“No, very few,” replied Rastignac. “To tell the truth, we do not expect to be in power very long; we brought about an election because in the general confusion into which the press has thrown public opinion, our constitutional duty was to force that opinion to reconstitute itself; but the fact is, we did not expect the result to be favorable to us, and we are therefore taken somewhat unawares.”
“You are like the peasant,” said Sallenauve, laughing, “who, expecting the end of the world, did not sow his wheat.”
“Well, we don’t look upon our retirement as the end of the world,” said Rastignac, modestly; “there are men to come after us, and many of them well able to govern; only, as we expected to give but few more representations in that transitory abode called ‘power,’ we have not unpacked either our costumes or our scenery. Besides, the coming session, in any case, can only be a business session. The question now is, of course, between the palace, that is, personal influence, and the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. This question will naturally come up when the vote is taken on the secret-service fund. Whenever, in one way or the other, that is settled, and the budget is voted, together with a few bills of secondary interest, Parliament has really completed its task; it will have put an end to a distressing struggle, and the country will know to which of the two parties it can look for the development of its prosperity.”
“And you think,” said Sallenauve, “that in a well-balanced system of government that question is a useful one to raise?”
“Well,” replied Rastignac, “we have not raised it. It is born perhaps of circumstances; a great deal, as I think, from the restlessness of certain ambitions, and also from the tactics of parties.”
“So that, in your opinion, one of the combatants is not guilty and has absolutely nothing to reproach himself with?”
“You are a republican,” said Rastignac, “and therefore, a priori, an enemy to the dynasty. I think I should lose my time in trying to change your ideas on the policy you complain of.”
“You are mistaken,” said the theoretical republican deputy; “I have no preconceived hatred to the reigning dynasty. I even think that in its past, striped, if I may say so, with royal affinities and revolutionary memories, it has all that is needed to respond to the liberal and monarchical instincts of the nation. But you will find it difficult to persuade me that in the present head of the dynasty we shall not find extreme ideas of personal influence, which in the long run will undermine and subvert the finest as well as the strongest institutions.”
“Yes,” said Rastignac, ironically, “and they are saved by the famous axiom of the deputy of Sancerre: ‘The king reigns, but does not govern.’”
Whether he was tired of standing to converse, or whether he wished to prove his ease in releasing himself from the trap which had evidently been laid for him, Sallenauve, before replying, drew up a chair for his interlocutor, and, taking one himself, said, —
“Will you permit me to cite the example of another royal behavior? — that of a prince who was not considered indifferent to his royal prerogative, and who was not ignorant of constitutional mechanism — ”
“Louis XVIII.,” said Rastignac, “or, as the newspapers used to call him, ‘the illustrious author of the Charter’?”
“Precisely; and will you kindly tell me where he died?”
“Parbleu! at the Tuileries.”
“And his successor?”
“In exile — Oh! I see what you are coming to.”
“My conclusion is certainly not difficult to guess. But have you fully remarked the deduction to be drawn from that royal career? — for which I myself feel the greatest respect. Louis XVIII. was not a citizen king. He granted this Charter, but he never consented to it. Born nearer to the throne than the prince whose regrettable tendencies I mentioned just now, he might naturally share more deeply still the ideas, the prejudices, and the infatuations of the court; in person he was ridiculous (a serious princely defect in France); he bore the brunt of a new and untried regime; he succeeded a government which had intoxicated the people with that splendid gilded smoke called glory; and if he was not actually brought back to France by foreigners, at any rate he came as the result of the armed invasion of Europe. Now, shall I tell you why, in spite of all these defects and disadvantages, in spite, too, of the ceaseless conspiracy kept up against his government, it was given to him to die tranquilly in his bed at the Tuileries?”
“Because he had made himself a constitutional king,” said Rastignac, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “But do you mean to say that we are not that?”
