Beatrix, Honoré de Balzac [great books for teens .TXT] 📗

of Camille and Beatrix. They were sitting on the sofa together, apparently on the best of terms. Calyste, with the headlong impulse of love, flung himself heedlessly on the sofa beside the marquise, took her hand, and slipped the letter within it. He did this so rapidly that Felicite, watchful as she was, did not perceive it. Calyste's heart was tingling with an emotion half sweet, half painful, as he felt the hand of Beatrix press his own, and saw her, without interrupting her words, or seeming in the least disconcerted, slip the letter into her glove.

"You fling yourself on a woman's dress without mercy," she said, laughing.

"Calyste is a boy who is wanting in common-sense," said Felicite, not sparing him an open rebuke.

Calyste rose, took Camille's hand, and kissed it. Then he went to the piano and ran his finger-nail over the notes, making them all sound at once, like a rapid scale. This exuberance of joy surprised Camille, and made her thoughtful; she signed to Calyste to come to her.

"What is the matter with you?" she whispered in his ear.

"Nothing," he replied.

"There is something between them," thought Mademoiselle des Touches.

The marquise was impenetrable. Camille tried to make Calyste talk, hoping that his artless mind would betray itself; but the youth excused himself on the ground that his mother expected him, and he left Les Touches at eleven o'clock,--not, however, without having faced the fire of a piercing glance from Camille, to whom that excuse was made for the first time.

After the agitations of a wakeful night filled with visions of Beatrix, and after going a score of times through the chief street of Guerande for the purpose of meeting the answer to his letter, which did not come, Calyste finally received the following reply, which the marquise's waiting-woman, entering the hotel du Guenic, presented to him. He carried it to the garden, and there, in the grotto, he read as follows:--

Madame de Rochefide to Calyste.

You are a noble child, but you are only a child. You are bound to
Camille, who adores you. You would not find in me either the
perfections that distinguish her or the happiness that she can
give you. Whatever you may think, she is young and I am old; her
heart is full of treasures, mine is empty; she has for you a
devotion you ill appreciate; she is unselfish; she lives only for
you and in you. I, on the other hand, am full of doubts; I should
drag you down to a wearisome life, without grandeur of any kind,
--a life ruined by my own conduct. Camille is free; she can go and
come as she will; I am a slave.

You forget that I love and am beloved. The situation in which I
have placed myself forbids my accepting homage. That a man should
love me, or say he loves me, is an insult. To turn to another
would be to place myself at the level of the lowest of my sex.

You, who are young and full of delicacy, how can you oblige me to
say these things, which rend my heart as they issue from it?

I preferred the scandal of an irreparable deed to the shame of
constant deception; my own loss of station to a loss of honesty.
In the eyes of many persons whose esteem I value, I am still
worthy; but if I permitted another man to love me, I should fall
indeed. The world is indulgent to those whose constancy covers, as
with a mantle, the irregularity of their happiness; but it is
pitiless to vice.

You see I feel neither disdain nor anger; I am answering your
letter frankly and with simplicity. You are young; you are
ignorant of the world; you are carried away by fancy; you are
incapable, like all whose lives are pure, of making the
reflections which evil suggests. But I will go still further.

Were I destined to be the most humiliated of women, were I forced
to hide fearful sorrows, were I betrayed, abandoned,--which, thank
God, is wholly impossible,--no one in this world would see me
more. Yes, I believe I should find courage to kill a man who,
seeing me in that situation, should talk to me of love.

You now know my mind to its depths. Perhaps I ought to thank you
for having written to me. After receiving your letter, and, above
all, after making you this reply, I could be at my ease with you
in Camille's house, I could act out my natural self, and be what
you ask of me; but I hardly need speak to you of the bitter
ridicule that would overwhelm me if my eyes or my manner ceased to
express the sentiments of which you complain. A second robbery
from Camille would be a proof of her want of power which no woman
could twice forgive. Even if I loved you, if I were blind to all
else, if I forgot all else, I should still see Camille! Her love
for you is a barrier too high to be o'erleaped by any power, even
by the wings of an angel; none but a devil would fail to recoil
before such treachery. In this, my dear Calyste, are many motives
which delicate and noble women keep to themselves, of which you
men know nothing; nor could you understand them, even though you
were all as like our sex as you yourself appear to be at this
moment.

