The Last Fay

by Honoré de Balzac

  Catherine tries to put on one of her gloves, but cannot do it. Three times her hand has passed through the opening of the white glove; she looks, lamentably, at Juliette, who sheds a tear, for poor Catherine has as eyes as dry as Brutus when he saw his dead sons.16

  Père Grandvani contemplates his daughter; he examines her, and an involuntary fear takes possession of his senses. He dares not speak; he can only gaze at his dear daughter. Bontems is silent, perhaps thinking that the testimonies of his amour will make that excess of modesty—the last regret of a girl saying a virginal adieu to the nature of her childhood—disappear. He consoles Père Grandvani thus, and because hope is the most persuasive god, the poor Maire is deceived.

  Before leaving the room to go to the church, Catherine went to her father, put her arms around him, and deposited a filial kiss on his forehead imprinted with all the love she had for him. The poor father blessed her with a smile.

  They go in silence to the church. Everything is a dream for Catherine; she kneels down mechanically and gives her hand to the priest, as if by instinct.

  The curé found it cold; he looked at Catherine, and trembled involuntarily.

  The wedding party returned to Père Grandvani’s house, accompanied by two violins and a joyful troop. Every peasant had a knot of ribbons on his buttonhole, for the entire village adored Catherine.

  An old woman sitting under an enormous elm saw the cortege pas by; she darted a horrified glance at the bride, and whispered to another old woman who was sitting beside her: “That bride will die a virgin!”

  Grandvani’s room received the guests. Juliette and Catherine went up the antique staircase together and went into Catherine’s virginal bedroom. The room maintained an extreme propriety; on going into it, one divined, but the care that reigned there, that the charming being who inhabited that simple place decorated with white cambric and modest furniture, was a being composed of love and tenderness: there was not a single speck of dust; a spirit of order and goodness murmured that the young virgin remained pure, and that her thoughts, as naïve as her, had only ever had one object.

  “Juliette” she said, “I love God, but I love him almost as much. It’s necessary not to deceive anyone down here; I can’t live with Jacques, and life is nothing without the gifts of a shared love. I prefer a dagger-thrust to a thousand pinpricks during my life. I only have him in my heart, as you know. It’s not because his face is beautiful for if he had been ugly I would have been even more content to look at him. He’s happy now. Well, I’ll be on high to make sure that nothing is lacking to his happiness.”

  Juliette wept.

  “You’re weeping, my dear sister?” Stop—don’t mourn me. He told me that there are divine spirits that become dew, which are the coloring of flowers, the morning breeze, the evening star, which glide through the air distributing sounds. I shall be one of those, and I shall always remain close to him. Adieu, Juliette,”

  “Oh, let me hope,” said Antoine’s wife.

  “Yes,” said Catherine, “hope! For I hope myself; perhaps all is not yet concluded....”

  They separated, weeping, and Catherine deposited a tender kiss of hope or adieu on her friend’s lips.

  Juliette went downstairs; she found the guests around the table; she took her place, everyone was joyful; the feasting began; the dancing was to follow, but Jacques Bontems and Grandvani noticed that Catherine was missing.

  The guests looked at one another in silence, and Juliette said to herself: No more joy!

  However, for some time yet, they continued eating and laughing—but the intrepid cuirassier felt his heart faltering, and the father, as he poured the wine, trembled so much that it spilled over the table.

  In the end, he asked for his daughter; someone went to fetch her—but she could not be found.

  Horror and silence reigned in the formerly joyful house, and nothing could any longer be heard but the pendulum of the clock measuring the instants of anguish and terror.

  Juliette, who had promised secrecy, tried to appear as anxious as the rest.

  The house emptied. Grandvani, Bontems and Juliette were left alone, surrounded by the cortege of dolor, silence and dread.

  Grandvani was still looking at the door, and when Françoise opened it, he shivered, but he only felt a dolor even more profound, because it was not his daughter. The village was in stupor.

