The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  Madame de Langeais raised both hands to her hair to push back the bunches of curls from her warm forehead, and seemed very excited.

  “You come to a weak creature with all your calculations made, telling yourself: ‘She will talk to me about her husband for a while, then about God, then of love’s inevitable consequences. But I will use and abuse the influence I have gained; I will make myself necessary, I will be able to count on the bonds of habit, the arrangements ratified by the public. And at last, when society will have ended by accepting our liaison, I will be this woman’s master.’ Be honest, these are your thoughts. Oh, you calculate and you talk of loving me! Indeed, you are amorous! I certainly believe that! You desire me and want me as your mistress, that’s all. Well, no, the Duchesse de Langeais will not stoop so low. Let some naïve bourgeois women fall for your falsities; as for me, I never will. Nothing guarantees your love. You speak of my beauty; I could be ugly in six months, like my neighbor the dear princess. You are captivated by my wit, my grace; heavens, you would grow used to them, just as you would grow used to your pleasure. Have you not already grown used to the favors that I have been weak enough to grant you in the past few months? When one day I will be lost, you will give me no reason for your change beyond the final word: ‘I have ceased to love you.’ Rank, fortune, honor, and all that is the Duchesse de Langeais will be swallowed up in disappointed hope. I will have children who will bear witness to my shame, and . . .” But with an involuntary gesture of impatience, she went on, “I am too good to explain to you what you know better than I. Come! Let us remain as we are. I am only too fortunate that I am still able to break the bonds that you think so strong. Is there anything so heroic in coming to the Hôtel de Langeais to spend a few moments every evening with a woman whose babble amuses you, whom you treat like a plaything? But several young bucks come here just as regularly every afternoon between three and five o’clock. They, too, are very generous. I make fun of them; they put up rather calmly with my petulance, my impertinence, and make me laugh. Whereas you, to whom I grant the most precious treasures of my soul, you want to ruin me and cause me endless pain. Quiet then, enough, enough,” she said, seeing him ready to speak, “you have neither heart nor soul nor delicacy. I know what you want me to say. Ah well, yes. I would rather seem to you a cold, insensitive woman, with no loyalty, even no heart, than to seem like an ordinary woman in the eyes of society, to be condemned to eternal damnation after being condemned to the claims of your pleasures, of which you will surely tire. Your selfish love is not worth so many sacrifices.”

  These words imperfectly represent those the duchess warbled with the rapid verbosity of a little canary. She could have gone on even longer; poor Armand answered this torrent of trilled notes with a silence full of horrible feelings. For the first time, he caught a glimpse of the coquetry of this woman and instinctively guessed that devoted love, mutual love, did not calculate, did not reason like this in a true woman. Then he experienced a kind of shame, remembering that he had involuntarily made the calculations, odious in content, for which he was reproached. Looking inside himself with an angelic good faith, he found only egotism in his words, in his ideas, in the responses he imagined but did not express. He stood self-convicted, and in his despair he yearned to fling himself out the window. His ego was killing him. What could he say, indeed, to a woman who does not believe in love? “Let me prove to you how much I love you.” Always me. Montriveau did not know what the heroes of the boudoir always know—how to imitate the crude logician walking before the Pyrrhonists, who deny movement. This otherwise audacious man precisely lacked the audacity that never deserts lovers who know the formulas of feminine algebra. If so many women, and even the most virtuous, are prey to gentlemen adept at love—given a bad name by the populace—perhaps it is because they are great provers, and that in spite of its delicious emotional poetry, love wants a little more geometry than we think.

  Now the Duchesse de Langeais and Montriveau were equally inexperienced in love. She knew a bit of theory, was ignorant of its practice, felt nothing, and reflected on it at length. Montriveau knew something of the practice, was ignorant of the theory, and felt too strongly to reflect on anything. Both of them thus endured the misery of this bizarre situation. In this supreme moment, his myriad thoughts could have been reduced to this: “Let yourself be possessed.” A horribly egotistical line for a woman in whom these words bore no freight of memory and awakened no image. Nonetheless, he had to say something. Although her little phrases whipped up his blood like sharp, cold, bitter arrows shot one after another, Montriveau had to hide his rage so as not to lose everything by some extravagant remonstration.

