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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Another Study of Woman, by Honoré de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Another Study of Woman
+
+Author: Honoré de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
+
+Release Date: March 1, 2010 [EBook #1714]
+Last Updated: October 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN
+
+By Honoré De Balzac
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+To Leon Gozlan as a Token of Literary Good-fellowship.
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN
+
+At Paris there are almost always two separate parties going on at
+every ball and rout. First, an official party, composed of the persons
+invited, a fashionable and much-bored circle. Each one grimaces for his
+neighbor’s eye; most of the younger women are there for one person
+only; when each woman has assured herself that for that one she is the
+handsomest woman in the room, and that the opinion is perhaps shared
+by a few others, a few insignificant phrases are exchanged, as: “Do
+you think of going away soon to La Crampade?” “How well Madame de
+Portenduère sang!” “Who is that little woman with such a load of
+diamonds?” Or, after firing off some smart epigrams, which give
+transient pleasure, and leave wounds that rankle long, the groups thin
+out, the mere lookers on go away, and the waxlights burn down to the
+sconces.
+
+The mistress of the house then waylays a few artists, amusing people
+or intimate friends, saying, “Do not go yet; we will have a snug little
+supper.” These collect in some small room. The second, the real party,
+now begins; a party where, as of old, every one can hear what is said,
+conversation is general, each one is bound to be witty and to contribute
+to the amusement of all. Everything is made to tell, honest laughter
+takes the place of the gloom which in company saddens the prettiest
+faces. In short, where the rout ends pleasure begins.
+
+The Rout, a cold display of luxury, a review of self-conceits in full
+dress, is one of those English inventions which tend to mechanize other
+nations. England seems bent on seeing the whole world as dull as itself,
+and dull in the same way. So this second party is, in some French
+houses, a happy protest on the part of the old spirit of our
+light-hearted people. Only, unfortunately, so few houses protest; and
+the reason is a simple one. If we no longer have many suppers nowadays,
+it is because never, under any rule, have there been fewer men placed,
+established, and successful than under the reign of Louis Philippe, when
+the Revolution began again, lawfully. Everybody is on the march some
+whither, or trotting at the heels of Fortune. Time has become the
+costliest commodity, so no one can afford the lavish extravagance of
+going home to-morrow morning and getting up late. Hence, there is no
+second soiree now but at the houses of women rich enough to entertain,
+and since July 1830 such women may be counted in Paris.
+
+In spite of the covert opposition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, two or
+three women, among them Madame d’Espard and Mademoiselle des Touches,
+have not chosen to give up the share of influence they exercised in
+Paris, and have not closed their houses.
+
+The salon of Mademoiselle des Touches is noted in Paris as being the
+last refuge where the old French wit has found a home, with its reserved
+depths, its myriad subtle byways, and its exquisite politeness. You will
+there still find grace of manner notwithstanding the conventionalities
+of courtesy, perfect freedom of talk notwithstanding the reserve which
+is natural to persons of breeding, and, above all, a liberal flow of
+ideas. No one there thinks of keeping his thought for a play; and no one
+regards a story as material for a book. In short, the hideous skeleton
+of literature at bay never stalks there, on the prowl for a clever sally
+or an interesting subject.
+
+The memory of one of these evenings especially dwells with me, less by
+reason of a confidence in which the illustrious de Marsay opened up
+one of the deepest recesses of woman’s heart, than on account of the
+reflections to which his narrative gave rise, as to the changes that
+have taken place in the French woman since the fateful revolution of
+July.
+
+On that evening chance had brought together several persons, whose
+indisputable merits have won them European reputations. This is not
+a piece of flattery addressed to France, for there were a good many
+foreigners present. And, indeed, the men who most shone were not the
+most famous. Ingenious repartee, acute remarks, admirable banter,
+pictures sketched with brilliant precision, all sparkled and flowed
+without elaboration, were poured out without disdain, but without
+effort, and were exquisitely expressed and delicately appreciated. The
+men of the world especially were conspicuous for their really artistic
+grace and spirit.
+
+Elsewhere in Europe you will find elegant manners, cordiality, genial
+fellowship, and knowledge; but only in Paris, in this drawing-room,
+and those to which I have alluded, does the particular wit abound which
+gives an agreeable and changeful unity to all these social qualities,
+an indescribable river-like flow which makes this profusion of ideas, of
+definitions, of anecdotes, of historical incidents, meander with ease.
+Paris, the capital of taste, alone possesses the science which makes
+conversation a tourney in which each type of wit is condensed into a
+shaft, each speaker utters his phrase and casts his experience in a
+word, in which every one finds amusement, relaxation, and exercise.
+Here, then, alone, will you exchange ideas; here you need not, like the
+dolphin in the fable, carry a monkey on your shoulders; here you will
+be understood, and will not risk staking your gold pieces against base
+metal.
+
+Here, again, secrets neatly betrayed, and talk, light or deep, play and
+eddy, changing their aspect and hue at every phrase. Eager criticism and
+crisp anecdotes lead on from one to the next. All eyes are listening,
+a gesture asks a question, and an expressive look gives the answer. In
+short, and in a word, everything is wit and mind.
+
+The phenomenon of speech, which, when duly studied and well handled,
+is the power of the actor and the story-teller, had never so completely
+bewitched me. Nor was I alone under the influence of its spell; we all
+spent a delightful evening. The conversation had drifted into anecdote,
+and brought out in its rushing course some curious confessions,
+several portraits, and a thousand follies, which make this enchanting
+improvisation impossible to record; still, by setting these things
+down in all their natural freshness and abruptness, their elusive
+divarications, you may perhaps feel the charm of a real French evening,
+taken at the moment when the most engaging familiarity makes each one
+forget his own interests, his personal conceit, or, if you like, his
+pretensions.
+
+At about two in the morning, as supper ended, no one was left sitting
+round the table but intimate friends, proved by intercourse of fifteen
+years, and some persons of great taste and good breeding, who knew the
+world. By tacit agreement, perfectly carried out, at supper every one
+renounced his pretensions to importance. Perfect equality set the tone.
+But indeed there was no one present who was not very proud of being
+himself.
+
+Mademoiselle des Touches always insists on her guests remaining at table
+till they leave, having frequently remarked the change which a move
+produces in the spirit of a party. Between the dining-room and the
+drawing-room the charm is destroyed. According to Sterne, the ideas
+of an author after shaving are different from those he had before. If
+Sterne is right, may it not be boldly asserted that the frame of mind of
+a party at table is not the same as that of the same persons returned
+to the drawing-room? The atmosphere is not heady, the eye no longer
+contemplates the brilliant disorder of the dessert, lost are the happy
+effects of that laxness of mood, that benevolence which comes over us
+while we remain in the humor peculiar to the well-filled man, settled
+comfortably on one of the springy chairs which are made in these days.
+Perhaps we are not more ready to talk face to face with the dessert and
+in the society of good wine, during the delightful interval when every
+one may sit with an elbow on the table and his head resting on his
+hand. Not only does every one like to talk then, but also to listen.
+Digestion, which is almost always attent, is loquacious or silent, as
+characters differ. Then every one finds his opportunity.
+
+Was not this preamble necessary to make you know the charm of the
+narrative, by which a celebrated man, now dead, depicted the innocent
+jesuistry of women, painting it with the subtlety peculiar to persons
+who have seen much of the world, and which makes statesmen such
+delightful storytellers when, like Prince Talleyrand and Prince
+Metternich, they vouchsafe to tell a story?
+
+De Marsay, prime minister for some six months, had already given proofs
+of superior capabilities. Those who had known him long were not indeed
+surprised to see him display all the talents and various aptitudes of a
+statesman; still it might yet be a question whether he would prove to
+be a solid politician, or had merely been moulded in the fire of
+circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man whom he had
+made a préfet, a man of wit and observation, who had for a long time
+been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without infusing into his
+admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which, in Paris, one superior
+man excuses himself from admiring another.
+
+“Was there ever,” said he, “in your former life, any event, any thought
+or wish which told you what your vocation was?” asked Émile Blondet;
+“for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls and leads us to
+the spot where our faculties develop——”
+
+“Yes,” said de Marsay; “I will tell you about it.”
+
+Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, de Marsay’s intimate
+friends,—all settled themselves comfortably, each in his favorite
+attitude, to look at the Minister. Need it be said that the servants had
+left, that the doors were shut, and the curtains drawn over them? The
+silence was so complete that the murmurs of the coachmen’s voices could
+be heard from the courtyard, and the pawing and champing made by horses
+when asking to be taken back to their stable.
+
+“The statesman, my friends, exists by one single quality,” said the
+Minister, playing with his gold and mother-of-pearl dessert knife. “To
+wit: the power of always being master of himself; of profiting more or
+less, under all circumstances, by every event, however fortuitous; in
+short, of having within himself a cold and disinterested other self, who
+looks on as a spectator at all the changes of life, noting our passions
+and our sentiments, and whispering to us in every case the judgment of a
+sort of moral ready-reckoner.”
+
+“That explains why a statesman is so rare a thing in France,” said old
+Lord Dudley.
