The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Well, my dear Antoinette, we have searched for you everywhere,” said the countess, opening the door to the boudoir.

  “I came in here to breathe,” she said, “it is unbearably hot in the public rooms.”

  “We thought you had gone, but my brother Ronquerolles told me he had seen your servants waiting for you.”

  “I am worn out, my dear, let me rest here a moment.”

  The duchess sat down on her friend’s divan.

  “What’s the matter with you? You’re trembling all over.”

  The Marquis de Ronquerolles entered.

  “I was afraid, madame la duchesse, that something had happened to you. I just saw your coachman looking as tipsy as the Swiss.”

  The duchess did not answer but looked at the fireplace, at the mirrors, trying to see some trace of her passage. Then she experienced an extraordinary sensation to see herself in the midst of the pleasures of the ball after the terrible scene that had just set her life on another course. She began to tremble violently.

  “Monsieur de Montriveau’s prediction this evening has shaken my nerves. Joking or not, I shall see if his London ax will haunt my sleep. Adieu then, my dear. Adieu, monsieur le marquis.”

  She went through the salons, where she was stopped by flatterers, who seemed to her pitiful. Small and humiliated as she was, she was the queen of this world, and she found it petty. Besides, what were these men compared to the one she truly loved, whose character had been temporarily belittled by her but was now perhaps exaggerated beyond all measure, once again taking on gigantic proportions? She could not stop herself from looking at her servant and those who had accompanied her, and seeing him fast asleep.

  “You didn’t leave here?” she asked him.

  “No, madame.”

  Climbing into her carriage, she understood that her coachman was in such a drunken state that in other circumstances she would have been frightened. But the great crises in life deprive fear of its usual fodder. Moreover, she arrived home without incident, but she felt utterly transformed and prey to feelings surprisingly new. For her there was now but one man in the world, that is, henceforth she wished to be of some value only to him.

  While the physiologists can promptly define love according to the laws of nature, the moralists are much more hesitant to explain it when they wish to consider love in its various social developments. Still, in spite of the heresies of the thousand sects that divide the Church of Love, there is one straight, deep line running clearly through all their doctrines, a line whose strict application explains the crisis in which, like nearly all women, the Duchesse de Langeais was plunged. She was not yet in love—she had a passion.

  Love and passion are two different conditions of the soul that poets and men of the world, philosophers and fools alike, continually confuse. Love involves mutual feelings, a certainty of bliss that nothing can change, and a too-constant exchange of pleasures, a too-complete clinging of hearts—not excluding jealousy. Possession is then a means and not an end; infidelity causes suffering but no breach; the soul is neither more nor less ardent or aroused, it is incessantly happy. In short, desire extended by a divine breath from one end of time’s vastness to the other tints us with the same color: Life is as blue as a pure sky. Passion is the presentiment of love and its infinitude to which all suffering souls aspire. Passion is a hope that will perhaps be dashed. Passion signifies both suffering and transition; passion ceases when hope is dead. Men and women can, without dishonor, conceive several passions; it is natural to leap toward happiness! But in life there is only one love. So all discussions of feelings, written or oral, can be summed up by these two questions: Is it a passion? Is it love?

  Since love comes to life only with the intimate pleasures that perpetuate it, the duchess was suffering beneath passion’s yoke, and by enduring its devouring agitations, involuntary calculations, fevered desires—in other words everything embodied by the word passion—she suffered. In the midst of her soul’s troubles, she was buffeted by sudden gusts of vanity, self-regard, pride—all those varieties of egotism held together.

  She had said to a man, “I love you, I am yours!” Could the Duchesse de Langeais have uttered these words in vain? She would either be loved or abdicate her social role. Feeling the solitude of her voluptuous bed where lust had not yet set its hot feet, she rolled about twisting and repeating, “I want to be loved!” And the faith she still had in herself gave her hope that she would yet succeed. The duchess was piqued, the vain Parisienne was humiliated, the true woman glimpsed happiness, and her imagination, avenger of time lost by nature, took delight in kindling in her the inextinguishable fires of pleasure. She almost attained the sensations of love, for gripped by the doubt that she was loved, she found happiness in telling herself, “I love him!” Society and love, she wanted to trample them underfoot. Montriveau was now her religion. She spent the following day in a state of moral stupor mingled with bodily agitations that nothing could express. She tore up as many letters as she had written and indulged in a thousand impossible speculations. At the hour when Montriveau used to come, she wanted to believe he would come and took pleasure in waiting for him. Her life was concentrated in her single sense of hearing. She sometimes closed her eyes and willed herself to listen across space. Then she wished she could erase all obstacles between her and her lover so as to reach that absolute silence that allows us to perceive noise at a vast distance. In this reverential silence, the ticking of her clock was hateful, a sinister gossip that she stopped. Midnight struck in the salon.

  “My God!” she said to herself. “What happiness it would be to see him here. And yet he used to come here, led by desire. His voice filled this boudoir. And now, nothing!”

  Remembering the scenes in which she had played the coquette and which had torn him from her, tears of despair ran freely down her cheeks.

