The Girl With the Golden Eyes

by Honoré de Balzac

  Now we have reached the third circle of this hell, which might someday find its Dante. This third social circle is a kind of Parisian stomach, where the interests of the city are digested and where the crowd of attorneys, doctors, notaries, lawyers, businessmen, bankers, wholesale merchants, speculators, and magistrates are condensed in the form called business affairs, and where the mass is moved and stirred up by an acrid and venomous intestinal agitation. Here more than anywhere else are encountered causes for physical and moral destruction. Almost all these people live in squalid dens, in reeking courtrooms, in little barred offices, spending all day bent over beneath the weight of affairs; they get up at dawn to be prepared, to keep from being rooked, to win everything or to lose nothing, to seize hold of a man or of his money, to get a deal going or wrap one up, to take advantage of a fleeting circumstance, to have a man hanged or acquitted. They have an effect on their horses, work them to death, overtax them, aging their horses’ legs long before their time. Time is their tyrant, they never have enough of it, it slips away from them; they can neither stretch it out nor contract it. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, generous, what face can remain handsome in the depraving exercise of a profession that forces you to bear the weight of public miseries, to analyze them, weigh them, gauge them, bleed them systematically? Where do these people keep their hearts? I don’t know; but they leave them somewhere else, if they have any, before they descend every morning to the depths of the suffering that afflicts families. For them, there are no mysteries, they see the other side of the society for which they are confessors, and they despise it. Yet whatever they do, by dint of pitting themselves against corruption, they come to loathe it and are aggrieved by it; or else, out of weariness, by a secret transaction, they wed it. Ultimately, necessarily, they grow bored with all emotions, these people whom laws, people, institutions make fly down like crows onto corpses still warm. At any time of day, the money-man weighs the living, the contract-man weighs the dead, the law-man weighs our conscience. Obliged to talk continually, they replace ideas with words, emotions with phrases, and their soul turns into a larynx. They wear themselves down and grow demoralized. Neither the great negotiator, nor the judge, nor the lawyer keeps his heart in the right place: They stop feeling, they apply rules that bribes distort. Carried away by their torrential existence, they can be neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on a sledge over the things of life, and live every minute compelled by the affairs of the great city. When they return home, they are called upon to attend a ball, or the Opéra, or parties where they go to develop clients for themselves, or acquaintances, or protectors. They all eat to excess, play, stay up late, till their faces grow round, smooth, red. To such terrible expenditures of intellectual strength, to such an increase in moral contradictions, they oppose not pleasure—too pale, flat, without contrast—but debauchery, a secret, terrifying debauchery, since they have everything at their disposal, and they are the ones that create society’s morals. Their actual stupidity is hidden beneath an expert science. They know their profession, but they ignore anything unconnected with their profession. So, to protect their self-esteem, they call everything into question, criticize right and left; seem skeptical but are actually gullible, and drown their minds in interminable discussions. Almost all of them adopt convenient social, literary, or political prejudices so as to dispense with having to form an opinion of their own, just as they place their conscience in the shelter of common law, or of the commercial court. Having left home early in order to become remarkable men, they become mediocre, and crawl along on the heights of society. Accordingly, their faces present us with this sour pallor, these false complexions, these dull, lined eyes, these talkative and sensual mouths where the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneration of thought and its turning round and round in the dull circle of specialization that kills the generative faculties of the brain, the gift of seeing the big picture, of generalizing and deducing. They almost all shrivel up in the furnace of business affairs. Never can a man who has let himself be caught up in the crushing gears of these immense machines become great. If he is a doctor, either he has practiced little medicine, or he is an exception, a Bichat who dies young. If, as a great merchant, there’s still something left, he is almost a financier like Jacques Coeur. Did Robespierre practice law? Danton was a lazy man who bided his time. But who in any case has ever envied the figures of Danton or Robespierre, superb as they may be? These busy men par excellence draw money to themselves and amass it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic families. If the worker’s ambition is the same as a man of the lower middle class, here too passions are the same. In Paris, vanity epitomizes all the passions. The classic example of this level of society is either the ambitious bourgeois, who, after a life full of constant anxiety and maneuvering, gets onto the Council of State the way an ant crawls through a crack; or some newspaper editor, riddled with intrigues, whom the King makes a peer of France, perhaps to get back at the nobility; or some notary who gets to become mayor of his arrondissement: All of them have been exhausted by business affairs and, if they reach their goal, are killed doing so. In France, it is customary to honor grey hair. But Napoleon, Louis XIV, the truly great monarchs always wanted young people to carry out their plans.

