions. They came to talking of one of the plague
+spots of social life, of which we were just now speaking--adultery. My
+uncle remarked on the contradiction which the legislators of the Code,
+still feeling the blows of the revolutionary storm, had established
+between civil and religious law, and which he said was at the root of
+all the mischief.
+
+" 'In the eyes of the Church,' said he, 'adultery is a crime; in those
+of your tribunals it is a misdemeanor. Adultery drives to the police
+court in a carriage instead of standing at the bar to be tried.
+Napoleon's Council of State, touched with tenderness towards erring
+women, was quite inefficient. Ought they not in this case to have
+harmonized the civil and the religious law, and have sent the guilty
+wife to a convent, as of old?'
+
+" 'To a convent!' said M. de Serizy. 'They must first have created
+convents, and in those days monasteries were being turned into
+barracks. Besides, think of what you say, M. l'Abbe--give to God what
+society would have none of?'
+
+" 'Oh!' said the Comte de Grandville, 'you do not know France. They
+were obliged to leave the husband free to take proceedings: well,
+there are not ten cases of adultery brought up in a year.'
+
+" 'M. l'Abbe preaches for his own saint, for it was Jesus Christ who
+invented adultery,' said Comte Octave. 'In the East, the cradle of the
+human race, woman was merely a luxury, and there was regarded as a
+chattel; no virtues were demanded of her but obedience and beauty. By
+exalting the soul above the body, the modern family in Europe--a
+daughter of Christ--invented indissoluble marriage, and made it a
+sacrament.'
+
+" 'Ah! the Church saw the difficulties,' exclaimed M. de Grandville.
+
+" 'This institution has given rise to a new world,' the Count went on
+with a smile. 'But the practices of that world will never be that of a
+climate where women are marriageable at seven years of age, and more
+than old at five-and-twenty. The Catholic Church overlooked the needs
+of half the globe.--So let us discuss Europe only.
+
+" 'Is woman our superior or our inferior? That is the real question so
+far as we are concerned. If woman is our inferior, by placing her on
+so high a level as the Church does, fearful punishments for adultery
+were needful. And formerly that was what was done. The cloister or
+death sums up early legislation. But since then practice has modified
+the law, as is always the case. The throne served as a hotbed for
+adultery, and the increase of this inviting crime marks the decline of
+the dogmas of the Catholic Church. In these days, in cases where the
+Church now exacts no more than sincere repentance from the erring
+wife, society is satisfied with a brand-mark instead of an execution.
+The law still condemns the guilty, but it no longer terrifies them. In
+short, there are two standards of morals: that of the world, and that
+of the Code. Where the Code is weak, as I admit with our dear Abbe,
+the world is audacious and satirical. There are so few judges who
+would not gladly have committed the fault against which they hurl the
+rather stolid thunders of their "Inasmuch." The world, which gives the
+lie to the law alike in its rejoicings, in its habits, and in its
+pleasures, is severer than the Code and the Church; the world punishes
+a blunder after encouraging hypocrisy. The whole economy of the law on
+marriage seems to me to require reconstruction from the bottom to the
+top. The French law would be perfect perhaps if it excluded daughters
+from inheriting.'
+
+" 'We three among us know the question very thoroughly,' said the
+Comte de Grandville with a laugh. 'I have a wife I cannot live with.
+Serizy has a wife who will not live with him. As for you, Octave,
+yours ran away from you. So we three represent every case of the
+conjugal conscience, and, no doubt, if ever divorce is brought in
+again, we shall form the committee.'
+
+"Octave's fork dropped on his glass, broke it, and broke his plate. He
+had turned as pale as death, and flashed a thunderous glare at M. de
+Grandville, by which he hinted at my presence, and which I caught.
+
+" 'Forgive me, my dear fellow. I did not see Maurice,' the President
+went on. 'Serizy and I, after being the witnesses to your marriage,
+became your accomplices; I did not think I was committing an
+indiscretion in the presence of these two venerable priests.'
+
+"M. de Serizy changed the subject by relating all he had done to
+please his wife without ever succeeding. The old man concluded that it
+was impossible to regulate human sympathies and antipathies; he
+maintained that social law was never more perfect than when it was
+nearest to natural law. Now Nature takes no account of the affinities
+of souls; her aim is fulfilled by the propagation of the species.
+Hence, the Code, in its present form, was wise in leaving a wide
+latitude to chance. The incapacity of daughters to inherit so long as
+there were male heirs was an excellent provision, whether to hinder
+the degeneration of the race, or to make households happier by
+abolishing scandalous unions and giving the sole preference to moral
+qualities and beauty.
+
+" 'But then,' he exclaimed, lifting his hand with a gesture of
+disgust, 'how are we to perfect legislation in a country which insists
+on bringing together seven or eight hundred legislators!--After all,
+if I am sacrificed,' he added, 'I have a child to succeed me.'
+
+" 'Setting aside all the religious question,' my uncle said, 'I would
+remark to your Excellency that Nature only owes us life, and that it
+is society that owes us happiness. Are you a father?' asked my uncle.
+
+" 'And I--have I any children?' said Comte Octave in a hollow voice,
+and his tone made such an impression that there was no more talk of
+wives or marriage.
+
+"When coffee had been served, the two Counts and the two priests stole
+away, seeing that poor Octave had fallen into a fit of melancholy
+which prevented his noticing their disappearance. My patron was
+sitting in an armchair by the fire, in the attitude of a man crushed.
+
+" 'You now know the secret of my life, said he to me on noticing that
+we were alone. 'After three years of married life, one evening when I
+came in I found a letter in which the Countess announced her flight.
+The letter did not lack dignity, for it is in the nature of women to
+preserve some virtues even when committing that horrible sin.--The
+story is now that my wife went abroad in a ship that was wrecked; she
+is supposed to be dead. I have lived alone for seven years!--Enough
+for this evening, Maurice. We will talk of my situation when I have
+grown used to the idea of speaking of it to you. When we suffer from a
+chronic disease, it needs time to become accustomed to improvement.
+That improvement often seems to be merely another aspect of the
+complaint.'
+
+"I went to bed greatly agitated; for the mystery, far from being
+explained, seemed to me more obscure than ever. I foresaw some strange
+drama indeed, for I understood that there could be no vulgar
+difference between the woman that Count could choose and such a
+character as his. The events which had driven the Countess to leave a
+man so noble, so amiable, so perfect, so loving, so worthy to be
+loved, must have been singular, to say the least. M. de Grandville's
+remark had been like a torch flung into the caverns over which I had
+so long been walking; and though the flame lighted them but dimly, my
+eyes could perceive their wide extent! I could imagine the Count's
+sufferings without knowing their depths or their bitterness. That
+sallow face, those parched temples, those overwhelming studies, those
+moments of absentmindedness, the smallest details of the life of this
+married bachelor, all stood out in luminous relief during the hour of
+mental questioning, which is, as it were, the twilight before sleep,
+and to which any man would have given himself up, as I did.
+
+"Oh! how I loved my poor master! He seemed to me sublime. I read a
+poem of melancholy, I saw perpetual activity in the heart I had
+accused of being torpid. Must not supreme grief always come at last to
+stagnation? Had this judge, who had so much in his power, ever
+revenged himself? Was he feeding himself on her long agony? Is it not
+a remarkable thing in Paris to keep anger always seething for ten
+years? What had Octave done since this great misfortune--for the
+separation of husband and wife is a great misfortune in our day, when
+domestic life has become a social question, which it never was of old?
+
+"We allowed a few days to pass on the watch, for great sorrows have a
+diffidence of their own; but at last, one evening, the Count said in a
+grave voice:
+
+" 'Stay.'
+
+
+
+"This, as nearly as may be, is his story.
+
+" 'My father had a ward, rich and lovely, who was sixteen at the time
+when I came back from college to live in this old house. Honorine, who
+had been brought up by my mother, was just awakening to life. Full of
+grace and of childish ways, she dreamed of happiness as she would have
+dreamed of jewels; perhaps happiness seemed to her the jewel of the
+soul. Her piety was not free from puerile pleasures; for everything,
+even religion, was poetry to her ingenuous heart. She looked to the
+future as a perpetual fete. Innocent and pure, no delirium had
+disturbed her dream. Shame and grief had never tinged her cheek nor
+moistened her eye. She did not even inquire into the secret of her
+involuntary emotions on a fine spring day. And then, she felt that she
+was weak and destined to obedience, and she awaited marriage without
+wishing for it. Her smiling imagination knew nothing of the corruption
+--necessary perhaps--which literature imparts by depicting the
+passions; she knew nothing of the world, and was ignorant of all the
+dangers of society. The dear child had suffered so little that she had
+not even developed her courage. In short, her guilelessness would have
+led her to walk fearless among serpents, like the ideal figure of
+Innocence a painter once created. We lived together like two brothers.
+
+" 'At the end of a year I said to her one day, in the garden of this
+house, by the basin, as we stood throwing crumbs to the fish:
+
+" ' "Would you like that we should be married? With me you could do
+whatever you please, while another man would make you unhappy."
+
+" ' "Mamma," said she to my mother, who came out to join us, "Octave
+and I have agreed to be married----"
+
+" ' "What! at seventeen?" said my mother. "No, you must wait eighteen
+months; and if eighteen months hence you like each other, well, your
+birth and fortunes are equal, you can make a marriage which is
+suitable, as well as being a love match."
+
+" 'When I was six-and-twenty, and Honorine nineteen, we were married.
+Our respect for my father and mother, old folks of the Bourbon Court,
+hindered us from making this house fashionable, or renewing the
+furniture; we lived on, as we had done in the past, as children.
+However, I went into society; I initiated my wife into the world of
+fashion; and I regarded it as one of my duties to instruct her.
+
+" 'I recognized afterwards that marriages contracted under such
+circumstances as ours bear in themselves a rock against which many
+affections are wrecked, many prudent calculations, many lives. The
+husband becomes a pedagogue, or, if you like, a professor, and love
+perishes under the rod which, sooner or later, gives pain; for a young
+and handsome wife, at once discreet and laughter-loving, will not
+accept any superiority above that with which she is endowed by nature.
+Perhaps I was in the wrong? During the difficult beginnings of a
+household I, perhaps, assumed a magisterial tone? On the other hand, I
+may have made the mistake of trusting too entirely to that artless
+nature; I kept no watch over the Countess, in whom revolt seemed to me
+impossible? Alas! neither in politics nor in domestic life has it yet
+been ascertained whether empires and happiness are wrecked by too much
+confidence or too much severity! Perhaps again, the husband failed to
+realize Honorine's girlish dreams? Who can tell, while happy days
+last, what precepts he has neglected?'
+
+"I remember only the broad outlines of the reproaches the Count
+addressed to himself, with all the good faith of an anatomist seeking
+the cause of a disease which might be overlooked by his brethren; but
+his merciful indulgence struck me then as really worthy of that of
+Jesus Christ when He rescued the woman taken in adultery.
+
+" 'It was eighteen months after my father's death--my mother followed
+him to the tomb in a few months--when the fearful night came which
+surprised me by Honorine's farewell letter. What poetic delusion had
+seduced my wife? Was it through her senses? Was it the magnetism of
+misfortune or of genius? Which of these powers had taken her by storm
+or misled her?--I would not know. The blow was so terrible, that for a
+month I remained stunned. Afterwards, reflection counseled me to
+continue in ignorance, and Honorine's misfortunes have since taught me
+too much about all these things.--So far, Maurice, the story is
+commonplace enough; but one word will change it all: I love Honorine,
+I have never ceased to worship her. From the day when she left me I
+have lived on memory; one by one I recall the pleasures for which
+Honorine no doubt had no taste.
+
+" 'Oh!' said he, seeing the amazement in my eyes, 'do not make a hero
+of me, do not think me such a fool, as the Colonel of the Empire would
+say, as to have sought no diversion. Alas, my boy! I was either too
+young or too much in love; I have not in the whole world met with
+another woman. After frightful struggles with myself, I tried to
+forget; money in hand, I stood on the very threshold of infidelity,
+but there the memory of Honorine rose before me like a white statue.
+As I recalled the infinite delicacy of that exquisite skin, through
+which the blood might be seen coursing and the nerves quivering; as I
+saw in fancy that ingenuous face, as guileless on the eve of my
+sorrows as on the day when I said to her, "Shall we marry?" as I
+remembered a heavenly fragrance, the very odor of virtue, and the
+light in her eyes, the prettiness of her movements, I fled like a man
+preparing to violate a tomb, who sees emerging from it the
+transfigured soul of the dead. At consultations, in Court, by night, I
+dream so incessantly of Honorine that only by excessive strength of
+mind do I succeed in attending to what I am doing and saying. This is
+the secret of my labors.