“In the letter, yes; in the spirit, no. When Louis XVIII. gave his confidence to a minister, he gave it sincerely and wholly. He did not cheat him; he played honestly into his hand, — witness the famous ordinance of September 5, and the dissolution of the Chamber, which was more Royalist than himself, — a thing he had the wisdom not to desire. Later, a movement of public opinion shook the minister who had led him along that path; that minister was his favorite, his son, as he called him. No matter; yielding to the constitutional necessity, he bravely sent him to foreign parts, after loading him with crosses and titles, — in short, with everything that could soften the pain of his fall; and he did not watch and manoeuvre surreptitiously to bring him back to power, which that minister never regained.”
“For a man who declares he does not hate us,” said Rastignac, “you treat us rather roughly. According to you we are almost faithless to the constitutional compact, and our policy, to your thinking ambiguous and tortuous, gives us a certain distant likeness to Monsieur Doublemain in the ‘Mariage de Figaro.’”
“I do not say that the evil is as deep as that,” replied Sallenauve; “perhaps, after all, we are simply a faiseur, — using the word, be it understood, in the sense of a meddler, one who wants to have his finger in everything.”
“Ah! monsieur, but suppose we are the ablest politician in the country.”
“If we are, it does not follow that our kingdom ought not to have the chance of becoming as able as ourselves.”
“Parbleu!” cried Rastignac, in the tone of a man who comes to the climax of a conversation, “I wish I had power to realize a wish — ”
“And that is?”
“To see you grappling with that ability which you call meddlesome.”
“Well, you know, Monsieur le ministre, that we all spend three fourths of life in wishing for the impossible.”
“Why impossible? Would you be the first man of the Opposition to be seen at the Tuileries? An invitation to dinner given publicly, openly, which would, by bringing you into contact with one whom you misjudge at a distance — ”
“I should have the honor to refuse.”
And he emphasized the words have the honor in a way to show the meaning he attached to them.
“You are all alike, you men of the Opposition!” cried the minister; “you won’t let yourselves be enlightened when the opportunity presents itself; or, to put it better, you — ”
“Do you call the rays of those gigantic red bottles in a chemist’s shop light, when they flash into your eyes as you pass them after dark? Don’t they, on the contrary, seem to blind you?”
“It is not our rays that frighten you,” said Rastignac; “it is the dark lantern of your party watchmen on their rounds.”
“There may be some truth in what you say; a party and the man who undertakes to represent it are in some degree a married couple, who in order to live peaceably together must be mutually courteous, frank, and faithful in heart as well as in principle.”
“Well, try to be moderate. Your dream is far more impossible to realize than mine; the day will come when you will have more to say about the courtesy of your chaste better half.”
“If there is an evil for which I ought to be prepared, it is that.”
“Do you think so? With the lofty and generous sentiments so apparent in your nature, shall you remain impassive under political attack, — under calumny, fo
r instance?”
“You yourself, Monsieur le ministre, have not escaped its venom; but it did not, I think, deter you from your course.”
“But,” said Rastignac, lowering his voice, “suppose I were to tell you that I have already sternly refused to listen to a proposal to search into your private life on a certain side which, being more in the shade than the rest, seems to offer your enemies a chance to entrap you.”
“I do not thank you for the honor you have done yourself in rejecting with contempt the proposals of men who can be neither of my party nor of yours; they belong to the party of base appetites and selfish passions. But, supposing the impossible, had they found some acceptance from you, pray believe that my course, which follows the dictates of my conscience, could not be affected thereby.”
“But your party, — consider for a moment its elements: a jumble of foiled ambitions, brutal greed, plagiarists of ‘93, despots disguising themselves as lovers of liberty.”
“My party has nothing, and seeks to gain something. Yours calls itself conservative, and it is right; its chief concern is how to preserve its power, offices, and wealth, — in short, all it now monopolizes.”
“But, monsieur, we are not a closed way; we open our way, on the contrary, to all ambitions. But the higher you are in character and intellect, the less we can allow you to pass, dragging after you your train of democrats; for the day when that crew gains the upper hand it will not be a change of policy, but a revolution.”