  Above this sphere lives the artistic world. But here again the faces, marked by the seal of originality, are sublimely broken, but broken they are, weary, haggard. Overwhelmed by the need to keep producing, overwhelmed by their costly imaginations, wearied by a devouring genius, starved for pleasure, the artists of Paris all want to recover through excessive labor the depletions left by laziness, and seek vainly to reconcile the world and glory, money and art. From the start, the artist is ceaselessly panting beneath the creditor; his needs engender debts, and his debts take his nights away from him. After work, pleasure. The actor plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor bends beneath his statue; the journalist is a thought on the march, like the soldier at war; the fashionable painter is overwhelmed with work, the painter without commissions is eaten away if he feels he is a man of genius. Competition, rivalries, calumnies murder talent. Some, desperate, roll into the abysses of vice, others die young and unknown because of having counted too soon on their future. Few of these faces, sublime to begin with, remain handsome. Moreover, the flamboyant beauty of their heads remains misunderstood. An artist’s face is always extravagant, it is always above or below the conventional lines of what imbeciles call ideal beauty. What power destroys them? Passion. All passion in Paris is focused on two goals: gold and pleasure.

  Now, can’t you breathe more easily? Can’t you feel that the spacious atmosphere has been purified? Here, no labor or suffering. The spiral of gold has reached the summit. From the bottom of basement windows where its rivulets begin, from the depths of shops where meager dykes constrain its flow, from the heart of neighborhood branch offices and big headquarters where it lets itself be made into bars, gold, in the form of dowries or inheritances, brought by the hands of young women or by the big-knuckled hands of old men, gushes towards the race of aristocrats where it gleams, spreads out, flows. But before we leave the four regions on which upper-class Paris relies, shouldn’t we, after the aforementioned moral causes, deduce the physical causes, and call attention to a plague, which we could term as underlying, that is constantly acting on the faces of the porter, the shopkeeper, the laborer; shouldn’t we point out a noxious influence whose corruptive power equals that of the Parisian administrators who complacently allow it to subsist! If the air of houses where most of the middle-class live is foul, if the atmosphere of the streets spits out cruel fumes in back-alley-shops where air is scarce, be aware that besides this pestilence, the 40,000 houses of this great city bathe their feet in ordure that the authorities have not yet seriously considered encircling with concrete walls that might prevent the most fetid mud from seeping through the ground, poisoning the wells, and continuing underground its famous
name, Lutetia, place of the swamps. Half of Paris lies in the putrid exhalations of backyards, streets, and outhouses.