+
+" 'Well, I felt no more anger with her than a father can feel on
+seeing his beloved child in some danger it has imprudently rushed
+into. I understood that I had made a poem of my wife--a poem I
+delighted in with such intoxication, that I fancied she shared the
+intoxication. Ah! Maurice, an indiscriminating passion in a husband is
+a mistake that may lead to any crime in a wife. I had no doubt left
+all the faculties of this child, loved as a child, entirely
+unemployed; I had perhaps wearied her with my love before the hour of
+loving had struck for her! Too young to understand that in the
+constancy of the wife lies the germ of the mother's devotion, she
+mistook this first test of marriage for life itself, and the
+refractory child cursed life, unknown to me, nor daring to complain to
+me, out of sheer modesty perhaps! In so cruel a position she would be
+defenceless against any man who stirred her deeply.--And I, so wise a
+judge as they say--I, who have a kind heart, but whose mind was
+absorbed--I understood too late these unwritten laws of the woman's
+code, I read them by the light of the fire that wrecked my roof. Then
+I constituted my heart a tribunal by virtue of the law, for the law
+makes the husband a judge: I acquitted my wife, and I condemned
+myself. But love took possession of me as a passion, the mean,
+despotic passion which comes over some old men. At this day I love the
+absent Honorine as a man of sixty loves a woman whom he must possess
+at any cost, and yet I feel the strength of a young man. I have the
+insolence of the old man and the reserve of a boy.--My dear fellow,
+society only laughs at such a desperate conjugal predicament. Where it
+pities a lover, it regards a husband as ridiculously inept; it makes
+sport of those who cannot keep the woman they have secured under the
+canopy of the Church, and before the Maire's scarf of office. And I
+had to keep silence.
+
+" 'Serizy is happy. His indulgence allows him to see his wife; he can
+protect and defend her; and, as he adores her, he knows all the
+perfect joys of a benefactor whom nothing can disturb, not even
+ridicule, for he pours it himself on his fatherly pleasures. "I remain
+married only for my wife's sake," he said to me one day on coming out
+of court.
+
+" 'But I--I have nothing; I have not even to face ridicule, I who live
+solely on a love which is starving! I who can never find a word to say
+to a woman of the world! I who loathe prostitution! I who am faithful
+under a spell!--But for my religious faith, I should have killed
+myself. I have defied the gulf of hard work; I have thrown myself into
+it, and come out again alive, fevered, burning, bereft of sleep!----'
+
+"I cannot remember all the words of this eloquent man, to whom passion
+gave an eloquence indeed so far above that of the pleader that, as I
+listened to him, I, like him, felt my cheeks wet with tears. You may
+conceive of my feelings when, after a pause, during which we dried
+them away, he finished his story with this revelation:--
+
+" 'This is the drama of my soul, but it is not the actual living drama
+which is at this moment being acted in Paris! The interior drama
+interests nobody. I know it; and you will one day admit that it is so,
+you, who at this moment shed tears with me; no one can burden his
+heart or his skin with another's pain. The measure of our sufferings
+is in ourselves.--You even understand my sorrows only by very vague
+analogy. Could you see me calming the most violent frenzy of despair
+by the contemplation of a miniature in which I can see and kiss her
+brow, the smile on her lips, the shape of her face, can breathe the
+whiteness of her skin; which enables me almost to feel, to play with
+the black masses of her curling hair?--Could you see me when I leap
+with hope--when I writhe under the myriad darts of despair--when I
+tramp through the mire of Paris to quell my irritation by fatigue? I
+have fits of collapse comparable to those of a consumptive patient,
+moods of wild hilarity, terrors as of a murderer who meets a sergeant
+of police. In short, my life is a continual paroxysm of fears, joy,
+and dejection.
+
+" 'As to the drama--it is this. You imagine that I am occupied with
+the Council of State, the Chamber, the Courts, Politics.--Why, dear
+me, seven hours at night are enough for all that, so much are my
+faculties overwrought by the life I lead! Honorine is my real concern.
+To recover my wife is my only study; to guard her in her cage, without
+her suspecting that she is in my power; to satisfy her needs, to
+supply the little pleasure she allows herself, to be always about her
+like a sylph without allowing her to see or to suspect me, for if she
+did, the future would be lost,--that is my life, my true life.--For
+seven years I have never gone to bed without going first to see the
+light of her night-lamp, or her shadow on the window curtains.
+
+" 'She left my house, choosing to take nothing but the dress she wore
+that day. The child carried her magnanimity to the point of folly!
+Consequently, eighteen months after her flight she was deserted by her
+lover, who was appalled by the cold, cruel, sinister, and revolting
+aspect of poverty--the coward! The man had, no doubt, counted on the
+easy and luxurious life in Switzerland or Italy which fine ladies
+indulge in when they leave their husbands. Honorine has sixty thousand
+francs a year of her own. The wretch left the dear creature expecting
+an infant, and without a penny. In the month of November 1820 I found
+means to persuade the best /accoucheur/ in Paris to play the part of a
+humble suburban apothecary. I induced the priest of the parish in
+which the Countess was living to supply her needs as though he were
+performing an act of charity. Then to hide my wife, to secure her
+against discovery, to find her a housekeeper who would be devoted to
+me and be my intelligent confidante--it was a task worthy of Figaro!
+You may suppose that to discover where my wife had taken refuge I had
+only to make up my mind to it.
+
+" 'After three months of desperation rather than despair, the idea of
+devoting myself to Honorine with God only in my secret, was one of
+those poems which occur only to the heart of a lover through life and
+death! Love must have its daily food. And ought I not to protect this
+child, whose guilt was the outcome of my imprudence, against fresh
+disaster--to fulfil my part, in short, as a guardian angel?--At the
+age of seven months her infant died, happily for her and for me. For
+nine months more my wife lay between life and death, deserted at the
+time when she most needed a manly arm; but this arm,' said he, holding
+out his own with a gesture of angelic dignity, 'was extended over her
+head. Honorine was nursed as she would have been in her own home.
+When, on her recovery, she asked how and by whom she had been
+assisted, she was told--"By the Sisters of Charity in the neighborhood
+--by the Maternity Society--by the parish priest, who took an interest
+in her."
+
+" 'This woman, whose pride amounts to a vice, has shown a power of
+resistance in misfortune, which on some evenings I call the obstinacy
+of a mule. Honorine was bent on earning her living. My wife works! For
+five years past I have lodged her in the Rue Saint-Maur, in a charming
+little house, where she makes artificial flowers and articles of
+fashion. She believes that she sells the product of her elegant
+fancywork to a shop, where she is so well paid that she makes twenty
+francs a day, and in these six years she had never had a moment's
+suspicion. She pays for everything she needs at about the third of its
+value, so that on six thousand francs a year she lives as if she had
+fifteen thousand. She is devoted to flowers, and pays a hundred crowns
+to a gardener, who costs me twelve hundred in wages, and sends me in a
+bill for two thousand francs every three months. I have promised the
+man a market-garden with a house on it close to the porter's lodge in
+the Rue Saint-Maur. I hold this ground in the name of a clerk of the
+law courts. The smallest indiscretion would ruin the gardener's
+prospects. Honorine has her little house, a garden, and a splendid
+hothouse, for a rent of five hundred francs a year. There she lives
+under the name of her housekeeper, Madame Gobain, the old woman of
+impeccable discretion whom I was so lucky as to find, and whose
+affection Honorine has won. But her zeal, like that of the gardener,
+is kept hot by the promise of reward at the moment of success. The
+porter and his wife cost me dreadfully dear for the same reasons.
+However, for three years Honorine has been happy, believing that she
+owes to her own toil all the luxury of flowers, dress, and comfort.
+
+" 'Oh! I know what you are about to say,' cried the Count, seeing a
+question in my eyes and on my lips. 'Yes, yes; I have made the
+attempt. My wife was formerly living in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
+One day when, from what Gobain told me, I believed in some chance of a
+reconciliation, I wrote by post a letter, in which I tried to
+propitiate my wife--a letter written and re-written twenty times! I
+will not describe my agonies. I went from the Rue Payenne to the Rue
+de Reuilly like a condemned wretch going from the Palais de Justice to
+his execution, but he goes on a cart, and I was on foot. It was dark--
+there was a fog; I went to meet Madame Gobain, who was to come and
+tell me what my wife had done. Honorine, on recognizing my writing,
+had thrown the letter into the fire without reading it.--"Madame
+Gobain," she had exclaimed, "I leave this to-morrow."
+
+" 'What a dagger-stroke was this to a man who found inexhaustible
+pleasure in the trickery by which he gets the finest Lyons velvet at
+twelve francs a yard, a pheasant, a fish, a dish of fruit, for a tenth
+of their value, for a woman so ignorant as to believe that she is
+paying ample wages with two hundred and fifty francs to Madame Gobain,
+a cook fit for a bishop.
+
+" 'You have sometimes found me rubbing my hands in the enjoyment of a
+sort of happiness. Well, I had just succeeded in some ruse worthy of
+the stage. I had just deceived my wife--I had sent her by a purchaser
+of wardrobes an Indian shawl, to be offered to her as the property of
+an actress who had hardly worn it, but in which I--the solemn lawyer
+whom you know--had wrapped myself for a night! In short, my life at
+this day may be summed up in the two words which express the extremes
+of torment--I love, and I wait! I have in Madame Gobain a faithful spy
+on the heart I worship. I go every evening to chat with the old woman,
+to hear from her all that Honorine has done during the day, the
+lightest word she has spoken, for a single exclamation might betray to
+me the secrets of that soul which is wilfully deaf and dumb. Honorine
+is pious; she attends the Church services and prays, but she has never
+been to confession or taken the Communion; she foresees what a priest
+would tell her. She will not listen to the advice, to the injunction,
+that she should return to me. This horror of me overwhelms me, dismays
+me, for I have never done her the smallest harm. I have always been
+kind to her. Granting even that I may have been a little hasty when
+teaching her, that my man's irony may have hurt her legitimate girlish
+pride, is that a reason for persisting in a determination which only
+the most implacable hatred could have inspired? Honorine has never
+told Madame Gobain who she is; she keeps absolute silence as to her
+marriage, so that the worthy and respectable woman can never speak a
+word in my favor, for she is the only person in the house who knows my
+secret. The others know nothing; they live under the awe caused by the
+name of the Prefect of Police, and their respect for the power of a
+Minister. Hence it is impossible for me to penetrate that heart; the
+citadel is mine, but I cannot get into it. I have not a single means
+of action. An act of violence would ruin me for ever.
+
+" 'How can I argue against reasons of which I know nothing? Should I
+write a letter, and have it copied by a public writer, and laid before
+Honorine? But that would be to run the risk of a third removal. The
+last cost me fifty thousand francs. The purchase was made in the first
+instance in the name of the secretary whom you succeeded. The unhappy
+man, who did not know how lightly I sleep, was detected by me in the
+act of opening a box in which I had put the private agreement; I
+coughed, and he was seized with a panic; next day I compelled him to
+sell the house to the man in whose name it now stands, and I turned
+him out.
+
+" 'If it were not that I feel all my noblest faculties as a man
+satisfied, happy, expansive; if the part I am playing were not that of
+divine fatherhood; if I did not drink in delight by every pore, there
+are moments when I should believe that I was a monomaniac. Sometimes
+at night I hear the jingling bells of madness. I dread the violent
+transitions from a feeble hope, which sometimes shines and flashes up,
+to complete despair, falling as low as man can fall. A few days since
+I was seriously considering the horrible end of the story of Lovelace
+and Clarissa Harlowe, and saying to myself, if Honorine were the
+mother of a child of mine, must she not necessarily return under her
+husband's roof?
+
+" 'And I have such complete faith in a happy future, that ten months
+ago I bought and paid for one of the handsomest houses in the Faubourg
+Saint-Honore. If I win back Honorine, I will not allow her to see this
+house again, nor the room from which she fled. I mean to place my idol
+in a new temple, where she may feel that life is altogether new. That
+house is being made a marvel of elegance and taste. I have been told
+of a poet who, being almost mad with love for an actress, bought the
+handsomest bed in Paris without knowing how the actress would reward
+his passion. Well, one of the coldest of lawyers, a man who is
+supposed to be the gravest adviser of the Crown, was stirred to the
+depths of his heart by that anecdote. The orator of the Legislative
+Chamber can understand the poet who fed his ideal on material
+possibilities. Three days before the arrival of Maria Louisa, Napoleon
+flung himself on his wedding bed at Compiegne. All stupendous passions
+have the same impulses. I love as a poet--as an emperor!'
+
+"As I heard the last words, I believed that Count Octave's fears were
+realized; he had risen, and was walking up and down, and
+gesticulating, but he stopped as if shocked by the vehemence of his
+own words.
+
+" 'I am very ridiculous,' he added, after a long pause, looking at me,
+as if craving a glance of pity.
+
+" 'No, monsieur, you are very unhappy.'
