Letters of Two Brides

by Honoré de Balzac

  “That said, Father,” I added, “I am not telling you my true thoughts: the other day my mother made me fear I might come across as a boor if I spoke of my impressions.”

  “Among family, you may speak freely,” my mother interjected.

  “Well then,” said I, “so far I find the young men far more ambitious than attractive, more preoccupied with themselves than with us, but in truth they have little talent for display: they put on a fine face to talk to us, then immediately let it slip when they turn away, no doubt convinced we don’t know how to use our own eyes. The man speaking to us is the lover; the man no longer speaking to us is the husband. As for the young ladies, they are so artificial that their true character comes out only in their dance: their physiques and their movements alone do not lie. Above all, I am shocked by the coarseness of the beau monde. Things happen at supper—on a different scale, to be sure—that give me an inkling of what a popular uprising must be like. Politesse does a very imperfect job of hiding the universal egoism. I imagined society differently. Women count for very little; perhaps that is a lingering effect of Bonaparte’s doctrines.”

  “Armande has made remarkable progress,” my mother said. “

  Mother, do you believe I will go on asking you forever if Madame de Staël is dead?”

  My father smiled and rose.

  Saturday

  My dear, I have not told you all; here are some observations I have been saving for you. The love we used to imagine must be very deeply hidden away, for I’ve seen no trace of it anywhere. To be sure, I have caught an occasional quick exchange of glances in the salons, but how pale it all seems! Our notion of love, that universe of marvels, of beautiful daydreams, of delicious realities, of interlaced torments and joys, those smiles that light up the whole world, those words that enrapture, that happiness ever given, ever taken, those sorrows provoked by a lover’s distance, those joys set off by his presence . . . no such thing have I found. Where are all those splendid flowers of the soul born? Who is lying? Is it us, or is it the world? I have seen boys and men by the hundreds, and not one of them stirred me in the slightest; they could have sworn their undying love and devotion, they could have fought duels over me, I would have looked on unmoved. Love, my dear, is a phenomenon so rare that one can live an entire lifetime and not meet the one person endowed by nature with the ability to make us happy. A chilling notion, for suppose that meeting comes too late—do you have any thoughts on that?

  Over the past few days, I have begun to look with horror on our destiny, to understand why so many women have such downcast faces beneath the layer of vermillion applied to them by the false festiveness of a party. They marry by chance, just as you will. A hurricane of reflections has blown through my soul. Oh, to be loved every day just the same but in ever new ways, to be loved no less after ten happy years than on the first day! Such a love takes time: one must let oneself be desired for a good while, one must awaken and satisfy many curiosities, one must arouse and return many sympathies. Are there laws, then, governing the creations of the heart, as there are governing the visible creations of nature? Can joy endure? In what proportion must love combine pleasures and tears? The cold routine of the convent’s dreary, unchanging, interminable existence then seemed to me possible, whereas the richness, the splendor, the tears, rapture, rejoicing, bliss, and pleasures of a mutual, equal, licit love seemed inconceivable. I see no place in this city for love’s tender sweetness, its sacred strolls beneath a bower by the light of the full moon, the waters glimmering, the maiden resisting her lover’s urgent entreaties. Rich, young, and beautiful, I have nothing to do but love, love can become my whole life, my sole occupation, but for three months I have been curiously casting about, and in all those shiny, eager, alert gazes I have found nothing. No voice has moved me, no glance has lit up the world. Music alone enchants my soul, it alone has filled the void left by our separation. I have sometimes sat at my window for an hour, deep in the night, looking out at the garden, wishing something would happen, begging for some event from the unknown source whence they spring. I have sometimes taken the carriage out for a drive, alighting on the Champs-Élysées and telling myself that a man was about to appear, he who would awaken my insensible soul, that he would follow me, look at me, but I saw only hucksters, gingerbread sellers, and conjurers, passersby hurrying about their business, or lovers fleeing all eyes, whom I was tempted to stop and ask, “You who are happy, tell me, what is love?” I fought back those ridiculous notions, climbed into my carriage, and vowed to remain unmarried forever. Love is an incarnation, and how many conditions must be met for it to occur! We are never entirely in agreement with ourselves, how hard must it be when there are two! God alone can answer that. I am beginning to think I may return to the convent. If I remain out in the world, I will do things that people think foolish, for I cannot accept what I see. Everything offends my sensibilities, the mores of my soul, or my secret thoughts. Ah! my mother is the happiest woman in the world, she is adored by her great little Canalis. My angel, I am sometimes overcome by a horrible fancy to know what goes on between that young man and my mother. Griffith has had all these same thoughts, she says, she has wanted to lash out at the women she saw to be happy, she has scorned them, she has savaged them. According to her, virtue consists in burying that hatefulness at the bottom of one’s heart. What, then, is the bottom of one’s heart? A storehouse of all that is wicked within us. I am quite humiliated not to have met one man who adores me. I am a girl of marriageable age, but I have brothers, I have a family, I have difficult parents. Ah! if that’s why the men have proven so reserved, they must be very great cowards. I marvel at Chimène, in Le Cid, and at Le Cid himself. What a grand play that is! Enough of this, farewell.