  “Madame la duchesse,” said her ladies’ maid, “does not perhaps know that it is two o’clock in the morning. I thought that madame was indisposed.”

  “Yes, I am going to bed. But remember, Suzette,” said Madame de Langeais, wiping her tears, “never enter my boudoir without being ordered to do so, and I will not tell you a second time.”

  For a week, Madame de Langeais went to all the houses where she hoped to meet Monsieur de Montriveau. Contrary to her habits, she arrived early and left late; she no longer danced but played cards. Useless efforts! She could not manage to see Armand, whose name she no longer dared pronounce. One evening, however, in a desperate moment, she said to Madame de Sérizy, with as much nonchalance as it was possible for her summon, “So you have quarreled with Monsieur de Montriveau? I no longer see him at your house.”

  “He does not come here any more?” answered the countess, laughing. “He is not seen anywhere, for that matter. He is interested in some woman, no doubt.”

  “I thought,” the duchess continued softly, “that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was one of his friends.”

  “I have never heard my brother say that he knew him.”

  Madame de Langeais did not reply. Then Madame de Sérizy thought that she could apply the whip with impunity to a discreet friendship that had long embittered her and continued the conversation.

  “So you miss that melancholy personage. I have heard the most monstrous things about him: Wound him, and he never returns, never forgives. Love him, and he puts you in chains. To everything I have said about him, one of those that praise him to the skies would always answer, ‘He knows how to love!’ They continually repeat to me: ‘Montriveau will drop everything for a friend, he has a great soul.’ Bah! Society does not demand great souls. Men of that character are better off at home, let them stay there, and let them leave us to our small pleasures. What do you say, Antoinette?”

  Despite being a woman of the world, the duchess seemed agitated, but nonetheless she said with a facility that fooled her friend, “I am sorry to miss him. I took a great interest in him and wished him my sincere friendship. You may fi
nd me ridiculous, dear friend, but I love great souls. To give oneself to a fool is a clear admission, is it not, that one is governed wholly by the senses?”

  Madame de Sérizy had never distinguished any but ordinary men and was loved at the moment by a handsome man, the Marquis d’Aiglemont.

  The countess cut short her visit, you may be sure. Madame de Langeais, seeing a hope in Armand’s absolute withdrawal, immediately wrote him a humble, sweet letter that ought to bring him back to her if he still loved her. The following day she had her personal valet carry the letter, and when he returned, she asked him if he had given it to Montriveau himself; his affirmation prompted her unrestrained gesture of joy. Armand was in Paris, he was staying at home alone, he was not going out into society! So she was loved. All day she waited for a reply, and the reply did not come. Amidst recurring crises caused by her impatience, Antoinette justified this tardiness to herself: Armand was preoccupied, the reply would come by post. But that evening she could no longer lie to herself. A dreadful day, a mingling of pleasing sufferings, of crushing palpitations, rapid heartbeats wasting her life-force. The next day she sent to Armand’s for a reply.

  “Monsieur le marquis sent word that he would call on madame la duchesse,” announced Julien the valet.

  She fled so as not to let her happiness show and fell on her couch to devour her first emotions.

  “He is going to come!” This thought rent her soul. Indeed, woe unto those for whom waiting is not the most dreadful of tempests and the germination of the sweetest pleasures; they have nothing in them of that flame that awakens the images of things and doubles nature in binding us as much to the pure essence of objects as to their reality. What is waiting in love but the constant drawing upon unfailing hope, submission to the terrible scourge of passion, happy without the disenchantments of truth! Waiting is a constant emanation of force and desire. Is it not the equivalent in the human soul of the perfumed exhalations of certain flowers? We have left behind the gaudy and sterile colors of coreopsis or tulips and we turn repeatedly to breathe in the delicious thought of the orange blossom or the volkameria flower, which their countries have involuntarily compared to young brides-to-be, full of love, beautiful in their past and their future.

  The duchess learned the pleasures of her new life by reeling with the flagellations of love; then, changing her sentiments, she found other destinations and a better sense of things. Rushing into her cabinet de toilette, she understood the careful adornment and the most fastidious bodily attentions when they are ordered by love and not by vanity; already these rituals of dressing helped her to bear the slow passage of time. Once her toilette was finished, she fell again into excessive agitations, into the nervous convulsions of that dreadful power that stirs up all ideas and that is perhaps only an illness whose sufferings we love. The duchess was ready at two o’clock in the afternoon. Monsieur de Montriveau had not yet arrived at eleven thirty in the evening. In order to explain the anguish of this woman, who could pass for a spoiled child of civilization, we would have to know how much poetry the heart can concentrate in one thought, how powerful a force the soul exhales at the sound of the bell, or how to estimate the life-force consumed by a carriage that rolls past and does not stop.

  “Is he toying with me?” she said, listening to the stroke of midnight.