+
+" 'Ah yes!' said he, taking up the thread of his confidences. 'From
+the violence of my speech you may, you must believe in the intensity
+of a physical passion which for nine years has absorbed all my
+faculties; but that is nothing in comparison with the worship I feel
+for the soul, the mind, the heart, all in that woman; the enchanting
+divinities in the train of Love, with whom we pass our life, and who
+form the daily poem of a fugitive delight. By a phenomenon of
+retrospection I see now the graces of Honorine's mind and heart, to
+which I paid little heed in the time of my happiness--like all who are
+happy. From day to day I have appreciated the extent of my loss,
+discovering the exquisite gifts of that capricious and refractory
+young creature who has grown so strong and so proud under the heavy
+hand of poverty and the shock of the most cowardly desertion. And that
+heavenly blossom is fading in solitude and hiding!--Ah! The law of
+which we were speaking,' he went on with bitter irony, 'the law is a
+squad of gendarmes--my wife seized and dragged away by force! Would
+not that be to triumph over a corpse? Religion has no hold on her; she
+craves its poetry, she prays, but she does not listen to the
+commandments of the Church. I, for my part, have exhausted everything
+in the way of mercy, of kindness, of love; I am at my wits' end. Only
+one chance of victory is left to me; the cunning and patience with
+which bird-catchers at last entrap the wariest birds, the swiftest,
+the most capricious, and the rarest. Hence, Maurice, when M. de
+Grandville's indiscretion betrayed to you the secret of my life, I
+ended by regarding this incident as one of the decrees of fate, one of
+the utterances for which gamblers listen and pray in the midst of
+their most impassioned play. . . . Have you enough affection for me to
+show me romantic devotion?'
+
+" 'I see what you are coming to, Monsieur le Comte,' said I,
+interrupting him; 'I guess your purpose. Your first secretary tried to
+open your deed box. I know the heart of your second--he might fall in
+love with your wife. And can you devote him to destruction by sending
+him into the fire? Can any one put his hand into a brazier without
+burning it?'
+
+" 'You are a foolish boy,' replied the Count. 'I will send you well
+gloved. It is no secretary of mine that will be lodged in the Rue
+Saint-Maur in the little garden-house which I have at his disposal. It
+is my distant cousin, Baron de l'Hostal, a lawyer high in
+office . . ."
+
+"After a moment of silent surprise, I heard the gate bell ring, and a
+carriage came into the courtyard. Presently the footman announced
+Madame de Courteville and her daughter. The Count had a large family
+connection on his mother's side. Madame de Courteville, his cousin,
+was the widow of a judge on the bench of the Seine division, who had
+left her a daughter and no fortune whatever. What could a woman of
+nine-and-twenty be in comparison with a young girl of twenty, as
+lovely as imagination could wish for an ideal mistress?
+
+" 'Baron, and Master of Appeals, till you get something better, and
+this old house settled on her,--would not you have enough good reasons
+for not falling in love with the Countess?' he said to me in a
+whisper, as he took me by the hand and introduced me to Madame de
+Courteville and her daughter.
+
+"I was dazzled, not so much by these advantages of which I had never
+dreamed, but by Amelie de Courteville, whose beauty was thrown into
+relief by one of those well-chosen toilets which a mother can achieve
+for a daughter when she wants to see her married.
+
+"But I will not talk of myself," said the Consul after a pause.
+
+"Three weeks later I went to live in the gardener's cottage, which had
+been cleaned, repaired, and furnished with the celerity which is
+explained by three words: Paris; French workmen; money! I was as much
+in love as the Count could possibly desire as a security. Would the
+prudence of a young man of five-and-twenty be equal to the part I was
+undertaking, involving a friend's happiness? To settle that matter, I
+may confess that I counted very much on my uncle's advice; for I had
+been authorized by the Count to take him into confidence in any case
+where I deemed his interference necessary. I engaged a garden; I
+devoted myself to horticulture; I worked frantically, like a man whom
+nothing can divert, turning up the soil of the market-garden, and
+appropriating the ground to the culture of flowers. Like the maniacs
+of England, or of Holland, I gave it out that I was devoted to one
+kind of flower, and especially grew dahlias, collecting every variety.
+You will understand that my conduct, even in the smallest details, was
+laid down for me by the Count, whose whole intellectual powers were
+directed to the most trifling incidents of the tragi-comedy enacted in
+the Rue Saint-Maur. As soon as the Countess had gone to bed, at about
+eleven at night, Octave, Madame Gobain, and I sat in council. I heard
+the old woman's report to the Count of his wife's least proceedings
+during the day. He inquired into everything: her meals, her
+occupations, her frame of mind, her plans for the morrow, the flowers
+she proposed to imitate. I understood what love in despair may be when
+it is the threefold passion of the heart, the mind, and the senses.
+Octave lived only for that hour.
+
+"During two months, while my work in the garden lasted, I never set
+eyes on the little house where my fair neighbor dwelt. I had not even
+inquired whether I had a neighbor, though the Countess' garden was
+divided from mine by a paling, along which she had planted cypress
+trees already four feet high. One fine morning Madame Gobain announced
+to her mistress, as a disastrous piece of news, the intention,
+expressed by an eccentric creature who had become her neighbor, of
+building a wall between the two gardens, at the end of the year. I
+will say nothing of the curiosity which consumed me to see the
+Countess! The wish almost extinguished my budding love for Amelie de
+Courteville. My scheme for building a wall was indeed a dangerous
+threat. There would be no more fresh air for Honorine, whose garden
+would then be a sort of narrow alley shut in between my wall and her
+own little house. This dwelling, formerly a summer villa, was like a
+house of cards; it was not more than thirty feet deep, and about a
+hundred feet long. The garden front, painted in the German fashion,
+imitated a trellis with flowers up to the second floor, and was really
+a charming example of the Pompadour style, so well called rococo. A
+long avenue of limes led up to it. The gardens of the pavilion and my
+plot of ground were in the shape of a hatchet, of which this avenue
+was the handle. My wall would cut away three-quarters of the hatchet.
+
+"The Countess was in despair.
+
+" 'My good Gobain,' said she, 'what sort of man is this florist?'
+
+" 'On my word,' said the housekeeper, 'I do not know whether it will
+be possible to tame him. He seems to have a horror of women. He is the
+nephew of a Paris cure. I have seen the uncle but once; a fine old man
+of sixty, very ugly, but very amiable. It is quite possible that this
+priest encourages his nephew, as they say in the neighborhood, in his
+love of flowers, that nothing worse may happen----'
+
+" 'Why--what?'
+
+" 'Well, your neighbor is a little cracked!' said Gobain, tapping her
+head!
+
+"Now a harmless lunatic is the only man whom no woman ever distrusts
+in the matter of sentiment. You will see how wise the Count had been
+in choosing this disguise for me.
+
+" 'What ails him then?' asked the Countess.
+
+" 'He has studied too hard,' replied Gobain; 'he has turned
+misanthropic. And he has his reasons for disliking women--well, if you
+want to know all that is said about him----'
+
+" 'Well,' said Honorine, 'madmen frighten me less than sane folks; I
+will speak to him myself! Tell him that I beg him to come here. If I
+do not succeed, I will send for the cure.,'
+
+"The day after this conversation, as I was walking along my graveled
+path, I caught sight of the half-opened curtains on the first floor of
+the little house, and of a woman's face curiously peeping out. Madame
+Gobain called me. I hastily glanced at the Countess' house, and by a
+rude shrug expressed, 'What do I care for your mistress!'
+
+" "Madame,' said Gobain, called upon to give an account of her errand,
+'the madman bid me leave him in peace, saying that even a charcoal
+seller is master in his own premises, especially when he has no wife.'
+
+" 'He is perfectly right,' said the Countess.
+
+" 'Yes, but he ended by saying, "I will go," when I told him that he
+would greatly distress a lady living in retirement, who found her
+greatest solace in growing flowers.'
+
+"Next day a signal from Gobain informed me that I was expected. After
+the Countess' breakfast, when she was walking to and fro in front of
+her house, I broke out some palings and went towards her. I had
+dressed myself like a countryman, in an old pair of gray flannel
+trousers, heavy wooden shoes, and shabby shooting coat, a peaked cap
+on my head, a ragged bandana round my neck, hands soiled with mould,
+and a dibble in my hand.
+
+" 'Madame,' said the housekeeper, 'this good man is your neighbor.'
+
+"The Countess was not alarmed. I saw at last the woman whom her own
+conduct and her husband's confidences had made me so curious to meet.
+It was in the early days of May. The air was pure, the weather serene;
+the verdure of the first foliage, the fragrance of spring formed a
+setting for this creature of sorrow. As I then saw Honorine I
+understood Octave's passion and the truthfulness of his description,
+'A heavenly flower!'
+
+"Her pallor was what first struck me by its peculiar tone of white--
+for there are as many tones of white as of red or blue. On looking at
+the Countess, the eye seemed to feel that tender skin, where the blood
+flowed in the blue veins. At the slightest emotion the blood mounted
+under the surface in rosy flushes like a cloud. When we met, the
+sunshine, filtering through the light foliage of the acacias, shed on
+Honorine the pale gold, ambient glory in which Raphael and Titian,
+alone of all painters, have been able to enwrap the Virgin. Her brown
+eyes expressed both tenderness and vivacity; their brightness seemed
+reflected in her face through the long downcast lashes. Merely by
+lifting her delicate eyelids, Honorine could cast a spell; there was
+so much feeling, dignity, terror, or contempt in her way of raising or
+dropping those veils of the soul. She could freeze or give life by a
+look. Her light-brown hair, carelessly knotted on her head, outlined a
+poet's brow, high, powerful, and dreamy. The mouth was wholly
+voluptuous. And to crown all by a grace, rare in France, though common
+in Italy, all the lines and forms of the head had a stamp of nobleness
+which would defy the outrages of time.
+
+"Though slight, Honorine was not thin, and her figure struck me as
+being one that might revive love when it believed itself exhausted.
+She perfectly represented the idea conveyed by the word /mignonne/,
+for she was one of those pliant little women who allow themselves to
+be taken up, petted, set down, and taken up again like a kitten. Her
+small feet, as I heard them on the gravel, made a light sound
+essentially their own, that harmonized with the rustle of her dress,
+producing a feminine music which stamped itself on the heart, and
+remained distinct from the footfall of a thousand other women. Her
+gait bore all the quarterings of her race with so much pride, that, in
+the street, the least respectful working man would have made way for
+her. Gay and tender, haughty and imposing, it was impossible to
+understand her, excepting as gifted with these apparently incompatible
+qualities, which, nevertheless, had left her still a child. But it was
+a child who might be as strong as an angel; and, like the angel, once
+hurt in her nature, she would be implacable.
+
+"Coldness on that face must no doubt be death to those on whom her
+eyes had smiled, for whom her set lips had parted, for those whose
+soul had drunk in the melody of that voice, lending to her words the
+poetry of song by its peculiar intonation. Inhaling the perfume of
+violets that accompanied her, I understood how the memory of this wife
+had arrested the Count on the threshold of debauchery, and how
+impossible it would be ever to forget a creature who really was a
+flower to the touch, a flower to the eye, a flower of fragrance, a
+heavenly flower to the soul. . . . Honorine inspired devotion,
+chivalrous devotion, regardless of reward. A man on seeing her must
+say to himself:
+
+" 'Think, and I will divine your thought; speak, and I will obey. If
+my life, sacrificed in torments, can procure you one day's happiness,
+take my life, I will smile like a martyr at the stake, for I shall
+offer that day to God, as a token to which a father responds on
+recognizing a gift to his child.' Many women study their expression,
+and succeed in producing effects similar to those which would have
+struck you at first sight of the Countess; only, in her, it was all
+the outcome of a delightful nature, that inimitable nature went at
+once to the heart. If I tell you all this, it is because her soul, her
+thoughts, the exquisiteness of her heart, are all we are concerned
+with, and you would have blamed me if I had not sketched them for you.
+
+"I was very near forgetting my part as a half-crazy lout, clumsy, and
+by no means chivalrous.
+
+" 'I am told, madame, that you are fond of flowers?'
+
+" 'I am an artificial flower-maker,' said she. 'After growing flowers,
+I imitate them, like a mother who is artist enough to have the
+pleasure of painting her children. . . . That is enough to tell you
+that I am poor and unable to pay for the concession I am anxious to
+obtain from you?'
+
+" 'But how,' said I, as grave as a judge, 'can a lady of such rank as
+yours would seem to be, ply so humble a calling? Have you, like me,
+good reasons for employing your fingers so as to keep your brains from
+working?'
+
+" 'Let us stick to the question of the wall,' said she, with a smile.
+
+" 'Why, we have begun at the foundations,' said I. 'Must not I know
+which of us ought to yield to the other in behalf of our suffering,
+or, if you choose, of our mania?--Oh! what a charming clump of
+narcissus! They are as fresh as this spring morning!'
+
+"I assure you, she had made for herself a perfect museum of flowers
+and shrubs, which none might see but the sun, and of which the
+arrangement had been prompted by the genius of an artist; the most
+heartless of landlords must have treated it with respect. The masses
+of plants, arranged according to their height, or in single clumps,
+were really a joy to the soul. This retired and solitary garden
+breathed comforting scents, and suggested none but sweet thoughts and
+graceful, nay, voluptuous pictures. On it was set that inscrutable
+sign-manual, which our true character stamps on everything, as soon as
+nothing compels us to obey the various hypocrisies, necessary as they
+are, which Society insists on. I looked alternately at the mass of
+narcissus and at the Countess, affecting to be far more in love with
+the flowers than with her, to carry out my part.
+
+" 'So you are very fond of flowers?' said she.
