“So far, I have found nothing very terrible in marriage,” I said, as I walked to the window and looked out on the glorious moon which lit up a charming park, breathing of heavy scents.
He drew near, put his arm again round me, and said:
“Why fear it? Have I ever yet proved false to my promise in gesture or look? Why should I be false in the future?”
Yet never were words or glances more full of mastery; his voice thrilled every fibre of my heart and roused a sleeping force; his eyes were like the sun in power.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, “what a world of Moorish perfidy in this attitude of perpetual prostration!”
He understood, my dear.
So, my fair sweetheart, if I have let months slip by without writing, you can now divine the cause. I have to recall the girl’s strange past in order to explain the woman to myself. Renee, I understand you now. Not to her dearest friend, not to her mother, not, perhaps, even to herself, can a happy bride speak of her happiness. This memory ought to remain absolutely her own, an added rapture — a thing beyond words, too sacred for disclosure!
Is it possible that the name of duty has been given to the delicious frenzy of the heart, to the overwhelming rush of passion? And for what purpose? What malevolent power conceived the idea of crushing a woman’s sensitive delicacy and all the thousand wiles of her modesty under the fetters of constraint? What sense of duty can force from her these flowers of the heart, the roses of life, the passionate poetry of her nature, apart from love? To claim feeling as a right! Why, it blooms of itself under the sun of love, and shrivels to death under the cold blast of distaste and aversion! Let love guard his own rights!
Oh! my noble Renee! I understand you now. I bow to your greatness, amazed at the depth and clearness of your insight. Yes, the woman who has not used the marriage ceremony, as I have done, merely to legalize and publish the secret election of her heart, has nothing left but to fly to motherhood. When earth fails, the soul makes for heaven!
One hard truth emerges from all that you have said. Only men who are really great know how to love, and now I understand the reason of this. Man obeys two forces — one sensual, one spiritual. Weak or inferior men mistake the first for the last, whilst great souls know how to clothe the merely natural instinct in all the graces of the spirit. The very strength of this spiritual passion imposes severe self-restraint and inspires them with reverence for women. Clearly, feeling is sensitive in proportion to the calibre of the mental powers generally, and this is why the man of genius alone has something of a woman’s delicacy. He understands and divines woman, and the wings of passion on which he raises her are restrained by the timidity of the sensitive spirit. But when the mind, the heart, and the senses all have their share in the rapture which transports us — ah! then there is no falling to earth, rather it is to heaven we soar, alas! for only too brief a visit.
Such, dear soul, is the philosophy of the first three months of my married life. Felipe is angelic. Without figure of speech, he is another self, and I can think aloud with him. His greatness of soul passes my comprehension. Possession only attaches him more closely to me, and he discovers in his happiness new motives for loving me. For him, I am the nobler part of himself. I can foresee that years of wedded life, far from impairing his affection, will only make it more assured, develop fresh possibilities of enjoyment, and bind us in more perfect sympathy. What a delirium of joy!
It is part of my nature that pleasure has an exhilarating effect on me; it leaves sunshine behind, and becomes a part of my inner being. The interval which parts one ecstasy from another is like the short night which marks off our long summer days. The sun which flushed the mountain tops with warmth in setting finds them hardly cold when it rises. What happy chance has given me such a destiny? My mother had roused a host of fears in me; her forecast, which, though free from the alloy of vulgar pettiness, seemed to me redolent of jealousy, has been falsified by the event. Your fears and hers, my own — all have vanished in thin air!
We remained at Chantepleurs seven months and a half, for all the world like a couple of runaway lovers fleeing the parental warmth, while the roses of pleasure crowned our love and embellished our dual solitude. One morning, when I was even happier than usual, I began to muse over my lot, and suddenly Renee and her prosaic marriage flashed into my mind. It seemed to me that now I could grasp the inner meaning in your life. Oh! my sweet, why do we speak a different tongue? Your marriage of convenience and my love match are two worlds, as widely separated as the finite from infinity. You still walk the earth, whilst I range the heavens! Your sphere is human, mine divine! Love crowned me queen, you reign by reason and duty. So lofty are the regions where I soar, that a fall would shiver me to atoms.