+
+“From a sentimental point of view, this is horrible,” the Minister went
+on. “Hence, when such a phenomenon is seen in a young man—Richelieu,
+who, when warned overnight by a letter of Concini’s peril, slept till
+midday, when his benefactor was killed at ten o’clock—or say Pitt, or
+Napoleon, he was a monster. I became such a monster at a very early age,
+thanks to a woman.”
+
+“I fancied,” said Madame de Montcornet with a smile, “that more
+politicians were undone by us than we could make.”
+
+“The monster of which I speak is a monster just because he withstands
+you,” replied de Marsay, with a little ironical bow.
+
+“If this is a love-story,” the Baronne de Nucingen interposed, “I
+request that it may not be interrupted by any reflections.”
+
+“Reflection is so antipathetic to it!” cried Joseph Bridau.
+
+“I was seventeen,” de Marsay went on; “the Restoration was being
+consolidated; my old friends know how impetuous and fervid I was then.
+I was in love for the first time, and I was—I may say so now—one of
+the handsomest young fellows in Paris. I had youth and good looks, two
+advantages due to good fortune, but of which we are all as proud as of
+a conquest. I must be silent as to the rest.—Like all youths, I was in
+love with a woman six years older than myself. No one of you here,”
+ said he, looking carefully round the table, “can suspect her name or
+recognize her. Ronquerolles alone, at the time, ever guessed my secret.
+He had kept it well, but I should have feared his smile. However, he is
+gone,” said the Minister, looking round.
+
+“He would not stay to supper,” said Madame de Nucingen.
+
+“For six months, possessed by my passion,” de Marsay went on, “but
+incapable of suspecting that it had overmastered me, I had abandoned
+myself to that rapturous idolatry which is at once the triumph and the
+frail joy of the young. I treasured her old gloves; I drank an infusion
+of the flowers she had worn; I got out of bed at night to go and gaze at
+her window. All my blood rushed to my heart when I inhaled the perfume
+she used. I was miles away from knowing that woman is a stove with a
+marble casing.”
+
+“Oh! spare us your terrible verdicts,” cried Madame de Montcornet with a
+smile.
+
+“I believe I should have crushed with my scorn the philosopher who first
+uttered this terrible but profoundly true thought,” said de Marsay. “You
+are all far too keen-sighted for me to say any more on that point. These
+few words will remind you of your own follies.
+
+“A great lady if ever there was one, a widow without children—oh! all
+was perfect—my idol would shut herself up to mark my linen with her
+hair; in short, she responded to my madness by her own. And how can we
+fail to believe in passion when it has the guarantee of madness?
+
+“We each devoted all our minds to concealing a love so perfect and so
+beautiful from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded. And what charm
+we found in our escapades! Of her I will say nothing. She was perfection
+then, and to this day is considered one of the most beautiful women in
+Paris; but at that time a man would have endured death to win one of her
+glances. She had been left with an amount of fortune sufficient for a
+woman who had loved and was adored; but the Restoration, to which she
+owed renewed lustre, made it seem inadequate in comparison with her
+name. In my position I was so fatuous as never to dream of a
+suspicion. Though my jealousy would have been of a hundred and twenty
+Othello-power, that terrible passion slumbered in me as gold in the
+nugget. I would have ordered my servant to thrash me if I had been so
+base as ever to doubt the purity of that angel—so fragile and so strong,
+so fair, so artless, pure, spotless, and whose blue eyes allowed my
+gaze to sound it to the very depths of her heart with adorable
+submissiveness. Never was there the slightest hesitancy in her attitude,
+her look, or word; always white and fresh, and ready for the Beloved
+like the Oriental Lily of the ‘Song of Songs!’ Ah! my friends!” sadly
+exclaimed the Minister, grown young again, “a man must hit his head very
+hard on the marble to dispel that poem!”
+
+This cry of nature, finding an echo in the listeners, spurred the
+curiosity he had excited in them with so much skill.
+
+“Every morning, riding Sultan—the fine horse you sent me from England,”
+ de Marsay went on, addressing Lord Dudley, “I rode past her open
+carriage, the horses’ pace being intentionally reduced to a walk, and
+read the order of the day signaled to me by the flowers of her bouquet
+in case we were unable to exchange a few words. Though we saw each
+other almost every evening in society, and she wrote to me every day, to
+deceive the curious and mislead the observant we had adopted a scheme of
+conduct: never to look at each other; to avoid meeting; to speak ill
+of each other. Self-admiration, swagger, or playing the disdained
+swain,—all these old manoeuvres are not to compare on either part with
+a false passion professed for an indifferent person and an air of
+indifference towards the true idol. If two lovers will only play that
+game, the world will always be deceived; but then they must be very
+secure of each other.
+
+“Her stalking-horse was a man in high favor, a courtier, cold and
+sanctimonious, whom she never received at her own house. This little
+comedy was performed for the benefit of simpletons and drawing-room
+circles, who laughed at it. Marriage was never spoken of between us; six
+years’ difference of age might give her pause; she knew nothing of my
+fortune, of which, on principle, I have always kept the secret. I, on my
+part, fascinated by her wit and manners, by the extent of her knowledge
+and her experience of the world, would have married her without a
+thought. At the same time, her reserve charmed me. If she had been the
+first to speak of marriage in a certain tone, I might perhaps have noted
+it as vulgar in that accomplished soul.
+
+“Six months, full and perfect—a diamond of the purest water! That has
+been my portion of love in this base world.
+
+“One morning, attacked by the feverish stiffness which marks the
+beginning of a cold, I wrote her a line to put off one of those secret
+festivals which are buried under the roofs of Paris like pearls in the
+sea. No sooner was the letter sent than remorse seized me: she will not
+believe that I am ill! thought I. She was wont to affect jealousy and
+suspiciousness.—When jealousy is genuine,” said de Marsay, interrupting
+himself, “it is the visible sign of an unique passion.”
+
+“Why?” asked the Princesse de Cadignan eagerly.
+
+“Unique and true love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of corporeal
+apathy attuned to the contemplation into which one falls. Then the mind
+complicates everything; it works on itself, pictures its fancies, turns
+them into reality and torment; and such jealousy is as delightful as it
+is distressing.”
+
+A foreign minister smiled as, by the light of memory, he felt the truth
+of this remark.
+
+“Besides,” de Marsay went on, “I said to myself, why miss a happy hour?
+Was it not better to go, even though feverish? And, then, if she learns
+that I am ill, I believe her capable of hurrying here and compromising
+herself. I made an effort; I wrote a second letter, and carried it
+myself, for my confidential servant was now gone. The river lay between
+us. I had to cross Paris; but at last, within a suitable distance of
+her house, I caught sight of a messenger; I charged him to have the note
+sent up to her at once, and I had the happy idea of driving past her
+door in a hackney cab to see whether she might not by chance receive the
+two letters together. At the moment when I arrived it was two
+o’clock; the great gate opened to admit a carriage. Whose?—That of the
+stalking-horse!
+
+“It is fifteen years since—well, even while I tell the tale, I, the
+exhausted orator, the Minister dried up by the friction of public
+business, I still feel a surging in my heart and the hot blood about my
+diaphragm. At the end of an hour I passed once more; the carriage was
+still in the courtyard! My note no doubt was in the porter’s hands. At
+last, at half-past three, the carriage drove out. I could observe my
+rival’s expression; he was grave, and did not smile; but he was in love,
+and no doubt there was business in hand.
+
+“I went to keep my appointment; the queen of my heart met me; I saw her
+calm, pure, serene. And here I must confess that I have always thought
+that Othello was not only stupid, but showed very bad taste. Only a man
+who is half a Negro could behave so: indeed Shakespeare felt this when
+he called his play ‘The Moor of Venice.’ The sight of the woman we love
+is such a balm to the heart that it must dispel anguish, doubt,
+and sorrow. All my rage vanished. I could smile again. Hence this
+cheerfulness, which at my age now would be the most atrocious
+dissimulation, was the result of my youth and my love. My jealousy once
+buried, I had the power of observation. My ailing condition was evident;
+the horrible doubts that had fermented in me increased it. At last I
+found an opening for putting in these words: ‘You have had no one with
+you this morning?’ making a pretext of the uneasiness I had felt in the
+fear lest she should have disposed of her time after receiving my first
+note.—‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, ‘only a man could have such ideas! As if
+I could think of anything but your suffering. Till the moment when I
+received your second note I could think only of how I could contrive to
+see you.’—‘And you were alone?’—‘Alone,’ said she, looking at me with a
+face of innocence so perfect that it must have been his distrust of such
+a look as that which made the Moor kill Desdemona. As she lived alone
+in the house, the word was a fearful lie. One single lie destroys
+the absolute confidence which to some souls is the very foundation of
+happiness.
+
+“To explain to you what passed in me at that moment it must be assumed
+that we have an internal self of which the exterior I is but the husk;
+that this self, as brilliant as light, is as fragile as a shade—well,
+that beautiful self was in me thenceforth for ever shrouded in crape.
+Yes; I felt a cold and fleshless hand cast over me the winding-sheet
+of experience, dooming me to the eternal mourning into which the first
+betrayal plunges the soul. As I cast my eyes down that she might not
+observe my dizziness, this proud thought somewhat restored my strength:
+‘If she is deceiving you, she is unworthy of you!’