+
+" 'They are,' I replied, 'the only beings that never disappoint our
+cares and affection.' And I went on to deliver such a diatribe while
+comparing botany and the world, that we ended miles away from the
+dividing wall, and the Countess must have supposed me to be a wretched
+and wounded sufferer worthy of her pity. However, at the end of half
+an hour my neighbor naturally brought me back to the point; for women,
+when they are not in love, have all the cold blood of an experienced
+attorney.
+
+" 'If you insist on my leaving the paling,' said I, 'you will learn
+all the secrets of gardening that I want to hide; I am seeking to grow
+a blue dahlia, a blue rose; I am crazy for blue flowers. Is not blue
+the favorite color of superior souls? We are neither of us really at
+home; we might as well make a little door of open railings to unite
+our gardens. . . . You, too, are fond of flowers; you will see mine, I
+shall see yours. If you receive no visitors at all, I, for my part,
+have none but my uncle, the Cure of the White Friars.'
+
+" 'No,' said she, 'I will give you the right to come into my garden,
+my premises at any hour. Come and welcome; you will always be admitted
+as a neighbor with whom I hope to keep on good terms. But I like my
+solitude too well to burden it with any loss of independence.'
+
+" 'As you please,' said I, and with one leap I was over the paling.
+
+" 'Now, of what use would a door be?' said I, from my own domain,
+turning round to the Countess, and mocking her with a madman's gesture
+and grimace.
+
+"For a fortnight I seemed to take no heed of my neighbor. Towards the
+end of May, one lovely evening, we happened both to be out on opposite
+sides of the paling, both walking slowly. Having reached the end, we
+could not help exchanging a few civil words; she found me in such deep
+dejection, lost in such painful meditations, that she spoke to me of
+hopefulness, in brief sentences that sounded like the songs with which
+nurses lull their babies. I then leaped the fence, and found myself
+for the second time at her side. The Countess led me into the house,
+wishing to subdue my sadness. So at last I had penetrated the
+sanctuary where everything was in harmony with the woman I have tried
+to describe to you.
+
+"Exquisite simplicity reigned there. The interior of the little house
+was just such a dainty box as the art of the eighteenth century
+devised for the pretty profligacy of a fine gentleman. The dining-
+room, on the ground floor, was painted in fresco, with garlands of
+flowers, admirably and marvelously executed. The staircase was
+charmingly decorated in monochrome. The little drawing-room, opposite
+the dining-room, was very much faded; but the Countess had hung it
+with panels of tapestry of fanciful designs, taken off old screens. A
+bath-room came next. Upstairs there was but one bedroom, with a
+dressing-room, and a library which she used as her workroom. The
+kitchen was beneath in the basement on which the house was raised, for
+there was a flight of several steps outside. The balustrade of a
+balcony in garlands a la Pompadour concealed the roof; only the lead
+cornices were visible. In this retreat one was a hundred leagues from
+Paris.
+
+"But for the bitter smile which occasionally played on the beautiful
+red lips of this pale woman, it would have been possible to believe
+that this violet buried in her thicket of flowers was happy. In a few
+days we had reached a certain degree of intimacy, the result of our
+close neighborhood and of the Countess' conviction that I was
+indifferent to women. A look would have spoilt all, and I never
+allowed a thought of her to be seen in my eyes. Honorine chose to
+regard me as an old friend. Her manner to me was the outcome of a kind
+of pity. Her looks, her voice, her words, all showed that she was a
+hundred miles away from the coquettish airs which the strictest virtue
+might have allowed under such circumstances. She soon gave me the
+right to go into the pretty workshop where she made her flowers, a
+retreat full of books and curiosities, as smart as a boudoir where
+elegance emphasized the vulgarity of the tools of her trade. The
+Countess had in the course of time poetized, as I may say, a thing
+which is at the antipodes to poetry--a manufacture.
+
+"Perhaps of all the work a woman can do, the making of artificial
+flowers is that of which the details allow her to display most grace.
+For coloring prints she must sit bent over a table and devote herself,
+with some attention, to this half painting. Embroidering tapestry, as
+diligently as a woman must who is to earn her living by it, entails
+consumption or curvature of the spine. Engraving music is one of the
+most laborious, by the care, the minute exactitude, and the
+intelligence it demands. Sewing and white embroidery do not earn
+thirty sous a day. But the making of flowers and light articles of
+wear necessitates a variety of movements, gestures, ideas even, which
+do not take a pretty woman out of her sphere; she is still herself;
+she may chat, laugh, sing, or think.
+
+"There was certainly a feeling for art in the way in which the
+Countess arranged on a long deal table the myriad-colored petals which
+were used in composing the flowers she was to produce. The saucers of
+color were of white china, and always clean, arranged in such order
+that the eye could at once see the required shade in the scale of
+tints. Thus the aristocratic artist saved time. A pretty little
+cabinet with a hundred tiny drawers, of ebony inlaid with ivory,
+contained the little steel moulds in which she shaped the leaves and
+some forms of petals. A fine Japanese bowl held the paste, which was
+never allowed to turn sour, and it had a fitted cover with a hinge so
+easy that she could lift it with a finger-tip. The wire, of iron and
+brass, lurked in a little drawer of the table before her.
+
+"Under her eyes, in a Venetian glass, shaped like a flower-cup on its
+stem, was the living model she strove to imitate. She had a passion
+for achievement; she attempted the most difficult things, close
+racemes, the tiniest corollas, heaths, nectaries of the most
+variegated hues. Her hands, as swift as her thoughts, went from the
+table to the flower she was making, as those of an accomplished
+pianist fly over the keys. Her fingers seemed to be fairies, to use
+Perrault's expression, so infinite were the different actions of
+twisting, fitting, and pressure needed for the work, all hidden under
+grace of movement, while she adapted each motion to the result with
+the lucidity of instinct.
+
+"I could not tire of admiring her as she shaped a flower from the
+materials sorted before her, padding the wire stem and adjusting the
+leaves. She displayed the genius of a painter in her bold attempts;
+she copied faded flowers and yellowing leaves; she struggled even with
+wildflowers, the most artless of all, and the most elaborate in their
+simplicity.
+
+" 'This art,' she would say, 'is in its infancy. If the women of Paris
+had a little of the genius which the slavery of the harem brings out
+in Oriental women, they would lend a complete language of flowers to
+the wreaths they wear on their head. To please my own taste as an
+artist I have made drooping flowers with leaves of the hue of
+Florentine bronze, such as are found before or after the winter. Would
+not such a crown on the head of a young woman whose life is a failure
+have a certain poetical fitness? How many things a woman might express
+by her head-dress! Are there not flowers for drunken Bacchantes,
+flowers for gloomy and stern bigots, pensive flowers for women who are
+bored? Botany, I believe, may be made to express every sensation and
+thought of the soul, even the most subtle.'
+
+"She would employ me to stamp out the leaves, cut up material, and
+prepare wires for the stems. My affected desire for occupation made me
+soon skilful. We talked as we worked. When I had nothing to do, I read
+new books to her, for I had my part to keep up as a man weary of life,
+worn out with griefs, gloomy, sceptical, and soured. My person led to
+adorable banter as to my purely physical resemblance--with the
+exception of his club foot--to Lord Byron. It was tacitly acknowledged
+that her own troubles, as to which she kept the most profound silence,
+far outweighed mine, though the causes I assigned for my misanthropy
+might have satisfied Young or Job.
+
+"I will say nothing of the feelings of shame which tormented me as I
+inflicted on my heart, like the beggars in the street, false wounds to
+excite the compassion of that enchanting woman. I soon appreciated the
+extent of my devotedness by learning to estimate the baseness of a
+spy. The expressions of sympathy bestowed on me would have comforted
+the greatest grief. This charming creature, weaned from the world, and
+for so many years alone, having, besides love, treasures of kindliness
+to bestow, offered these to me with childlike effusiveness and such
+compassion as would inevitably have filled with bitterness any
+profligate who should have fallen in love with her; for, alas, it was
+all charity, all sheer pity. Her renunciation of love, her dread of
+what is called happiness for women, she proclaimed with equal
+vehemence and candor. These happy days proved to me that a woman's
+friendship is far superior to her love.
+
+"I suffered the revelations of my sorrows to be dragged from me with
+as many grimaces as a young lady allows herself before sitting down to
+the piano, so conscious are they of the annoyance that will follow. As
+you may imagine, the necessity for overcoming my dislike to speak had
+induced the Countess to strengthen the bonds of our intimacy; but she
+found in me so exact a counterpart of her own antipathy to love, that
+I fancied she was well content with the chance which had brought to
+her desert island a sort of Man Friday. Solitude was perhaps beginning
+to weigh on her. At the same time, there was nothing of the coquette
+in her; nothing survived of the woman; she did not feel that she had a
+heart, she told me, excepting in the ideal world where she found
+refuge. I involuntarily compared these two lives--hers and the
+Count's:--his, all activity, agitation, and emotion; hers, all
+inaction, quiescence, and stagnation. The woman and the man were
+admirably obedient to their nature. My misanthropy allowed me to utter
+cynical sallies against men and women both, and I indulged in them,
+hoping to bring Honorine to the confidential point; but she was not to
+be caught in any trap, and I began to understand that mulish obstinacy
+which is commoner among women than is generally supposed.
+
+" 'The Orientals are right,' I said to her one evening, 'when they
+shut you up and regard you merely as the playthings of their pleasure.
+Europe has been well punished for having admitted you to form an
+element of society and for accepting you on an equal footing. In my
+opinion, woman is the most dishonorable and cowardly being to be
+found. Nay, and that is where her charm lies. Where would be the
+pleasure of hunting a tame thing? When once a woman has inspired a
+man's passion, she is to him for ever sacred; in his eyes she is
+hedged round by an imprescriptible prerogative. In men gratitude for
+past delights is eternal. Though he should find his mistress grown old
+or unworthy, the woman still has rights over his heart; but to you
+women the man you have loved is as nothing to you; nay, more, he is
+unpardonable in one thing--he lives on! You dare not own it, but you
+all have in your hearts the feeling which that popular calumny called
+tradition ascribes to the Lady of the Tour de Nesle: "What a pity it
+is that we cannot live on love as we live on fruit, and that when we
+have had our fill, nothing should survive but the remembrance of
+pleasure!" '
+
+" 'God has, no doubt, reserved such perfect bliss for Paradise,' said
+she. 'But,' she added, 'if your argument seems to you very witty, to
+me it has the disadvantage of being false. What can those women be who
+give themselves up to a succession of loves?' she asked, looking at me
+as the Virgin in Ingres' picture looks at Louis XIII. offering her his
+kingdom.
+
+" 'You are an actress in good faith,' said I, 'for you gave me a look
+just now which would make the fame of an actress. Still, lovely as you
+are, you have loved; /ergo/, you forget.'
+
+" 'I!' she exclaimed, evading my question, 'I am not a woman. I am a
+nun, and seventy-two years old!'
+
+" 'Then, how can you so positively assert that you feel more keenly
+than I? Sorrow has but one form for women. The only misfortunes they
+regard are disappointments of the heart.'
+
+"She looked at me sweetly, and, like all women when stuck between the
+issues of a dilemma, or held in the clutches of truth, she persisted,
+nevertheless, in her wilfulness.
+
+" 'I am a nun,' she said, 'and you talk to me of the world where I
+shall never again set foot.'
+
+" 'Not even in thought?' said I.
+
+" 'Is the world so much to be desired?' she replied. 'Oh! when my mind
+wanders, it goes higher. The angel of perfection, the beautiful angel
+Gabriel, often sings in my heart. If I were rich, I should work, all
+the same, to keep me from soaring too often on the many-tinted wings
+of the angel, and wandering in the world of fancy. There are
+meditations which are the ruin of us women! I owe much peace of mind
+to my flowers, though sometimes they fail to occupy me. On some days I
+find my soul invaded by a purposeless expectancy; I cannot banish some
+idea which takes possession of me, which seems to make my fingers
+clumsy. I feel that some great event is impending, that my life is
+about to change; I listen vaguely, I stare into the darkness, I have
+no liking for my work, and after a thousand fatigues I find life once
+more--everyday life. Is this a warning from heaven? I ask myself----'
+
+"After three months of this struggle between two diplomates, concealed
+under the semblance of youthful melancholy, and a woman whose disgust
+of life made her invulnerable, I told the Count that it was impossible
+to drag this tortoise out of her shell; it must be broken. The evening
+before, in our last quite friendly discussion, the Countess had
+exclaimed:
+
+" 'Lucretia's dagger wrote in letters of blood the watchword of
+woman's charter: /Liberty!/'
+
+"From that moment the Count left me free to act.
+
+" 'I have been paid a hundred francs for the flowers and caps I made
+this week!' Honorine exclaimed gleefully one Saturday evening when I
+went to visit her in the little sitting-room on the ground floor,
+which the unavowed proprietor had had regilt.
+
+"It was ten o'clock. The twilight of July and a glorious moon lent us
+their misty light. Gusts of mingled perfumes soothed the soul; the
+Countess was clinking in her hand the five gold pieces given to her by
+a supposititious dealer in fashionable frippery, another of Octave's
+accomplices found for him by a judge, M. Popinot.
