The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  “If she wants to do something foolish for me,” Armand said to himself, “I would certainly be a simpleton to prevent her. She surely loves me, and of course she does not despise the world more than I do myself. So let us go to the ball!”

  The duchess surely thought that in seeing the general follow her to the ball in boots and a black cravat, no one would hesitate to believe he was passionately in love with her. Happy to see the queen of this elegant world wishing to compromise herself for him, the general’s hope gave him wit. Sure to please, he displayed his ideas and feelings without the restraint that had deeply embarrassed him the evening before. This substantive, animated conversation was filled with those first confidences as sweet to speak as to hear. Was Madame de Langeais really seduced by his talk or had she devised this charming bit of coquetry? In any case, she looked mischievously at the clock when it struck midnight.

  “Ah, you are making me miss the ball!” she said, expressing surprise and vexation that she had forgotten. Then she justified this exchange of pleasures by a smile that made Armand’s heart leap. “I really had promised Madame de Beauséant,” she added. “Everyone is expecting me.”

  “Well then, go.”

  “No—go on. I will stay. Your adventures in the Orient charm me. Tell me all about your life. I love to take part in the sufferings experienced by a man of courage, for I feel them, truly!” She played with her scarf, twisting it and tearing it by her impatient movements that seemed to speak of an inner discontent and deep feelings.

  “We are worthless, we society women,” she went on. “Ah, we are contemptible creatures, selfish and frivolous. We know only how to bore ourselves with amusements. Not one of us understands what part to play in life. In the old days in France, women were benevolent lights, they lived to comfort those who wept, to encourage great virtue, to reward artists and animate their lives with noble thoughts. If the world has become so petty, the fault is ours. You make me hate this world and the ball. No, I am not sacrificing much for you.”

  She finished destroying her scarf, like a child playing with a flower who ends by tearing off all its petals. She rolled it up and threw it away from her, so she could display her swan’s neck.

  She rang the bell. “I will not be going out,” she said to her valet de chambre. Then she timidly turned her big blue eyes toward Armand, and by the fear they expressed he was meant to take this order for an admission, for a first and great favor. “You have surely had a difficult life,” she said, after a pause full of thought and with the tenderness that women often have in their voice, if not in their heart.

  “No,” replied Armand. “Until today, I did not understand happiness.”

  “You know it now?” she said, looking up at him with a sly, hypocritical glance.

  “For me, from now on happiness is to see you, to hear you . . . Until today I have only suffered, and now I understand that I can be unhappy—”

  “Enough, enough,” she said. “You must go, it is midnight, we must respect the conventions. I did not go to the ball and you were here. Let us not make people talk. Farewell. I do not know what I will say, but the migraine is a good friend and tells no lies.”

  “Is there to be a ball tomorrow?” he asked.

  “You will grow used to it, I think. Very well, yes, we will go to the ball again tomorrow night.”

  Armand went home the happiest man in the world and came every evening to Madame de Langeais’s at the hour reserved for him by a sort of tacit agreement. It would be tiresome and redundant for a multitude of young men who have such fine memories to follow this story step by step, like following the poem of these secret conversations that were advanced or retarded at a woman’s whim—quarreling over words when feelings were too rampant or appealing to feelings when words no longer corresponded to her thought. So to mark this work in progress in the manner of Ulysses’s Penelope, perhaps we would have to mark its material expressions of feeling.

  For instance, a few days after the first meeting between the duchess and Armand de Montriveau, the assiduous general had won and kept the right to kiss his mistress’s insatiable hands. Wherever Madame de Langeais went, Monsieur de Montriveau was inevitably seen to follow, so that certain persons jokingly called him “the duchess’s orderly.” Armand’s position had already made him the object of envy, jealousy, and enmity. Madame de Langeais had attained her goal. The marquis was just one of her numerous admirers and helped her to humiliate those who bragged of being in her good graces by setting him publicly a step above the others.

  “Decidedly,” said Madame de Sérizy, “Monsieur de Montriveau is the man the duchess prefers.”