  “Madame la duchesse, I am in despair that God has invented no way for woman to confirm the gift of her heart save by adding the gift of her person. The high price that you attach to yours shows me that I must value it equally well. If you give me your soul and all your feelings, as you tell me you do, what does the rest matter? Besides, if my happiness is such a painful sacrifice to you, let us no longer speak of it. Only, you will forgive a man of good heart if he feels humiliated in seeing that he is taken for a spaniel.”

  The tone of this last line might perhaps have frightened other women; but when one of these skirt-wearers sets herself above all others and allows herself to be addressed as a divinity, no power on earth is as proud as she.

  “Monsieur le marquis, I am in despair that God has not invented for man a nobler way of confirming the gift of his heart than the expression of such prodigiously vulgar desires. If in giving our person, we become slaves, a man makes no commitment by accepting us. Who will assure me that I will always be loved? The love I might constantly show to cement your attachment to me would be, perhaps, a reason to be abandoned. I do not want to become a second edition of Madame de Beauséant. Does anyone ever know what keeps you with us? Our constant coldness is the secret of the constant passion in some of you; others require untiring devotion, continual adoration; for some, gentleness; for others, despotism. No woman has yet been able with confidence to read your hearts.”

  There was a pause, then she changed her tone.

  “In short, my friend, you cannot prevent a woman from trembling at this question: Will I always be loved? Hard as they may be, my words are dictated by the dread of losing you. My lord! It is not me speaking but reason, and how can it exist in someone as mad as I am? The truth is, I know nothing about it.”

  To hear this answer begun with the most searing irony and ending in the most melodious accents an ingenious woman can adopt to depict love—surely this is a moment’s dash from martyrdom to heaven. Montriveau grew pale and, for the first time in his life, fell on his knees before a woman. He kissed the hem of the duchess’s dress, her feet, her knees. But for the honor of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it is necessary to respect the mysteries of its boudoirs, where many are willing to take all that love has to offer without any proof of love in return.

  “Dear Antoinette,” cried Montriveau, plunged into delirium at the duchess’s complete surrender, while she believed she was being generous in allowing him to express his adoration. “Yes, you are right, I do not want you to harbor any doubts. I am trembling at this moment as well, should the angel of my life leave me, and I would like to invent indissoluble bonds between us.”

  “Ah!” she murmured quietly. “So I was right, then—”

  “Let me finish,” Armand broke in. “I am going to banish all your fears with a single word. Listen, if I were to abandon you, I would deserve a thousand deaths. Be everything to me and I will give you the right to kill me should I betray you. I will myself write a letter in which I will declare certain reasons that would force me to kill myself—in short, I will make my final arrangements. You will keep this letter, which would legitimize my death and could thereby avenge you without anything to fear from God or me.”

  “Do I need this letter? If I had lost your love, what would life be worth? If I wanted to kill you, would I not be ready to f
ollow myself? No, I thank you for the idea, but I do not want this letter. Would I not think you were faithful to me out of fear, or that the danger of an infidelity would be an attraction for a man who thus surrenders his life? Armand, what I ask is the one difficult thing to do.”

  “And so, what is it you want?”

  “Your obedience and my freedom.”

  “My God!” he cried. “I am like a child.”

  “A willful and very spoiled child,” she said, caressing the thick hair of his head, which she kept on her knees. “Oh, yes, much more beloved than he thinks, and yet so disobedient. Why not remain like this? Why not sacrifice to me those desires that offend me? Why not accept what I can give if this is all that I can honestly confer? Are you not happy this way?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am happy when I have no more doubts. Antoinette, is it not true that in love, to doubt is to die?”