+
+“I ascribed my sudden reddening and the tears which started to my eyes
+to an attack of pain, and the sweet creature insisted on driving me
+home with the blinds of the cab drawn. On the way she was full of a
+solicitude and tenderness that might have deceived the Moor of Venice
+whom I have taken as a standard of comparison. Indeed, if that great
+child were to hesitate two seconds longer, every intelligent spectator
+feels that he would ask Desdemona’s forgiveness. Thus, killing the woman
+is the act of a boy.—She wept as we parted, so much was she distressed
+at being unable to nurse me herself. She wished she were my valet, in
+whose happiness she found a cause of envy, and all this was as elegantly
+expressed, oh! as Clarissa might have written in her happiness. There is
+always a precious ape in the prettiest and most angelic woman!”
+
+At these words all the women looked down, as if hurt by this brutal
+truth so brutally stated.
+
+“I will say nothing of the night, nor of the week I spent,” de Marsay
+went on. “I discovered that I was a statesman.”
+
+It was so well said that we all uttered an admiring exclamation.
+
+“As I thought over the really cruel vengeance to be taken on a woman,”
+ said de Marsay, continuing his story, “with infernal ingenuity—for, as
+we had loved each other, some terrible and irreparable revenges were
+possible—I despised myself, I felt how common I was, I insensibly
+formulated a horrible code—that of Indulgence. In taking vengeance on
+a woman, do we not in fact admit that there is but one for us, that we
+cannot do without her? And, then, is revenge the way to win her back? If
+she is not indispensable, if there are other women in the world, why not
+grant her the right to change which we assume?
+
+“This, of course, applies only to passion; in any other sense it
+would be socially wrong. Nothing more clearly proves the necessity for
+indissoluble marriage than the instability of passion. The two sexes
+must be chained up, like wild beasts as they are, by inevitable law,
+deaf and mute. Eliminate revenge, and infidelity in love is nothing.
+Those who believe that for them there is but one woman in the world must
+be in favor of vengeance, and then there is but one form of it—that of
+Othello.
+
+“Mine was different.”
+
+The words produced in each of us the imperceptible movement which
+newspaper writers represent in Parliamentary reports by the words: great
+sensation.
+
+“Cured of my cold, and of my pure, absolute, divine love, I flung myself
+into an adventure, of which the heroine was charming, and of a style of
+beauty utterly opposed to that of my deceiving angel. I took care not to
+quarrel with this clever woman, who was so good an actress, for I doubt
+whether true love can give such gracious delights as those lavished by
+such a dexterous fraud. Such refined hypocrisy is as good as virtue.—I
+am not speaking to you Englishwomen, my lady,” said the Minister,
+suavely, addressing Lady Barimore, Lord Dudley’s daughter. “I tried to
+be the same lover.
+
+“I wished to have some of my hair worked up for my new angel, and I went
+to a skilled artist who at that time dwelt in the Rue Boucher. The man
+had a monopoly of capillary keepsakes, and I mention his address for the
+benefit of those who have not much hair; he has plenty of every kind and
+every color. After I had explained my order, he showed me his work. I
+then saw achievements of patience surpassing those which the story books
+ascribe to fairies, or which are executed by prisoners. He brought me up
+to date as to the caprices and fashions governing the use of hair. ‘For
+the last year,’ said he, ‘there has been a rage for marking linen
+with hair; happily I had a fine collection of hair and skilled
+needlewomen,’—on hearing this a suspicion flashed upon me; I took out
+my handkerchief and said, ‘So this was done in your shop, with false
+hair?’—He looked at the handkerchief, and said, ‘Ay! that lady was very
+particular, she insisted on verifying the tint of the hair. My wife
+herself marked those handkerchiefs. You have there, sir, one of the
+finest pieces of work we have ever executed.’ Before this last ray of
+light I might have believed something—might have taken a woman’s word.
+I left the shop still having faith in pleasure, but where love was
+concerned I was as atheistical as a mathematician.
+
+“Two months later I was sitting by the side of the ethereal being in
+her boudoir, on her sofa; I was holding one of her hands—they were very
+beautiful—and we scaled the Alps of sentiment, culling their sweetest
+flowers, and pulling off the daisy-petals; there is always a moment when
+one pulls daisies to pieces, even if it is in a drawing-room and there
+are no daisies. At the intensest moment of tenderness, and when we are
+most in love, love is so well aware of its own short duration that
+we are irresistibly urged to ask, ‘Do you love me? Will you love
+me always?’ I seized the elegiac moment, so warm, so flowery, so
+full-blown, to lead her to tell her most delightful lies, in the
+enchanting language of love. Charlotte displayed her choicest
+allurements: She could not live without me; I was to her the only man in
+the world; she feared to weary me, because my presence bereft her of all
+her wits; with me, all her faculties were lost in love; she was indeed
+too tender to escape alarms; for the last six months she had been
+seeking some way to bind me to her eternally, and God alone knew that
+secret; in short, I was her god!”
+
+The women who heard de Marsay seemed offended by seeing themselves so
+well acted, for he seconded the words by airs, and sidelong attitudes,
+and mincing grimaces which were quite illusory.
+
+“At the very moment when I might have believed these adorable
+falsehoods, as I still held her right hand in mine, I said to her, ‘When
+are you to marry the Duke?’
+
+“The thrust was so direct, my gaze met hers so boldly, and her hand
+lay so tightly in mine, that her start, slight as it was, could not
+be disguised; her eyes fell before mine, and a faint blush colored
+her cheeks.—‘The Duke! What do you mean?’ she said, affecting great
+astonishment.—‘I know everything,’ replied I; ‘and in my opinion, you
+should delay no longer; he is rich; he is a duke; but he is more than
+devout, he is religious! I am sure, therefore, that you have been
+faithful to me, thanks to his scruples. You cannot imagine how urgently
+necessary it is that you should compromise him with himself and with
+God; short of that you will never bring him to the point.’—‘Is this
+a dream?’ said she, pushing her hair from her forehead, fifteen
+years before Malibran, with the gesture which Malibran has made so
+famous.—‘Come, do not be childish, my angel,’ said I, trying to take
+her hands; but she folded them before her with a little prudish and
+indignant mein.—‘Marry him, you have my permission,’ said I, replying to
+this gesture by using the formal vous instead of tu. ‘Nay, better, I
+beg you to do so.’—‘But,’ cried she, falling at my knees, ‘there is some
+horrible mistake; I love no one in the world but you; you may demand
+any proofs you please.’—‘Rise, my dear,’ said I, ‘and do me the honor of
+being truthful.’—‘As before God.’—‘Do you doubt my love?’—‘No.’—‘Nor my
+fidelity?’—‘No.’—‘Well, I have committed the greatest crime,’ I went on.
+‘I have doubted your love and your fidelity. Between two intoxications
+I looked calmly about me.’—‘Calmly!’ sighed she. ‘That is enough, Henri;
+you no longer love me.’
+
+“She had at once found, you perceive, a loophole for escape. In scenes
+like these an adverb is dangerous. But, happily, curiosity made her
+add: ‘And what did you see? Have I ever spoken of the Duke excepting in
+public? Have you detected in my eyes——?’—‘No,’ said I, ‘but in his.
+And you have eight times made me go to Saint-Thomas d’Aquin to see you
+listening to the same mass as he.’—‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, ‘then I have
+made you jealous!’—Oh! I only wish I could be!’ said I, admiring the
+pliancy of her quick intelligence, and these acrobatic feats which can
+only be successful in the eyes of the blind. ‘But by dint of going to
+church I have become very incredulous. On the day of my first cold, and
+your first treachery, when you thought I was in bed, you received the
+Duke, and you told me you had seen no one.’—‘Do you know that your
+conduct is infamous?’—‘In what respect? I consider your marriage to the
+Duke an excellent arrangement; he gives you a great name, the only rank
+that suits you, a brilliant and distinguished position. You will be one
+of the queens of Paris. I should be doing you a wrong if I placed any
+obstacle in the way of this prospect, this distinguished life, this
+splendid alliance. Ah! Charlotte, some day you will do me justice by
+discovering how unlike my character is to that of other young men. You
+would have been compelled to deceive me; yes, you would have found it
+very difficult to break with me, for he watches you. It is time that we
+should part, for the Duke is rigidly virtuous. You must turn prude;
+I advise you to do so. The Duke is vain; he will be proud of his
+wife.’—‘Oh!’ cried she, bursting into tears, ‘Henri, if only you
+had spoken! Yes, if you had chosen’—it was I who was to blame, you
+understand—‘we would have gone to live all our days in a corner,
+married, happy, and defied the world.’—‘Well, it is too late now,’ said
+I, kissing her hands, and putting on a victimized air.—‘Good God! But I
+can undo it all!’ said she.—‘No, you have gone too far with the Duke. I
+ought indeed to go a journey to part us more effectually. We should both
+have reason to fear our own affection——’—‘Henri, do you think the
+Duke has any suspicions?’ I was still ‘Henri,’ but the tu was lost for
+ever.—‘I do not think so,’ I replied, assuming the manner of a friend;
+‘but be as devout as possible, reconcile yourself to God, for the Duke
+waits for proofs; he hesitates, you must bring him to the point.’
+
+“She rose, and walked twice round the boudoir in real or affected
+agitation; then she no doubt found an attitude and a look beseeming the
+new state of affairs, for she stopped in front of me, held out her hand,
+and said in a voice broken by emotion, ‘Well, Henri, you are loyal,
+noble, and a charming man; I shall never forget you.’
