“Genius is stronger than wit,” said Blondet to Nathan.
This broadside of sarcasms was in fact the discharge of a battery of cannons against a platoon of musketry. When coffee was served, Blondet and Nathan went up to d’Arthez with an eagerness no one else dared to imitate, so unable were the rest of the company to show the admiration his conduct inspired from the fear of making two powerful enemies.
“This is not the first time we have seen that your character equals your talent in grandeur,” said Blondet. “You behaved just now more like a demi-god than a man. Not to have been carried away by your heart or your imagination, not to have taken up the defence of a beloved woman — a fault they were enticing you to commit, because it would have given those men of society eaten up with jealousy of your literary fame a triumph over you — ah! give me leave to say you have attained the height of private statesmanship.”
“Yes, you are a statesman,” said Nathan. “It is as clever as it is difficult to avenge a woman without defending her.”
“The princess is one of those heroines of the legitimist party, and it is the duty of all men of honor to protect her quand meme,” replied d’Arthez, coldly. “What she has done for the cause of her masters would excuse all follies.”
“He keeps his own counsel!” said Nathan to Blondet.
“Precisely as if the princess were worth it,” said Rastignac, joining the other two.
D’Arthez went to the princess, who was awaiting him with the keenest anxiety. The result of this experiment, which Diane had herself brought about, might be fatal to her. For the first time in her life this woman suffered in her heart. She knew not what she should do in case d’Arthez believed the world which spoke the truth, instead of believing her who lied; for never had so noble a nature, so complete a man, a soul so pure, a conscience so ingenuous come beneath her hand. Though she had told him cruel lies she was driven to do so by the desire of knowing a true love. That love — she felt it dawning in her heart; yes, she loved d’Arthez; and now she was condemned forever to deceive him! She must henceforth remain to him the actress who had played that comedy to blind his eyes.
When she heard Daniel’s step in the dining-room a violent commotion, a shudder which reached to her very vitals came over her. That convulsion, never felt during all the years of her adventurous existence, told her that she had staked her happiness on this issue. Her eyes, gazing into space, took in the whole of d’Arthez’s person; their light poured through his flesh, she read his soul; suspicion had not so much as touched him with its bat’s-wing. The terrible emotion of that fear then came to its reaction; joy almost stifled her; for there is no human being who is not more able to endure grief than to bear extreme felicity.
“Daniel, they have calumniated me, and you have avenged me!” she cried, rising, and opening her arms to him.
In the profound amazement caused by these words, the roots of which were utterly unknown to him, Daniel allowed his hand to be taken between her beautiful hands, as the princess kissed him sacredly on the forehead.
“But,” he said, “how could you know — ”
“Oh! illustrious ninny! do you not see that I love you fondly?”
Since that day nothing has been said of the Princess de Cadignan, nor of d’Arthez. The princess has inherited some fortune from her mother and she spends all her summers in a villa on the lake of Geneva, where the great writer joins her. She returns to Paris for a few months in winter. D’Arthez is never seen except in the Chamber. His writings are becoming exceedingly rare. Is this a conclusion? Yes, for people of sense; no, for persons who want to know everything.
FACINO CANE
Translated by Clara Bell
This short story first appeared in the Chronique de Paris on March 17, 1836 and in 1837 Balzac classified it as an Étude philosophique (Philosophical Study). In 1843, the short story appeared with the novel Albert Savarus and in the following year it was then moved into the Scènes de la Vie Parisienne section of La Comédie humaine.
The novel concerns a blind old man called Father Canet, who claims to be a descendant of the 14th century condottiere of the same name. The narrator meets Facino Cane at the wedding celebration of his maid’s sisters. Interested by the appearance of the old man, the narrator begins a conversation with him, and Facino Cane mentions being from Venice. He then tells the story of his life and how he lost his status and money and became blind.
FACINO CANE
I once used to live in a little street which probably is not known to you — the Rue de Lesdiguieres. It is a turning out of the Rue Saint-Antoine, beginning just opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and ending in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge stranded me in a garret; my nights I spent in work, my days in reading at the Bibliotheque d’Orleans, close by. I lived frugally; I had accepted the conditions of the monastic life, necessary conditions for every worker, scarcely permitting myself a walk along the Boulevard Bourdon when the weather was fine. One passion only had power to draw me from my studies; and yet, what was that passion but a study of another kind? I used to watch the manners and customs of the Faubourg, its inhabitants, and their characteristics. As I dressed no better than a working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put them on their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove bargains or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work. Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I watched, just as the dervish in the Arabian Nights could pass into any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven o’clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I used to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking about the play; then from one thing to another they would come to their own affairs, and the mother would walk on and on, heedless of complaints or question from the little one that dragged at her hand, while she and her husband reckoned up the wages to be paid on the morrow, and spent the money in a score of different ways. Then came domestic details, lamentations over the excessive dearness of potatoes, or the length of the winter and the high price of block fuel, together with forcible representations of amounts owing to the baker, ending in an acrimonious dispute, in the course of which such couples reveal their characters in picturesque language. As I listened, I could make their lives mine, I felt their rags on my back, I walked with their gaping shoes on my feet; their cravings, their needs, had all passed into my soul, or my soul had passed into theirs. It was the dream of a waking man. I waxed hot with them over the foreman’s tyranny, or the bad customers that made them call again and again for payment.