  Who does not know what it means, in Paris, to be preferred by a woman? Things were thus perfectly in order. The stories people were pleased to tell about the general made him so formidable that the clever young men quietly abdicated their claims on the duchess and remained in her circle only to exploit the importance it reflected on them, to make use of her name, of her person, to put themselves on a better footing with certain powerful persons of the second order, who would be delighted to take a lover away from Madame de Langeais. The duchess had a shrewd enough eye to spot these desertions and alliances, and she was too proud to be duped by them. And as Monsieur le Prince de Talleyrand, who was very fond of her, used to say, she knew how to take renewed revenge by striking these “morganatic” unions with a double-edged remark. Her disdainful mockery contributed more than a little to making her feared and thought to be excessively clever. In this way, she consolidated her reputation for virtue while amusing herself with the secrets of others and never letting them penetrate her own. Nonetheless, after two months of regular attendance, she had a sort of vague fear deep in her soul that Monsieur de Montriveau still understood nothing of the Faubourg Saint-Germain sort of coquetry and took Parisian mannerisms seriously.

  “That man, my dear duchess,” the old Vidame de Pamiers said to her, “is first cousin to the eagles. You will not tame him and he will carry you off to his aerie if you do not take care.”

  The day after the evening when the shrewd old nobleman had made this remark, which the duchess feared would be prophetic, she tried to make herself hateful, to appear hard, demanding, nervous, detestable to Armand, who disarmed her with his angelic sweetness. This woman was so unfamiliar with the generosity of great characters that she was penetrated with the gracious pleasantries by which her complaints were first met. She was looking for a quarrel and found proof of affection. Then she persisted.

  “How could a man who idolizes you cause you displeasure?” Armand said to her.

  “You do not displease me,” she answered, suddenly becoming sweet and submissive. “But why do you want me to compromise myself? You must be only my friend. Don’t you think so? I wish I could see that you have the instinct and delicacies of true friendship, in order to lose neither your esteem nor the pleasures I feel when I’m with you.”

  “To be only your friend?” cried Monsieur de Montriveau, whose mind shook with electric shocks at the sound of this terrible word. “On the faith of the sweet hours you grant me, I slumber and wake in your heart, and today, without any reason, you take pleasure in gratuitously killing the secret hopes that give me life. After making me promise such constancy and showing such horror for women who are all caprice, do you wish to tell me that like all Parisian women you have passions and no love? Then why have you asked me for my life and why have you accepted it?”

  “I was wrong, my friend. Yes, a woman is wrong to let someone go to such lengths of abandon when she neither can nor should reward them.”

  “I understand, you have been merely a coquette, toying with me, and—”

  “Coquette? I hate coquetry. To be a coquette, Armand, means to promise oneself to several men and to give oneself to none. To give oneself to everyone is to be a libertine. That is my understanding of our ways. But to be melancholy with humorists, gay with the frivolous, and politic with the ambitious; to listen to gossips with apparent
admiration, to discuss war with soldiers, to be passionate about the good of the country with philanthropists, to grant each person his little dose of flattery—this seems to me as necessary as putting flowers in our hair, wearing diamonds, gloves, and clothes. Talk is the moral aspect of the toilette, it is put on and taken off with the plumed toque.

  “Do you call this coquetry? But I have never treated you as I treat everyone else. With you, my friend, I am honest. I have not always shared your ideas, and when you have convinced me, after a discussion, have I not been happy about it? In short, I love you, but only as a religious and pure woman is allowed to love. I have thought about this. I am married, Armand. If the way that I live with Monsieur de Langeais leaves me free to give my heart, laws and conventions have deprived me of the right to give my person. A dishonored woman of any rank in life is an outcast, and I have yet to meet any man who has known what our sacrifice involves. Even more so, the break between Madame de Beauséant and Monsieur d’Ajuda, who, they say, is marrying Mademoiselle de Rochefide, has proven to me that these very sacrifices are almost always at the root of our abandonment.