But no more of this. I shrink from painting to you the rainbow brightness, the profusion, the exuberant joy of love’s springtime, as we know it.
For ten days we have been in Paris, staying in a charming house in the Rue du Bac, prepared for us by the architect to whom Felipe intrusted the decoration of Chantepleurs. I have been listening, in all the full content of an assured and sanctioned love, to that divine music of Rossini’s, which used to soothe me when, as a restless girl, I hungered vaguely after experience. They say I am more beautiful, and I have a childish pleasure in hearing myself called “Madame.”
Friday morning.
Renee, my fair saint, the happiness of my own life pulls me for ever back to you. I feel that I can be more to you than ever before, you are so dear to me! I have studied your wedded life closely in the light of my own opening chapters; and you seem to me to come out of the scrutiny so great, so noble, so splendid in your goodness, that I here declare myself your inferior and humble admirer, as well as your friend. When I think what marriage has been to me, it seems to me that I should have died, had it turned out otherwise. And you live! Tell me what your heart feeds on! Never again shall I make fun of you. Mockery, my sweet, is the child of ignorance; we jest at what we know nothing of. “Recruits will laugh where the veteran soldier looks grave,” was a remark made to me by the Comte de Chaulieu, that poor cavalry officer whose campaigning so far has consisted in marches from Paris to Fontainebleau and back again.
I surmise, too, my dear love, that you have not told me all. There are wounds which you have hidden. You suffer; I am convinced of it. In trying to make out at this distance and from the scraps you tell me the reasons of your conduct, I have weaved together all sorts of romantic theories about you. “She has made a mere experiment in marriage,” I thought one evening, “and what is happiness for me had proved only suffering to her. Her sacrifice is barren of reward, and she would not make it greater than need be. The unctuous axioms of social morality are only used to cloak her disappointment.” Ah! Renee, the best of happiness is that it needs no dogma and no fine words to pave the way; it speaks for itself, while theory has been piled upon theory to justify the system of women’s vassalage and thralldom. If self-denial be so noble, so sublime, what, pray, of my joy, sheltered by the gold-and-white canopy of the church, and witnessed by the hand and seal of the most sour-faced of mayors? Is it a thing out of nature?
For the honor of the law, for her own sake, but most of all to make my happiness complete, I long to see my Renee content. Oh! tell me that you see a dawn of love for this Louis who adores you! Tell me that the solemn, symbolic torch of Hymen has not alone served to lighten your darkness, but that love, the glorious sun of our hearts, pours his rays on you. I come back always, you see, to this midday blaze, which will be my destruction, I fear.
Dear Renee, do you remember how, in your outbursts of girlish devotion, you would say to me, as we sat under the vine-covered arbor of the convent garden, “I love you so, Louise, that if God appeared to me in a vision, I would pray Him that all the sorrows of life might be mine, and all the joy yours. I burn to suffer for you”? Now, darling, the day has come when I take up your prayer, imploring Heaven to grant you a share in my happiness.
I mu
st tell you my idea. I have a shrewd notion that you are hatching ambitious plans under the name of Louis de l’Estorade. Very good; get him elected deputy at the approaching election, for he will be very nearly forty then; and as the Chamber does not meet till six months later, he will have just attained the age necessary to qualify for a seat. You will come to Paris — there, isn’t that enough? My father, and the friends I shall have made by that time, will learn to know and admire you; and if your father-in-law will agree to found a family, we will get the title of Comte for Louis. That is something at least! And we shall be together.