“But what makes you think I want an opening of any kind?”
“What! follow a course without an aim? — a course that leads nowhere? A certain development of a man’s faculties not only gives him the right but makes it his duty to seek to govern.”
“To watch the governing power is a useful career, and, I may add, a very busy one.”
“You can fancy, monsieur,” said Rastignac, good-humoredly, “that if Beauvisage were in your place I should not have taken the trouble to argue with him; I may say, however, that he would have made my effort less difficult.”
“This meeting, which chance has brought about between us,” said Sallenauve, “will have one beneficial result; we understand each other henceforth, and our future meetings will always therefore be courteous — which will not lessen the strength of our convictions.”
“Then I must say to the king — for I had his royal commands to — ”
Rastignac did not end the sentence in which he was, so to speak, firing his last gun, for the orchestra began to play a quadrille, and Nais, running up, made him a coquettish courtesy, saying, —
“Monsieur le ministre, I am very sorry, but you have taken my partner, and you must give him up. He is down for my eleventh quadrille, and if I miss it my list gets into terrible confusion.”
“You permit me, monsieur?” said Sallenauve, laughing. “As you see, I am not a very savage republican.” So saying, he followed Nais, who led him along by the hand.
Madame de l’Estorade, comprehending that this fancy of Nais was rather compromising to the dignity of the new deputy, had arranged that several papas and mammas should figure in the same quadrille; and she herself with the Scottish lad danced vis-a-vis to her daughter, who beamed with pride and joy. In the evolutions of the last figure, where Nais had to take her mother’s hand, she said, pressing it passionately, —
“Poor mamma! if it hadn’t been for him, you wouldn’t have me now.”
This sudden reminder so agitated Madame de l’Estorade, coming as it did unexpectedly, that she was seized with a return of the nervous trembling her daughter’s danger had originally caused, and was forced to sit down. Seeing her change color, Sallenauve, Nais, and Madame Octave de Camps ran to her to know if she were ill.
“It is nothing,” she answered, addressing Sallenauve; “only that my little girl reminded me suddenly of the utmost obligation we are under to you, monsieur. ‘Without him,’ she said, ‘you would not have me.’ Ah! monsieur, without your generous courage where would my child be now?”
“Come, come, don’t excite yourself,” interposed Madame Octave de Camps, observing the convulsive and almost gasping tone of her friend’s voice. “It is not reasonable to put yourself in such a state for a child’s speech.”
“She is better than the rest of us,” replied Madame de l’Estorade, taking Nais in her arms.
“Come, mamma, be reasonable,” said that young lady.
“She puts nothing in the world,” continued Madame de l’Estorade, “before her gratitude to her preserver, whereas her father and I have scarcely shown him any.”
“But, madame,” said Sallenauve, “you have courteously — ”
“Courteously!” interrupted Nais, shaking her pretty head with an air of disapproval; “if any one had saved my daughter, I should be different to him from that.”
“Nais,” said Madame de Camps, sternly, “children should be silent when their opinion is not asked.”
“What is the matter,” said Monsieur de l’Estorade, joining the group.
“Nothing,” said Madame de Camps; “only a giddiness Renee had in dancing.”
“Is it over?”
“Yes, I am quite well again,” said Madame de l’Estorade.
“Then come and say good-night to Madame de Rastignac, who is preparing to take leave.”
In his eagerness to get to the minister’s wife, he forgot to give his own wife his arm. Sallenauve was more thoughtful. As they walked together in the wake of her husband, Madame de l’Estorade said, —
“I saw you talking for a long time with Monsieur de Rastignac; did he practise his well-known seductions upon you?”
“Do you think he succeeded?” replied Sallenauve.
“No; but such attempts to capture are always disagreeable, and I beg you to believe that I was not a party to the plot. I am not so violently ministerial as my husband.”
“Nor I as violently revolutionary as they think.”
