The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  Here all the women exchanged a glance.

  “While the memory of her betrayal pained me for some time to come, I still laugh today at the absolute certainty and quiet satisfaction with which she foresaw, if not my imminent demise, then at least a life of undying sorrow,” de Marsay went on. “Oh! don’t laugh yet,” he told his audience, “the best is yet to come. After a pause, I gave her a long, reverent look and said, ‘Yes, I have asked myself that very question.’ ‘Well, what will you do?’ ‘So I wondered, the day after my cold.’ ‘And?’ she said, visibly anxious. ‘And I made my arrangements with that little creature I was supposedly courting.’ Charlotte leapt up from the divan like a startled doe, trembled like a leaf, shot me one of those looks in which women forget all their dignity, all their discretion, their finesse, even their beauty, the gleaming stare of a cornered viper, and answered, ‘And to think that I loved this man! That I struggled! To think that I . . . ’ She followed that third thought, which I will allow you to guess for yourselves, with the most majestically ringing silence I have ever heard. ‘My God!’ she cried. ‘Poor women! We can never be loved. In the purest sentiments, you men see nothing serious. But, you realize, even when you deceive us, you remain our dupes.’ ‘I can see that all too clearly,’ I said, with a chastened air. ‘Your rage is too neatly phrased for your heart to be suffering in earnest.’ This modest epigram redoubled her fury; she found tears of spite to shed. ‘You’re tarnishing all existence in my eyes, the whole world,’ she said, ‘you’re shattering my illusions, you’re poisoning my heart.’ Everything I had a right to say to her, she was saying to me with a guileless effrontery, an innocent audacity that would certainly have left any other man wholly disarmed. ‘What will become of us, we poor women, in this society Louis XVIII’s new Charter is creating!’ (See the lengths to which her eloquence led her.) ‘Yes, we women are born to suffer. In matters of passion, we’re always above mere loyalty, and you always beneath it. You haven’t a shred of sincerity in your hearts. For you love is a game, and you always cheat.’ ‘My dear,’ I said to her, ‘to take anything seriously in contemporary society would be to swear eternal devotion to an actress.’ ‘What abominable treachery! It was all reasoned out.’ ‘No, it was simply reasonable.’ ‘Adieu, Monsieur de Marsay,’ she said. ‘You’ve wronged me atrociously.’ Adopting a submissive attitude, I asked her, ‘Will madame la duchesse remember Charlotte’s insults?’ ‘Surely,’ she said, in a bitter voice. ‘Then you despise me?’ She bowed her head, and I told myself, ‘Nothing is lost!’ I left her feeling that she had something to avenge. Now, my friends, I have carefully studied the lives of men who had some success with women, but I do not believe that even Marshal de Richelieu could have pulled off such an expert disengagement on his first attempt, nor Lauzun, nor Louis de Valois. As for my mind and my heart, they were tempered there forever, and the mastery I thereby gained over the thoughtless impulses that lead us into so many foolish acts granted me the perfect coolheadedness you know me for.”

  “How I pity the second woman!” said the Baroness de Nucingen.

  An imperceptible smile on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de Nucingen blush.

  “Zo qvickly ve forget!” cried the Baron de Nucingen.

  The illustrious banker’s ingenuous remark met with such success that his wife, who was that second woman of de Marsay’s, could not help joining in the laughter.

  “You’re all so quick to condemn this woman,” said Lady Dudley. “Well, I can perfectly understand her not seeing that marriage as an act of inconstancy! Men never want to distinguish between constancy and fidelity. I knew the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told us, and she’s one of your last grandes dames!”

  “Alas, milady, you’re right,” de Marsay answered. “For what will soon be fifty years, we’ve been seeing the steady collapse of all social distinctions. We should have rescued women from that wreckage, but the civil code has tamped them down with its great leveling stick. However terrible the words, let us say it: Duchesses are disappearing, and marquises along with them! As for baronesses, begging the pardon of Madame de Nucingen, who will find herself a countess as soon as her husband becomes a peer of France, baronesses have never managed to be taken seriously.”

  “The aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” said Blondet, smiling.

  “Countesses will remain,” de Marsay went on. “An elegant woman will be more or less a countess, a countess of the Empire or of yesteryear, a countess of time-honored tradition or, as they say in Italy, a countess by courtesy. But as for the grande dame, she died with the opulent entourages of the last century, along with powder, beauty spots, high-heeled slippers, whalebone corsets adorned with a delta of bows. Today duchesses stride through doorways that have no need to be widened to accommodate their panniers. In short, the Empire has seen the last of gowns with trains! I am still at a loss to understand how the sovereign who wanted his court swept clean by the satin or velvet of ducal robes could have failed to establish an inalienable right of succession, for certain families at least. Napoleon did not foresee the effects of his cherished code. When he created his duchesses, he gave birth to today’s creature of fashion, the indirect product of his legislation.”