  Meanwhile, in the middle of the night, when the most voluptuous dances accompanied by an enchanting music had given scope to Abel’s wife and her rivals to deploy everything their bodies had of the most supple and enchanting; when the brilliant fête was fatigued by the very abundance of wealth and splendor, it was announced that a sumptuous meal awaited the thousand guests.

  The excessive heat had caused a few windows in the house to be opened. At the moment when someone came to announce to Madame le Duchesse that dinner was served, Abel was breathing in the fresh nocturnal air.

  “Are you coming, then, dear friend?” said his bride, who, seeing that he was not quitting the balcony, put her hand lightly on his shoulder and tugged him gently.

  “Can you not see something out there?” Abel replied.

  She advanced her head, and they both perceived a white mass that the obscurity, slightly tempered by the lanterns, only permitted to be seen in an indistinct manner. By dint of looking, they saw the mass move, taking shape in the darkness and allowing forms to appear; it was a woman.

  She was wandering, raising herself up on tiptoe, being to be allowed to enter. Suddenly, she looked up at the casement, and immersed herself in the contemplation of the two charming individuals whose contours the light of the salon seemed to caress in rendering them graspable to sight.

  Abel assembled his memories; he thought…was not sure…that it was Catherine...but there was certainly something that resembled her; he thought he recognized the costume of Juliette’s wedding. He hesitated...

  His charming bride, on the pretext that everyone was waiting, drew him away.

  Then, when he quit the window, dolorous accents, the debris of a charming voice, reached his ear: there were wishes for his happiness…a joy at having seen him…albeit from afar and in a fugitive manner…and then regrets...amour, and finally an adieu spoken with the voice of death.

  The woman waved her arms toward him for a long time, and uttered a cry when he disappeared.

  The momentum of the fête, the joy of the nuptial meal, the enchantments of the miraculous gallery, the presence of a crowd prey to joy, made that instant of trouble a dreamlike moment, almost forgotten, for Abel.

  The last outbursts of joy were resounding in the salons when Abel and the Pearl Fay had withdrawn. Abel was swimming in a torrent of delights, without worrying about whether, elsewhere, people were living or dying, happy or unhappy, whether pain and chagrin might be devouring sensitive beings; an immense sum had just been spent; it had just vanished in enjoyments of pride—light smoke!—in wines, foodstuffs, witty remarks, subjects of indigestions and indiscretions...

  But if one thought about that, one would not take any pleasure in the world, one would always be weeping!

  Long live joy! Down with chagrin!

  Jacques Bontems spent his wedding night running around the village; he had death in his soul and offered to give his sight for news of Catherine. No one had seen her.

  Grandvani would have given all his wealth for a curl of his dear Catherine’s hair; she was his only child, his joy and his happiness. He saw his house empty; the pretty Catherine, so genteel, so lovable, so good was no longer there!

  Dolor filled that entire night.

  Two days after his marriage, Abel, drunk with joy and happiness, at the peak of human enjoyment, was borne away by an elegant carriage on the road to Versailles, which the duchesse wanted to take him to see, for that charming fay surrounded Abel with all seductions. She unveiled all the riches of the capital to him, spreading the grace of her intelligence in all her discourse, seeking to cover with flowers the roads th
at Abel traveled. Their hands were united, pressing one another amorously, and a caleche harnessed to six horses rolled with frightening rapidity along the banks of the Seine.

  A group of three individuals, a soldier, a peasant woman and an old man, were being studied by a saddened crowd, because the dolor of those individuals was so true and so profound that it had spread from person to person; their movements were imprinted by the slowness that one put into the accomplishment of a painful duty; it seemed that their fatigued arms fell back continually.

  A young woman had just been taken out of the water. Her garments were so tight around her body that there was nothing to be done other than take her as the fatal net had stopped her in the bosom of the waters. Only her hair was floating…and she was holding between her teeth, with the force that death gives, a black necklace with which she had doubtless wanted to perish and be buried.