  And suddenly he displayed what he was and what all men are when lit by the fire of eloquent, insinuating desire. After tasting the pleasures permitted, surely, by a secret and Jesuitical fiat, the duchess was touched by Armand’s love and that cerebral excitement that habit had made as necessary to her as society, the ball, or the opera. Seeing herself adored by a man whose superiority and character inspired her with a certain fear, turning him into a child, playing with him as Poppaea played with Nero, many women, like the wives of Henry VIII, paid for this perilous happiness with all the blood in their veins. Ah well, a strange presentiment! In offering him her pretty, ash-blond hair in which he loved to run his fingers, feeling the hand of this truly great man pressing her, playing with the black curls of his mane in this boudoir where she reigned, the duchess said to herself, “This man is capable of killing me if he sees that I am toying with him.”

  Monsieur de Montriveau stayed until two o’clock in the morning with his mistress, who from this moment on no longer seemed to him a duchess or a Navarreins: Antoinette had in the end disguised herself as a woman. During this delightful evening, the sweetest preface that ever a Parisienne had invented for what society calls “a sin,” the general was allowed to see her, in spite of the affectations of coyness, in all her young woman’s beauty. He could think with some reason that so many capricious quarrels had been but veils clothing a heavenly soul, veils that had to be lifted one by one, like those that enveloped her adorable body. To him, the duchess was the most naïve, the most girlish of mistresses, and he chose her as his woman. He went away happy to have at last led her to give him such guarantees of love that it seemed impossible that he would not be henceforth her secret husband, a choice approved by God. With this thought in mind, and the candor of those who feel all the obligations of love while savoring its pleasures, Armand slowly returned home.

  He went along the quays in order to see as much of the sky as possible; he wanted to find the firmament and nature expanded as his heart expanded. His lungs seemed to him to breathe in more air than they had the evening before. He questioned himself as he walked and vowed to love this woman so religiously that every day she would find an absolution for her social sins in her constant happiness. The sweet agitations of a full life! Men who have strength enough to steep their soul in a single emotion feel infinite joys in contemplating glimpses of an ardent lifetime, as certain monks could contemplate the divine light in their ecstasies. Love would be nothing without this belief in its permanence; it grows great through constancy. So it was that, wholly absorbed by his happiness, Montriveau understood passion.

  “We belong to each other forever!”

  For this man, such a thought was a talisman that fulfilled his life’s wishes. He did not wonder whether the duchess would change, whether this love would endure; no, he had faith, one of the virtues without which there is no Christian future but which is perhaps still more necessary to societies. For the first time, he conceived life in terms of feelings, he who had yet lived only through action, the most extreme of human efforts, a soldier’s quasi-corporal devotion.

  The next day, Monsieur de Montriveau set out early for the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He had a meeting in a house neighboring the Hôtel de Langeais, where, when his affairs were settled, he went as if he were going home. The general was walking at the time with a man for whom he seemed to have a sort of aversion when he met him in the salons. This man was the Marquis de Ronquerolles, whose reputation became so great in the boudoirs of Paris. He was a man of wit, talent, especially courage, and set the tone for all the Parisian youth; a gallant man, whose success and experience were equally envied, and who lacked nether fortune nor birth, which add such luster to the qualities of fashionable men in Paris.

  “Where are you going?” said Monsieur de Ronquerolles to Montriveau.

  “To Madame de Langeais’s.”

  “Ah, it is true, I forgot that you let yourself be caught in her web. You are wasting a love on her that you could better employ elsewhere. I could give you ten women who are worth a thousand times more than this titled courtesan, who does with her head what other, franker women do—”

  “What are you saying, my dear fellow?” Armand interrupted Ronquerolles. “The duchess is an angel of innocence.”

  Ronquerolles began to laugh.

  “Since you have brought it up, my dear fellow,” he said, “I must enlighten you. Just a word; there’s no harm in it between us. Does the duchess belong to you? In this case, I will have nothing to say. Come on, confide in me. It is a question of not wasting your time grafting your great soul onto an ungrateful stock when all your hopes of cultivation will come to nothing.”

  When Armand had naïvely made a general report on the state of the situation in which he enumerated the rights he had so painfully won, Ronquerolles burst into a peal of laughter so cruel that in another man it would have cost him his life. But to see how these two men were looking at each other and conversing at the corner of a wall, as far removed from others as if they might be in the middle of a desert, it was easy to assume that they were united in a boundless friendship and that no earthly cause could estrange them.