XXVIII. RENEE DE L’ESTORADE TO LOUISE DE MACUMER December.
My thrice happy Louise, your letter made me dizzy. For a few moments I held it in my listless hands, while a tear or two sparkled on it in the setting sun. I was alone beneath the small barren rock where I have had a seat placed; far off, like a lance of steel, the Mediterranean shone. The seat is shaded by aromatic shrubs, and I have had a very large jessamine, some honeysuckle, and Spanish brooms transplanted there, so that some day the rock will be entirely covered with climbing plants. The wild vine has already taken root there. But winter draws near, and all this greenery is faded like a piece of old tapestry. In this spot I am never molested; it is understood that here I wish to be alone. It is named Louise’s seat — a proof, is it not, that even in solitude I am not alone here?
If I tell you all these details, to you so paltry, and try to describe the vision of green with which my prophetic gaze clothes this bare rock — on which top some freak of nature has set up a magnificent parasol pine — it is because in all this I have found an emblem to which I cling.
It was while your blessed lot was filling me with joy and — must I confess it? — with bitter envy too, that I felt the first movement of my child within, and this mystery of physical life reacted upon the inner recesses of my soul. This indefinable sensation, which partakes of the nature at once of a warning, a delight, a pain, a promise, and a fulfilment; this joy, which is mine alone, unshared by mortal, this wonder of wonders, has whispered to me that one day this rock shall be a carpet of flowers, resounding to the merry laughter of children, that I shall at last be blessed among women, and from me shall spring forth fountains of life. Now I know what I have lived for! Thus the first certainty of bearing within me another life brought healing to my wounds. A joy that beggars description has crowned for me those long days of sacrifice, in which Louis had already found his.
Sacrifice! I said to myself, how far does it excel passion! What pleasure has roots so deep as one which is not personal but creative? Is not the spirit of Sacrifice a power mightier than any of its results? Is it not that mysterious, tireless divinity, who hides beneath innumerable spheres in an unexplored centre, through which all worlds in turn must pass? Sacrifice, solitary and secret, rich in pleasures only tasted in silence, which none can guess at, and no profane eye has ever seen; Sacrifice, jealous God and tyrant, God of strength and victory, exhaustless spring which, partaking of the very essence of all that exists, can by no expenditure be drained below its own level; — Sacrifice, there is the keynote of my life.
For you, Louise, love is but the reflex of Felipe’s passion; the life which I shed upon my little ones will come back to me in ever-growing fulness. The plenty of your golden harvest will pass; mine, though late, will be but the more enduring, for each hour will see it renewed. Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears. Love makes my Louis happy, but marriage has made me a mother, and who shall say I am not happy also?
With slow steps, then, I returned to my white grange, with the green shutters, to write you these thoughts.
So it is, darling, that the most marvelous, and yet the simplest, process of nature has been going on in me for five months; and yet — in your ear let me whisper it — so far it agitates neither my heart nor my understanding. I see all around me happy; the grandfather-to-be has become a child again, trespassing on the grandchild’s place; the father wears a grave and anxious look; they are all most attentive to me, all talk of the joy of being a mother. Alas! I alone remain cold, and I dare not tell you how dead I am to all emotion, though I affect a little in order not to damp the general satisfaction. But with you I may be frank; and I confess that, at my present stage, motherhood is a mere affair of the imagination.
Louis was to the full as much surprised as I. Does not this show how little, unless by his impatient wishes, the father counts for in this matter? Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing. My doctor, while maintaining that this chance works in harmony with nature, does not deny that children who are the fruit of passionate love are bound to be richly endowed both physically and mentally, and that often the happiness which shone like a radiant star over their birth seems to watch over them through life. It may be then, Louise, that motherhood reserves joys for you which I shall never know. It may be that the feeling of a mother for the child of a man whom she adores, as you adore Felipe, is different from that with which she regards the offspring of reason, duty, and desperation!