  The caleche went past very rapidly, but the fleeting glance that the tender Abel darted at the group made him shiver, for that hair, that figure, and above all that familiar necklace, told him: “It’s your sister in amour; it’s Catherine!”

  But the caleche carried him away so quickly that he was already far away, very far, when having recovered from his double surprise, he cried: “Stop! I want to see her again!”

  The caleche was still going on, for the tender fay, fearing chagrins for him, divining that he was about to seek a dolor, was too careful of drawing the thorns of life from him to suffer that his heart might break, and a movement of her delicate hand ordered the coachman to go even faster.

  Poor Catherine!

  When, after a year of marriage, Comte Osterwald went back to see his cottage and Caliban, he perceived before the door a grave covered with grass, in the middle of which, without inscription and without ostentation, a young lily was growing proudly.

  Abel, looking at the comtesse, exclaimed: “Poor Catherine!”

  Caliban appeared, carrying a watering can; he was walking painfully, with the air of a shade; it was him who watered the lily, and he often said: “She loved him, she...!” He did not add anything more, for the old servant had lost his reason, and only recognized his young master.

  That reawakening of the soul, in that body near the tomb, had something moving about it; he cried: “I’ve seen him again; I can die!”

  As he finished that speech, he dropped the watering can, he leaned over the grave, and his soul regained the heavens. As he exhaled his last sigh, his cold and icy hand made a few movements, as if to shake that of the young comte.

  Thus far, the greatest joy crowns Abel’s existence every day, and that cloudless happiness will doubtless endure.

  Afterword

  by the Translator

  As noted in the introduction, La Dernière fée was attempting to achieve something new in prose fiction, which perhaps turned out to be impractical—at least in the sense that the story is preposterously implausible—but was nevertheless a heroic endeavor, which a close reading of the text suggests that the author seems to have pushed through to its logical conclusion even after he became convinced that it was not working. In fact, the disfavor that the story often found, both initially and thereafter, probably has little to do with its implausibility—for which subsequent literary history has demonstrated abundantly that readers have a high tolerance—and much more to do with the author’s insistence of driving it relentlessly to a conclusion that, although logically necessary, is also deliberately discomfiting.

  It is, of course, traditional that “fairy stories” end happily; in English the standard formula is usually rendered as “And they lived happily ever after.” That is not always true of the folkloristic tales on which “fairy” stories are notionally based, but the fact that it often is reflects a common assumption that stories ought to end happily because that is the way that hearers and readers prefer them to end, and many hearers and readers feel betrayed and cheated if they do not.

  Writers attempting to sophisticate folkloristic materials in stories dosed with an element of realism or cynicism, however, often want to oppose or undermine that assumption. It is not obvious why readers and writers are so often at odds over this matter—which is to say, why writers, who are also readers themselves, so often want to defy and thwart reader expectations in one way or another. Clearly the psychology of reading and the psychology of writing have a significant difference that warrants investigation. It is, however, manifestly the case that many writers, at least some of the time, do want, determinedly and passionately, to oppose the yoke that readers (and hence editors) want to place upon them by demanding happy endings, in the interests of arguing—or screaming—that the real world is not like that.

  There are, of course, entire genres of fiction whose stories do not end happily, including the genre of tragedy—but it is worth noting that the sense of tragedy is parasitic upon the sentiment that stories ought to end happily; if it were not for that conviction, catastrophic endings would not be “tragic,” but merely routine accidents of happenstance. Another such genre, generally known as contes cruels, was pioneered by one of Balzac’s closest friends when they were both struggling writers in the early 1820s, S. Henry Berthoud, in the collection Contes misanthropiques (1831; tr. as Misanthropic Tales). Balzac wrote tales of that kind himself, and the two of them undoubtedly discussed narrative strategies appropriate to the undermining of the essential fictitiousness of conventional fiction.