+
+" 'I earn my living by amusing myself,' said she; 'I am free, when
+men, armed with their laws, have tried to make us slaves. Oh, I have
+transports of pride every Saturday! In short, I like M. Gaudissart's
+gold pieces as much as Lord Byron, your double, liked Mr. Murray's.'
+
+" 'This is not becoming in a woman,' said I.
+
+" 'Pooh! Am I a woman? I am a boy gifted with a soft soul, that is
+all; a boy whom no woman can torture----'
+
+" 'Your life is the negation of your whole being,' I replied. 'What?
+You, on whom God has lavished His choicest treasures of love and
+beauty, do you never wish----'
+
+" 'For what?' said she, somewhat disturbed by a speech which, for the
+first time, gave the lie to the part I had assumed.
+
+" 'For a pretty little child, with curling hair, running, playing
+among the flowers, like a flower itself of life and love, and calling
+you mother!'
+
+"I waited for an answer. A too prolonged silence led me to perceive
+the terrible effect of my words, though the darkness at first
+concealed it. Leaning on her sofa, the Countess had not indeed
+fainted, but frozen under a nervous attack of which the first chill,
+as gentle as everything that was part of her, felt, as she afterwards
+said, like the influence of a most insidious poison. I called Madame
+Gobain, who came and led away her mistress, laid her on her bed,
+unlaced her, undressed her, and restored her, not to life, it is true,
+but to the consciousness of some dreadful suffering. I meanwhile
+walked up and down the path behind the house, weeping, and doubting my
+success. I only wished to give up this part of the bird-catcher which
+I had so rashly assumed. Madame Gobain, who came down and found me
+with my face wet with tears, hastily went up again to say to the
+Countess:
+
+" 'What has happened, madame? Monsieur Maurice is crying like a
+child.'
+
+"Roused to action by the evil interpretation that might be put on our
+mutual behavior, she summoned superhuman strength to put on a wrapper
+and come down to me.
+
+" 'You are not the cause of this attack,' said she. 'I am subject to
+these spasms, a sort of cramp of the heart----'
+
+" 'And will you not tell me of your troubles?' said I, in a voice
+which cannot be affected, as I wiped away my tears. 'Have you not just
+now told me that you have been a mother, and have been so unhappy as
+to lose your child?'
+
+" 'Marie!' she called as she rang the bell. Gobain came in.
+
+" 'Bring lights and some tea,' said she, with the calm decision of a
+Mylady clothed in the armor of pride by the dreadful English training
+which you know too well.
+
+"When the housekeeper had lighted the tapers and closed the shutters,
+the Countess showed me a mute countenance; her indomitable pride and
+gravity, worthy of a savage, had already reasserted their mastery. She
+said:
+
+" 'Do you know why I like Lord Byron so much? It is because he
+suffered as animals do. Of what use are complaints when they are not
+an elegy like Manfred's, nor bitter mockery like Don Juan's, nor a
+reverie like Childe Harold's? Nothing shall be known of me. My heart
+is a poem that I lay before God.'
+
+" 'If I chose----' said I.
+
+" 'If?' she repeated.
+
+" 'I have no interest in anything,' I replied, 'so I cannot be
+inquisitive; but, if I chose, I could know all your secrets by
+to-morrow.'
+
+" 'I defy you!' she exclaimed, with ill-disguised uneasiness.
+
+" 'Seriously?'
+
+" 'Certainly,' said she, tossing her head. 'If such a crime is
+possible, I ought to know it.'
+
+" 'In the first place, madame,' I went on, pointing to her hands,
+'those pretty fingers, which are enough to show that you are not a
+mere girl--were they made for toil? Then you call yourself Madame
+Gobain, you, who, in my presence the other day on receiving a letter,
+said to Marie: "Here, this is for you?" Marie is the real Madame
+Gobain; so you conceal your name behind that of your housekeeper.--
+Fear nothing, madame, from me. You have in me the most devoted friend
+you will ever have: Friend, do you understand me? I give this word its
+sacred and pathetic meaning, so profaned in France, where we apply it
+to our enemies. And your friend, who will defend you against
+everything, only wishes that you should be as happy as such a woman
+ought to be. Who can tell whether the pain I have involuntarily caused
+you was not a voluntary act?'
+
+" 'Yes,' replied she with threatening audacity, 'I insist on it. Be
+curious, and tell me all that you can find out about me; but,' and she
+held up her finger, 'you must also tell me by what means you obtain
+your information. The preservation of the small happiness I enjoy here
+depends on the steps you take.'
+
+" 'That means that you will fly----'
+
+" 'On wings!' she cried, 'to the New World----'
+
+" 'Where you will be at the mercy of the brutal passions you will
+inspire,' said I, interrupting her. 'Is it not the very essence of
+genius and beauty to shine, to attract men's gaze, to excite desires
+and evil thoughts? Paris is a desert with Bedouins; Paris is the only
+place in the world where those who must work for their livelihood can
+hide their life. What have you to complain of? Who am I? An additional
+servant--M. Gobain, that is all. If you have to fight a duel, you may
+need a second.'
+
+" 'Never mind; find out who I am. I have already said that I insist.
+Now, I beg that you will,' she went on, with the grace which you
+ladies have at command," said the Consul, looking at the ladies.
+
+" 'Well, then, to-morrow, at the same hour, I will tell you what I may
+have discovered,' replied I. 'But do not therefore hate me! Will you
+behave like other women?'
+
+" 'What do other women do?'
+
+" 'They lay upon us immense sacrifices, and when we have made them,
+they reproach us for it some time later as if it were an injury.'
+
+" 'They are right if the thing required appears to be a sacrifice!'
+replied she pointedly.
+
+" 'Instead of sacrifices, say efforts and----'
+
+" 'It would be an impertinence,' said she.
+
+" 'Forgive me,' said I. 'I forget that woman and the Pope are
+infallible.'
+
+" 'Good heavens!' said she after a long pause, 'only two words would
+be enough to destroy the peace so dearly bought, and which I enjoy
+like a fraud----'
+
+"She rose and paid no further heed to me.
+
+" 'Where can I go?' she said. 'What is to become of me?--Must I leave
+this quiet retreat, that I had arranged with such care to end my days
+in?'
+
+" 'To end your days!' exclaimed I with visible alarm. 'Has it never
+struck you that a time would come when you could no longer work, when
+competition will lower the price of flowers and articles of
+fashion----?'
+
+" 'I have already saved a thousand crowns,' she said.
+
+" 'Heavens! what privations such a sum must represent!' I exclaimed.
+
+" 'Leave me,' said she, 'till to-morrow. This evening I am not myself;
+I must be alone. Must I not save my strength in case of disaster? For,
+if you should learn anything, others besides you would be informed,
+and then--Good-night,' she added shortly, dismissing me with an
+imperious gesture.
+
+" 'The battle is to-morrow, then,' I replied with a smile, to keep up
+the appearance of indifference I had given to the scene. But as I went
+down the avenue I repeated the words:
+
+" 'The battle is to-morrow.'
+
+"Octave's anxiety was equal to Honorine's. The Count and I remained
+together till two in the morning, walking to and fro by the trenches
+of the Bastille, like two generals who, on the eve of a battle,
+calculate all the chances, examine the ground, and perceive that the
+victory must depend on an opportunity to be seized half-way through
+the fight. These two divided beings would each lie awake, one in the
+hope, the other in agonizing dread of reunion. The real dramas of life
+are not in circumstances, but in feelings; they are played in the
+heart, or, if you please, in that vast realm which we ought to call
+the Spiritual World. Octave and Honorine moved and lived altogether in
+the world of lofty spirits.
+
+"I was punctual. At ten next evening I was, for the first time, shown
+into a charming bedroom furnished with white and blue--the nest of
+this wounded dove. The Countess looked at me, and was about to speak,
+but was stricken dumb by my respectful demeanor.
+
+" 'Madame la Comtesse,' said I with a grave smile.
+
+"The poor woman, who had risen, dropped back into her chair and
+remained there, sunk in an attitude of grief, which I should have
+liked to see perpetuated by a great painter.
+
+" 'You are,' I went on, 'the wife of the noblest and most highly
+respected of men; of a man who is acknowledged to be great, but who is
+far greater in his conduct to you than he is in the eyes of the world.
+You and he are two lofty natures.--Where do you suppose yourself to be
+living?' I asked her.
+
+" 'In my own house,' she replied, opening her eyes with a wide stare
+of astonishment.
+
+" 'In Count Octave's,' I replied. 'You have been tricked. M.
+Lenormand, the usher of the Court, is not the real owner; he is only a
+screen for your husband. The delightful seclusion you enjoy is the
+Count's work, the money you earn is paid by him, and his protection
+extends to the most trivial details of your existence. Your husband
+has saved you in the eyes of the world; he has assigned plausible
+reasons for your disappearance; he professes to hope that you were not
+lost in the wreck of the /Cecile/, the ship in which you sailed for
+Havana to secure the fortune to be left to you by an old aunt, who
+might have forgotten you; you embarked, escorted by two ladies of her
+family and an old man-servant. The Count says that he has sent agents
+to various spots, and received letters which give him great hopes. He
+takes as many precautions to hide you from all eyes as you take
+yourself. In short, he obeys you . . .'
+
+" 'That is enough,' she said. 'I want to know but one thing more. From
+whom have you obtained all these details?'
+
+" 'Well, madame, my uncle got a place for a penniless youth as
+secretary to the Commissary of police in this part of Paris. That
+young man told me everything. If you leave this house this evening,
+however stealthily, your husband will know where you are gone, and his
+care will follow you everywhere.--How could a woman so clever as you
+are believe that shopkeepers buy flowers and caps as dear as they sell
+them? Ask a thousand crowns for a bouquet, and you will get it. No
+mother's tenderness was ever more ingenious than your husband's! I
+have learned from the porter of this house that the Count often comes
+behind the fence when all are asleep, to see the glimmer of your
+nightlight! Your large cashmere shawl cost six thousand francs--your
+old-clothes-seller brings you, as second hand, things fresh from the
+best makers. In short, you are living here like Venus in the toils of
+Vulcan; but you are alone in your prison by the devices of a sublime
+magnanimity, sublime for seven years past, and at every hour.'
+
+"The Countess was trembling as a trapped swallow trembles while, as
+you hold it in your hand, it strains its neck to look about it with
+wild eyes. She shook with a nervous spasm, studying me with a defiant
+look. Her dry eyes glittered with a light that was almost hot: still,
+she was a woman! The moment came when her tears forced their way, and
+she wept--not because she was touched, but because she was helpless;
+they were tears of desperation. She had believed herself independent
+and free; marriage weighed on her as the prison cell does on the
+captive.
+
+" 'I will go!' she cried through her tears. 'He forces me to it; I
+will go where no one certainly will come after me.'
+
+" 'What,' I said, 'you would kill yourself?--Madame, you must have
+some very powerful reasons for not wishing to return to Comte Octave.'
+
+" 'Certainly I have!'
+
+" 'Well, then, tell them to me; tell them to my uncle. In us you will
+find two devoted advisers. Though in the confessional my uncle is a
+priest, he never is one in a drawing-room. We will hear you; we will
+try to find a solution of the problems you may lay before us; and if
+you are the dupe or the victim of some misapprehension, perhaps we can
+clear the matter up. Your soul, I believe, is pure; but if you have
+done wrong, your fault is fully expiated. . . . At any rate, remember
+that in me you have a most sincere friend. If you should wish to evade
+the Count's tyranny, I will find you the means; he shall never find
+you.'
+
+" 'Oh! there is always a convent!' said she.
+
+" 'Yes. But the Count, as Minister of State, can procure your
+rejection by every convent in the world. Even though he is powerful, I
+will save you from him--; but--only when you have demonstrated to me
+that you cannot and ought not to return to him. Oh! do not fear that
+you would escape his power only to fall into mine,' I added, noticing
+a glance of horrible suspicion, full of exaggerated dignity. 'You
+shall have peace, solitude, and independence; in short, you shall be
+as free and as little annoyed as if you were an ugly, cross old maid.
+I myself would never be able to see you without your consent.'
+
+" 'And how? By what means?'
+
+" 'That is my secret. I am not deceiving you, of that you may be sure.
+Prove to me that this is the only life you can lead, that it is
+preferable to that of the Comtesse Octave, rich, admired, in one of
+the finest houses in Paris, beloved by her husband, a happy
+mother . . . and I will decide in your favor.'
+
+" 'But,' said she, 'will there never be a man who understands me?'
+
+" 'No. And that is why I appeal to religion to decide between us. The
+Cure of the White Friars is a saint, seventy-five years of age. My
+uncle is not a Grand Inquisitor, he is Saint John; but for you he will
+be Fenelon--the Fenelon who said to the Duc de Bourgogne: 'Eat a calf
+on a Friday by all means, monseigneur. But be a Christian.'
+
+" 'Nay, nay, monsieur, the convent is my last hope and my only refuge.