To come out of my own ways of life, to be another than myself through a kind of intoxication of the intellectual faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my recreation. Whence comes the gift? Is it a kind of second sight? Is it one of those powers which when abused end in madness? I have never tried to discover its source; I possess it, I use it, that is all. But this it behooves you to know, that in those days I began to resolve the heterogeneous mass known as the People into its elements, and to evaluate its good and bad qualities. Even then I realized the possibilities of my suburb, that hotbed of revolution in which heroes, inventors, and practical men of science, rogues and scoundrels, virtues and vices, were all packed together by poverty, stifled by necessity, drowned in drink, and consumed by ardent spirits.
You would not imagine how many adventures, how many tragedies, lie buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and beauty lurks there. No imagination can reach the Truth, no one can go down into that city to make discoveries; for one must needs descend too low into its d
epths to see the wonderful scenes of tragedy or comedy enacted there, the masterpieces brought forth by chance.
I do not know how it is that I have kept the following story so long untold. It is one of the curious things that stop in the bag from which Memory draws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a lottery. There are plenty of tales just as strange and just as well hidden still left; but some day, you may be sure, their turn will come.
One day my charwoman, a working man’s wife, came to beg me to honor her sister’s wedding with my presence. If you are to realize what this wedding was like you must know that I paid my charwoman, poor creature, four francs a month; for which sum she came every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and make ready my breakfast, before going to her day’s work of turning the handle of a machine, at which hard drudgery she earned five-pence. Her husband, a cabinetmaker, made four francs a day at his trade; but as they had three children, it was all that they could do to gain an honest living. Yet I have never met with more sterling honesty than in this man and wife. For five years after I left the quarter, Mere Vaillant used to come on my birthday with a bunch of flowers and some oranges for me — she that had never a sixpence to put by! Want had drawn us together. I never could give her more than a ten-franc piece, and often I had to borrow the money for the occasion. This will perhaps explain my promise to go to the wedding; I hoped to efface myself in these poor people’s merry-making.
The banquet and the ball were given on a first floor above a wineshop in the Rue de Charenton. It was a large room, lighted by oil lamps with tin reflectors. A row of wooden benches ran round the walls, which were black with grime to the height of the tables. Here some eighty persons, all in their Sunday best, tricked out with ribbons and bunches of flowers, all of them on pleasure bent, were dancing away with heated visages as if the world were about to come to an end. Bride and bridegroom exchanged salutes to the general satisfaction, amid a chorus of facetious “Oh, ohs!” and “Ah, ahs!” less really indecent than the furtive glances of young girls that have been well brought up. There was something indescribably infectious about the rough, homely enjoyment in all countenances.
But neither the faces, nor the wedding, nor the wedding-guests have anything to do with my story. Simply bear them in mind as the odd setting to it. Try to realize the scene, the shabby red-painted wineshop, the smell of wine, the yells of merriment; try to feel that you are really in the faubourg, among old people, working men and poor women giving themselves up to a night’s enjoyment.
The band consisted of a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one in the room (with charming delicacy of feeling) refrained from finding fault. The music made such a brutal assault on the drum of my ear, that after a first glance round the room my eyes fell at once upon the blind trio, and the sight of their uniform inclined me from the first to indulgence. As the artists stood in a window recess, it was difficult to distinguish their faces except at close quarters, and I kept away at first; but when I came nearer (I hardly know why) I thought of nothing else; the wedding party and the music ceased to exist, my curiosity was roused to the highest pitch, for my soul passed into the body of the clarionet player.
The fiddle and the flageolet were neither of them interesting; their faces were of the ordinary type among the blind — earnest, attentive, and grave. Not so the clarionet player; any artist or philosopher must have come to a stop at the sight of him.
Picture to yourself a plaster mask of Dante in the red lamplight, with a forest of silver-white hair above the brows. Blindness intensified the expression of bitterness and sorrow in that grand face of his; the dead eyes were lighted up, as it were, by a thought within that broke forth like a burning flame, lit by one sole insatiable desire, written large in vigorous characters upon an arching brow scored across with as many lines as an old stone wall.
The old man was playing at random, without the slightest regard for time or tune. His fingers traveled mechanically over the worn keys of his instrument; he did not trouble himself over a false note now and again (a canard, in the language of the orchestra), neither did the dancers, nor, for that matter, did my old Italian’s acolytes; for I had made up my mind that he must be Italian, and an Italian he was. There was something great, something too of the despot about this old Homer bearing within him an Odyssey doomed to oblivion. The greatness was so real that it triumphed over his abject position; the despotism so much a part of him, that it rose above his poverty.