+
+“These were admirable tactics. She was bewitching in this transition
+of feeling, indispensable to the situation in which she wished to place
+herself in regard to me. I fell into the attitude, the manners, and the
+look of a man so deeply distressed, that I saw her too newly assumed
+dignity giving way; she looked at me, took my hand, drew me along
+almost, threw me on the sofa, but quite gently, and said after a
+moment’s silence, ‘I am dreadfully unhappy, my dear fellow. Do you love
+me?’—‘Oh! yes.’—‘Well, then, what will become of you?’”
+
+At this point the women all looked at each other.
+
+“Though I can still suffer when I recall her perfidy, I still laugh at
+her expression of entire conviction and sweet satisfaction that I must
+die, or at any rate sink into perpetual melancholy,” de Marsay went on.
+“Oh! do not laugh yet!” he said to his listeners; “there is better to
+come. I looked at her very tenderly after a pause, and said to her,
+‘Yes, that is what I have been wondering.’—‘Well, what will you do?’—‘I
+asked myself that the day after my cold.’—‘And——?’ she asked with eager
+anxiety.—‘And I have made advances to the little lady to whom I was
+supposed to be attached.’
+
+“Charlotte started up from the sofa like a frightened doe, trembling
+like a leaf, gave me one of those looks in which women forgo all their
+dignity, all their modesty, their refinement, and even their grace, the
+sparkling glitter of a hunted viper’s eye when driven into a corner, and
+said, ‘And I have loved this man! I have struggled! I have——’ On this
+last thought, which I leave you to guess, she made the most impressive
+pause I ever heard.—‘Good God!’ she cried, ‘how unhappy are we women!
+we never can be loved. To you there is nothing serious in the purest
+feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you still are our dupes!’—‘I
+see that plainly,’ said I, with a stricken air; ‘you have far too much
+wit in your anger for your heart to suffer from it.’—This modest epigram
+increased her rage; she found some tears of vexation. ‘You disgust
+me with the world and with life.’ she said; ‘you snatch away all my
+illusions; you deprave my heart.’
+
+“She said to me all that I had a right to say to her, and with a simple
+effrontery, an artless audacity, which would certainly have nailed any
+man but me on the spot.—‘What is to become of us poor women in a state
+of society such as Louis XVIII.’s charter made it?’—(Imagine how her
+words had run away with her.)—‘Yes, indeed, we are born to suffer. In
+matters of passion we are always superior to you, and you are beneath
+all loyalty. There is no honesty in your hearts. To you love is a game
+in which you always cheat.’—‘My dear,’ said I, ‘to take anything
+serious in society nowadays would be like making romantic love to an
+actress.’—‘What a shameless betrayal! It was deliberately planned!’—‘No,
+only a rational issue.’—‘Good-bye, Monsieur de Marsay,’ said she; ‘you
+have deceived me horribly.’—‘Surely,’ I replied, taking up a
+submissive attitude, ‘Madame la Duchesse will not remember Charlotte’s
+grievances?’—‘Certainly,’ she answered bitterly.—‘Then, in fact, you
+hate me?’—She bowed, and I said to myself, ‘There is something still
+left!’
+
+“The feeling she had when I parted from her allowed her to believe that
+she still had something to avenge. Well, my friends, I have carefully
+studied the lives of men who have had great success with women, but I
+do not believe that the Maréchal de Richelieu, or Lauzun, or Louis de
+Valois ever effected a more judicious retreat at the first attempt. As
+to my mind and heart, they were cast in a mould then and there, once
+for all, and the power of control I thus acquired over the thoughtless
+impulses which make us commit so many follies gained me the admirable
+presence of mind you all know.”
+
+“How deeply I pity the second!” exclaimed the Baronne de Nucingen.
+
+A scarcely perceptible smile on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de
+Nucingen color.
+
+“How we do forget!” said the Baron de Nucingen.
+
+The great banker’s simplicity was so extremely droll, that his wife, who
+was de Marsay’s “second,” could not help laughing like every one else.
+
+“You are all ready to condemn the woman,” said Lady Dudley. “Well,
+I quite understand that she did not regard her marriage as an act
+of inconstancy. Men will never distinguish between constancy and
+fidelity.—I know the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told us,
+and she is one of the last of your truly great ladies.”
+
+“Alas! my lady, you are right,” replied de Marsay. “For very nearly
+fifty years we have been looking on at the progressive ruin of all
+social distinctions. We ought to have saved our women from this great
+wreck, but the Civil Code has swept its leveling influence over their
+heads. However terrible the words, they must be spoken: Duchesses are
+vanishing, and marquises too! As to the baronesses—I must apologize to
+Madame de Nucingen, who will become a countess when her husband is made
+a peer of France—baronesses have never succeeded in getting people to
+take them seriously.”
+
+“Aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” said Blondet with a smile.
+
+“Countesses will survive,” said de Marsay. “An elegant woman will be
+more or less of a countess—a countess of the Empire or of yesterday,
+a countess of the old block, or, as they say in Italy, a countess by
+courtesy. But as to the great lady, she died out with the dignified
+splendor of the last century, with powder, patches, high-heeled
+slippers, and stiff bodices with a delta stomacher of bows. Duchesses
+in these days can pass through a door without any need to widen it for
+their hoops. The Empire saw the last of gowns with trains! I am still
+puzzled to understand how a sovereign who wished to see his drawing-room
+swept by ducal satin and velvet did not make indestructible laws.
+Napoleon never guessed the results of the Code he was so proud of.
+That man, by creating duchesses, founded the race of our ‘ladies’ of
+to-day—the indirect offspring of his legislation.”
+
+“It was logic, handled as a hammer by boys just out of school and
+by obscure journalists, which demolished the splendors of the social
+state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “In these days every rogue who can
+hold his head straight in his collar, cover his manly bosom with half an
+ell of satin by way of a cuirass, display a brow where apocryphal genius
+gleams under curling locks, and strut in a pair of patent-leather pumps
+graced by silk socks which cost six francs, screws his eye-glass into
+one of his eye-sockets by puckering up his cheek, and whether he be an
+attorney’s clerk, a contractor’s son, or a banker’s bastard, he stares
+impertinently at the prettiest duchess, appraises her as she walks
+downstairs, and says to his friend—dressed by Buisson, as we all are,
+and mounted in patent-leather like any duke himself—‘There, my boy, that
+is a perfect lady.’”
+
+“You have not known how to form a party,” said Lord Dudley; “it will
+be a long time yet before you have a policy. You talk a great deal in
+France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized property.
+So this is what happens: Any duke—and even in the time of Louis XVIII.
+and Charles X. there were some left who had two hundred thousand francs
+a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train of servants—well,
+such a duke could live like a great lord. The last of these great
+gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.—This duke leaves four
+children, two of them girls. Granting that he has great luck in marrying
+them all well, each of these descendants will have but sixty or eighty
+thousand francs a year now; each is the father or mother of children,
+and consequently obliged to live with the strictest economy in a flat on
+the ground floor or first floor of a large house. Who knows if they
+may not even be hunting a fortune? Henceforth the eldest son’s wife, a
+duchess in name only, has no carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time
+to herself. She has not her own rooms in the family mansion, nor her
+fortune, nor her pretty toys; she is buried in trade; she buys socks for
+her dear little children, nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on
+her girls, whom she no longer sends to school at a convent. Thus your
+noblest dames have been turned into worthy brood-hens.”
+
+“Alas! it is true,” said Joseph Bridau. “In our day we cannot show
+those beautiful flowers of womanhood which graced the golden ages of the
+French Monarchy. The great lady’s fan is broken. A woman has nothing now
+to blush for; she need not slander or whisper, hide her face or reveal
+it. A fan is of no use now but for fanning herself. When once a thing is
+no more than what it is, it is too useful to be a form of luxury.”
+
+“Everything in France has aided and abetted the ‘perfect lady,’” said
+Daniel d’Arthez. “The aristocracy has acknowledged her by retreating
+to the recesses of its landed estates, where it has hidden itself to
+die—emigrating inland before the march of ideas, as of old to foreign
+lands before that of the masses. The women who could have founded
+European salons, could have guided opinion and turned it inside out
+like a glove, could have ruled the world by ruling the men of art or
+of intellect who ought to have ruled it, have committed the blunder of
+abandoning their ground; they were ashamed of having to fight against
+the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out on to the stage of
+the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the barbarians who are
+at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist on seeing princesses,
+these are really only ladylike young women. In these days princes can
+find no great ladies whom they may compromise; they cannot even confer
+honor on a woman taken up at random. The Duc de Bourbon was the last
+prince to avail himself of this privilege.”
+
+“And God alone knows how dearly he paid for it,” said Lord Dudley.
+
+“Nowadays princes have lady-like wives, obliged to share their opera-box
+with other ladies; royal favor could not raise them higher by a hair’s
+breadth; they glide unremarkable between the waters of the citizen
+class and those of the nobility—not altogether noble nor altogether
+bourgeoises,” said the Marquise de Rochegude acridly.