+There is none but God who can understand me. No man, not Saint
+Augustine himself, the tenderest of the Fathers of the Church, could
+enter into the scruples of my conscience, which are to me as the
+circles of Dante's hell, whence there is no escape. Another than my
+husband, a different man, however unworthy of the offering, has had
+all my love. No, he has not had it, for he did not take it; I gave it
+him as a mother gives her child a wonderful toy, which it breaks. For
+me there never could be two loves. In some natures love can never be
+on trial; it is, or it is not. When it comes, when it rises up, it is
+complete.--Well, that life of eighteen months was to me a life of
+eighteen years; I threw into it all the faculties of my being, which
+were not impoverished by their effusiveness; they were exhausted by
+that delusive intimacy in which I alone was genuine. For me the cup of
+happiness is not drained, nor empty; and nothing can refill it, for it
+is broken. I am out of the fray; I have no weapons left. Having thus
+utterly abandoned myself, what am I?--the leavings of a feast. I had
+but one name bestowed on me, Honorine, as I had but one heart. My
+husband had the young girl, a worthless lover had the woman--there is
+nothing left!--Then let myself be loved! that is the great idea you
+mean to utter to me. Oh! but I still am something, and I rebel at the
+idea of being a prostitute! Yes, by the light of the conflagration I
+saw clearly; and I tell you--well, I could imagine surrendering to
+another man's love, but to Octave's?--No, never.'
+
+" 'Ah! you love him,' I said.
+
+" 'I esteem him, respect him, venerate him; he never has done me the
+smallest hurt; he is kind, he is tender; but I can never more love
+him. However,' she went on, 'let us talk no more of this. Discussion
+makes everything small. I will express my notions on this subject in
+writing to you, for at this moment they are suffocating me; I am
+feverish, my feet are standing in the ashes of my Paraclete. All that
+I see, these things which I believed I had earned by my labor, now
+remind me of everything I wish to forget. Ah! I must fly from hence as
+I fled from my home.'
+
+" 'Where will you go?' I asked. 'Can a woman exist unprotected? At
+thirty, in all the glory of your beauty, rich in powers of which you
+have no suspicion, full of tenderness to be bestowed, are you prepared
+to live in the wilderness where I could hide you?--Be quite easy. The
+Count, who for nine years has never allowed himself to be seen here,
+will never go there without your permission. You have his sublime
+devotion of nine years as a guarantee for your tranquillity. You may
+therefore discuss the future in perfect confidence with my uncle and
+me. My uncle has as much influence as a Minister of State. So compose
+yourself; do not exaggerate your misfortune. A priest whose hair has
+grown white in the exercise of his functions is not a boy; you will be
+understood by him to whom every passion has been confided for nearly
+fifty years now, and who weighs in his hands the ponderous heart of
+kings and princes. If he is stern under his stole, in the presence of
+your flowers he will be as tender as they are, and as indulgent as his
+Divine Master.'
+
+"I left the Countess at midnight; she was apparently calm, but
+depressed, and had some secret purpose which no perspicacity could
+guess. I found the Count a few paces off, in the Rue Saint-Maur. Drawn
+by an irresistible attraction, he had quitted the spot on the
+Boulevards where we had agreed to meet.
+
+" 'What a night my poor child will go through!' he exclaimed, when I
+had finished my account of the scene that had just taken place.
+'Supposing I were to go to her!' he added; 'supposing she were to see
+me suddenly?'
+
+" 'At this moment she is capable of throwing herself out of the
+window,' I replied. 'The Countess is one of those Lucretias who could
+not survive any violence, even if it were done by a man into whose
+arms she could throw herself.'
+
+" 'You are young,' he answered; 'you do not know that in a soul tossed
+by such dreadful alternatives the will is like waters of a lake lashed
+by a tempest; the wind changes every instant, and the waves are driven
+now to one shore, now to the other. During this night the chances are
+quite as great that on seeing me Honorine might rush into my arms as
+that she would throw herself out of the window.'
+
+" 'And you would accept the equal chances,' said I.
+
+" 'Well, come,' said he, 'I have at home, to enable me to wait till
+to-morrow, a dose of opium which Desplein prepared for me to send me
+to sleep without any risk!'
+
+"Next day at noon Gobain brought me a letter, telling me that the
+Countess had gone to bed at six, worn out with fatigue, and that,
+having taken a soothing draught prepared by the chemist, she had now
+fallen asleep.
+
+"This is her letter, of which I kept a copy--for you, mademoiselle,"
+said the Consul, addressing Camille, "know all the resources of art,
+the tricks of style, and the efforts made in their compositions by
+writers who do not lack skill; but you will acknowledge that
+literature could never find such language in its assumed pathos; there
+is nothing so terrible as truth. Here is the letter written by this
+woman, or rather by this anguish:--
+
+" 'MONSIEUR MAURICE,--
+
+" 'I know all your uncle would say to me; he is not better informed
+than my own conscience. Conscience is the interpreter of God to man. I
+know that if I am not reconciled to Octave, I shall be damned; that is
+the sentence of religious law. Civil law condemns me to obey, cost
+what it may. If my husband does not reject me, the world will regard
+me as pure, as virtuous, whatever I may have done. Yes, that much is
+sublime in marriage; society ratifies the husband's forgiveness; but
+it forgets that the forgiveness must be accepted. Legally,
+religiously, and from the world's point of view I ought to go back to
+Octave. Keeping only to the human aspect of the question, is it not
+cruel to refuse him happiness, to deprive him of children, to wipe his
+name out of the Golden Book and the list of peers? My sufferings, my
+repugnance, my feelings, all my egoism--for I know that I am an egoist
+--ought to be sacrificed to the family. I shall be a mother; the
+caresses of my child will wipe away many tears! I shall be very happy;
+I certainly shall be much looked up to. I shall ride, haughty and
+wealthy, in a handsome carriage! I shall have servants and a fine
+house, and be the queen of as many parties as there are weeks in the
+year. The world will receive me handsomely. I shall not have to climb
+up again to the heaven of aristocracy, I shall never have come down
+from it. So God, the law, society are all in accord.
+
+" ' "What are you rebelling against?" I am asked from the height of
+heaven, from the pulpit, from the judge's bench, and from the throne,
+whose august intervention may at need be invoked by the Count. Your
+uncle, indeed, at need, would speak to me of a certain celestial grace
+which will flood my heart when I know the pleasure of doing my duty.
+
+" 'God, the law, the world, and Octave all wish me to live, no doubt.
+Well, if there is no other difficulty, my reply cuts the knot: I will
+not live. I will become white and innocent again; for I will lie in my
+shroud, white with the blameless pallor of death. This is not in the
+least "mulish obstinacy." That mulish obstinacy of which you jestingly
+accused me is in a woman the result of confidence, of a vision of the
+future. Though my husband, sublimely generous, may forget all, I shall
+not forget. Does forgetfulness depend on our will? When a widow
+re-marries, love makes a girl of her; she marries a man she loves. But
+I cannot love the Count. It all lies in that, do not you see?
+
+" 'Every time my eyes met his I should see my sin in them, even when
+his were full of love. The greatness of his generosity would be the
+measure of the greatness of my crime. My eyes, always uneasy, would be
+for ever reading an invisible condemnation. My heart would be full of
+confused and struggling memories; marriage can never move me to the
+cruel rapture, the mortal delirium of passion. I should kill my
+husband by my coldness, by comparisons which he would guess, though
+hidden in the depths of my conscience. Oh! on the day when I should
+read a trace of involuntary, even of suppressed reproach in a furrow
+on his brow, in a saddened look, in some imperceptible gesture,
+nothing could hold me: I should be lying with a fractured skull on the
+pavement, and find that less hard than my husband. It might be my own
+over-susceptibility that would lead me to this horrible but welcome
+death; I might die the victim of an impatient mood in Octave caused by
+some matter of business, or be deceived by some unjust suspicion.
+Alas! I might even mistake some proof of love for a sign of contempt!
+
+" 'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I
+doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly
+unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known
+raptures branded on me with fire, which are my shame, but which I
+cannot forget.
+
+" 'Have I shown you enough of my heart? No one, monsieur, can convince
+me that love may be renewed, for I neither can nor will accept love
+from any one. A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty
+wife is like a flower that had been walked over. You, who are a
+florist, you know whether it is ever possible to restore the broken
+stem, to revive the faded colors, to make the sap flow again in the
+tender vessels of which the whole vegetative function lies in their
+perfect rigidity. If some botanist should attempt the operation, could
+his genius smooth out the folds of the bruised corolla? If he could
+remake a flower, he would be God! God alone can remake me! I am
+drinking the bitter cup of expiation; but as I drink it I painfully
+spell out this sentence: Expiation is not annihilation.
+
+" 'In my little house, alone, I eat my bread soaked in tears; but no
+one sees me eat nor sees me weep. If I go back to Octave, I must give
+up my tears--they would offend him. Oh! monsieur, how many virtues
+must a woman tread under foot, not to give herself, but to restore
+herself to a betrayed husband? Who could count them? God alone; for He
+alone can know and encourage the horrible refinements at which the
+angels must turn pale. Nay, I will go further. A woman has courage in
+the presence of her husband if he knows nothing; she shows a sort of
+fierce strength in her hypocrisy; she deceives him to secure him
+double happiness. But common knowledge is surely degrading. Supposing
+I could exchange humiliation for ecstasy? Would not Octave at last
+feel that my consent was sheer depravity? Marriage is based on esteem,
+on sacrifices on both sides; but neither Octave nor I could esteem
+each other the day after our reunion. He would have disgraced me by a
+love like that of an old man for a courtesan, and I should for ever
+feel the shame of being a chattel instead of a lady. I should
+represent pleasure, and not virtue, in his house. These are the bitter
+fruits of such a sin. I have made myself a bed where I can only toss
+on burning coals, a sleepless pillow.
+
+" 'Here, when I suffer, I bless my sufferings; I say to God, "I thank
+Thee!" But in my husband's house I should be full of terror, tasting
+joys to which I have no right.
+
+" 'All this, monsieur, is not argument; it is the feeling of a soul
+made vast and hollow by seven years of suffering. Finally, must I make
+a horrible confession? I shall always feel at my bosom the lips of a
+child conceived in rapture and joy, and in the belief in happiness, of
+a child I nursed for seven months, that I shall bear in my womb all
+the days of my life. If other children should draw their nourishment
+from me, they would drink in tears mingling with the milk, and turning
+it sour. I seem a light thing, you regard me as a child--Ah yes! I
+have a child's memory, the memory which returns to us on the verge of
+the tomb. So, you see, there is not a situation in that beautiful life
+to which the world and my husband's love want to recall me, which is
+not a false position, which does not cover a snare or reveal a
+precipice down which I must fall, torn by pitiless rocks. For five
+years now I have been wandering in the sandy desert of the future
+without finding a place convenient to repent in, because my soul is
+possessed by true repentance.
+
+" 'Religion has its answers ready to all this, and I know them by
+heart. This suffering, these difficulties, are my punishment, she
+says, and God will give me strength to endure them. This, monsieur, is
+an argument to certain pious souls gifted with an energy which I have
+not. I have made my choice between this hell, where God does not
+forbid my blessing Him, and the hell that awaits me under Count
+Octave's roof.
+
+" 'One word more. If I were still a girl, with the experience I now
+have, my husband is the man I should choose; but that is the very
+reason of my refusal. I could not bear to blush before that man. What!
+I should be always on my knees, he always standing upright; and if we
+were to exchange positions, I should scorn him! I will not be better
+treated by him in consequence of my sin. The angel who might venture
+under such circumstances on certain liberties which are permissible
+when both are equally blameless, is not on earth; he dwells in heaven!
+Octave is full of delicate feeling, I know; but even in his soul
+(which, however generous, is a man's soul after all) there is no
+guarantee for the new life I should lead with him.
+
+" 'Come then, and tell me where I may find the solitude, the peace,
+the silence, so kindly to irreparable woes, which you promised me.'
+
+"After making this copy of the letter to preserve it complete, I went
+to the Rue Payenne. Anxiety had conquered the power of opium. Octave
+was walking up and down his garden like a madman.
+
+" 'Answer that!' said I, giving him his wife's letter. 'Try to
+reassure the modesty of experience. It is rather more difficult than
+conquering the modesty of ignorance, which curiosity helps to betray.'
+
+" 'She is mine!' cried the Count, whose face expressed joy as he went
+on reading the letter.
+
+"He signed to me with his hand to leave him to himself. I understood
+that extreme happiness and extreme pain obey the same laws; I went in
+to receive Madame de Courteville and Amelie, who were to dine with the
+Count that day. However handsome Mademoiselle de Courteville might be,
+I felt, on seeing her once more, that love has three aspects, and that
+the women who can inspire us with perfect love are very rare. As I
+involuntarily compared Amelie with Honorine, I found the erring wife
+more attractive than the pure girl. To Honorine's heart fidelity had
+not been a duty, but the inevitable; while Amelie would serenely
+pronounce the most solemn promises without knowing their purport or to
+what they bound her. The crushed, the dead woman, so to speak, the
+sinner to be reinstated, seemed to me sublime; she incited the special
+generosities of a man's nature; she demanded all the treasures of the
+heart, all the resources of strength; she filled his life and gave the
+zest of a conflict to happiness; whereas Amelie, chaste and confiding,
+would settle down into the sphere of peaceful motherhood, where the
+commonplace must be its poetry, and where my mind would find no
+struggle and no victory.