  She grew pale, her teeth chattered, and she clapped her hands as she leapt across the boudoir, where formerly, she thought, he appeared without being called. But she resigned herself. Had she not made him turn pale and twinge under the sharp arrows of her irony? Madame de Langeais understood the horror of the fate of women who, deprived of man’s means of action, must wait when they love. To take the first step toward her beloved is a fault that few men know how to forgive. Most of them see degradation in this celestial flattery; but Armand had a great soul and ought to count among the few men who know how to excuse such an excess of love by eternal devotion.

  “Well then, I shall go,” she said to herself, tossing sleepless in her bed. “I shall go to him, I shall not exhaust myself holding out a hand. An exceptional man sees in each step a woman takes toward him promises of love and constancy. Yes, angels must descend from the heavens to come to men, and I want to be an angel for him.”

  The next day she wrote one of those notes in which the minds of Paris’s ten thousand Sévignés excel. However, knowing how to plead without abasing herself, flying with both wings spread without humbly trailing them, complaining without offending, rebelling gracefully, forgiving without compromising her personal dignity, saying everything and admitting nothing, one had to be the Duchesse de Langeais and raised by Madame la Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry to write this delicious note. Julien was, like all personal valets, the victim of love’s advances and counter-advances.

  “What did Monsieur de Montriveau reply?” she asked Julien as indifferently as she could, when he came to report on his mission.

  “Monsieur le marquis begged me to say to madame la duchesse that it was all right.”

  Dreadful reaction of the soul on itself! To have this matter of the heart exposed before curious witnesses, and not to murmur, and to be forced into silence. One of those thousand sorrows of the rich!

  For twenty-two days Madame de Langeais wrote to Monsieur de Montriveau without receiving a reply. She had finally let it be known that she was ill in order to excuse herself from her duties, whether to the princess to whom she was attached or to society. She received only her father, the Duc de Navarreins; her aunt the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry; the old Vidame de Pamiers, her maternal great-uncle; and her husband’s uncle the Duc de Grandlieu. These persons easily believed in Madame de Langeais’s illness, finding her from day to day increasingly worn out, pale, and thin. The vague ardors of a real love, the irritations of wounded pride, the constant prick of the only contempt that could touch her, her yearnings toward perpetual pleasures perpetually desired and betrayed; finally all her forces were stimulated to no purpose and undermined her double nature. She was paying the arrears of her life of make-believe.

  She went out at last to see a military review. Monsieur de Montriveau was sure to be there. For the duchess, seated on the balcony of the Tuileries with the royal family, it was one of those celebrations that linger in the soul’s memory for a long time. She looked supremely beautiful in her languor, and all eyes paid homage to her with admiration. She exchanged several looks with Montriveau, whose presence only enhanced her beauty. The general marched nearly at her feet in all the splendor of that military uniform whose effect on the feminine imagination is avowed by even the most prudish women. For a woman so in love, who has not seen her lover in two months, this brief moment surely resembles that phase of our dreams when our view fleetingly embraces nature without horizons.

  So it is that only women or young people can imagine the dumb, delirious hunger expressed by the eyes of the duchess. As for men, if during their youth they experienced in the paroxysm of their first passions these phenomena of nervous power, later they forget them so completely that they end by denying such luxuriant ecstasies, the only possible name for these magnificent intuitions. Religious ecstasy is the madness of thought disengaged from corporal bonds; while in the ecstasy of love, the forces of our two natures are mingled, united, and embraced. When a woman is prey to the frenzied tyrannies under which Madame de Langeais was forced to bend, definitive resolutions came so quick and fast that it is impossible to define them. Thoughts are born in this way, one from the other, and pass through the soul like clouds borne by the wind on a gray backdrop that veils the sun.

  Henceforth, facts tell all. So here are the facts. The day after the review, Madame de Langeais sent her carriage with her livery to wait at the door of the Marquis de Montriveau from eight o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon. Armand lived on rue de Seine, a few doors down from the Chamber of Peers, where he was to have a meeting that day. But long before the peers met at their palace, several persons glimpsed the duchess’s
carriage and livery. The Baron de Maulincour, a young officer disdained by Madame de Langeais and taken up by Madame de Sérizy, was the first to recognize her servants. He went on the spot to his mistress to tell her, sworn to secrecy, about this strange folly. Instantly the news was telegraphed to all the coteries of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, reaching the Élysée-Bourbon palace, becoming the news of the day, the subject of all conversations from noon to evening. Nearly all the women denied the fact, but in such a way that the report was confirmed, and the men believed it, showing the most indulgent interest in Madame de Langeais.

  “That savage of a Montriveau has a heart of bronze, no doubt he insisted on this scandal,” said some, casting the blame on Armand.

  “Ah well,” said others, “Madame de Langeais has committed the noblest form of imprudence! To renounce, for her lover, society, rank, fortune, and respect in the face of all Paris—that is as fine a coup d’état for a woman as the wig-maker’s knife-wielding that so affected Canning in the assize court. Not one of the women who blame the duchess would make this kind of declaration worthy of the old regime. Madame de Langeais is a heroic woman to proclaim herself so frankly. Now she can love no one but Montriveau. There is surely some greatness in a woman who says, ‘I have but one passion.’”