+
+“The press has fallen heir to the Woman,” exclaimed Rastignac. “She
+no longer has the quality of a spoken feuilleton—delightful calumnies
+graced by elegant language. We read feuilletons written in a dialect
+which changes every three years, society papers about as mirthful as
+an undertaker’s mute, and as light as the lead of their type. French
+conversation is carried on from one end of the country to the other in
+a revolutionary jargon, through long columns of type printed in old
+mansions where a press groans in the place where formerly elegant
+company used to meet.”
+
+“The knell of the highest society is tolling,” said a Russian Prince.
+“Do you hear it? And the first stroke is your modern word lady.”
+
+“You are right, Prince,” said de Marsay. “The ‘perfect lady,’ issuing
+from the ranks of the nobility, or sprouting from the citizen class, and
+the product of every soil, even of the provinces is the expression of
+these times, a last remaining embodiment of good taste, grace, wit,
+and distinction, all combined, but dwarfed. We shall see no more great
+ladies in France, but there will be ‘ladies’ for a long time, elected by
+public opinion to form an upper chamber of women, and who will be among
+the fair sex what a ‘gentleman’ is in England.”
+
+“And that they call progress!” exclaimed Mademoiselle des Touches. “I
+should like to know where the progress lies?”
+
+“Why, in this,” said Madame de Nucingen. “Formerly a woman might have
+the voice of a fish-seller, the walk of a grenadier, the face of an
+impudent courtesan, her hair too high on her forehead, a large foot, a
+thick hand—she was a great lady in spite of it all; but in these days,
+even if she were a Montmorency—if a Montmorency would ever be such a
+creature—she would not be a lady.”
+
+“But what do you mean by a ‘perfect lady’?” asked Count Adam Laginski.
+
+“She is a modern product, a deplorable triumph of the elective system
+as applied to the fair sex,” said the Minister. “Every revolution has a
+word of its own which epitomizes and depicts it.”
+
+“You are right,” said the Russian, who had come to make a literary
+reputation in Paris. “The explanation of certain words added from time
+to time to your beautiful language would make a magnificent history.
+Organize, for instance, is the word of the Empire, and sums up Napoleon
+completely.”
+
+“But all that does not explain what is meant by a lady!” the young Pole
+exclaimed, with some impatience.
+
+“Well, I will tell you,” said Émile Blondet to Count Adam. “One fine
+morning you go for a saunter in Paris. It is past two, but five has not
+yet struck. You see a woman coming towards you; your first glance at her
+is like the preface to a good book, it leads you to expect a world
+of elegance and refinement. Like a botanist over hill and dale in his
+pursuit of plants, among the vulgarities of Paris life you have at
+last found a rare flower. This woman is attended by two very
+distinguished-looking men, of whom one, at any rate, wears an order; or
+else a servant out of livery follows her at a distance of ten yards. She
+displays no gaudy colors, no open-worked stockings, no over-elaborate
+waist-buckle, no embroidered frills to her drawers fussing round her
+ankles. You will see that she is shod with prunella shoes, with sandals
+crossed over extremely fine cotton stockings, or plain gray silk
+stockings; or perhaps she wears boots of the most exquisite simplicity.
+You notice that her gown is made of a neat and inexpensive material, but
+made in a way that surprises more than one woman of the middle class;
+it is almost always a long pelisse, with bows to fasten it, and neatly
+bound with fine cord or an imperceptible braid. The Unknown has a way of
+her own in wrapping herself in her shawl or mantilla; she knows how to
+draw it round her from her hips to her neck, outlining a carapace, as it
+were, which would make an ordinary woman look like a turtle, but which
+in her sets off the most beautiful forms while concealing them. How does
+she do it? This secret she keeps, though unguarded by any patent.
+
+“As she walks she gives herself a little concentric and harmonious
+twist, which makes her supple or dangerous slenderness writhe under the
+stuff, as a snake does under the green gauze of trembling grass. Is it
+to an angel or a devil that she owes the graceful undulation which plays
+under her long black silk cape, stirs its lace frill, sheds an airy
+balm, and what I should like to call the breeze of a Parisienne? You may
+recognize over her arms, round her waist, about her throat, a science of
+drapery recalling the antique Mnemosyne.
+
+“Oh! how thoroughly she understands the cut of her gait—forgive the
+expression. Study the way she puts her foot forward moulding her
+skirt with such a decent preciseness that the passer-by is filled with
+admiration, mingled with desire, but subdued by deep respect. When an
+Englishwoman attempts this step, she looks like a grenadier marching
+forward to attack a redoubt. The women of Paris have a genius for
+walking. The municipality really owed them asphalt footwalks.
+
+“Our Unknown jostles no one. If she wants to pass, she waits with
+proud humility till some one makes way. The distinction peculiar to
+a well-bred woman betrays itself, especially in the way she holds her
+shawl or cloak crossed over her bosom. Even as she walks she has a
+little air of serene dignity, like Raphael’s Madonnas in their frames.
+Her aspect, at once quiet and disdainful, makes the most insolent dandy
+step aside for her.
+
+“Her bonnet, remarkable for its simplicity, is trimmed with crisp
+ribbons; there may be flowers in it, but the cleverest of such women
+wear only bows. Feathers demand a carriage; flowers are too showy.
+Beneath it you see the fresh unworn face of a woman who, without
+conceit, is sure of herself; who looks at nothing, and sees everything;
+whose vanity, satiated by being constantly gratified, stamps her face
+with an indifference which piques your curiosity. She knows that she is
+looked at, she knows that everybody, even women, turn round to see her
+again. And she threads her way through Paris like a gossamer, spotless
+and pure.
+
+“This delightful species affects the hottest latitudes, the cleanest
+longitudes of Paris; you will meet her between the 10th and 110th Arcade
+of the Rue de Rivoli; along the line of the Boulevards from the equator
+of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of India flourish,
+where the warmest creations of industry are displayed, to the Cape of
+the Madeleine; in the least muddy districts of the citizen quarters,
+between No. 30 and No. 130 of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. During
+the winter, she haunts the terrace of the Feuillants, but not the
+asphalt pavement that lies parallel. According to the weather, she may
+be seen flying in the Avenue of the Champs-Élyseés, which is bounded on
+the east by the Place Louis XV., on the west by the Avenue de Marigny,
+to the south by the road, to the north by the gardens of the Faubourg
+Saint-Honoré. Never is this pretty variety of woman to be seen in the
+hyperborean regions of the Rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamtschatka of
+miry, narrow, commercial streets, never anywhere in bad weather.
+These flowers of Paris, blooming only in Oriental weather, perfume the
+highways; and after five o’clock fold up like morning-glory flowers.
+The women you will see later, looking a little like them, are would-be
+ladies; while the fair Unknown, your Beatrice of a day, is a ‘perfect
+lady.’
+
+“It is not very easy for a foreigner, my dear Count, to recognize the
+differences by which the observer emeritus distinguishes them—women
+are such consummate actresses; but they are glaring in the eyes of
+Parisians: hooks ill fastened, strings showing loops of rusty-white
+tape through a gaping slit in the back, rubbed shoe-leather, ironed
+bonnet-strings, an over-full skirt, an over-tight waist. You will see
+a certain effort in the intentional droop of the eyelid. There is
+something conventional in the attitude.
+
+“As to the bourgeoise, the citizen womankind, she cannot possibly be
+mistaken for the spell cast over you by the Unknown. She is bustling,
+and goes out in all weathers, trots about, comes, goes, gazes, does not
+know whether she will or will not go into a shop. Where the lady knows
+just what she wants and what she is doing, the townswoman is undecided,
+tucks up her skirts to cross a gutter, dragging a child by the hand,
+which compels her to look out for the vehicles; she is a mother in
+public, and talks to her daughter; she carries money in her bag, and has
+open-work stockings on her feet; in winter, she wears a boa over her
+fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is accomplished in the
+redundancies of dress.
+
+“You will meet the fair Unknown again at the Italiens, at the Opéra,
+at a ball. She will then appear under such a different aspect that you
+would think them two beings devoid of any analogy. The woman has emerged
+from those mysterious garments like a butterfly from its silky cocoon.
+She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished eyes, the forms
+which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At the theatre she
+never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the Italiens.
+You can there watch at your leisure the studied deliberateness of her
+movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all the little political
+artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude all idea of art
+or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand, the most
+perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely necessary that
+she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet or curl she plays
+with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will be persuaded that she
+is giving irony or grace to what she says to her neighbor, sitting in
+such a position as to produce the magical effect of the ‘lost profile,’
+so dear to great painters, by which the cheek catches the high light,
+the nose is shown in clear outline, the nostrils are transparently rosy,
+the forehead squarely modeled, the eye has its spangle of fire, but
+fixed on space, and the white roundness of the chin is accentuated by
+a line of light. If she has a pretty foot, she will throw herself on
+a sofa with the coquettish grace of a cat in the sunshine, her feet
+outstretched without your feeling that her attitude is anything but the
+most charming model ever given to a sculptor by lassitude.