  That awareness helps to understand what Balzac was trying to do in La Dernière fée, and the way in which he did it. It is a work that sets out to fuse the conventional happy ending demanded by tales of enchantment with tragedy, by making the tragedy a necessary consequence of the happy ending, and hence a perverse aspect of it; in terms of narrative strategy, it is a matter of finding a way to sugar-coat the cake and poison it too. The story ends, as it designed to do, with a paraphrase of “And they lived happily ever after”—although it scrupulously uses the future tense rather than the past, because the “once upon a time” in which the story is set is located in historical time, not the mythological time of tales of the marvelous, and hence leads inexorably to the present.

  The whole point of the story, therefore, is to make that ostentatiously happy ending one face of a coin whose other side is stark, harrowing tragedy. It thus contrives a challenge to and a subversion of conventional reader expectation that is markedly different from tragedies and contes cruels, which is arguably even more brutal than tragedy and even more vitriolically ironic than a conte cruel. Perhaps the combination does not really work, and the narrative effort required to set it up certainly renders the story’s plot implausible, but it nevertheless aims for an interesting species of discomfiture, which has few parallels even now, let alone in 1823. That alone surely makes the story with reading, and worth pondering. It is, admittedly, slightly rough-hewn work, but it is rough-hewn work by a genius, and that shows; many a polished craftsman could not have done half as well.

  Notes

  1 Available from Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-455-3/

  2 “Peau d’âne” (1697; tr. as “Donkeyskin”) is one of the initial set of Perrault’s tales, the richest in strange sexual symbolism; the donkey whose skin is adopted after its death as a disguise by the heroine has the useful ability to shit gold.

  3 “Serpentin vert” (tr. as “The Green Serpent”); “Gracieuse et Percinet” (tr. as “Graciosa and Percinet”), “L’Oiseau bleu” (tr. as “The Blue Bird”), which features the fée Truitonne, and “Le Prince Lutin” (tr. as “The Imp Prince”), which features the fée Abricotine, are all stories by Madame d’Aulnoy, from Contes de fées (1696-99), all of which were included in both the 1717 version of the Cabinet des fées and Mayer’s expanded set.

  4 Although it is not the only representation of the subject, the reference is certainly to The Return of Marcus Sextus by Pierre-Narcisse, Baron Guérin, first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1799, where it was met with great acclaim, inspiring numerous literary tributes.<
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  5 I have translated Caliban’s poularde [fattened pullet] literally, but it is more than likely that he intends its metaphorical meaning, which is to a loose woman or prostitute.

  6 Author’s note: “Copied from an original.”

  7 Faruck-naz is a character featured in the comic opera La Petite lampe merveilleuse [The Marvelous Little Lamp] (1822). Although he had also appeared, as Farucknaze, in at least one earlier stage work based on the story of Aladdin, he is not in Galland’s original story, and appears to have been borrowed from an imitation work, Le Mille et un jours [The Thousand-and-One Days] (1710-12) by Francois Pétis de la Croix, where he appears as Farrukh-naz.

  8 The theme in question was depicted by various painters, but the particular image that Balzac has in mind is one in the Louvre that he is known to have admired greatly, painted in Rome in 1791 by Anne-Louis Girodet and exhibited at the Salons of 1793 and 1814. Girodet is cited again, by name, later in the story.

  9 The term loxia d’or [golden crossbill] does not seem to appear anywhere else than in this work, so Balzac might have improvised it as an alternative designation of the nightingale.

  10 La Fée Urgèle (1765) is a comic opera with music by Egidio Duni and a libretto by Charles-Simon Favart, based on Voltaire’s Ce qui plait aux dames, which was itself based of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” The alternative spelling employed here was used in English translations. Urgèle was featured in later mock-folkloristic stories by other French writers, including Catulle Mendès. Gentille is featured in Madame d’Aulnoy’s “Le Prince Lutin.” The phrase “fée des eaux” [Fay of the Waters] was commonly used as a generic term for water-sprites,