The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Monsieur, is it indiscreet to ask what you mean to do with me?” she said, with impertinence and stinging mockery.

  The duchess imagined an excessive love in Montriveau’s words. Furthermore, surely a woman must be the object of a man’s adoration for him to abduct her!

  “Nothing at all, madame,” he replied, gracefully puffing the last of his cigar. “You are here for a short while. First of all, I want to explain to you what you are, and what I am. I cannot put my thoughts into words when you are twisting on your divan in your boudoir. And when you are at home, you ring for your servant at the slightest thought that displeases you, you shout out loud and show your lover the door, as if he were the lowest of the low. Here my mind is free. Here no one can throw me out the door. Here you will be my victim for a few moments, and you will have the extreme goodwill to hear me out. Do not be afraid. I have not abducted you in order to insult you, to wrench from you by violence what I have not been able to merit, what you have not wished to grant me of your own free will. That would be beneath me. Perhaps you imagine rape; I, on the other hand, have no such idea.”

  Abruptly, he tossed his cigar into the fire.

  “Madame, the smoke is no doubt unpleasant to you?”

  Rising at once, he took a hot chafing dish from the hearth, burned perfumes and purified the air. The duchess’s astonishment was equal only to her humiliation. She was in this man’s power, and he did not wish to abuse his power. She saw those eyes, formerly blazing with love, now calm and steady as stars. She trembled. Then her dread of Armand was increased by one of those transfixing sensations like the agitations you feel in a nightmare, unable to move. Fear nailed her in place as she thought she saw the glow from behind the curtain intensify as from the work of a bellows. Suddenly the reflections, growing more vivid, illuminated three masked figures. This ghastly aspect vanished so suddenly that she took it for an optical illusion.

  “Madame,” Armand went on, regarding her with cold contempt, “a minute, a single minute is enough for me to reach you in every moment of your life, the only eternity I can touch. I am not God. Listen to me carefully,” he said, pausing to give due weight to his words. “Love will always come at your bidding; you have a limitless power over men. But remember that one day you bade love come and it came pure and candid, as much as it can be on this earth; as respectful as it was violent; caressing as the love of a woman, or as that of a mother for her child; finally, so great that it was a kind of madness. You played with this love, and thus you have committed a crime. It is any woman’s right to refuse a love she feels she cannot share. The man who loves without making himself loved cannot complain, nor has he any right to complain. But, madame la duchesse, to attract a poor man deprived of all affection by feigning love, giving him a glimpse of happiness at its fullest only to steal it from him, to snatch away his future felicity, to kill it not only today but for as long as his life lasts, poisoning all his hours and his thoughts—this is what I call a dreadful crime!”

  “Monsieur—”

  “I cannot yet allow you to answer me. Listen to me, then. Besides, I have rights over you, but I want only the rights of the judge over the criminal so as to awaken your conscience. If you had no more conscience, I would not blame you at all; but you are so young! I like to think that you must feel some life in your heart. While I believe you are depraved enough to commit a crime unpunished by law, I think you are not so degraded that you cannot comprehend the full meaning of my words. I continue.”

  At this moment, the duchess heard the hollow sound of a bellows; the strangers whom she had just glimpsed were no doubt using it to fan the fire clearly reflected on the curtain. But Montriveau’s burning look forced her to stay still, her heart beating, her eyes staring in front of her. Whatever her curiosity, the fire of Montriveau’s words interested her even more than the sound of this mysterious fire.

