The Lily of the Valley, Honoré de Balzac [the little red hen read aloud TXT] 📗

go with me this evening to the Chateau; your fortune is made. The king spoke of you this morning, and said, 'He is young, capable, and trustworthy.' His Majesty added that he wished he knew whether you were living or dead, and in what part of France events had thrown you after you had executed your mission so ably."

That night I was appointed master of petitions to the council of State, and I also received a private and permanent place in the employment of Louis XVIII. himself,--a confidential position, not highly distinguished, but without any risks, a position which put me at the very heart of the government and has been the source of all my subsequent prosperity. Madame de Mortsauf had judged rightly. I now owed everything to her; power and wealth, happiness and knowledge; she guided and encouraged me, purified my heart, and gave to my will that unity of purpose without which the powers of youth are wasted. Later I had a colleague; we each served six months. We were allowed to supply each other's place if necessary; we had rooms at the Chateau, a carriage, and large allowances for travelling when absent on missions. Strange position! We were the secret disciples of a monarch in a policy to which even his enemies have since done signal justice; alone with us he gave judgment on all things, foreign and domestic, yet we had no legitimate influence; often we were consulted like Laforet by Moliere, and made to feel that the hesitations of long experience were confirmed or removed by the vigorous perceptions of youth.

In other respects my future was secured in a manner to satisfy ambition. Beside my salary as master of petitions, paid by the budget of the council of State, the king gave me a thousand francs a month from his privy purse, and often himself added more to it. Though the king knew well that no young man of twenty-three could long bear up under the labors with which he loaded me, my colleague, now a peer of France, was not appointed till August, 1817. The choice was a difficult one; our functions demanded so many capabilities that the king was long in coming to a decision. He did me the honor to ask which of the young men among whom he was hesitating I should like for an associate. Among them was one who had been my school-fellow at Lepitre's; I did not select him. His Majesty asked why.

"The king," I replied, "chooses men who are equally faithful, but whose capabilities differ. I choose the one whom I think the most able, certain that I shall always be able to get on with him."

My judgment coincided with that of the king, who was pleased with the sacrifice I had made. He said on this occasion, "You are to be the chief"; and he related these circumstances to my colleague, who became, in return for the service I had done him, my good friend. The consideration shown to me by the Duc de Lenoncourt set the tone of that which I met with in society. To have it said, "The king takes an interest in the young man; that young man has a future, the king likes him," would have served me in place of talents; and it now gave to the kindly welcome accorded to youth a certain respect that is only given to power. In the salon of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt and also at the house of my sister who had just married the Marquis de Listomere, son of the old lady in the Ile St. Louis, I gradually came to know the influential personages of the Faubourg St. Germain.

Henriette herself put me at the heart of the circle then called "le Petit Chateau" by the help of her great-aunt, the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, to whom she wrote so warmly in my behalf that the princess immediately sent for me. I cultivated her and contrived to please her, and she became, not my protectress but a friend, in whose kindness there was something maternal. The old lady took pains to make me intimate with her daughter Madame d'Espard, with the Duchesse de Langeais, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, women who held the sceptre of fashion, and who were all the more gracious to me because I made no pretensions and was always ready to be useful and agreeable to them. My brother Charles, far from avoiding me, now began to lean upon me; but my rapid success roused a secret jealousy in his mind which in after years caused me great vexation. My father and mother, surprised by a triumph so unexpected, felt their vanity flattered, and received me at last as a son. But their feeling was too artificial, I might say false, to let their present treatment have much influence upon a sore heart. Affectations stained with selfishness win little sympathy; the heart abhors calculations and profits of all kinds.

I wrote regularly to Henriette, who answered by two letters a month. Her spirit hovered over me, her thoughts traversed space and made the atmosphere around me pure. No woman could captivate me. The king noticed my reserve, and as, in this respect, he belonged to the school of Louis XV., he called me, in jest, Mademoiselle de Vandenesse; but my conduct pleased him. I am convinced that the habit of patience I acquired in my childhood and practised at Clochegourde had much to do in my winning the favor of the king, who was always most kind to me. He no doubt took a fancy to read my letters, for he soon gave up his notion of my life as that of a young girl. One day when the duke was on duty, and I was writing at the king's dictation, the latter suddenly remarked, in that fine, silvery voice of his, to which he could give, when he chose, the biting tone of epigram:--

"So that poor devil of a Mortsauf persists in living?"