  8

  FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

  January

  Our Spanish teacher is a poor refugee, forced into hiding by his involvement in the revolution quelled not long ago by the Duke d’Angoulême—a success that was the occasion of some wonderful parties. Liberal though he be, and very likely a commoner, this man interests me: I imagined he had been condemned to die. I drew him out to discover his secret, but he is as taciturn as any Castilian, proud as Gonzalo de Córdoba,[23] though gentle and patient as an angel. He does not make a show of his pride, as Miss Griffith does; he keeps it entirely to himself. He exacts his due as he pays his respects to us, and he holds us at a distance with his courtliness. My father claims there is more than a little of the nobleman about this Monsieur Hénarez, and as a joke calls him Don Hénarez in private. When, a few days ago, I took the liberty of addressing him by that name, he raised his usually lowered eyes and threw out two bolts of lightning that left me without words; my dear, he truly has the most beautiful eyes in the world. I asked if I’d done something to anger him, and in his sublime, grandiose Spanish tongue he answered, “Mademoiselle, I am here to teach you Spanish, nothing more.”

  I was humiliated, I blushed; I was about to lash back with some cutting impertinence when I remembered what our dear mother superior used to tell us, and so answered, “If I have wronged you in any way, then I am in your debt.”

  He started, the blood rushed to his olive face, and in a gently moved voice he said, “Religion must have taught you, better than I ever could, to be respectful of deep sorrows. Were I a don in Spain who had lost everything with King Ferdinand’s triumph, there would be cruelty in your little jest, but if I am only a poor language teacher, is there not stinging mockery? Neither is worthy of a highborn young woman.”

  I took his hand and said, “Let me invoke religion in turn, and beseech you to forgive me my trespass.” He bowed his head, opened my Don Quixote, and sat down.

  That little incident caused me more emotion than all the compliments, stares, and fine words I ever reaped at my most successful evening party. As the lesson went on, I closely studied that man, who let himself be examined without knowing it: he never looks up at me. I discovered that our teacher, whom we thought to be forty,
is in fact a young of man of perhaps twenty-six or twenty-eight. My governess, with whom I had left him alone for a moment, remarked to me on his beautiful black hair, his pearl-white teeth. As for his eyes, they are at once velvet and fire. And that’s all: apart from that, he is short and ugly. We have heard the Spanish described as a slovenly people, but he is impeccably groomed, his hands whiter than his face. His back is slightly stooped, his head huge and oddly shaped. His rather dashing ugliness is aggravated by the smallpox scars that pepper his face. His brow is very prominent, his eyebrows meet and are exceedingly thick, and give him a hard and daunting air. He has the sullen, drawn face of a child destined to die young, who owes his life only to constant care, like Sister Marthe. As my father said, he has the wizened face of Cardinal Jimenez.[24] My father is not fond of him; he makes him uncomfortable. Our teacher has a natural dignity that seems to disturb the dear duke; he cannot tolerate any sort of greatness around him. We will leave for Madrid as soon as my father has learned Spanish. Two days after the lesson he’d taught me, when Hénarez returned, I said to him, marking a sort of gratitude, “I do not doubt that you left Spain because of the events; if my father is sent there, as they say he shall be, we will be in a position to help you, to obtain your pardon, perhaps, should you have a sentence hanging over you.”

  “No one can help me,” he answered.

  “Do you mean, monsieur,” I asked, “that you will not accept it or that it cannot be done?”

  “Both,” he said, with a little bow, and in a tone that ordered me to be silent. My father’s blood growled in my veins. Vexed by that haughtiness, I left Monsieur Hénarez there. Nonetheless, my dear, there is something beautiful about this refusal to want anything from others. He would never accept even our friendship, I told myself as I conjugated a verb. I broke off and told him what I was thinking, but in Spanish. This Hénarez very courteously answered that no sentiment is possible without an equality that would be absent here, and so the question was moot.

  “Do you mean equality of sentiment or equality of rank?” I asked, trying to drag him out of that seriousness I find so trying. He raised his formidable eyes once again, and I lowered mine.

  My dear, this man is an impenetrable enigma. He seemed to be asking if my words were a declaration: in his gaze I saw a happiness, a pride, an agonizing uncertainty that tugged at my heart. I realized that such coquetries, which in France are seen as nothing more than they are, can become dangerously meaningful with a Spaniard, and I retreated into my shell, feeling rather foolish. When the lesson was over, he bade me goodbye with a glance full of humble prayers, a glance that said, “Do not toy with an unhappy man.” That sudden contrast with his grave, dignified manner made a powerful impression. This is a dreadful thing to think and to say, but I believe there are vast reserves of affection in that man.