  “Madame,” he said, after a pause, “in Paris, when the executioner must lay hands on a poor murderer and place him on the block, where a murderer by law loses his head . . . You know, the newspapers forewarn rich and poor alike, telling the rich to remain calm and the poor to be watchful for their lives. Well, you who are religious, and even something of a bigot, go to say Mass for this man: You are part of the family, but you are of the elder branch. That branch can rest in peace, happy and carefree. Pushed by poverty or by anger, your brother the convict has only killed a man. And you! You have killed a man’s happiness, the best part of his life, his most dearly held beliefs. Driven by misery or anger, your convict brother has quite naïvely lain in wait for his victim; he has killed him in spite of himself and in fear of the scaffold. But you . . . you have heaped up all the sins of weakness against an innocent strength; you have tamed the heart of your patient the better to devour it! You have lured him with caresses, you have left nothing undone that could lead him to imagine, dream, desire the delights of love. You have asked of him a thousand sacrifices in order to reject them all. Indeed, you have made him see the light before putting out his eyes.

  “Admirable courage! Such villainy is a luxury beyond the ken of those bourgeois women whom you so despise. They know how to give themselves and forgive; they know how to love and suffer. They make us look small by the grandeur of their devotions. The higher we rise in society, we find as much filth as at the bottom, only it is hardened and gilded. Yes, to achieve perfect baseness you need a fine education, a great name, a pretty woman, a duchess. To fall as low as possible, you needed to be above it all. I express my thoughts poorly, I still suffer from too many wounds you inflicted; but do not imagine that I complain! No. My words are not the expression of any personal hope and contain no bitterness. Be assured, madame, I forgive you, and this forgiveness is so complete that you need not feel sorry that you’ve come here to find it against your will . . . But you might abuse other hearts as childlike as mine, and I must spare them that pain. You have thus inspired me with an idea for justice. Expiate your sin here on earth, perhaps God will forgive you—I certainly hope so—but He is implacable and will strike you.”

  At these words, the eyes of this woman—battered, torn—filled with tears.

  “Why are you weeping? Stay true to your nature. You coldly contemplated the tortures of the heart you were breaking. Enough, madame, console yourself. I can suffer no more. Others will tell you that you have given them life. I, on the other hand, am delighted to tell you that you have given me nothingness. Perhaps you imagine that I haven’t a minute to myself, that I live for my friends, and that from now on I will have to bear death’s coldness and life’s sorrows together? Do you really have such kindness in you? Perhaps you are like the tigers in the desert, who lick the wounds they have first inflicted?”

  The duchess dissolved in tears.

  “Spare yourself these tears, madame. If I believed in them, it would only put me on my guard. Is it merely one of your artful tricks or not? After all those you have used, how can one think there is any truth in you? Henceforth, you have no more power to move me. I have said all I have to say.”

  Madame de Langeais rose, moving with both a noble bearing and humility.

  “You are right to treat me harshly,” she said, holding out to this man a hand that he did not take. “Your words are still not harsh enough, and I deserve this punishment.”

  “I punish you, madame! But to punish someone is to love them, is it not? Do not expect anything from me that resembles an emotion. On behalf of my own cause, I might make myself both accuser and judge, pronounce your sentence and be your executioner. But for me the cruelest vengeance is to disdain any possible vengeance. Who knows! Perhaps I will be the minister of your pleasures. From now on, elegantly wearing the sad uniform society prescribes for criminals, perhaps you will be forced to have their integrity. And then you will love!”

  The duchess listened with a submission that was no longer infused with calculated coquetry; she spoke only after an interlude of silence.

  “Armand,” she said, “it se
ems to me that by resisting love, I was obeying all the considerations of a woman’s modesty, and I would not have expected such reproach from you. You have turned all my weaknesses against me and made them into crimes. How could you fail to understand that all the curiosities of love might have led me beyond my duties, and that the next day I would have been angry with myself, in despair that I had gone so far? Alas, there was as much good faith in my sins as in my remorse. My severity betrayed much more love than my concessions. And besides, what are you complaining about? The gift of my heart was not enough for you, you brutally demanded my person—”

  “Brutally!” cried Monsieur de Montriveau. But he said to himself, “I am lost if I allow myself to take up this argument over words.”