There are violent passions which drive a man to good or evil, making of him a hero or a convict; of these there was not one that had failed to leave its traces on the grandly-hewn, lividly Italian face. You trembled lest a flash of thought should suddenly light up the deep sightless hollows under the grizzled brows, as you might fear to see brigands with torches and poniards in the mouth of a cavern. You felt that there was a lion in that cage of flesh, a lion spent with useless raging against iron bars. The fires of despair had burned themselves out into ashes, the lava had cooled; but the tracks of the flames, the wreckage, and a little smoke remained to bear witness to the violence of the eruption, the ravages of the fire. These images crowded up at the sight of the clarionet player, till the thoughts now grown cold in his face burned hot within my soul.
The fiddle and the flageolet took a deep interest in bottles and glasses; at the end of a country-dance, they hung their instruments from a button on their reddish-colored coats, and stretched out their hands to a little table set in the window recess to hold their liquor supply. Each time they did so they held out a full glass to the Italian, who could not reach it for himself because he sat in front of the table, and each time the Italian thanked them with a friendly nod. All their movements were made with the precision which always amazes you so much at the Blind Asylum. You could almost think that they can see. I came nearer to listen; but when I stood beside them, they evidently guessed I was not a working man, and kept themselves to themselves.
“What part of the world do you come from, you that are playing the clarionet?”
“From Venice,” he said, with a trace of Italian accent.
“Have you always been blind, or did it come on afterwards — ”
“Afterwards,” he answered quickly. “A cursed gutta serena.”
“Venice is a fine city; I have always had a fancy to go there.”
The old man’s face lighted up, the wrinkles began to work, he was violently excited.
“If I went with you, you would not lose your time,” he said.
“Don’t talk about Venice to our Doge,” put in the fiddle, “or you will start him off, and he has stowed away a couple of bottles as it is — has the prince!”
“Come, strike up, Daddy Canard!” added the flageolet, and the three began to play. But while they executed the four figures of a square dance, the Venetian was scenting my thoughts; he guessed the great interest I felt in him. The dreary, dispirited look died out of his face, some mysterious hope brightened his features and slid like a blue flame over his wrinkles. He smiled and wiped his brow, that fearless, terrible brow of his, and at length grew gay like a man mounted on his hobby.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Eighty-two.”
“How long have you been blind?”
“For very nearly fifty years,” he said, and there was that in his tone which told me that his regret was for something more than his lost sight, for great power of which he had been robbed.
“Then why do they call you ‘the Doge’?” I asked.
“Oh, it is a joke. I am a Venetian noble, and I might have been a doge like any one else.”
“What is your name?”
“Here, in Paris, I am Pere Canet,” he said. “It was the only way of spelling my name on the register. But in Italy I am Marco
Facino Cane, Prince of Varese.”
“What, are you descended from the great condottiere Facino Cane, whose lands won by the sword were taken by the Dukes of Milan?”
“E vero,” returned he. “His son’s life was not safe under the Visconti; he fled to Venice, and his name was inscribed on the Golden Book. And now neither Cane or Golden Book are in existence.” His gesture startled me; it told of patriotism extinguished and weariness of life.
“But if you were once a Venetian senator, you must have been a wealthy man. How did you lose your fortune?”
“In evil days.”
He waved away the glass of wine handed to him by the flageolet, and bowed his head. He had no heart to drink. These details were not calculated to extinguish my curiosity.
As the three ground out the music of the square dance, I gazed at the old Venetian noble, thinking thoughts that set a young man’s mind afire at the age of twenty. I saw Venice and the Adriatic; I saw her ruin in the ruin of the face before me. I walked to and fro in that city, so beloved of her citizens; I went from the Rialto Bridge, along the Grand Canal, and from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido, returning to St. Mark’s, that cathedral so unlike all others in its sublimity. I looked up at the windows of the Casa Doro, each with its different sculptured ornaments; I saw old palaces rich in marbles, saw all the wonders which a student beholds with the more sympathetic eyes because visible things take their color of his fancy, and the sight of realities cannot rob him of the glory of his dreams. Then I traced back a course of life for this latest scion of a race of condottieri, tracking down his misfortunes, looking for the reasons of the deep moral and physical degradation out of which the lately revived sparks of greatness and nobility shone so much the more brightly. My ideas, no doubt, were passing through his mind, for all processes of thought-communications are far more swift, I think, in blind people, because their blindness compels them to concentrate their attention. I had not long to wait for proof that we were in sympathy in this way. Facino Cane left off playing, and came up to me. “Let us go out!” he said; his tones thrilled through me like an electric shock. I gave him my arm, and we went.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 670