Thoughts such as these, which I bury in my inmost heart, add to the preoccupation only natural to a woman soon to be a mother. And yet, as the family cannot exist without children, I long to speed the moment from which the joys of family, where alone I am to find my life, shall date their beginning. At present I live a life all expectation and mystery, except for a sickening physical discomfort, which no doubt serves to prepare a woman for suffering of a different kind. I watch my symptoms; and in spite of the attentions and thoughtful care with which Louis’ anxiety surrounds me, I am conscious of a vague uneasiness, mingled with the nausea, the distaste for food, and abnormal longings common to my condition. If I am to speak candidly, I must confess, at the risk of disgusting you with the whole business, to an incomprehensible craving for rotten fruit. My husband goes to Marseilles to fetch the finest oranges the world produces — from Malta, Portugal, Corsica — and these I don’t touch. Then I hurry there myself, sometimes on foot, and in a little back street, running down to the harbor, close to the Town Hall, I find wretched, half-putrid oranges, two for a sou, which I devour eagerly. The bluish, greenish shades on the mouldy parts sparkle like diamonds in my eyes, they are flowers to me; I forget the putrid odor, and find them delicious, with a piquant flavor, and stimulating as wine. My dear, they are the first love of my life! Your passion for Felipe is nothing to this! Sometimes I can slip out secretly and fly to Marseilles, full of passionate longings, which grow more intense as I draw near the street. I tremble lest the woman should be sold out of rotten oranges; I pounce on them and devour them as I stand. It seems to me an ambrosial food, and yet I have seen Louis turn aside, unable to bear the smell. Then came to my mind the ghastly words of Obermann in his gloomy elegy, which I wish I had never read, “Roots slake their thirst in foulest streams.” Since I took to this diet, the sickness has ceased, and I feel much stronger. This depravity of taste must have a meaning, for it seems to be part of a natural process and to be common to most women, sometimes going to most extravagant lengths.
When my situation is more marked, I shall not go beyond the grounds, for I should not like to be seen under these circumstances. I have the greatest curiosity to know at what precise moment the sense of motherhood begins. It cannot possibly be in the midst of frightful suffering, the very thought of which makes me shudder.
Farewell, favorite of fortune! Farewell, my friend, in whom I live again, and through whom I am able to picture to myself this brave love, this jealousy all on fire at a look, these whisperings in the ear, these joys which create for women, as it were, a new atmosphere, a new daylight, fresh life! Ah! pet, I too understand love. Don’t weary of telling me everything. Keep faithful to our bond. I promise, in my turn, to spare you nothing.
Nay — to conclude in all seriousness — I will not conceal from you that, on reading your letter a second time, I was
seized with a dread which I could not shake off. This superb love seems like a challenge to Providence. Will not the sovereign master of this earth, Calamity, take umbrage if no place be left for him at your feast? What mighty edifice of fortune has he not overthrown? Oh! Louise, forget not, in all this happiness, your prayers to God. Do good, be kind and merciful; let your moderation, if it may be, avert disaster. Religion has meant much more to me since I left the convent and since my marriage; but your Paris news contains no mention of it. In your glorification of Felipe it seems to me you reverse the saying, and invoke God less than His saint.
But, after all, this panic is only excess of affection. You go to church together, I do not doubt, and do good in secret. The close of this letter will seem to you very primitive, I expect, but think of the too eager friendship which prompts these fears — a friendship of the type of La Fontaine’s, which takes alarms at dreams, at half-formed, misty ideas. You deserve to be happy, since, through it all, you still think of me, no less than I think of you, in my monotonous life, which, though it lacks color, is yet not empty, and, if uneventful, is not unfruitful. God bless you, then!
XXIX. M. DE L’ESTORADE TO THE BARONNE DE MACUMER December 1825.
Madame, — It is the desire of my wife that you should not learn first from the formal announcement of an event which has filled us with joy. Renee has just given birth to a fine boy, whose baptism we are postponing till your return to Chantepleurs. Renee and I both earnestly hope that you may then come as far as La Crampade, and will consent to act as godmother to our firstborn. In this hope, I have had him placed on the register under the name of Armand-Louis de l’Estorade.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 29