Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

in which you
have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
remonstrances.

Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the
expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful
as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
in passing, is very rare.

The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social
woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like
circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt
only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,--sickly,
irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold
more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of
character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In
exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The
dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The
compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your
projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,
like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the
rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her
religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship
with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was
the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was
younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us
admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a
man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously
worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched
by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,
when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away
from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,--let us admit, I
say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the
glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of
our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the
picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of
poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed
verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am
still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me
sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very
ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other
empty-headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not
roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days,
of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do
I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil
uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are
worth far more than I,--D'Arthez, for instance.

Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to
these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the
happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been
to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine
for a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode
of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might
conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which
light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their
duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end
our tale in the common vulgar way,--marriage, a household,
children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!--could it be?
Therefore, adieu.

CHAPTER X. THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS

To Monsieur de Canalis:

My Friend,--Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But
perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to
each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and
asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the
answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of
Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not
remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most
lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that
of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,--happy to old age. Ah!
friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist
as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating
with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in
himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to
find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go
into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in
Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has
deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has
inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is
something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian
coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called
men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with
the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to
cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle
fragrance can never fail,--it is eternal.

Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or
commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude,
I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of
Lord Byron's many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you
shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of
which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the
roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak,
and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and
see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty,
intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the
vulgarities of life! it is yours--yours, before any eye has
blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my
thoughts,--all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my
heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If
you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can
live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your
sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your
friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my
future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks
not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a
poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of
his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden--so
devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you--is Friendship,
pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who
listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of
the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked
with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not
find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile
alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be
any the worse if Mademoiselle d'Este does not give it two or three
sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As
for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a
mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in
the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my
thoughts and all my earthly efforts.

I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never
belong to any ninny just because he is the son of