  But now let us approach the grand, airy, gilded drawing-rooms, the mansions with gardens, the world of the rich and idle of private means. Here the faces are pallid, eaten away by vanity. Here there is nothing real. Doesn’t the search for pleasure imply finding boredom? People in high society early on exhausted their true nature. Concerned only with creating joy for themselves, they quickly abused their senses, just as the common laborer abuses strong drink. Pleasure is like certain medicinal substances: To obtain the same effects, you have to keep increasing the dose, and death or mental exhaustion is inherent in the latter. All the lower classes lurk near the rich and keep an eye out for current tastes in order to exploit them and turn them into vices. How can one resist the clever seductions that are hatched in this country? Thus Paris has its theriakis, its own sort of opium-eaters—for them, gambling, gastrolatry, or the courtesan are their opium. So in these people you will see tastes but not passions—just romantic fantasies and timid affairs. Here impotence reigns; here there are no more ideas, the motive-force is lost in the playacting of the boudoir, in feminine antics. There are forty-year-old greenhorns, sixteen-year-old scholars. In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from having to have wit, science, or opinion. In this world, senselessness is as common as weakness and licentiousness. Here you become greedy for time by dint of losing it. Do not look for affection here any more than for ideas. Embraces mask profound indifference, politeness masks continuous scorn. Here the other is never loved. Shallow witticisms, hosts of indiscretions, much gossip, all blanketed by commonplaces—such is the substance of their language. But these unhappy “beautiful people” boast they don’t get together in order to speak and create maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld; as if the eighteenth century had never discovered that happy medium between the too-full and absolute emptiness. If a few intelligent men make use of a subtle, deft witticism, it isn’t understood. Soon they grow tired of giving without receiving, so they stay home and let idiots reign in their place. This hollow life, this constant waiting for a pleasure that doesn’t come, this permanent boredom, this inanity of spirit, heart, and brain, this weariness of the great Parisian rout is reproduced in their features, and produces these cardboard faces, these premature wrinkles, this physiognomy of the rich where impotence scowls, where gold is reflected, and from which intelligence has fled.

  This view of the moral Paris proves that the physical Paris could not be any different from the way it is. This tiara-clad city is a queen who, ever pregnant, has the usual irresistibly violent desires. Paris is the earth’s head, an intelligence bursting with genius and leading human civilization, a great man, a continuously creative artist, a politician with second sight who must have a well-developed cerebrum, with all the vices of a great man, the fantasies of an artist, and the plainness of politics. Its physiognomy implies the germination of good and evil, struggle and victory; the moral battle of 1789 whose trumpets are still resounding throughout all the corners of the world, and also the defeat of 1814. Thus this city could not possibly be any more moral, or more cordial, or cleaner than the engine boiler of those magnificent pyroscaphs, the steamboats you admire cleaving the waves! Isn’t Paris a sublime vessel freighted with intelligence? Yes, the city’s coat of arms is one of those prophecies that fate sometimes allows itself. The City of Paris has its great mast of bronze, sculpted from victories, with Napoleon as its look-out. The carvel indeed pitches and rolls in the waves, but it travels the world, fires shells at it from the hundred mouths of its galleries, plows through the seas of science, scuds through them at full sail, shouts from the peak of its topsails in the voice of its scholars and artists: “Forward, onward! Follow me!” It carries an immense crew that loves to deck it out with fresh streamers. Cabin boys and street urchins laugh in the rigging; its ballast is the ponderous bourgeoisie, laborers and common tars; in its cabins, the happy passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars, leaning on the rails. Then on the upper deck, its soldiers, driven by exploration or ambition, will land on every shore, and, while spreading their lively luster, strive for a glory that is pleasure, or love affairs that need gold.

  Hence the fierce impulses of the proletariat, hence the depraved interests that crush the lower and middle classes, hence the cruelties of the artist’s thoughts, and the excesses of pleasure constantly sought by the upper class—all these explain the normal ugliness of Parisian physiognomy. Only in the Orient does the human race offer a magnificent countenance; but it is a result of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, little legs, and boxy torsos, who scorn movement and loathe it; whereas in Paris, the Petty, the Average, and the Great all run, jump, and caper about, whipped by the pitiless goddess, Need: need for money, fame, or fun. A fresh, restful, gracious, truly young face is the most extraordinary of exceptions here: It is rarely encountered. If you see such a one, it must either belong to a young and fervent curate, or to some good abbé in his forties, with a triple chin; or to a young individual of pure habits, such as might be bred in certain middle-class families; to a twenty-year-old mother, still full of illusions, breastfeeding her firstborn; to a green youngster newly arrived from the provinces, and confided to the care of a pious dowager who keeps him penniless; or perhaps to some shop boy, who goes to bed at midnight, tired out from folding or unfolding calico, and who gets up at seven in the morning to arrange the window display; or, often, to a man of science or poetry, who lives monastically in harmony with a sublime idea, who remains sober, patient, and chaste; or to some idiot, pleased with himself, feeding on stupidity, bursting with health, always smiling at himself; or to the happy and flaccid species of idlers, the only people truly happy in Paris, who every hour sample its shifting poesies.