  “Wielded like a hammer by both the obscure journalist and the child just out of school, ideas have shattered the glories of the social state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “Today any oaf who can decently hold his head up atop a collar, who can cover his mighty breast with two feet of satin in the guise of a cuirass, who can advertise his putative genius on a brow surmounted by a crown of curled locks, who can totter on two varnished pumps set off by six-franc silk stockings, today any such man can squint his monocle into place and, whether law clerk or entrepreneur’s offspring or banker’s bastard, insolently ogle the prettiest duchess, appraising her as she descends the staircase of a theater, and say to his friend, dressed by Buisson like the rest of us, and mounted on patent leather like any duke: ‘There, my dear fellow, is a true creature of fashion.’”

  “You failed,” said Lord Dudley, “to become a party, so you will have no political force for a long time to come. You French talk a great deal about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized property. And here is the result: Once any duke—and there were still some to be found under Louis XVIII or Charles X, with an annual revenue of two hundred thousand pounds, a magnificent hôtel particulier, a full staff of domestics—could lead a truly lordly life. The last of those great French lords was the Prince de Talleyrand. Now that same duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Even if he marries them off advantageously, each of his heirs will collect only sixty or eighty thousand pounds per annum; each is the father or mother of several children, and so must live in an apartment, on the first or second floor of a house, with the strictest economy; perhaps, who knows, they will be reduced to seeking their own fortune! And so the wife of the eldest son, who is a duchess only in name, has neither her own coach, nor her own domestics, nor her own box at the theater, nor time to herself; she has neither her private rooms in her hôtel particulier, nor her fortune, nor her baubles; she is swallowed up in her marriage like a woman of the rue Saint-Denis in her trade; she buys her dear little children stockings, she feeds them, she looks after her daughters, whom she no longer puts in the convent. Your most noble women have become nothing more than estimable brood hens.”

  “Alas! It’s true,” said Joseph Bridau. “Gone from our age are those wonderful feminine flowers that ornamented the great centuries of the French monarchy. The fan of the grande dame is broken. Woman no longer has any call to blush, to gossip, to whisper, to conceal herself, to display herself. The fan is now used only for fanning. Once a thing is nothing more than what it is, it’s too useful to serve the cause of luxury.”

  “Everything in France has abetted the creature of fashion,” said Daniel d’Arthez. “The aristocracy gave their consent by retreating to their ancestral lands, going off to die in hiding, emigrating into the dep
ths of France hounded by modern ideas, as people once emigrated abroad hounded by the masses. Those women who could found European salons, who could command public opinion, who could turn it inside out like a glove, who could dominate the world by dominating the men of art or thought who would dominate it, they have committed the misstep of abandoning the terrain, ashamed at having to vie with a power-drunk bourgeoisie now stumbling onto the world stage only to be chopped to bits, perhaps, by the barbarians at their heels. And so where the bourgeoisie would see princesses, we find only fashionable young ladies. Princes today can find no more grandes dames to compromise, nor even raise a woman chosen by chance to an illustrious rank. The Duc de Bourbon is the last prince to have availed himself of that privilege.”

  “And God alone knows at what a cost!” said Lord Dudley.

  “The wives of today’s princes are mere creatures of fashion, obliged to share the expense of a box at the theater with their girlfriends, a box that not even the favor of the king could enlarge by a quarter inch, confined to the murky waters between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, neither entirely noble nor wholly bourgeois,” said the Marquise de Rochefide in disgust.

  “Woman’s role has been inherited by the press,” cried Rastignac. “Once every woman was a living gazette, a font of delicious slanders cast in beautiful language. Today all our gazettes are written, and written in a jargon that changes every three years, little journals amusing as undertakers, light as the lead in their souls. French conversations are couched in revolutionary babble from one end of France to the other, in long columns printed in hôtels particulier where the grind of a printing press has replaced the elegant circles that once scintillated there.”

  “The death knell of high society is sounding, do you hear?” said a Russian prince. “And the first toll is that modern expression of yours, ‘the creature of fashion’!”

  “Quite right, prince,” said de Marsay. “This woman, fallen from the ranks of the nobility or hoisted up from the bourgeoisie, this woman who comes from anywhere at all, even the provinces, is the very image of our times, one final exemplum of good taste, wit, grace, and distinction, all bound up together but shrunken. We will see no more grandes dames in France, but for a long time to come there will be creatures of fashion, elected by public opinion to a feminine high chamber, and who will be for the fair sex what the gentleman is in England.”