+
+"Of the plains of Champagne and the snowy, storm-beaten but sublime
+Alps, what young man would choose the chalky, monotonous level? No;
+such comparisons are fatal and wrong on the threshold of the Mairie.
+Alas! only the experience of life can teach us that marriage excludes
+passion, that a family cannot have its foundation on the tempests of
+love. After having dreamed of impossible love, with its infinite
+caprices, after having tasted the tormenting delights of the ideal, I
+saw before me modest reality. Pity me, for what could be expected! At
+five-and-twenty I did not trust myself; but I took a manful
+resolution.
+
+"I went back to the Count to announce the arrival of his relations,
+and I saw him grown young again in the reflected light of hope.
+
+" 'What ails you, Maurice?' said he, struck by my changed expression.
+
+" 'Monsieur le Comte----'
+
+" 'No longer Octave? You, to whom I shall owe my life, my
+happiness----'
+
+" 'My dear Octave, if you should succeed in bringing the Countess back
+to her duty, I have studied her well'--(he looked at me as Othello
+must have looked at Iago when Iago first contrived to insinuate a
+suspicion into the Moor's mind)--'she must never see me again; she
+must never know that Maurice was your secretary. Never mention my name
+to her, or all will be undone. . . . You have got me an appointment as
+Maitre des Requetes--well, get me instead some diplomatic post abroad,
+a consulship, and do not think of my marrying Amelie.--Oh! do not be
+uneasy,' I added, seeing him draw himself up, 'I will play my part to
+the end.'
+
+" 'Poor boy!' said he, taking my hand, which he pressed, while he kept
+back the tears that were starting to his eyes.
+
+" 'You gave me the gloves,' I said, laughing, 'but I have not put them
+on; that is all.'
+
+"We then agreed as to what I was to do that evening at Honorine's
+house, whither I presently returned. It was now August; the day had
+been hot and stormy, but the storm hung overhead, the sky was like
+copper; the scent of the flowers was heavy, I felt as if I were in an
+oven, and caught myself wishing that the Countess might have set out
+for the Indies; but she was sitting on a wooden bench shaped like a
+sofa, under an arbor, in a loose dress of white muslin fastened with
+blue bows, her hair unadorned in waving bands over her cheeks, her
+feet on a small wooden stool, and showing a little way beyond her
+skirt. She did not rise; she showed me with her hand to the seat by
+her side, saying:
+
+" 'Now, is not life at a deadlock for me?'
+
+" 'Life as you have made it, I replied. 'But not the life I propose to
+make for you; for, if you choose, you may be very happy. . . .'
+
+" 'How?' said she; her whole person was a question.
+
+" 'Your letter is in the Count's hands.'
+
+"Honorine started like a frightened doe, sprang to a few paces off,
+walked down the garden, turned about, remained standing for some
+minutes, and finally went in to sit alone in the drawing-room, where I
+joined her, after giving her time to get accustomed to the pain of
+this poniard thrust.
+
+" 'You--a friend? Say rather a traitor! A spy, perhaps, sent by my
+husband.'
+
+"Instinct in women is as strong as the perspicacity of great men.
+
+" 'You wanted an answer to your letter, did you not? And there was but
+one man in the world who could write it. You must read the reply, my
+dear Countess; and if after reading it you still find that your life
+is a deadlock, the spy will prove himself a friend; I will place you
+in a convent whence the Count's power cannot drag you. But, before
+going there, let us consider the other side of the question. There is
+a law, alike divine and human, which even hatred affects to obey, and
+which commands us not to condemn the accused without hearing his
+defence. Till now you have passed condemnation, as children do, with
+your ears stopped. The devotion of seven years has its claims. So you
+must read the answer your husband will send you. I have forwarded to
+him, through my uncle, a copy of your letter, and my uncle asked him
+what his reply would be if his wife wrote him a letter in such terms.
+Thus you are not compromised. He will himself bring the Count's
+answer. In the presence of that saintly man, and in mine, out of
+respect for your own dignity, you must read it, or you will be no
+better than a wilful, passionate child. You must make this sacrifice
+to the world, to the law, and to God.'
+
+"As she saw in this concession no attack on her womanly resolve, she
+consented. All the labor or four or five months had been building up
+to this moment. But do not the Pyramids end in a point on which a bird
+may perch? The Count had set all his hopes on this supreme instant,
+and he had reached it.
+
+"In all my life I remember nothing more formidable than my uncle's
+entrance into that little Pompadour drawing-room, at ten that evening.
+The fine head, with its silver hair thrown into relief by the entirely
+black dress, and the divinely calm face, had a magical effect on the
+Comtesse Honorine; she had the feeling of cool balm on her wounds, and
+beamed in the reflection of that virtue which gave light without
+knowing it.
+
+" 'Monsieur the Cure of the White Friars,' said old Gobain.
+
+" 'Are you come, uncle, with a message of happiness and peace?' said
+I.
+
+" 'Happiness and peace are always to be found in obedience to the
+precepts of the Church,' replied my uncle, and he handed the Countess
+the following letter:--
+
+" 'MY DEAR HONORINE,--
+
+" 'If you had but done me the favor of trusting me, if you had read
+the letter I wrote to you five years since, you would have spared
+yourself five years of useless labor, and of privations which have
+grieved me deeply. In it I proposed an arrangement of which the
+stipulations will relieve all your fears, and make our domestic life
+possible. I have much to reproach myself with, and in seven years of
+sorrow I have discovered all my errors. I misunderstood marriage. I
+failed to scent danger when it threatened you. An angel was in the
+house. The Lord bid me guard it well! The Lord has punished me for my
+audacious confidence.
+
+" 'You cannot give yourself a single lash without striking me. Have
+mercy on me, my dear Honorine. I so fully appreciated your
+susceptibilities that I would not bring you back to the old house in
+the Rue Payenne, where I can live without you, but which I could not
+bear to see again with you. I am decorating, with great pleasure,
+another house, in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, to which, in hope, I
+conduct not a wife whom I owe to her ignorance of life, and secured to
+me by law, but a sister who will allow me to press on her brow such a
+kiss as a father gives the daughter he blesses every day.
+
+" 'Will you bereave me of the right I have conquered from your despair
+--that of watching more closely over your needs, your pleasures, your
+life even? Women have one heart always on their side, always abounding
+in excuses--their mother's; you never knew any mother but my mother,
+who would have brought you back to me. But how is it that you never
+guessed that I had for you the heart of a mother, both of my mother
+and of your own? Yes, dear, my affection is neither mean nor grasping;
+it is one of those which will never let any annoyance last long enough
+to pucker the brow of the child it worships. What can you think of the
+companion of your childhood, Honorine, if you believe him capable of
+accepting kisses given in trembling, of living between delight and
+anxiety? Do not fear that you will be exposed to the laments of a
+suppliant passion; I would not want you back until I felt certain of
+my own strength to leave you in perfect freedom.
+
+" 'Your solitary pride has exaggerated the difficulties. You may, if
+you will, look on at the life of a brother, or of a father, without
+either suffering or joy; but you will find neither mockery nor
+indifference, nor have any doubt as to his intentions. The warmth of
+the atmosphere in which you live will be always equable and genial,
+without tempests, without a possible squall. If, later, when you feel
+secure that you are as much at home as in your own little house, you
+desire to try some other elements of happiness, pleasures, or
+amusements, you can expand their circle at your will. The tenderness
+of a mother knows neither contempt nor pity. What is it? Love without
+desire. Well, in me admiration shall hide every sentiment in which you
+might see an offence.
+
+" 'Thus, living side by side, we may both be magnanimous. In you the
+kindness of a sister, the affectionate thoughtfulness of a friend,
+will satisfy the ambition of him who wishes to be your life's
+companion; and you may measure his tenderness by the care he will take
+to conceal it. Neither you nor I will be jealous of the past, for we
+may each acknowledge that the other has sense enough to look only
+straight forward.
+
+" 'Thus you will be at home in your new house exactly as you are in
+the Rue Saint-Maur; unapproachable, alone, occupied as you please,
+living by your own law; but having in addition the legitimate
+protection, of which you are now exacting the most chivalrous labors
+of love, with the consideration which lends so much lustre to a woman,
+and the fortune which will allow of your doing many good works.
+Honorine, when you long for an unnecessary absolution, you have only
+to ask for it; it will not be forced upon you by the Church or by the
+Law; it will wait on your pride, on your own impulsion. My wife might
+indeed have to fear all the things you dread; but not my friend and
+sister, towards whom I am bound to show every form and refinement of
+politeness. To see you happy is enough happiness for me; I have proved
+this for the seven years past. The guarantee for this, Honorine, is to
+be seen in all the flowers made by you, carefully preserved, and
+watered by my tears. Like the /quipos/, the tally cords of the
+Peruvians, they are the record of our sorrows.
+
+" 'If this secret compact does not suit you, my child, I have begged
+the saintly man who takes charge of this letter not to say a word in
+my behalf. I will not owe your return to the terrors threatened by the
+Church, nor to the bidding of the Law. I will not accept the simple
+and quiet happiness that I ask from any one but yourself. If you
+persist in condemning me to the lonely life, bereft even of a
+fraternal smile, which I have led for nine years, if you remain in
+your solitude and show no sign, my will yields to yours. Understand me
+perfectly: you shall be no more troubled that you have been until this
+day. I will get rid of the crazy fellow who has meddled in your
+concerns, and has perhaps caused you some annoyance . . .'
+
+" 'Monsieur,' said Honorine, folding up the letter, which she placed
+in her bosom, and looking at my uncle, 'thank you very much. I will
+avail myself of Monsieur le Comte's permission to remain here----'
+
+" 'Ah!' I exclaimed.
+
+"This exclamation made my uncle look at me uneasily, and won from the
+Countess a mischievous glance, which enlightened me as to her motives.
+
+"Honorine had wanted to ascertain whether I were an actor, a bird
+snarer; and I had the melancholy satisfaction of deceiving her by my
+exclamation, which was one of those cries from the heart which women
+understand so well.
+
+" 'Ah, Maurice,' said she, 'you know how to love.'
+
+"The light that flashed in my eyes was another reply which would have
+dissipated the Countess' uneasiness if she still had any. Thus the
+Count found me useful to the very last.
+
+"Honorine then took out the Count's letter again to finish reading it.
+My uncle signed to me, and I rose.
+
+" 'Let us leave the Countess,' said he.
+
+" 'You are going already Maurice?' she said, without looking at me.
+
+"She rose, and still reading, followed us to the door. On the
+threshold she took my hand, pressed it very affectionately, and said,
+'We shall meet again . . .'
+
+" 'No,' I replied, wringing her hand, so that she cried out. 'You love
+your husband. I leave to-morrow.'
+
+"And I rushed away, leaving my uncle, to whom she said:
+
+" 'Why, what is the matter with your nephew?'
+
+"The good Abbe completed my work by pointing to his head and heart, as
+much as to say, 'He is mad, madame; you must forgive him!' and with
+all the more truth, because he really thought it.
+
+"Six days after, I set out with an appointment as vice-consul in
+Spain, in a large commercial town, where I could quickly qualify to
+rise in the career of a consul, to which I now restricted my ambition.
+After I had established myself there, I received this letter from the
+Count:--
+
+" 'MY DEAR MAURICE,--
+
+" 'If I were happy, I should not write to you, but I have entered on a
+new life of suffering. I have grown young again in my desires, with
+all the impatience of a man of forty, and the prudence of a
+diplomatist, who has learned to moderate his passion. When you left I
+had not yet been admitted to the /pavillon/ in the Rue Saint-Maur, but
+a letter had promised me that I should have permission--the mild and
+melancholy letter of a woman who dreaded the agitations of a meeting.
+After waiting for more than a month, I made bold to call, and desired
+Gobain to inquire whether I could be received. I sat down in a chair
+in the avenue near the lodge, my head buried in my hands, and there I
+remained for almost an hour.
+
+" ' "Madame had to dress," said Gobain, to hide Honorine's hesitancy
+under a pride of appearance which was flattering to me.
+
+" 'During a long quarter of an hour we both of us were possessed by an
+involuntary nervous trembling as great as that which seizes a speaker
+on the platform, and we spoke to each other sacred phrases, like those
+of persons taken by surprise who "make believe" a conversation.
+
+" ' "You see, Honorine," said I, my eyes full of tears, "the ice is
+broken, and I am so tremulous with happiness that you must forgive the
+incoherency of my language. It will be so for a long time yet."
+
+" ' "There is no crime in being in love with your wife," said she with
+a forced smile.
+
+" ' "Do me the favor," said I, "no longer to work as you do. I have
+heard from Madame Gobain that for three weeks you have been living on
+your savings; you have sixty thousand francs a year of your own, and
+if you cannot give me back your heart, at least do not abandon your
+fortune to me."
+
+" ' "I have long known your kindness," said she.
+
+" ' "Though you should prefer to remain here," said I, "and to
+preserve your independence; though the most ardent love should find no
+favor in your eyes, still, do not toil."
+
+" 'I gave her three certificates for twelve thousand francs a year
+each; she took them, opened them languidly, and after reading them
+through she gave me only a look as my reward. She fully understood
+that I was not offering her money, but freedom.