  “If you loved me sincerely you would stop seeing me for a time! As for me, I will lay aside all my vanity for you—is this not something? What do they say about a woman to whom no man is attached? Ah, she has no heart, no mind, no soul, above all no charm. Oh, the coquettes will not spare me; they will rob me of the very qualities that mortify them. If my reputation is still intact, what do I care if my rivals dispute my advantages? They will surely not inherit them. Come, my friend, give something to her who sacrifices so much for you! Do not come so often, I will not love you the less for it.”

  “Ah!” answered Armand, with the sharp irony of a wounded heart. “Love, so the scribblers say, feeds only on illusions! Nothing could be truer, I can see, so I must imagine that I am loved. But hold on—there are some thoughts, like some wounds, from which you do not recover. You were one of my last beliefs, and I now see that everything here is false.”

  She began to smile.

  “Yes,” Montriveau went on in a stricken voice, “your Catholic faith to which you would convert me is a lie that men concoct for themselves, hope is a lie at the cost of the future, pride is a lie between us all, pity, wisdom, terror are cunning lies. So my happiness will also be a lie. I must delude myself and be willing to give a gold louis for a silver ecu. If you can so easily dispense with my visits, if you admit me as neither your friend nor your lover, you do not love me! And I, poor fool, I tell myself this, I know it and yet I love.”

  “But heavens, my poor Armand, you are getting carried away.”

  “I am getting carried away?”

  “Yes, you think that everything is in question because I ask you to be careful.”

  In her heart she was charmed by the anger that filled her lover’s eyes. At this moment she was tormenting him, but she was judging him as well and noticed the slightest changes that passed over his features. If the general had been so unfortunate as to display his generosity unquestioningly, as sometimes happens to certain candid souls, he might have been banished forever, accused and convicted of not knowing how to love. Most women want to feel their morality violated. Is this not one of the ways they flatter themselves by surrendering only to force? But Armand was not sufficiently informed to see the trap the duchess had so cunningly set. Strong men who love have such childlike souls!

  “If you wish only to preserve appearances,” he said naïvely, “I am prepared to—”

  “Only preserve appearances,” she cried, interrupting him. “What ideas must you have of me! Have I given you the slightest right to think that I should be yours?”

  “Oh, well then, what are we talking about?”

  “Monsieur, you frighten me. No, pardon me—thank you,” she went on in a cold tone of voice. “Thank you, Armand. You warn me in time of an imprudence that was certainly not deliberate, believe me, my friend. You know how to suffer, you say? I, too, I will know how to suffer. We will stop seeing each other. Then, when we have both learned to recover a measure of calm, well then, we will consult and devise a happiness approved by the world. I am young, Armand, and a man lacking in delicacy might make a woman of twenty-four commit many foolish and careless things. But you! You will be my friend, promise me.”

  “The woman of twenty-four,” he answered, “knows how to manage.”

  He sat down on the divan in the boudoir and rested his head in his hands.

  “Do you love me, madame?” he asked, raising his head and showing her a face full of resolution. “Speak clearly: yes or no.”

  The duchess was more horrified by this interrogation than she would have been by a threat of death, a vulgar trick that has frightened few women in the nineteenth century, seeing that men no longer carry swords at their side. But are there not the effects of eyebrows, eyelashes, narrowing looks, trembling lips that communicate the terror they so vividly and magnetically express?

  “Ah!” she said. “If I were free, if—”

  “Well! Then is it your husband who prevents us?” the general cried joyfully, pacing boldly around the boudoir. “My dear Antoinette, I possess a power more absolute than the autocrat of all the Russias. I am in collusion with Fate; socially speaking, I can make it move forward or back, as you do with a clock. In our political machine, you can direct Fate simply by knowing its inner workings. Before long you shall be free, and then you must remember your promise.”

  “Armand,” she cried, “what do you mean? Good God, do you think that I could be the prize of a crime? Do you wish my death? Have you no religious beliefs? As for me, I fear God. If Monsieur de Langeais has given me the right to despise him, I do not wish him any harm.”

  Monsieur de Montriveau beat a tattoo mechanically with his fingers on the marble of the mantelpiece, content to look calmly at the duchess.