“I trust that these annoying politics, which have already produced a jar between you and Monsieur de l’Estorade, may not disgust you with the idea of being counted among our friends.”
“That is an honor, madame, for which I can only be grateful.”
“It is not an honor but a pleasure that I hoped you would find in it,” said Madame de l’Estorade, quickly. “I say, with Nais, if I had saved the life of a friend’s child, I should cease to be ceremonious with her.”
So saying, and without listening to his answer, she disengaged her arm quickly from that of Sallenauve, and left him rather astonished at the tone in which she had spoken.
In seeing Madame de l’Estorade so completely docile to the advice, more clever than prudent, perhaps, of Madame de Camps, the reader, we think, can scarcely be surprised. A certain attraction has been evident for some time on the part of the frigid countess not only to the preserver of her daughter, but to the man who under such romantic and singular circumstances had come before her mind. Carefully considered, Madame de l’Estorade is seen to be far from one of those impassible natures which resist all affectionate emotions except those of the family. With a beauty that was partly Spanish, she had eyes which her friend Louise de Chaulieu declared could ripen peaches. Her coldness was not what physicians call congenital; her temperament was an acquired one. Marrying from reason a man whose mental insufficiency is very apparent, she made herself love him out of pity and a sense of protection. Up to the present time, by means of a certain atrophy of heart, she had succeeded, without one failure, in making Monsieur de l’Estorade perfectly happy. With the same instinct, she had exaggerated the maternal sentiment to an almost inconceivable degree, until in that way she had fairly stifled all the other cravings of her nature. It must be said, however, that the success she had had in accomplishing this hard task was due in a great measure to the circumstance of Louise de Chaulieu. To her that dear mistaken one was like the drunken slave whom the Spartans made a living lesson to their children; and between the two friends a sort of tacit wager
was established. Louise having taken the side of romantic passion, Renee held firmly to that of superior reason; and in order to win the game, she had maintained a courage of good sense and wisdom which might have cost her far more to practise without this incentive. At the age she had now reached, and with her long habit of self-control, we can understand how, seeing, as she believed, the approach of a love against which she had preached so vehemently, she should instantly set to work to rebuff it; but a man who did not feel that love, while thinking her ideally beautiful, and who possibly loved elsewhere, — a man who had saved her child from death and asked no recompense, who was grave, serious, and preoccupied in an absorbing enterprise, — why should she still continue to think such a man dangerous? Why not grant to him, without further hesitation, the lukewarm sentiment of friendship?
VI. CURIOSITY THAT CAME WITHIN AN ACE OF BEING FATAL
On returning to Ville d’Avray, Sallenauve was confronted by a singular event. Who does not know how sudden events upset the whole course of our lives, and place us, without our will, in compromising positions?
Sallenauve was not mistaken in feeling serious anxiety as to the mental state of his friend Marie-Gaston.
When that unfortunate man had left the scene of his cruel loss immediately after the death of his wife, he would have done a wiser thing had he then resolved never to revisit it. Nature, providentially ordered, provides that if those whose nearest and dearest are struck by the hand of death accept the decree with the resignation which ought to follow the execution of all necessary law, they will not remain too long under the influence of their grief. Rousseau has said, in his famous letter against suicide: “Sadness, weariness of spirit, regret, despair are not lasting sorrows, rooted forever in the soul; experience will always cast out that feeling of bitterness which makes us at first believe our grief eternal.”
But this truth ceases to be true for imprudent and wilful persons, who seek to escape the first anguish of sorrow by flight or some violent distraction. All mental and moral suffering is a species of illness which, taking time for its specific, will gradually wear out, in the long run, of itself. If, on the contrary, it is not allowed to consume itself slowly on the scene of its trouble, if it is fanned into flame by motion or violent remedies, we hinder the action of nature; we deprive ourselves of the blessed relief of comparative forgetfulness, promised to those who will accept their suffering, and so transform it into a chronic affection, the memories of which, though hidden, are none the less true and deep.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 926