Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

equally certain of the intrinsic
worth of their writings,--so readily does self-esteem lend itself
to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an
unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of
criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience,
even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.

Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower
of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in
the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you
have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that
might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet
of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;
they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish,
ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing
innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with
many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your
affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be
interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought
that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not
suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am
deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding
you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,
one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual
carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous
imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,
perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where
you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which
drives all poetry from the manuscript?

But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life
you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose
mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can
equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that
no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,
what will you gain,--you, a young girl, brought up to be the
virtuous mother of a family,--if you learn to comprehend the
terrible agitations of a poet's life in this dreadful capital,
which may be defined by one sentence,--the hell in which men love.

If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl
thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and
write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of
degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one
of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?
Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within
you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,
alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too
much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,
tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you
have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious
ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet
of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what
every pure young girl should be,--a good woman, the virtuous
mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can
make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound
a woman's proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no
experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before
she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,
to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such
qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.

Hear the whole truth,--do I not owe it to you in return for your
intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great
renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man
to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore
poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He
becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we
say: "I thought her far more lovely." She has not warranted the
portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter,--the
fairy whose name is Imagination.

Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a
sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the
burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears
them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now
when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will
suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a
distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining
summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world
of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once
admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.

I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised
entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can
take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing
from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an
unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.

Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all
women, even those who are disguised and masked.

So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an imagination on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one,--fancying all things, except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep?

All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air. The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness of the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. "Ah, there is the poet!" thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing the wheezing voice of the outer world.

"He is right, and I am wrong," she said to herself. "But who could ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but one of Moliere's old men?"

When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, "flagrante delicto," she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows, and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the hearts of young girls.


CHAPTER VIII. BLADE TO BLADE

To Monsieur de Canalis:

Monsieur,--You are certainly a great poet, and you are something
more,--an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a
young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you
enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following
question?

Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine,
--would your ideas, your language have been the same,--had some
one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.
d'Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a
master?

Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with
yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing
that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your
confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an
answer to your first letter.

Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do
homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to
remain always,

Your humble servant, O. d'Este M.

When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have settled the matter in a single phrase, "The girl is a little hussy." But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways energetically.

"Ah, my dear Ernest," said Truth, "you never would have read that lesson to a rich heiress. No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste to Havre to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have