  “And they call that progressing!” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “Where is the progress, I’d like to know.”

  “Ah! Here it is,” said Madame de Nucingen. “In times past a woman could have the voice of a fishmonger, the walk of a grenadier, the brow of a brazen courtesan, cowlicks in her hair, an oversize foot, a fleshy hand, and she was still a grande dame, but today, even if she were a Montmorency, assuming the demoiselles de Montmorency could ever be thus, she would not be a creature of fashion.”

  “But what do you mean by creature of fashion?” Count Adam Laginski asked, ingenuously.

  “She is a modern creation, a deplorable triumph of the electoral system applied to the fair sex,” said the minister. “Every revolution has its word, a word that summarizes and portrays it.”

  “It’s true,” said the Russian prince, who had come to Paris in hopes of making his name in the literary world. “An explanation of certain words that have been added to your beautiful language over the centuries would be a magnificent history in itself. Organization, for instance, is a word of the Empire and contains all of Napoleon within it.”

  “But none of this tells me what a creature of fashion might be,” cried the young Pole.

  “Well, let me explain,” Émile Blondet said to Count Adam. “You’re out strolling the streets of Paris on a fine afternoon. It’s past two o’clock but not yet five. You see a woman approaching, and your first glimpse of her is like the preface of a wonderful book, it hints at a whole world of fine and elegant things. Like a botanist combing hill and dale for exceptional specimens, you have finally chanced onto a rare flower in the midst of the Parisian vulgarities. She may be accompanied by two very distinguished men, at least one of them decorated; if not, some domestic in town clothes is following ten steps behind her. She wears neither bright colors nor openwork stockings, nor too finely wrought a belt buckle, nor pantaloons with embroidered cuffs ruffling about her ankles. You will observe on her feet either prunella flats with laces crisscrossed over a stocking of exceedingly fine cotton or solid gray silk, or perhaps lace-up boots of the most exquisite simplicity. A rather pretty fabric of moderate price will draw your eye to her gown, whose cut surprises more than one woman of the bourgeoisie: It’s nearly always a fitted coat closed by knots and prettily edged with a braid or a discreet cord. This stranger has her own particular way with a shawl or a mantle; she can envelop herself from her neck to the small of her back, devising a sort of shell that would make a turtle of any bourgeoise, but beneath which this woman shows you the shapeliest curves, even as she veils them. How does she do it? This secret she keeps to herself, unprotected though it be by any patent. Her walk creates a certain concentric and harmonious movement that sets her innocent or dangerous forms wriggling under the fabric, like the noontime garter snake beneath the green netting of the quivering grass. Is it to an angel or a demon that she owes the graceful undulation that plays beneath the long cloak of black silk, that stirs the lace at its hem, that fills the air with an ethereal balm I might call the breeze of the Parisienne? About her arms, around her waist and throat, you will see the work of a science of drapery that bends even the most resistant cloth to its will and find yourself thinking of the ancient Mnemosyne. Ah! How perfectly she understands, if you will allow me this expression, the cut of the walk! See how she thrusts out her foot, molding the dress with such chaste precision that she excites in the passing stranger a wonderment spiked with desire but restrained by a profound respect! When an Englishwoman attempts that gait, she resembles a grenadier charging on a redoubt. None but the Parisienne knows the fine art of walking—hence the asphalt on our sidewalks, the least the city could do for her. This beautiful stranger does not jostle or shove: when she wishes to pass someone by, she waits with proud modesty for room to be made. The distinction peculiar to women of breeding is most clearly displayed by her way of holding the shawl or mantle crossed over her breast. Even as she walks, her air is tranquil and dignified, like the Madonnas of Raphael in their frames. Her manner, at once serene and aloof, compels even the most insolent dandy to step aside for her. Her hat is remarkably simple and adorned with crisp ribbons. There may be flowers, but the most expert of these women will have only bows. Feathers require a carriage, flowers too insistently attract the eye. Beneath that hat you will see the fresh, rested face of a woman who is confident but not smug, who looks at nothing and sees everything, whose vanity, jaded by ceaseless gratification, imbues her face with an indifference that arouses the interest of all who behold her. She knows she is being studied, she knows that nearly everyone, even the ladies, will turn around for a second look when she passes. Thus does she drift through Paris like gossamer, white and pure. This magnificent species prefers to keep to the warmest latitudes, the cleanest longitudes of Paris; you will find her between the 10th and 110th arcades on rue de Rivoli; along the equator of the Grands Boulevards, from the parallel of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of the Indies abound, where industry’s freshest creations flourish, to the cape of the Madeleine; in those lands least sullied by the bourgeoisie, between the 30th and 150th house on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In the winter, she sojourns on the Terrasse des Feuillants, in the Jardin des Tuileries, and not on the asphalt sidewalk that adjoins it. When the weather is fine, she glides along the allée des Champs-Élysées, within the bounds of place Louis XV on the east, avenue de Marigny on the west, the roadway on the south, and the gardens of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré on the north. Never will you encounter such a fine feminine specimen in the hyperborean regions of rue Saint-Denis, nor in the Kamchatkas of muddy, small, or comm