  “My friend,” she said, continuing, “respect him. He does not love me, he is not good to me, but I have obligations to him that must be fulfilled. What wouldn’t I do to avoid the disasters with which you threaten him? . . . Listen,” she continued after a pause, “I will no longer speak to you about separation, you will come here as in the past, I will always give you my forehead to kiss; if sometimes I refused you in the past, it was pure coquetry, truly. But let us understand each other,” she said, seeing him come near. “You will allow me to increase the number of my suitors, receiving more of them in the morning than I used to do. I wish to be twice as frivolous, I want to treat you with apparent negligence, to feign a rupture. You will come a little less often, and then, after . . .”

  With these words, she allowed herself to be held around the waist; Montriveau held her tightly and she seemed to feel the extreme pleasure most women feel at this pressure, which appears to promise all the pleasures of love. Then she meant to produce some confidence, for she stood up on her toes to bring her forehead to Armand’s burning lips.

  “From now on,” replied Montriveau, “you will no longer speak to me of your husband: You should banish him from your thoughts.”

  Madame de Langeais remained silent.

  “At least,” she said, after a meaningful pause, “you will do everything I wish without grumbling, without sulking—say yes, my friend. Did you want to frighten me? Come, then, admit it . . . you are too good ever to imagine criminal thoughts. But might you not have secrets that I do not know? How can you master fate?”

  “When you confirm the gift of the heart you have already given me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I trust you, Antoinette, I will have no suspicions or false jealousies. But if chance should make you free, we are united—”

  “Chance, Armand,” she said, making one of those pretty turns of the head that seem so weighty yet are tossed off so lightly, like a singer playing with her voice. “Pure chance,” she went on. “You must surely know that if something were to happen to Monsieur de Langeais through your fault, I would never be yours.”

  They parted, conten
t with each other. The duchess had made a pact that allowed her to show the world by her words and actions that Monsieur de Montriveau was certainly not her lover. As for him, the cunning woman vowed to wear him out. She would grant him no favors but those surprising moments in these little battles that she would stop at her will. She knew so prettily how to revoke the following day the concessions she had granted the day before. She was so seriously determined to remain physically virtuous, that she saw no danger to herself in preliminaries perilous only to women deeply in love. After all, a duchess separated from her husband, a marriage long since hollow, offered no great sacrifice to love.

  For his part, Montriveau was quite happy to obtain the vaguest of promises, sweeping aside objections that a wife might plead conjugal fidelity to refuse love, pleased with himself for having once more conquered further ground. And for some time he took unfair advantage of rights won with such difficulty. More childish than he had ever been, this man gave himself up to all the childishness that makes a first love the flower of life. He became a boy again, and he poured out his soul and all the thwarted powers that passion had given him on the hands of this woman, on her blond hair whose curls he kissed, on that shining forehead that seemed so pure to him. The duchess was flooded with love, subdued by the magnetic scents of such warmth, and she hesitated to start the quarrel that might separate them forever. She was more woman than she thought, this poor creature, trying to reconcile the demands of religion with the lively emotions of vanity, with the semblance of pleasure that makes a Parisian woman lose her footing.

  Every Sunday she attended Mass, never missing a service; then in the evening, she would plunge into the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Madame de Langeais were like those Indian fakirs who are rewarded for their chastity by the temptations it offers them. Perhaps, too, the duchess had ended by resolving love into those fraternal caresses, which surely must have seemed innocent to the world but to which her bold thoughts lent extreme depravity. How else to explain the incomprehensible mystery of her perpetual fluctuations? Every morning she thought to shut her door to the Marquis de Montriveau, then every evening at the appointed hour she succumbed to his charms. After a feeble defense, she became less unkind; her conversation grew sweet, soothing. Lovers alone could carry on this way. The duchess displayed her most sparkling wit, her most captivating wiles. Then, when she had inflamed her lover’s soul and senses, if he seized her, she indeed wished to let herself be broken and twisted by him, but she had her nec plus ultra of passion, and when it reached this point, she always grew angry if, submitting to his enthusiasm, he looked as though he might cross the line.