  “Yes, you arrived at my house as if it were the house of one of those fallen women, showing no respect, none of the attentions of love. Had I not the right to think it over? Well, I have thought it over. The unseemliness of your conduct is excusable: Love is the main point—let me believe that and justify your behavior to myself. So, Armand, at the very moment this evening when you were predicting my unhappiness, I was thinking of our happiness. Yes, I had confidence in your proud and noble character—you’ve given me proof of that . . . and I was all yours,” she added, leaning toward Montriveau’s ear.

  “Yes, I had some mysterious desire to make a man happy who has so violently suffered from adversity. Master for master, I wanted a great man. The loftier I felt, the less I wanted to settle for less. I had confidence in you and saw a life full of love while you were showing me death . . . Strength does not work without goodness. My friend, you are too strong to be wicked to a poor woman who loves you. If I was wrong, can I not be pardoned? Can I not set things right? Repentance is love’s grace, I want to be full of grace to you. How could I, alone among women, fail to share those uncertainties, those fears, that timidity so natural when you are bound for life, and know how you men break such bonds so easily! Those bourgeois women, to whom you compare me, give themselves, but they struggle. Well, I have struggled, but here I am . . . My God! He isn’t listening to me—” She broke off, twisting her hands and crying. “But I love you! I am yours!” She fell at Armand’s knees. “Yours! Yours, my one and only master!”

  “Madame,” said Armand, trying to raise her, “Antoinette can no longer save the Duchesse de Langeais. I do not believe either one anymore. You give yourself today, perhaps you will refuse to give yourself tomorrow. No power on heaven or earth could guarantee the sweet constancy of your love. Love’s pledges were in the past, and now there is no more past.”

  At this moment, a glimmer shone so brightly that the duchess could not help turning her head toward the curtain, and this time she saw distinctly three masked men.

  “Armand,” she said, “I would not like to misjudge you. What are those men doing there? What are you going to do to me?”

  “Those men are as discreet as I will be myself on what will happen here,” he said. “Think of them simply as my arms and my heart. One of them is a surgeon—”

  “A surgeon,” she said. “Armand, my friend, uncertainty is the cruelest form of suffering. Speak to me, then, tell me if you want to take my life. I will give it to you, you shall not take it.”

  “So you have not understood me?” replied Montriveau. “Did I not speak to you of justice?” he added coldly, taking a small steel object from the table. “I am going to put an end to your apprehensions, to explain what I have decided to do with you.”

  He showed her a cross of Lorraine at the end of a steel rod.

  “Two of my friends are even now heating a cross like this one. We will apply it to your forehead, just there between your eyes, so that you shall not be able to hide it behind diamonds and avoid the questions of society. In short, your forehead will bear the brand of infamy your brother convicts wear on their shoulders. The pain involved is minor, but I was afraid of an attack of nerves or some resistance—”

  “Of resistance?” she said, clapping her hands with joy. “No, no, I would have the whole world here to watch. Ah, my Armand, brand me quickly, brand your creature like some poor little thing you own. You were asking for pledges of my love, but here they are, all in one. Ah! I see only mercy and forgiveness, only eternal happiness in your vengeance . . . When you have marked a woman as yours this way, when you have a soul in bondage who will bear your red mark, well then, you can never abandon her, you will be mine forever. By isolating me on earth, you will be responsible for my happiness on pain of cowardice, and I will know your nobility, your greatness! But the woman in love is always branded by herself. Come, gentlemen, enter and brand me, brand the Duchesse de Langeais. Enter quickly, all of you, my forehead burns more than your iron.”