  Nonetheless, there is in Paris a company of privileged beings who profit from this extravagant movement of inventions, interests, business, arts, and gold. These beings are women. Although they too have a thousand secret causes that here, more than elsewhere, erode their physiognomy, one can find, in feminine society, little happy tribes who live in the oriental manner, and can preserve their beauty; but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets; they remain hidden, like rare plants that unfurl their petals only at certain times, and that constitute veritable exotic exceptions.

  Yet Paris is essentially a land of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare here, one can also find, here as well as elsewhere, noble friendships, unbounded devotion. On this battlefield of interests and passions, just as in the midst of those societies on the march where egoism triumphs, where everyone is forced to defend himself alone, and that we call “armies,” it seems that when feelings show themselves at all they have to be full-blown, and achieve nobility through contrast. So it is with faces. In Paris, sometimes, in the high aristocracy, a few ravishing faces of young men can be seen here and there, flowers of exceptional education and extraordinary manners. To the youthful beauty of English blood they join the firmness of southern traits, French wit, purity of form. The fire in their eyes, a delicious redness in their lips, the lustrous black of their fine hair, a fair complexion, the distinguished features of their face make them into beautiful human blossoms, magnificent to view above the mass of other dull, aged, crooked, grimacing physiognomies. Admire these young men with that greedy pleasure men take in looking at a pretty, decent, gracious individual, adorned with all the virginities with which our imagination likes to embellish the perfect girl.

  If this glance swiftly directed at the population of Paris has made you realize the rarity of a face like Raphael, and the passionate admiration it must inspire there at first sight, the main purpose of our story will be justified. Quod erat demonstrandum, what there was to demonstrate has been shown, if we be allowed to apply scholarly phrases to the science of manners.

  Now on one of thos
e fine spring mornings—when the leaves are not yet green though they have unfurled, when the sun is beginning to make the roofs blaze and the sky is blue, when the Parisians emerge from their dens, come buzzing along on the boulevards, flow like a many-colored serpent along the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries to hail the nuptial rites that the countryside is celebrating once again—on one of those joyous days, then, a young man, handsome as the day itself, tastefully dressed, easy in his manners, and (we’ll tell the secret) a love child, natural child of Lord Dudley and the famous Marquise de Vordac, was strolling down the wide lane of the Tuileries. This Adonis, named Henri de Marsay, was born in France, where Lord Dudley had come to marry off the young lady, already Henri’s mother, to an old gentleman named M. de Marsay. This faded, almost extinct butterfly recognized the child as his own, in exchange for the usufruct of an income of 100,000 francs permanently granted his putative son; an extravagance that didn’t cost Lord Dudley much: French bonds were then worth about seventeen francs fifty. The old gentleman died without having known his wife. Mme. de Marsay then married the Marquis de Vordac; but even before she became a marquise, she had not been all that concerned with her child or with Lord Dudley. To begin with, the war declared between France and England had separated the two lovers, and, in any case, fidelity was not and scarcely ever will be the fashion in Paris. And then the success of the elegant, pretty, universally adored woman drowned any maternal sentiment in the Parisian. Lord Dudley was no more concerned with his progeny than the mother was. The prompt infidelity of an ardently beloved young woman might perhaps have given him a sort of aversion for anything that came from her. Moreover, it might also be that fathers love only the children with whom they have become well acquainted; this is a social belief of the highest importance for a family’s peace of mind, one that every bachelor should maintain, proving that paternity is only a sentiment raised in a hothouse by woman, customs, and laws.