  “My dear Armand, why have you not told me that you are confused by the duchess? I would have given you advice that would have helped you in this intrigue. First, you must know that women of our Faubourg love, like all other women, to bask in love, but they want to possess without being possessed. They have made a sort of bargain with nature. The laws of the parish have allowed them almost everything, save positive sin. The sweets this duchess of yours enjoys are venial sins, which she washes off in the waters of penitence. But if you had the impertinence to desire in all seriousness the great mortal sin to which you must naturally attach the highest importance, you would see with what utter disdain the door to the boudoir and to the house would be impetuously closed to you. The tender Antoinette would have forgotten everything between you, and you would be less than zero to her. Your kisses, my dear friend, would be wiped away with the indifference a woman feels toward the items of her toilette. The duchess would wash the love off her cheeks along with her rouge. We know women like this, the pure Parisienne.

  “Have you ever noticed a shopgirl trotting daintily through the streets? Her head is as pretty as a picture: a delightful bonnet, pink cheeks, charming hairdo, lovely smile, and the rest is relatively neglected. Is this not an accurate portrait? That’s the Parisienne for you—she knows that her head alone will be seen. And so she devotes all her care, finery, and vanity to her head. Well, your duchess is all head, she feels only through her head, she has a heart in her brain, a voice in her head, all fondness is felt through her head. We call this poor thing a courtesan of the intellect. You have been played with like a child. If you doubt it, you will have proof this evening, this morning, this instant. Go to her, try to demand, to insist imperiously what you have been refused. Even if you go about it like the late Monsieur de Richelieu, you will get nothing for your pains.”

  Armand was struck dumb.

  “Has your desire reached the point of foolishness?”


  “I want her at any cost,” cried Montriveau desperately.

  “Very well. Now look here. Be as implacable as she is herself. Try to humiliate her, to wound her vanity. Do not try to move her heart or her soul but the woman’s nerves and temperament, for she is both nervous and lymphatic. If you can once awaken desire in her, you are saved. But let go of these romantic boyish notions of yours. Once you have her in your eagle’s talons, if you yield a point or draw back, if you so much as twitch an eyelid, if she thinks that she can regain her domination of you, she will slip out of your clutches like a fish, and you will never catch her again. Be as pitiless as the law. Show no more charity than the executioner. Hit hard, then hit again. Strike and keep on striking as if you were giving her the lash. Duchesses are made of hard stuff, my dear Armand, there is a sort of feminine nature that is only softened by repeated blows. And as suffering develops a heart in women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod. You must persevere. Ah! When pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and softened the fibers that you take to be so pliant and yielding, when a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under this discipline, when the brain has capitulated—then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and swoons and melting phrases. Then you shall see a most magnificent conflagration (always supposing that the chimney ignites). The steel feminine system will glow red-hot like iron in the forge; that kind of heat lasts longer than any other, and the glow may possibly turn to love.

  “Still,” he continued, “I have my doubts. And after all, is it worthwhile taking so much trouble with the duchess? Between ourselves, a man of my stamp should first take her in hand and break her in; I would make a charming woman of her; she is a thoroughbred. You two, left to yourselves, will never get beyond the A B C of love. But you are in love with her, and just now you might not perhaps share my views on this subject . . . A pleasant time to you, my children,” added Ronquerolles, after a pause. Then with a laugh: “For myself I prefer easy beauties; they are tender, and at any rate, the natural woman appears in their love without any of your social seasonings. A woman who haggles over herself, my poor boy, and only means to inspire love—well, have her like an extra horse, for show. The match between the sofa and the confessional, black and white, queen and knight, conscientious scruples and pleasure is an uncommonly amusing game of chess. A man who’s a bit of a rake, who knows the game, wins in three moves. Now if I undertook a woman of that sort, I should start with the deliberate purpose of . . .” His voice sank to a whisper over the last words in Armand’s ear, and he left quickly, before there was time to reply.