  Armand turned away quickly so as not to see the duchess on her knees, her heart throbbing. He spoke to them briefly and his three friends disappeared. Women used to salon life know the game of mirrors. So the duchess, intensely interested in reading Armand’s heart, was all eyes, while Armand, unaware of his mirror, openly shed two tears before quickly wiping them away. The duchess’s entire future lay in those two tears. When he turned back again to help her rise, he found Madame de Langeais already on her feet; she was sure that she was loved. And her heart must have throbbed hearing Montriveau tell her, with the firmness she knew so well how to take when she used to toy with him, “I spare you, madame. Believe me, this scene will be as if it had never taken place. But let us say farewell here. I like to think that you were sincere in your coquetries on your divan, and sincere in your emotional effusions here. Farewell. I no longer have faith. You would still torment me, you would always be a duchess. And . . . but farewell, we will never understand each other. Now, what would you like?” he said, assuming the air of a master of ceremonies. “To go home or to return to the ball at Madame de Sérizy’s? I have done everything in my power to leave your reputation intact. Neither your servants nor the world can know anything of what has passed between us for the last quarter of an hour. Your servants believe you are at the ball—your carriage has not left Madame de Sérizy’s courtyard, and likewise your brougham is in the courtyard of your own mansion. Where do you wish to be?”

  “What do you think, Armand?”

  “There is no more Armand, madame la duchesse. We are strangers to each other.”

  “Take me to the ball, then,” she said, still curious to test Armand’s power. “Throw back into the hell of society a creature who would suffer there, and who must continue to suffer if there is no happiness left for her. Oh, my friend, I still love you as your bourgeois women love. I would love to throw my arms around your neck at the ball, before everyone, if you asked me to. That dreadful society has not corrupted me. Go, I am young and I have just grown younger. Yes, I am a child, your child, you have just created me. Oh, do not banish me from my Eden!”

  Armand shook his head.

  “If I leave, at least let me take something with me, anything—this—to engrave this evening on my heart,” she said, taking Armand’s cap and wrapping it in her handkerchief, “No,” she continued, “I am not part of that world of depraved women. You do not know it, and so you cannot appreciate me. Know this, then: Some give themselves for gold, others can be plied with gifts—all vile. Oh, I would like to be a simple bourgeois woman, a working girl, if you prefer a woman beneath you to a woman in whom devotion is bound up with high rank. But my Armand, I am one of those noble, great, chaste, pure women, and they are lovely. I would like to have all the noble virtues that I might sacrifice them all to you. Misfortune has made me a duchess; I would like to have been royalty so that I might make the greatest possible sacrifice to you. I would be a shopgirl to you and a queen to others.”

  He was listening while moistening his cigars.

  “When you want to leave,” he said, “let me know.”

  “But I would like to stay—”

  “That is another matter!” he said.

  “Come, that was badly done,” she cried, seizing a
cigar and devouring what Armand’s lips had touched.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Oh, what would I not do to please you?”

  “Very well. Leave, madame.”

  “I will obey you,” she said, weeping.

  “You must be blindfolded so as not to get a glimpse of the way back.”

  “I am ready, Armand,” she said, covering her eyes.

  “Can you see?”

  “No.”

  Noiselessly he knelt before her.

  “Ah! I can hear you!” she cried, allowing a caressing gesture to escape, believing that this pretended harshness was over.

  He leant as if to kiss her lips; she held up her face.

  “You can see, madame.”

  “I am just a little curious.”

  “So you are deceiving me still?”

  “Ah!” she said with the rage of great generosity scorned. “Take off this handkerchief and lead me, monsieur, I will not open my eyes.”

  Armand felt certain of her honesty in that cry. He led the duchess who, true to her word, kept herself nobly blind. But in taking her paternally by the hand to help her climb up, then descend, Montriveau studied the throbbing of this woman’s heart so quickly invaded by a true love. Madame de Langeais, happy to be able to speak to him this way, took pleasure in telling him everything; but he remained inflexible, and when the duchess’s hand felt for him, his remained mute. At last, after having traveled for some time together, Armand told her to come forward. She did so and perceived that he was preventing her dress from touching the walls of what must have been a narrow opening. Madame de Langeais was moved by this care, which betrayed still a little love for her; but this was Montriveau’s way of bidding her farewell, for he left without a word. Feeling the warmth around her, the duchess opened her eyes. She saw that she was alone in front of the fireplace in the Countess de Sérizy’s boudoir. Her first concern was to see to her disordered toilette; in a moment she had readjusted her dress and restored her charming coiffure.