+
+“Only the perfect lady is quite at her ease in full dress; nothing
+inconveniences her. You will never see her, like the woman of the
+citizen class, pulling up a refractory shoulder-strap, or pushing down a
+rebellious whalebone, or looking whether her tucker is doing its office
+of faithful guardian to two treasures of dazzling whiteness, or glancing
+in the mirrors to see if her head-dress is keeping its place. Her toilet
+is always in harmony with her character; she had had time to study
+herself, to learn what becomes her, for she has long known what does not
+suit her. You will not find her as you go out; she vanishes before the
+end of the play. If by chance she is to be seen, calm and stately, on
+the stairs, she is experiencing some violent emotion; she has to bestow
+a glance, to receive a promise. Perhaps she goes down so slowly on
+purpose to gratify the vanity of a slave whom she sometimes obeys. If
+your meeting takes place at a ball or an evening party, you will gather
+the honey, natural or affected of her insinuating voice; her empty
+words will enchant you, and she will know how to give them the value of
+thought by her inimitable bearing.”
+
+“To be such a woman, is it not necessary to be very clever?” asked the
+Polish Count.
+
+“It is necessary to have great taste,” replied the Princesse de
+Cadignan.
+
+“And in France taste is more than cleverness,” said the Russian.
+
+“This woman’s cleverness is the triumph of a purely plastic art,”
+ Blondet went on. “You will not know what she said, but you will be
+fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white shoulders;
+she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout and smile; or
+throw a Voltairean epigram into an ‘Indeed!’ an ‘Ah!’ a ‘What then!’
+A jerk of her head will be her most pertinent form of questioning; she
+will give meaning to the movement by which she twirls a vinaigrette
+hanging to her finger by a ring. She gets an artificial grandeur out
+of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand impressively,
+letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops hang on the cup of
+a flower, and all is said—she has pronounced judgment beyond appeal, to
+the apprehension of the most obtuse. She knows how to listen to you;
+she gives you the opportunity of shining, and—I ask your modesty—those
+moments are rare?”
+
+The candid simplicity of the young Pole, to whom Blondet spoke, made all
+the party shout with laughter.
+
+“Now, you will not talk for half-an-hour with a bourgeoise without her
+alluding to her husband in one way or another,” Blondet went on with
+unperturbed gravity; “whereas, even if you know that your lady
+is married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so
+effectually that it will need the enterprise of Christopher Columbus to
+discover him. Often you will fail in the attempt single-handed. If you
+have had no opportunity of inquiring, towards the end of the evening you
+detect her gazing fixedly at a middle-aged man wearing a decoration, who
+bows and goes out. She has ordered her carriage, and goes.
+
+“You are not the rose, but you have been with the rose, and you go
+to bed under the golden canopy of a delicious dream, which will last
+perhaps after Sleep, with his heavy finger, has opened the ivory gates
+of the temple of dreams.
+
+“The lady, when she is at home, sees no one before four; she is shrewd
+enough always to keep you waiting. In her house you will find everything
+in good taste; her luxury is for hourly use, and duly renewed; you will
+see nothing under glass shades, no rags of wrappings hanging about, and
+looking like a pantry. You will find the staircase warmed. Flowers on
+all sides will charm your sight—flowers, the only gift she accepts, and
+those only from certain people, for nosegays live but a day; they give
+pleasure, and must be replaced; to her they are, as in the East, a
+symbol and a promise. The costly toys of fashion lie about, but not so
+as to suggest a museum or a curiosity shop. You will find her sitting by
+the fire in a low chair, from which she will not rise to greet you.
+Her talk will not now be what it was at the ball; there she was our
+creditor; in her own home she owes you the pleasure of her wit. These
+are the shades of which the lady is a marvelous mistress. What she
+likes in you is a man to swell her circle, an object for the cares
+and attentions which such women are now happy to bestow. Therefore, to
+attract you to her drawing-room, she will be bewitchingly charming. This
+especially is where you feel how isolated women are nowadays, and
+why they want a little world of their own, to which they may seem a
+constellation. Conversation is impossible without generalities.”
+
+“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have truly hit the fault of our age.
+The epigram—a volume in a word—no longer strikes, as it did in the
+eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events, and
+it dies in a day.”
+
+“Hence,” said Blondet, “the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
+consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great difference
+between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous; the lady
+does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will be; she
+hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank and falls
+full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last graces left
+to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church, but she will
+talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste to affect
+Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have opened
+the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and gestures
+understood by all these women: ‘For shame! I thought you had too much
+sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you deprive it
+of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and me; it is
+property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be selfish!
+Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the only
+remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,’ and so forth.
+Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with political
+notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant—but moral? Oh! deuced
+moral!—in which you may recognize a fag end of every material woven by
+modern doctrines, at loggerheads together.”
+
+The women could not help laughing at the airs by which Blondet
+illustrated his satire.
+
+“This explanation, dear Count Adam,” said Blondet, turning to the
+Pole, “will have proved to you that the ‘perfect lady’ represents
+the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is
+surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry
+which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by
+something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She certainly
+has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because she will
+have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked you your
+secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there are some
+things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You alone will
+be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart. The
+great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers and
+advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion neatly
+ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and minims,
+its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak women,
+she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or the future
+of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer flags so
+respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board. The whole
+aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady. She has
+not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty antagonism;
+she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be crushed. Thus
+she is apt at Jesuitical _mezzo termine_, she is a creature
+of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of anonymous passions
+steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as much afraid of her
+servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a trial in the
+divorce-court. This woman—so free at a ball, so attractive out
+walking—is a slave at home; she is never independent but in perfect
+privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in her position as
+a lady. This is her task.
+
+“For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
+allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the divine
+accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a townswoman;
+she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will not receive a
+married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still have anything
+to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect lady may perhaps
+give occasion to calumny, never to slander.”
+
+“It is all so horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.
+
+“And so,” said Blondet, “our ‘perfect lady’ lives between English
+hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century—a
+bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
+is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
+nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures shrink
+into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am fully
+convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born
+close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the
+encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the
+important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the
+angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence,
+the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the
+diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.”
+
+“And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn,” said
+Mademoiselle des Touches to Émile Blondet, “would you class the female
+author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman _comme il faut?_”
+
+“When she has no genius, she is a woman _comme il n’en faut
+pas_,” Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen
+glance, which might make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille
+Maupin. “This epigram is not mine, but Napoleon’s,” he added.
+
+“You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score,” said Canalis,
+with an emphatic tone and gesture. “It was one of his weaknesses to be
+jealous of literary genius—for he had his mean points. Who will ever
+explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented with his arms
+folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest force ever known,
+the most concentrated, the most mordant, the most acid of all forces;
+a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every direction
+without fixing it anywhere; a man who could do everything because
+he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, conquering an
+illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die of disease in bed after
+living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man with a code and a
+sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted spirit that foresaw
+everything but his own fall; a capricious politician who risked men by
+handfuls out of economy, and who spared three heads—those of Talleyrand,
+of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomatists whose death would
+have saved the French Empire, and who seemed to him of greater weight
+than thousands of soldiers; a man to whom nature, as a rare privilege,
+had given a heart in a frame of bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight
+amid women, and next morning manipulating Europe as a young girl might
+amuse herself by splashing water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous;
+loving tawdriness and simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the
+arts; and in spite of these antitheses, really great in everything
+by instinct or by temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at
+thirty; and then, like my grocer buried in Père Lachaise, a good husband
+and a good father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings,
+codes, verses, a romance—and all with more range than precision. Did he
+not aim at making all Europe France? And after making us weigh on the
+earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us
+poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us; while he, who had
+taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the frontier of his empire
+in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man all thought and all action, who
+comprehended Desaix and Fouché.”
+
+“All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!”
+ said de Marsay.
+
+“Ah! vat a pleashre it is to dichest vile you talk,” said Baron de
+Nucingen.
+
+“But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common one?”
+ asked Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the charms of conversation
+as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune would be
+inadequate! There is no second performance of the same flash of wit.”
+
+“And are we really so much deteriorated as these gentlemen think?” said
+the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the women with a smile at once
+sceptical and ironical. “Because, in these days, under a regime which
+makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms, small
+pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that prove
+that women too have grown smaller? Why should the human heart change
+because you change your coat? In all ages the passions remain the same.
+I know cases of beautiful devotion, of sublime sufferings, which lack
+the publicity—the glory, if you choose—which formerly gave lustre to
+the errors of some women. But though one may not have saved a King of
+France, one is not the less an Agnès Sorel. Do you believe that our
+dear Marquise d’Espard is not the peer of Madame Doublet, or Madame
+du Deffant, in whose rooms so much evil was spoken and done? Is not
+Taglioni a match for Camargo? or Malibran the equal of Saint-Huberti?
+Are not our poets superior to those of the eighteenth century? If at
+this moment, through the fault of the Grocers who govern us, we have not
+a style of our own, had not the Empire its distinguishing stamp as
+the age of Louis XV. had, and was not its splendor fabulous? Have the
+sciences lost anything?”
+
+“I am quite of your opinion, madame; the women of this age are truly
+great,” replied the Comte de Vandenesse. “When posterity shall have
+followed us, will not Madame Recamier appear in proportions as fine
+as those of the most beautiful women of the past? We have made so much
+history that historians will be lacking. The age of Louis XIV. had but
+one Madame de Sévigné; we have a thousand now in Paris who certainly
+write better than she did, and who do not publish their letters. Whether
+the Frenchwoman be called ‘perfect lady,’ or great lady, she will always
+be the woman among women.