"Yes," replied the duke.

"Madame de Mortsauf is an angel, whom I should like to see at my court," continued the king; "but if I cannot manage it, my chancellor here," turning to me, "may be more fortunate. You are to have six months' leave; I have decided on giving you the young man we spoke of yesterday as colleague. Amuse yourself at Clochegourde, friend Cato!" and he laughed as he had himself wheeled out of the room.

I flew like a swallow to Touraine. For the first time I was to show myself to my beloved, not merely a little less insignificant, but actually in the guise of an elegant young man, whose manners had been formed in the best salons, his education finished by gracious women; who had found at last a compensation for all his sufferings, and had put to use the experience given to him by the purest angel to whom heaven had ever committed the care of a child. You know how my mother had equipped me for my three months' visit at Frapesle. When I reached Clochegourde after fulfilling my mission in Vendee, I was dressed like a huntsman; I wore a jacket with white and red buttons, striped trousers, leathern gaiters and shoes. Tramping through underbrush had so injured my clothes that the count was obliged to lend me linen. On the present occasion, two years' residence in Paris, constant intercourse with the king, the habits of a life at ease, my completed growth, a youthful countenance, which derived a lustre from the placidity of the soul within magnetically united with the pure soul that beamed on me from Clochegourde,--all these things combined had transformed me. I was self-possessed without conceit, inwardly pleased to find myself, in spite of my years, at the summit of affairs; above all, I had the consciousness of being secretly the support and comfort of the dearest woman on earth, and her unuttered hope. Perhaps I felt a flutter of vanity as the postilions cracked their whips along the new avenue leading from the main road to Clochegourde and through an iron gate I had never seen before, which opened into a circular enclosure recently constructed. I had not written to the countess of my coming, wishing to surprise her. For this I found myself doubly in fault: first, she was overwhelmed with the excitement of a pleasure long desired, but supposed to be impossible; and secondly, she proved to me that all such deliberate surprises are in bad taste.

When Henriette saw a young man in him who had hitherto seemed but a child to her, she lowered her eyes with a sort of tragic slowness. She allowed me to take and kiss her hand without betraying her inward pleasure, which I nevertheless felt in her sensitive shiver. When she raised her face to look at me again, I saw that she was pale.

"Well, you don't forget your old friends?" said Monsieur de Mortsauf, who had neither changed nor aged.

The children sprang upon me. I saw them behind the grave face of the Abbe Dominis, Jacques' tutor.

"No," I replied, "and in future I am to have six months' leave, which will always be spent here--Why, what is the matter?" I said to the countess, putting my arm round her waist and holding her up in presence of them all.

"Oh, don't!" she said, springing away from me; "it is nothing."

I read her mind, and answered to its secret thought by saying, "Am I not allowed to be your faithful slave?"

She took my arm, left the count, the children, and the abbe, and led me to a distance on the lawn, though still within sight of the others; then, when sure that her voice could not be heard by them, she spoke.

"Felix, my dear friend," she said, "forgive my fears; I have but one thread by which to guide me in the labyrinth of life, and I dread to see it broken. Tell me that I am more than ever Henriette to you, that you will never abandon me, that nothing shall prevail against me, that you will ever be my devoted friend. I have suddenly had a glimpse into my future, and you were not there, as hitherto, your eyes shining and fixed upon me--"

"Henriette! idol whose worship is like that of the Divine,--lily, flower of my life, how is it that you do not know, you who are my conscience, that my being is so fused with yours that my soul is here when my body is in Paris? Must I tell you that I have come in seventeen hours, that each turn of the wheels gathered thoughts and desires in my breast, which burst forth like a tempest when I saw you?"

"Yes, tell me! tell me!" she cried; "I am so sure of myself that I can hear you without wrong. God does not will my death. He sends you to me as he sends his breath to his creatures; as he pours the rain of his clouds upon a parched earth,--tell me! tell me! Do you love me sacredly?"

"Sacredly."

"For ever?"

"For ever."

"As a virgin Mary, hidden behind her veil, beneath her white crown."

"As a virgin visible."

"As a sister?"

"As a sister too dearly loved."

"With chivalry and without hope?"

"With chivalry and with hope."

"As if you were still twenty years of age, and wearing that absurd blue coat?"

"Oh better far! I love you thus, and I also love you"--she looked at me with keen apprehension--"as you loved your aunt."

"I am happy! You dispel my terrors," she said, returning towards the