+
+" ' "I am conquered," said she, holding out her hand, which I kissed.
+"Come and see me as often as you like."
+
+" 'So she had done herself a violence in receiving me. Next day I
+found her armed with affected high spirits, and it took two months of
+habit before I saw her in her true character. But then it was like a
+delicious May, a springtime of love that gave me ineffable bliss; she
+was no longer afraid; she was studying me. Alas! when I proposed that
+she should go to England to return ostensibly to me, to our home, that
+she should resume her rank and live in our new residence, she was
+seized with alarm.
+
+" ' "Why not live always as we are?" she said.
+
+" 'I submitted without saying a word.
+
+" ' "Is she making an experiment?" I asked myself as I left her. On my
+way from my own house to the Rue Saint-Maur thoughts of love had
+swelled in my heart, and I had said to myself, like a young man, "This
+evening she will yield."
+
+" 'All my real or affected force was blown to the winds by a smile, by
+a command from those proud, calm eyes, untouched by passion. I
+remembered the terrible words you once quoted to me, "Lucretia's
+dagger wrote in letters of blood the watchword of woman's charter--
+Liberty!" and they froze me. I felt imperatively how necessary to me
+was Honorine's consent, and how impossible it was to wring it from
+her. Could she guess the storms that distracted me when I left as when
+I came?
+
+" 'At last I painted my situation in a letter to her, giving up the
+attempt to speak of it. Honorine made no answer, and she was so sad
+that I made as though I had not written. I was deeply grieved by the
+idea that I could have distressed her; she read my heart and forgave
+me. And this was how. Three days ago she received me, for the first
+time, in her own blue-and-white room. It was bright with flowers,
+dressed, and lighted up. Honorine was in a dress that made her
+bewitching. Her hair framed that face that you know in its light
+curls; and in it were some sprays of Cape heath; she wore a white
+muslin gown, a white sash with long floating ends. You know what she
+is in such simplicity, but that day she was a bride, the Honorine of
+long past days. My joy was chilled at once, for her face was terribly
+grave; there were fires beneath the ice.
+
+" ' "Octave," she said, "I will return as your wife when you will. But
+understand clearly that this submission has its dangers. I can be
+resigned----"
+
+" 'I made a movement.
+
+" ' "Yes," she went on, "I understand: resignation offends you, and
+you want what I cannot give--Love. Religion and pity led me to
+renounce my vow of solitude; you are here!" She paused.
+
+" ' "At first," she went on, "you asked no more. Now you demand your
+wife. Well, here I give you Honorine, such as she is, without
+deceiving you as to what she will be.--What shall I be? A mother? I
+hope it. Believe me, I hope it eagerly. Try to change me; you have my
+consent; but if I should die, my dear, do not curse my memory, and do
+not set down to obstinacy what I should call the worship of the Ideal,
+if it were not more natural to call the indefinable feeling which must
+kill me the worship of the Divine! The future will be nothing to me;
+it will be your concern; consult your own mind."
+
+" 'And she sat down in the calm attitude you used to admire, and
+watched me turning pale with the pain she had inflicted. My blood ran
+cold. On seeing the effect of her words she took both my hands, and,
+holding them in her own, she said:
+
+" ' "Octave, I do love you, but not in the way you wish to be loved. I
+love your soul. . . . Still, understand that I love you enough to die
+in your service like an Eastern slave, and without a regret. It will
+be my expiation."
+
+" 'She did more; she knelt before me on a cushion, and in a spirit of
+sublime charity she said:
+
+" ' "And perhaps I shall not die!"
+
+" 'For two months now I have been struggling with myself. What shall I
+do? My heart is too full; I therefore seek a friend, and send out this
+cry, "What shall I do?" '
+
+"I did not answer this letter. Two months later the newspapers
+announced the return on board an English vessel of the Comtesse
+Octave, restored to her family after adventures by land and sea,
+invented with sufficient probability to arouse no contradiction.
+
+"When I moved to Genoa I received a formal announcement of the happy
+event of the birth of a son to the Count and Countess. I held that
+letter in my hand for two hours, sitting on this terrace--on this
+bench. Two months after, urged by Octave, by M. de Grandville, and
+Monsieur de Serizy, my kind friends, and broken by the death of my
+uncle, I agreed to take a wife.
+
+"Six months after the revolution of July I received this letter, which
+concludes the story of this couple:--
+
+" 'MONSIEUR MAURICE,--I am dying though I am a mother--perhaps because
+I am a mother. I have played my part as a wife well; I have deceived
+my husband. I have had happiness not less genuine than the tears shed
+by actresses on the stage. I am dying for society, for the family, for
+marriage, as the early Christians died for God! I know not of what I
+am dying, and I am honestly trying to find out, for I am not perverse;
+but I am bent on explaining my malady to you--you who brought that
+heavenly physician your uncle, at whose word I surrendered. He was my
+director; I nursed him in his last illness, and he showed me the way
+to heaven, bidding me persevere in my duty.
+
+" 'And I have done my duty.
+
+" 'I do not blame those who forget. I admire them as strong and
+necessary natures; but I have the malady of memory! I have not been
+able twice to feel that love of the heart which identifies a woman
+with the man she loves. To the last moment, as you know, I cried to
+your heart, in the confessional, and to my husband, "Have mercy!" But
+there was no mercy. Well, and I am dying, dying with stupendous
+courage. No courtesan was ever more gay than I. My poor Octave is
+happy; I let his love feed on the illusions of my heart. I throw all
+my powers into this terrible masquerade; the actress is applauded,
+feasted, smothered in flowers; but the invisible rival comes every day
+to seek its prey--a fragment of my life. I am rent and I smile. I
+smile on two children, but it is the elder, the dead one, that will
+triumph! I told you so before. The dead child calls me, and I am going
+to him.
+
+" 'The intimacy of marriage without love is a position in which my
+soul feels degraded every hour. I can never weep or give myself up to
+dreams but when I am alone. The exigencies of society, the care of my
+child, and that of Octave's happiness never leave me a moment to
+refresh myself, to renew my strength, as I could in my solitude. The
+incessant need for watchfulness startles my heart with constant
+alarms. I have not succeeded in implanting in my soul the sharp-eared
+vigilance that lies with facility, and has the eyes of a lynx. It is
+not the lip of one I love that drinks my tears and kisses them; my
+burning eyes are cooled with water, and not with tender lips. It is my
+soul that acts a part, and that perhaps is why I am dying! I lock up
+my griefs with so much care that nothing is to be seen of it; it must
+eat into something, and it has attacked my life.
+
+" 'I said to the doctors, who discovered my secret, "Make me die of
+some plausible complaint, or I shall drag my husband with me."
+
+" 'So it is quite understood by M. Desplein, Bianchon, and myself that
+I am dying of the softening of some bone which science has fully
+described. Octave believes that I adore him, do you understand? So I
+am afraid lest he should follow me. I now write to beg you in that
+case to be the little Count's guardian. You will find with this a
+codicil in which I have expressed my wish; but do not produce it
+excepting in case of need, for perhaps I am fatuously vain. My
+devotion may perhaps leave Octave inconsolable but willing to live.--
+Poor Octave! I wish him a better wife than I am, for he deserves to be
+well loved.
+
+" 'Since my spiritual spy is married, I bid him remember what the
+florist of the Rue Saint-Maur hereby bequeaths to him as a lesson: May
+your wife soon be a mother! Fling her into the vulgarest materialism
+of household life; hinder her from cherishing in her heart the
+mysterious flower of the Ideal--of that heavenly perfection in which I
+believed, that enchanted blossom with glorious colors, and whose
+perfume disgusts us with reality. I am a Saint-Theresa who has not
+been suffered to live on ecstasy in the depths of a convent, with the
+Holy Infant, and a spotless winged angel to come and go as she wished.
+
+" 'You saw me happy among my beloved flowers. I did not tell you all:
+I saw love budding under your affected madness, and I concealed from
+you my thoughts, my poetry; I did not admit you to my kingdom of
+beauty. Well, well; you will love my child for love of me if he should
+one day lose his poor father. Keep my secrets as the grave will keep
+them. Do not mourn for me; I have been dead this many a day, if Saint
+Bernard was right in saying that where there is no more love there is
+no more life.' "
+
+"And the Countess died," said the Consul, putting away the letters and
+locking the pocket-book.
+
+"Is the Count still living?" asked the Ambassador, "for since the
+revolution of July he has disappeared from the political stage."
+
+"Do you remember, Monsieur de Lora," said the Consul-General, "having
+seen me going to the steamboat with----"
+
+"A white-haired man! an old man?" said the painter.
+
+"An old man of forty-five, going in search of health and amusement in
+Southern Italy. That old man was my poor friend, my patron, passing
+through Genoa to take leave of me and place his will in my hands. He
+appoints me his son's guardian. I had no occasion to tell him of
+Honorine's wishes."
+
+"Does he suspect himself of murder?" said Mademoiselle des Touches to
+the Baron de l'Hostal.
+
+"He suspects the truth," replied the Consul, "and that is what is
+killing him. I remained on board the steam packet that was to take him
+to Naples till it was out of the roadstead; a small boat brought me
+back. We sat for some little time taking leave of each other--for
+ever, I fear. God only knows how much we love the confidant of our
+love when she who inspired it is no more.
+
+" 'That man,' said Octave, 'holds a charm and wears an aureole.' the
+Count went to the prow and looked down on the Mediterranean. It
+happened to be fine, and, moved no doubt by the spectacle, he spoke
+these last words: 'Ought we not, in the interests of human nature, to
+inquire what is the irresistible power which leads us to sacrifice an
+exquisite creature to the most fugitive of all pleasures, and in spite
+of our reason? In my conscience I heard cries. Honorine was not alone
+in her anguish. And yet I would have it! . . . I am consumed by
+remorse. In the Rue Payenne I was dying of the joys I had not; now I
+shall die in Italy of the joys I have had. . . . Wherein lay the
+discord between two natures, equally noble, I dare assert?' "
+
+For some minutes profound silence reigned on the terrace.
+
+Then the Consul, turning to the two women, asked, "Was she virtuous?"
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches rose, took the Consul's arm, went a few steps
+away, and said to him:
+
+"Are not men wrong too when they come to us and make a young girl a
+wife while cherishing at the bottom of their heart some angelic image,
+and comparing us to those unknown rivals, to perfections often
+borrowed from a remembrance, and always finding us wanting?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, you would be right if marriage were based on passion;
+and that was the mistake of those two, who will soon be no more.
+Marriage with heart-deep love on both sides would be Paradise."
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches turned from the Consul, and was immediately
+joined by Claude Vignon, who said in her ear:
+
+"A bit of a coxcomb is M. de l'Hostal."
+
+"No," replied she, whispering to Claude these words: "for he has not
+yet guessed that Honorine would have loved him.--Oh!" she exclaimed,
+seeing the Consul's wife approaching, "his wife was listening! Unhappy
+man!"
+
+Eleven was striking by all the clocks, and the guests went home on
+foot along the seashore.
+
+"Still, that is not life," said Mademoiselle des Touches. "That woman
+was one of the rarest, and perhaps the most extraordinary exceptions
+in intellect--a pearl! Life is made up of various incidents, of pain
+and pleasure alternately. The Paradise of Dante, that sublime
+expression of the ideal, that perpetual blue, is to be found only in
+the soul; to ask it of the facts of life is a luxury against which
+nature protests every hour. To such souls as those the six feet of a
+cell, and the kneeling chair are all they need."
+
+"You are right," said Leon de Lora; "but good-for-nothing as I may be,
+I cannot help admiring a woman who is capable, as that one was, of
+living by the side of a studio, under a painter's roof, and never
+coming down, nor seeing the world, nor dipping her feet in the street
+mud."
+
+"Such a thing has been known--for a few months," said Claude Vignon,
+with deep irony.
+
+"Comtesse Honorine is not unique of her kind," replied the Ambassador
+to Mademoiselle des Touches. "A man, nay, and a politician, a bitter
+writer, was the object of such a passion; and the pistol shot which
+killed him hit not him alone; the woman who loved lived like a nun
+ever after."
+
+"Then there are yet some great souls in this age!" said Camille
+Maupin, and she stood for some minutes pensively leaning on the
+balustrade of the quay.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Bauvan, Comte Octave de
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Magic Skin
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Desplein
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cousin Pons
+  Lost Illusions
+  The Thirteen
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Fontanon, Abbe
+  A Second Home
+  The Government Clerks
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Gaudissart, Felix
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Cousin Pons
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Gaudissart the Great
+
+Gaudron, Abbe
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Start in Life
+
+Granville, Vicomte de (later Comte)
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  A Second Home
+  Farewell (Adieu)
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Lora, Leon de
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Start in Life
+  Pierre Grassou
+  Cousin Betty
+  Beatrix
+
+Loraux, Abbe
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Cesar Birotteau
+
+Popinot, Jean-Jules
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Middle Classes
+
+Serizy, Comte Hugret de
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des
+  Beatrix
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Beatrix
+  The Muse of the Department
+
+Vignon, Claude
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Honorine
+  Beatrix
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Honorine, by Honore de Balzac
+
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