ercial streets; never anywhere at all in bad weather. These flowers of Paris bloom when the weather is Oriental; they perfume the promenades, and then, after five o’clock, close up like morning glories. Those you will see later in the evening, vaguely similar in their air, doing their best to mimic them, are mere creatures of passion; only the beautiful stranger, your Beatrice for a day, is the true creature of fashion. A foreigner, my dear count, may well find it difficult to spot the details by which seasoned observers distinguish the one from the other, for women are gifted actresses indeed. To a Parisian, however, those differences fairly cry out aloud: ill-concealed clasps, dingy laces showing through a gaping slit, frayed shoes, re-dyed hat ribbons, a billowing gown, an over-starched bustle. You will observe a sort of effort in the calculated droop of her eyelid. There is something conventional in her manner. A bourgeoise, on the other hand, could never be confused with a creature of fashion: She sets her off wonderfully, she explains the spell that your stranger has cast on you. The bourgeoise has things to do, goes out in all weather, scurries, comes, goes, looks, wonders whether to enter a shop or go on. Where the creature of fashion knows precisely what she wants and what she is doing, the bourgeoise dithers, hitches up her skirts to step over a gutter, drags a child beside her, keeping a vigilant eye out for oncoming coaches; she is a mother in public and chats with her daughter; she has money in her shopping bag and openwork stockings on her legs; in the winter she wears a boa over a fur cape, in the summer a shawl and a scarf; the bourgeoise has a remarkable talent for vestimentary redundancy. As for your beautiful stranger, you will see her again at the Théâtre des Italiens, at the Opéra, at a ball, where she will show herself in such a different form that you will swear the two incarnations have nothing in common. She has emerged from her mysterious garments, as the butterfly from its silken cocoon. Like some delicacy, she serves up before your enchanted eyes the forms that her bodice only hinted at that morning. At the theater she is never encountered beyond the mezzanine, save at the Italiens. Here you will have the leisure to study the trained indolence of her movements. That adorable tricksteress exploits all of womankind’s little ploys with an innocence that forbids any suspicion of guile or premeditation. If she has a regally beautiful hand, even the shrewdest observer will believe it was vitally important that she twirl, plump, or push back the ringlet or curl she is caressing. If she has something splendid in her profile, you will feel sure she is offering her neighbor remarks full of irony or grace as she turns her head to produce that magical three-quarters-profile effect, so dear to the great painters, which lets the light fall over the cheek, clearly delineates the nose, illuminates the pink of the nostrils, cuts cleanly across the forehead, preserves the gaze’s bright spark while directing it into space, and dots the white roundness of the chin with a point of light. If she has a pretty foot, she will throw herself down on a divan with all the coquetry of a cat in the sun, her legs outstretched before her, and in her pose you will see nothing other than the most delicious model of weariness ever offered up to the art of statuary. No one is at ease in fine clothes like the creature of fashion; nothing troubles her poise. Never will you catch her, as you will a bourgeoise, tugging up a recalcitrant shoulder strap, tugging down an insubordinate whalebone, verifying that the fichu is discharging its mission as the faithless guardian of two dazzling white treasures, nor glancing at herself in mirrors to be sure that her coiffure is obeying its confinement to quarters. Her appearance is ever in harmony with her character; she’s had the time to examine herself, to choose only what best becomes her, having long since determined what does not become her at all. You will not see her later in the throngs pouring out of the theater; she vanishes before the curtain comes down. If by chance she appears, calm and noble, on the red steps of the staircase, she is then in the throes of the deepest emotion. She is there on command, she has a furtive glance to give, a promise to receive. It may well be to flatter the vanity of a slave whom she sometimes obeys that she is slowly making her way down those stairs. Should you encounter her at a ball or a party, you will drink in the honey, artificial or natural, of her lilting voice; you will be delighted by her empty words—empty but endowed with the force of deep thought by an inimitable artifice.”