  9

  FROM MADAME DE L’ESTORADE TO MADEMOISELLE DE CHAULIEU

  December

  Everything has been said, my dear child, and everything has been done: it is Madame de l’Estorade who writes you now, but nothing has changed between us, there is simply one maiden the less. Have no fear: I devoted great thought to my consent and did not give it lightly. The course of my life is now set. The certainty that comes with following a well-blazed trail suits my mind as it does my nature. A great inner strength has smoothed forever what are known as the ups and downs of life. We have land to cultivate, a home to decorate and improve; I have a household to run and make pleasant, a man who must be reconciled with life. I will no doubt have a family to look after, children to raise. There is no way around it: everyday existence has no room for grandeur and excess. The extravagant desires that exalt the soul and the mind have no place in these matters, or so at least it seems. What stops me from letting the boats that we launched onto the seas of the infinite sail ever onward? But do not believe that the humble things to which I intend to devote myself are devoid of passion. It is a very fine undertaking to make a poor man who has been the plaything of life’s tempests believe in happiness again, and that is enough to vary the sameness of my existence. I believe I have left no hold for sadness, and I have seen good to be done.

  Between you and me, I do not love Louis de l’Estorade with the love that makes the heart beat faster at the sound of a footstep, that sends a thrill through the soul on hearing a single word or feeling the embrace of an ardent gaze, but neither does he displease me. What will I do, you may ask, with the instinct for the sublime, with the gift for powerful thought that you and I share, that binds us, inhabits us? That has indeed been much on my mind, but is it not a grand thing to conceal it, to secretly use it for the happiness of the family, to make of it a means for the felicity of those entrusted to us, to whom we owe ourselves? The season in which those faculties shine is a short one among women and will soon have passed; my life may never be great, but it will be tranquil, smooth, and untroubled. We women have an inborn advantage: we can choose between love and motherhood. I have made my choice. I will make of my children my gods, and of this patch of land my Eldorado. That is all I can tell you today. I thank you for the things you sent me. Have a look at my orders, the list of which accompanies this letter. I want to live in an atmosphere of luxury and elegance, and to have about me nothing of the provinces but the pleasures they offer. A woman who protects her solitude can never be provincial, she will forever remain herself. I am counting on your devotion to keep me apprised of the latest fashions. In his enthusiasm, my father-in-law refuses me nothing and is remaking his house from top to bottom. We have workmen out from Paris, and we are making everything modern.

  10

  FROM MADEMOISELLE DE CHAULIEU TO MADAME DE L’ESTORADE

  January

  O Renée! You made me sad for several days. So that delicious body, that fine, proud face, those naturally elegant ways, that soul laden with rare gifts, those eyes in which the spirit drinks deep as at a fresh spring of love, that heart bursting with exquisite sensibilities, that broad mind, all those rare talents, those effects of nature and of our mutual education, those treasuries that should have offered up priceless riches for passion and desire, poems, hours fuller than years, delights to make a man a slave with one elegant gesture, so all that will be wasted on the tedium of a vulgar, common marriage, all that will vanish into the emptiness of a life you will soon tire of! I already hate your future children; they will be ill-begotten. Everything is planned out in your life: you will have no cause for hope, for fear, for suffering. Suppose that one glorious day you meet a man who wakes you from the sleep to which you are about to abandon yourself? . . . Ah! that thought sent a chill down my spine. But all the same, you have a friend in me. No doubt you will be the living spirit of that valley, you will discover its beauties, you will live amid that nature, you will fill yourself with the grandeur of it all, the slow growth of the greenery, the speed of racing thoughts; and when you look at your cheerful flowers, you will question yourself. And when you are out walking, with your husband ahead of you and your children behind, the children shrieking, whining, capering, the man silent and self-satisfied, I know already what you will write me. Your perfumed valley, its hills, whether barren or adorned with fine trees, your meadow, so unlikely in Provence, with the little rivulets of its limpid stream, the changing hues of the light, all that infinity around you, varied by God, will call to your mind the infinite monotony of your heart. But I will be here, my Renée, and in me you will find a friend whose heart is untouched by social pettiness, a heart wholly devoted to you.

  Monday

  My dear, my Spaniard is wonderfully melancholic: he has a calmness about him, an austerity, a dignity, a depth that interests me to the highest degree. There is something provocative for the soul in that constant solemnity, in the silence enshrouding that man. He is as silent and superb as a fallen king. We dwell on him, Griffith and I, as on an enigma. How very odd it all is! A language teacher captures my attention as no man ever has, I who have now reviewed the entire parade of well-bo
rn sons, attachés to the embassy, ambassadors, generals, sublieutenants, peers of France, their sons and their nephews, the court and the city. The coldness of that man is beguiling. The most profound pride fills the desert that he tries to and does put between us, for he wraps himself in darkness. He is the demure one, and I the bold. This oddity amuses me all the more in that it is of no consequence at all. What is a man to me, a Spaniard, a language teacher? I feel no respect for any man alive, were he even a king. I believe we are worth more than any of them, even the most justly celebrated. Oh! how I would have dominated Napoleon! How I would have made him feel, had he loved me, that he was at my command!