Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

it belongs only to man; God forbids us women to wear its halo, but
he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes
the brow scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and
you have now confirmed it.

Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of
inexpressible sweetness; a sort of peace, tender and divine, gives
me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction.
I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to
my Southern sunsets, full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fetes
and ardent poems. Well, after reading your letter, so full of
feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my
celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature,
and fancy that I am destined to die for one I love. One of your
poems, "The Maiden's Song," paints these delicious moments, when
gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need; it is one of my
favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one?--well
then, I think you worthy to be _me_!

Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I
have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity,
your projects; but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy
your wishes. Hear me, dear; the mystery in which I am shrouded
allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my
heart. Hear me: if we once meet, adieu to our mutual
comprehension! Will you make a compact with me? Was the first
disadvantageous to you? But remember it won you my esteem, and it
is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lined throughout
with esteem. Here is the compact: write me your life in a few
words; then tell me what you do in Paris, day by day, with no
reservations, and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well,
having done that, I will take a step myself--I will see you, I
promise you that. And it is a great deal.

This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure; no gallantry, as you men
say, can come of it, I warn you frankly. It involves my life, and
more than that,--something that causes me remorse for the many
thoughts that fly to you in flocks--it involves my father's and my
mother's life. I adore them, and my choice must please them; they
must find a son in you.

Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to
whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding
their amiability,--how far can they bend under a family yoke, and
put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated
upon. Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!
Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way;
and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor
the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my
long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you
have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which
they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in
their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions
of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself,
"Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit
for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you
tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were
the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared
a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you
perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to
escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for
the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither
Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any
inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And
this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their
blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The
visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their
results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who
has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to
his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates
all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not
perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is
so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to
bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what
sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the
life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering
his personal life, Moliere's comedy is horrible.

The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you
in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found
self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my
best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I
should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was
sixteen. What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that
fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in
my heart was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do
you know what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the
recesses of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said,
"Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,--marry
me to whom you please." And the man might have been a notary,
banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as
the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without
two ideas,--he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in
me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded
in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have
revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of
the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting
lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia,
breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a
curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have
taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight
of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a
bureau-drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor
girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,--but ah! I have _you_, I
believe in _you_, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts
and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes--see how far
my frankness leads me--I wish I were in the middle of the book we
are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments,
such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by
reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,--if
indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.

If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the
dreadful word "folly!" might escape you, and I should be cruelly
punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring
of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years
that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by
charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for
a few weeks.

Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
departed for the Crusades, "God wills it."

Ah! but you will cry out, "What a chatterbox!" All the people
round me say, on the contrary, "Mademoiselle is very taciturn."

O. d'Este M.

CHAPTER XI. WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE

The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom the author of the "Comedy of Human Life" obtained them; but their interest in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may not be shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the battle. The respect due to the majority in every nation under a constitutional government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven other letters exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of September. If, later on, some flattering majority should arise to claim them, let us hope that we can then find means to insert them in their proper place.

Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable, the truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves free play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more beautiful than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by a sense of the communion of two free souls. Ernest's whole life was now wrapped up in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what banknotes are to a miser; while in Modeste's soul a deep love took the place of her delight in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite of distance, its mainspring. Ernest's heart was the complement of Canalis's glory. Alas! it often takes two men to make a perfect lover, just as in literature we compose a type by collecting the peculiarities of several similar characters. How many a time a woman has been