+
+“Émile Blondet has given us a picture of the fascinations of a woman
+of the day; but, at need, this creature who bridles or shows off, who
+chirps out the ideas of Mr. This and Mr. That, would be heroic. And it
+must be said, your faults, mesdames, are all the more poetical, because
+they must always and under all circumstances be surrounded by greater
+perils. I have seen much of the world, I have studied it perhaps too
+late; but in cases where the illegality of your feelings might
+be excused, I have always observed the effects of I know not what
+chance—which you may call Providence—inevitably overwhelming such as we
+consider light women.”
+
+“I hope,” said Madame de Vandenesse, “that we can be great in other
+ways——”
+
+“Oh, let the Comte de Vandenesse preach to us!” exclaimed Madame de
+Serizy.
+
+“With all the more reason because he has preached a great deal by
+example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.
+
+“On my honor!” said General de Montriveau, “in all the dramas—a word you
+are very fond of,” he said, looking at Blondet—”in which the finger of
+God has been visible, the most frightful I ever knew was very near being
+by my act——”
+
+“Well, tell us all about it!” cried Lady Barimore; “I love to shudder!”
+
+“It is the taste of a virtuous woman,” replied de Marsay, looking at
+Lord Dudley’s lovely daughter.
+
+“During the campaign of 1812,” General de Montriveau began, “I was the
+involuntary cause of a terrible disaster which may be of use to you,
+Doctor Bianchon,” turning to me, “since, while devoting yourself to the
+human body, you concern yourself a good deal with the mind; it may tend
+to solve some of the problems of the will.
+
+“I was going through my second campaign; I enjoyed danger, and laughed
+at everything, like the young and foolish lieutenant of artillery that
+I was. When we reached the Beresina, the army had, as you know, lost all
+discipline, and had forgotten military obedience. It was a medley of men
+of all nations, instinctively making their way from north to south. The
+soldiers would drive a general in rags and bare-foot away from their
+fire if he brought neither wood nor victuals. After the passage of this
+famous river disorder did not diminish. I had come quietly and alone,
+without food, out of the marshes of Zembin, and was wandering in search
+of a house where I might be taken in. Finding none or driven away from
+those I came across, happily towards evening I perceived a wretched
+little Polish farm, of which nothing can give you any idea unless
+you have seen the wooden houses of Lower Normandy, or the poorest
+farm-buildings of la Beauce. These dwellings consist of a single room,
+with one end divided off by a wooden partition, the smaller division
+serving as a store-room for forage.
+
+“In the darkness of twilight I could just see a faint smoke rising above
+this house. Hoping to find there some comrades more compassionate than
+those I had hitherto addressed, I boldly walked as far as the farm.
+On going in, I found the table laid. Several officers, and with them
+a woman—a common sight enough—were eating potatoes, some horseflesh
+broiled over the charcoal, and some frozen beetroots. I recognized among
+the company two or three artillery captains of the regiment in which
+I had first served. I was welcomed with a shout of acclamation, which
+would have amazed me greatly on the other side of the Beresina; but at
+this moment the cold was less intense; my fellow-officers were resting,
+they were warm, they had food, and the room, strewn with trusses of
+straw, gave the promise of a delightful night. We did not ask for so
+much in those days. My comrades could be philanthropists gratis—one of
+the commonest ways of being philanthropic. I sat down to eat on one of
+the bundles of straw.
+
+“At the end of the table, by the side of the door opening into the
+smaller room full of straw and hay, sat my old colonel, one of the most
+extraordinary men I ever saw among all the mixed collection of men it
+has been my lot to meet. He was an Italian. Now, whenever human nature
+is truly fine in the lands of the South, it is really sublime. I do not
+know whether you have ever observed the extreme fairness of Italians
+when they are fair. It is exquisite, especially under an artificial
+light. When I read the fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet sketched
+by Charles Nodier, I found my own sensations in every one of his elegant
+phrases. Italian, then, as were most of the officers of his regiment,
+which had, in fact, been borrowed by the Emperor from Eugene’s army,
+my colonel was a tall man, at least eight or nine inches above the
+standard, and was admirably proportioned—a little stout perhaps, but
+prodigiously powerful, active, and clean-limbed as a greyhound. His
+black hair in abundant curls showed up his complexion, as white as a
+woman’s; he had small hands, a shapely foot, a pleasant mouth, and
+an aquiline nose delicately formed, of which the tip used to become
+naturally pinched and white whenever he was angry, as happened often.
+His irascibility was so far beyond belief that I will tell you nothing
+about it; you will have the opportunity of judging of it. No one could
+be calm in his presence. I alone, perhaps, was not afraid of him; he had
+indeed taken such a singular fancy to me that he thought everything I
+did right. When he was in a rage his brow was knit and the muscles of
+the middle of his forehead set in a delta, or, to be more explicit, in
+Redgauntlet’s horseshoe. This mark was, perhaps, even more terrifying
+than the magnetic flashes of his blue eyes. His whole frame quivered,
+and his strength, great as it was in his normal state, became almost
+unbounded.
+
+“He spoke with a strong guttural roll. His voice, at least as powerful
+as that of Charles Nordier’s Oudet, threw an incredible fulness of
+tone into the syllable or the consonant in which this burr was sounded.
+Though this faulty pronunciation was at times a grace, when commanding
+his men, or when he was excited, you cannot imagine, unless you had
+heard it, what force was expressed by this accent, which at Paris is so
+common. When the Colonel was quiescent, his blue eyes were angelically
+sweet, and his smooth brow had a most charming expression. On parade,
+or with the army of Italy, not a man could compare with him. Indeed,
+d’Orsay himself, the handsome d’Orsay, was eclipsed by our colonel on
+the occasion of the last review held by Napoleon before the invasion of
+Russia.
+
+“Everything was in contrasts in this exceptional man. Passion lives
+on contrast. Hence you need not ask whether he exerted over women the
+irresistible influences to which our nature yields”—and the general
+looked at the Princesse de Cadignan—“as vitreous matter is moulded under
+the pipe of the glass-blower; still, by a singular fatality—an observer
+might perhaps explain the phenomenon—the Colonel was not a lady-killer,
+or was indifferent to such successes.
+
+“To give you an idea of his violence, I will tell you in a few words
+what I once saw him do in a paroxysm of fury. We were dragging our guns
+up a very narrow road, bordered by a somewhat high slope on one side,
+and by thickets on the other. When we were half-way up we met another
+regiment of artillery, its colonel marching at the head. This colonel
+wanted to make the captain who was at the head of our foremost battery
+back down again. The captain, of course, refused; but the colonel of the
+other regiment signed to his foremost battery to advance, and in spite
+of the care the driver took to keep among the scrub, the wheel of the
+first gun struck our captain’s right leg and broke it, throwing him over
+on the near side of his horse. All this was the work of a moment. Our
+Colonel, who was but a little way off, guessed that there was a quarrel;
+he galloped up, riding among the guns at the risk of falling with his
+horse’s four feet in the air, and reached the spot, face to face with
+the other colonel, at the very moment when the captain fell, calling out
+‘Help!’ No, our Italian colonel was no longer human! Foam like the froth
+of champagne rose to his lips; he roared inarticulately like a lion.
+Incapable of uttering a word, or even a cry, he made a terrific signal
+to his antagonist, pointing to the wood and drawing his sword. The
+two colonels went aside. In two seconds we saw our Colonel’s opponent
+stretched on the ground, his skull split in two. The soldiers of his
+regiment backed—yes, by heaven, and pretty quickly too.
+
+“The captain, who had been so nearly crushed, and who lay yelping in
+the puddle where the gun carriage had thrown him, had an Italian wife,
+a beautiful Sicilian of Messina, who was not indifferent to our Colonel.
+This circumstance had aggravated his rage. He was pledged to protect
+the husband, bound to defend him as he would have defended the woman
+herself.
+
+“Now, in the hovel beyond Zembin, where I was so well received, this
+captain was sitting opposite to me, and his wife was at the other end
+of the table, facing the Colonel. This Sicilian was a little woman named
+Rosina, very dark, but with all the fire of the Southern sun in her
+black almond-shaped eyes. At this moment she was deplorably thin; her
+face was covered with dust, like fruit exposed to the drought of a
+highroad. Scarcely clothed in rags, exhausted by marches, her hair in
+disorder, and clinging together under a piece of a shawl tied close
+over her head, still she had the graces of a woman; her movements were
+engaging, her small rose mouth and white teeth, the outline of her
+features and figure, charms which misery, cold, and neglect had not
+altogether defaced, still suggested love to any man who could think of
+a woman. Rosina had one of those frames which are fragile in appearance,
+but wiry and full of spring. Her husband, a gentleman of Piedmont, had
+a face expressive of ironical simplicity, if it is allowable to ally
+the two words. Brave and well informed, he seemed to know nothing of
+the connections which had subsisted between his wife and the Colonel for
+three years past. I ascribed this unconcern to Italian manners, or to
+some domestic secret; yet there was in the man’s countenance one feature
+which always filled me with involuntary distrust. His under lip, which
+was thin and very restless, turned down at the corners instead of
+turning up, and this, as I thought, betrayed a streak of cruelty in a
+character which seemed so phlegmatic and indolent.