My child, you have a mother who has shown you what you ought to be
in life. She is pure and spotless; she fulfils her destiny nobly;
what I have heard of her has filled my eyes with tears, and in the
depths of my heart I envy her. I, too, might have been what she
is! Calyste, that is the woman your wife should be, and such
should be her life. I will never send you back, in jest, as I have
done, to that little Charlotte, who would weary you to death; but
I do commend you to some divine young girl who is worthy of your
love.

If I were yours, your life would be blighted. You would have given
me your whole existence, and I--you see, I am frank--I should have
taken it; I should have gone with you, Heaven knows where, far
from the world! But I should have made you most unhappy; for I am
jealous. I see lions lurking in the path, and monsters in drops of
water. I am made wretched by trifles that most women put up with;
inexorable thoughts--from my heart, not yours--would poison our
existence and destroy my life. If a man, after ten years'
happiness, were not as respectful and as delicate as he was to me
at first, I should resent the change; it would abase me in my own
eyes! Such a lover could not believe in the Amadis and the Cyrus
of my dreams. To-day true love is but a dream, not a reality. I
see in yours only the joy of a desire the end of which is, as yet,
unperceived by you.

For myself, I am not forty years old; I have not bent my pride
beneath the yoke of experience,--in short, I am a woman too young
to be anything but odious. I will not answer for my temper; my
grace and charm are all external. Perhaps I have not yet suffered
enough to have the indulgent manners and the absolute tenderness
which come to us from cruel disappointments. Happiness has its
insolence, and I, I fear, am insolent. Camille will be always your
devoted slave; I should be an unreasonable tyrant. Besides,
Camille was brought to you by your guardian angel, at the turning
point of your life, to show you the career you ought to follow,--a
career in which you cannot fail.

I know Felicite! her tenderness is inexhaustible; she may ignore
the graces of our sex, but she possesses that fruitful strength,
that genius for constancy, that noble intrepidity which makes us
willing to accept the rest. She will marry you to some young girl,
no matter what she suffers. She will find you a free Beatrix--if
it is a Beatrix indeed who answers to your desires in a wife, and
to your dreams; she will smooth all the difficulties in your way.
The sale of a single acre of her ground in Paris would free your
property in Brittany; she will make you her heir; are you not
already her son by adoption?

Alas! what could I do for your happiness? Nothing. Do not betray
that infinite love which contents itself with the duties of
motherhood. Ah! I think her very fortunate, my Camille! She can
well afford to forgive your feeling for poor Beatrix; women of her
age are indulgent to such fancies. When they are sure of being
loved, they will pardon a passing infidelity; in fact, it is often
one of their keenest pleasures to triumph over a younger rival.
Camille is above such women, and that remark does not refer to
her; but I make it to ease your mind.

I have studied Camille closely; she is, to my eyes, one of the
greatest women of our age. She has mind and she has goodness,--two
qualities almost irreconcilable in woman; she is generous and
simple,--two other grandeurs seldom found together in our sex. I
have seen in the depths of her soul such treasures that the
beautiful line of Dante on eternal happiness, which I heard her
interpreting to you the other day, "Senza brama sicura ricchezza,"
seems as if made for her. She has talked to me of her career; she
has related her life, showing me how love, that object of our
prayers, our dreams, has ever eluded her. I replied that she
seemed to me an instance of the difficulty, if not the
impossibility, of uniting in one person two great glories.

You, Calyste, are one of the angelic souls whose mate it seems
impossible to find; but Camille will obtain for you, even if she
dies in doing so, the hand of some young girl with whom you can
make a happy home.

For myself, I hold out to you a friendly hand, and I count, not on
your heart, but on your mind, to make