+
+“As you may suppose the conversation was not very sparkling when I went
+in. My weary comrades ate in silence; of course, they asked me some
+questions, and we related our misadventures, mingled with reflections on
+the campaign, the generals, their mistakes, the Russians, and the cold.
+A minute after my arrival the colonel, having finished his meagre meal,
+wiped his moustache, bid us good-night, shot a black look at the Italian
+woman, saying, ‘Rosina?’ and then, without waiting for a reply, went
+into the little barn full of hay, to bed. The meaning of the Colonel’s
+utterance was self-evident. The young wife replied by an indescribable
+gesture, expressing all the annoyance she could not feel at seeing her
+thralldom thus flaunted without human decency, and the offence to her
+dignity as a woman, and to her husband. But there was, too, in the rigid
+setting of her features and the tight knitting of her brows a sort of
+presentiment; perhaps she foresaw her fate. Rosina remained quietly in
+her place.
+
+“A minute later, and apparently when the Colonel was snug in his couch
+of straw or hay, he repeated, ‘Rosina?’
+
+“The tone of this second call was even more brutally questioning than
+the first. The Colonel’s strong burr, and the length which the
+Italian language allows to be given to vowels and the final syllable,
+concentrated all the man’s despotism, impatience, and strength of will.
+Rosina turned pale, but she rose, passed behind us, and went to the
+Colonel.
+
+“All the party sat in utter silence; I, unluckily, after looking at
+them all, began to laugh, and then they all laughed too.—‘Tu ridi?—you
+laugh?’ said the husband.
+
+“‘On my honor, old comrade,’ said I, becoming serious again, ‘I confess
+that I was wrong; I ask your pardon a thousand times, and if you are not
+satisfied by my apologies I am ready to give you satisfaction.’
+
+“‘Oh! it is not you who are wrong, it is I!’ he replied coldly.
+
+“Thereupon we all lay down in the room, and before long all were sound
+asleep.
+
+“Next morning each one, without rousing his neighbor or seeking
+companionship, set out again on his way, with that selfishness
+which made our rout one of the most horrible dramas of self-seeking,
+melancholy, and horror which ever was enacted under heaven.
+Nevertheless, at about seven or eight hundred paces from our shelter we,
+most of us, met again and walked on together, like geese led in flocks
+by a child’s wilful tyranny. The same necessity urged us all.
+
+“Having reached a knoll where we could still see the farmhouse where we
+had spent the night, we heard sounds resembling the roar of lions in the
+desert, the bellowing of bulls—no, it was a noise which can be compared
+to no known cry. And yet, mingling with this horrible and ominous roar,
+we could hear a woman’s feeble scream. We all looked round, seized by I
+know not what impulse of terror; we no longer saw the house, but a huge
+bonfire. The farmhouse had been barricaded, and was in flames. Swirls
+of smoke borne on the wind brought us hoarse cries and an indescribable
+pungent smell. A few yards behind, the captain was quietly approaching
+to join our caravan; we gazed at him in silence, for no one dared
+question him; but he, understanding our curiosity, pointed to his breast
+with the forefinger of his right hand, and, waving the left in the
+direction of the fire, he said, ‘_Son’io_.’
+
+“We all walked on without saying a word to him.”
+
+“There is nothing more terrible than the revolt of a sheep,” said de
+Marsay.
+
+“It would be frightful to let us leave with this horrible picture in our
+memory,” said Madame de Montcornet. “I shall dream of it——”
+
+“And what was the punishment of Monsieur de Marsay’s ‘First’?” said Lord
+Dudley, smiling.
+
+“When the English are in jest, their foils have the buttons on,” said
+Blondet.
+
+“Monsieur Bianchon can tell us, for he saw her dying,” replied de
+Marsay, turning to me.
+
+“Yes,” said I; “and her end was one of the most beautiful I ever
+saw. The Duke and I had spent the night by the dying woman’s pillow;
+pulmonary consumption, in the last stage, left no hope; she had taken
+the sacrament the day before. The Duke had fallen asleep. The Duchess,
+waking at about four in the morning, signed to me in the most touching
+way, with a friendly smile, to bid me leave him to rest, and she
+meanwhile was about to die. She had become incredibly thin, but her face
+had preserved its really sublime outline and features. Her pallor made
+her skin look like porcelain with a light within. Her bright eyes
+and color contrasted with this languidly elegant complexion, and her
+countenance was full of expressive calm. She seemed to pity the Duke,
+and the feeling had its origin in a lofty tenderness which, as death
+approached, seemed to know no bounds. The silence was absolute. The
+room, softly lighted by a lamp, looked like every sickroom at the hour
+of death.
+
+“At this moment the clock struck. The Duke awoke, and was in despair at
+having fallen asleep. I did not see the gesture of impatience by which
+he manifested the regret he felt at having lost sight of his wife for a
+few of the last minutes vouchsafed to him; but it is quite certain
+that any one but the dying woman might have misunderstood it. A busy
+statesman, always thinking of the interests of France, the Duke had a
+thousand odd ways on the surface, such as often lead to a man of genius
+being mistaken for a madman, and of which the explanation lies in the
+exquisiteness and exacting needs of their intellect. He came to seat
+himself in an armchair by his wife’s side, and looked fixedly at her.
+The dying woman put her hand out a little way, took her husband’s and
+clasped it feebly; and in a low but agitated voice she said, ‘My poor
+dear, who is left to understand you now?’ Then she died, looking at
+him.”
+
+“The stories the doctor tells us,” said the Comte de Vandenesse, “always
+leave a deep impression.”
+
+“But a sweet one,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, rising.
+
+PARIS, June 1839-42.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+  The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+  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
+    Honorine
+    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:  La Grande Breteche
+
+  Blondet, Émile  Jealousies of a Country Town
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    Modeste Mignon
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    A Daughter of Eve
+    The Firm of Nucingen
+    The Peasantry
+
+  Blondet, Virginie (Madame Montcornet)  Jealousies of a Country Town
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    The Peasantry
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    The Member for Arcis
+    A Daughter of Eve
+
+  Bridau, Joseph  The Purse
+    A Bachelor’s Establishment
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    A Start in Life
+    Modeste Mignon
+    Pierre Grassou
+    Letters of Two Brides
+    Cousin Betty
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de  Letters of Two Brides
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Modeste Mignon
+    The Magic Skin
+    A Start in Life
+    Beatrix
+    The Unconscious Humorists
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Dudley, Lord  The Lily of the Valley
+    The Thirteen
+    A Man of Business
+    A Daughter of Eve
+
+  Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise d’
+    The Commission in Lunacy
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    Letters of Two Brides
+    The Gondreville Mystery
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    A Daughter of Eve
+    Beatrix
+
+  Laginski, Comte Adam Mitgislas  The Imaginary Mistress
+    Cousin Betty
+
+  Marsay, Henri de  The Thirteen
+    The Unconscious Humorists
+    The Lily of the Valley
+    Father Goriot
+    Jealousies of a Country Town
+    Ursule Mirouet
+    A Marriage Settlement
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Letters of Two Brides
+    The Ball at Sceaux
+    Modeste Mignon
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    The Gondreville Mystery
+    A Daughter of Eve
+
+  Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de  The Secrets of a Princess
+    Modeste Mignon
+    Jealousies of a Country Town
+    The Muse of the Department
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    Letters of Two Brides
+    The Gondreville Mystery
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de  The Thirteen
+    Father Goriot
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Pierrette
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Nucingen, Baron Frederic de  The Firm of Nucingen
+    Father Goriot
+    Pierrette
+    Cesar Birotteau
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    A Man of Business
+    Cousin Betty
+    The Muse of the Department
+    The Unconscious Humorists
+
+  Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de  Father Goriot
+    The Thirteen
+    Eugenie Grandet
+    Cesar Birotteau
+    Melmoth Reconciled
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    The Commission in Lunacy
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    Modeste Mignon
+    The Firm of Nucingen
+    A Daughter of Eve
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Portenduere, Vicomtesse Savinien de  Ursule Mirouet
+    Beatrix
+
+  Rastignac, Eugene de  Father Goriot
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+    The Ball at Sceaux
+    The Commission in Lunacy
+    A Study of Woman
+    The Magic Skin
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    A Daughter of Eve
+    The Gondreville Mystery
+    The Firm of Nucingen
+    Cousin Betty
+    The Member for Arcis
+    The Unconscious Humorists
+
+  Ronquerolles, Marquis de  The Imaginary Mistress
+    The Peasantry
+    Ursule Mirouet
+    A Woman of Thirty
+    The Thirteen
+    The Member for Arcis
+
+  Serizy, Comtesse de  A Start in Life
+    The Thirteen
+    Ursule Mirouet
+    A Woman of Thirty
+    Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+
+    The Imaginary Mistress
+
+  Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des  Beatrix
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    A Bachelor’s Establishment
+    A Daughter of Eve
+    Honorine
+    Beatrix
+    The Muse of the Department
+
+  Vandenesse, Comte Felix de  The Lily of the Valley
+    Lost Illusions
+    A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+    Cesar Birotteau
+    Letters of Two Brides
+    A Start in Life
+    The Marriage Settlement
+    The Secrets of a Princess
+    The Gondreville Mystery
+    A Daughter of Eve
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Another Study of Woman, by Honore de Balzac
+
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