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

mother, who pressed her hands and wept for joy.

A week after the baron's funeral, Mademoiselle des Touches, the Baronne du Guenic and Calyste started for Paris, leaving the household in charge of old Zephirine.


XVII. A DEATH: A MARRIAGE

Felicite's tender love was preparing for Calyste a prosperous future. Being allied to the family of Grandlieu, the ducal branch of which was ending in five daughters for lack of a male heir, she had written to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, describing Calyste and giving his history, and also stating certain intentions of her own, which were as follows: She had lately sold her house in the rue du Mont-Blanc, for which a party of speculators had given her two millions five hundred thousand francs. Her man of business had since purchased for her a charming new house in the rue de Bourbon for seven hundred thousand francs; one million she intended to devote to the recovery of the du Guenic estates, and the rest of her fortune she desired to settle upon Sabine de Grandlieu. Felicite had long known the plans of the duke and duchess as to the settlement of their five daughters: the youngest was to marry the Vicomte de Grandlieu, the heir to their ducal title; Clotilde-Frederique, the second daughter, desired to remain unmarried, in memory of a man she had deeply loved, Lucien de Rubempre, while, at the same time, she did not wish to become a nun like her eldest sister; two of the remaining sisters were already married, and the youngest but one, the pretty Sabine, just twenty years old, was the only disposable daughter left. It was Sabine on whom Felicite resolved to lay the burden of curing Calyste's passion for Beatrix.

During the journey to Paris Mademoiselle des Touches revealed to the baroness these arrangements. The new house in the rue de Bourbon was being decorated, and she intended it for the home of Sabine and Calyste if her plans succeeded.

The party had been invited to stay at the hotel de Grandlieu, where the baroness was received with all the distinction due to her rank as the wife of a du Guenic and the daughter of a British peer. Mademoiselle des Touches urged Calyste to see Paris, while she herself made the necessary inquiries about Beatrix (who had disappeared from the world, and was travelling abroad), and she took care to throw him into the midst of diversions and amusements of all kinds. The season for balls and fetes was just beginning, and the duchess and her daughters did the honors of Paris to the young Breton, who was insensibly diverted from his own thoughts by the movement and life of the great city. He found some resemblance of mind between Madame de Rochefide and Sabine de Grandlieu, who was certainly one of the handsomest and most charming girls in Parisian society, and this fancied likeness made him give to her coquetries a willing attention which no other woman could possibly have obtained from him. Sabine herself was greatly pleased with Calyste, and matters went so well that during the winter of 1837 the young Baron du Guenic, whose youth and health had returned to him, listened without repugnance to his mother when she reminded him of the promise made to his dying father and proposed to him a marriage with Sabine de Grandlieu. Still, while agreeing to fulfil his promise, he concealed within his soul an indifference to all things, of which the baroness alone was aware, but which she trusted would be conquered by the pleasures of a happy home.

On the day when the Grandlieu family and the baroness, accompanied by her relations who came from England for this occasion, assembled in the grand salon of the hotel de Grandlieu to sign the marriage contract, and Leopold Hannequin, the family notary, explained the preliminaries of that contract before reading it, Calyste, on whose forehead every one present might have noticed clouds, suddenly and curtly refused to accept the benefactions offered him by Mademoiselle des Touches. Did he still count on Felicite's devotion to recover Beatrix? In the midst of the embarrassment and stupefaction of the assembled families, Sabine de Grandlieu entered the room and gave him a letter, explaining that Mademoiselle des Touches had requested her to give it to him on this occasion.

Calyste turned away from the company to the embrasure of a window and read as follows:--

Camille Maupin to Calyste.

Calyste, before I enter my convent cell I am permitted to cast a
look upon the world I am now to leave for a life of prayer and
solitude. That look is to you, who have been the whole world to me
in these last months. My voice will reach you, if my calculations
do not miscarry, at the moment of a ceremony I am unable to take
part in.

On the day when you stand before the altar giving your hand and
name to a young and charming girl who can love you openly before
earth and heaven, I shall be before another altar in a convent at
Nantes betrothed forever to Him who will neither fail nor betray
me. But I do not write to sadden you,--only to entreat you not to
hinder by false delicacy the service I have wished to do you since
we first met. Do not contest my rights so dearly bought.

If love is suffering, ah! I have loved you indeed, my Calyste. But
feel no remorse; the only happiness I have known in life I owe to
you; the pangs were caused by my own self. Make me compensation,
then, for all those pangs, those sorrows, by causing me an
everlasting joy. Let the poor Camille, who _is_ no longer, still
be something in the material comfort you enjoy. Dear, let me be
like the fragrance of flowers in your life, mingling myself with
it unseen and not importunate.

To you, Calyste, I shall owe my eternal happiness; will you not
accept a few paltry and fleeting benefits from me? Surely you will
not be wanting in generosity? Do you not see in this the last
message of a renounced love? Calyste, the world without you had
nothing more for me; you made it the most awful of solitudes; and
you have thus brought Camille Maupin, the unbeliever, the writer
of books, which I am soon to repudiate solemnly--you have cast
her, daring and perverted, bound hand and foot, before God.

I am to-day what I might have been, what I was born to be,
--innocent, and a child. I have washed my robes in the tears of
repentance; I can come before the altar whither my guardian angel,
my beloved Calyste, has led me. With what tender comfort I give
you that name, which the step I now take sanctifies. I love you
without self-seeking, as a mother loves her son, as the Church
loves her children. I can pray for you and for yours without one
thought or wish except for your happiness. Ah! if you only knew
the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in
thought above all petty earthly interests, and how precious is the
thought of DOING (as your noble motto days) our duty, you would
enter your beautiful new life with unfaltering step and never a
glance behind you or about you. Above all, my earnest prayer to
you is that you be faithful to yourself and to those belonging to
you. Dear, society, in which you are to live, cannot exist without
the religion of duty, and you will terribly mistake it, as I
mistook it, if you allow yourself to yield to passion and to
fancy, as I did. Woman is the equal of man only in making her life
a continual offering, as that of man is a perpetual action; my
life has been, on the contrary, one long egotism. If may be that
God placed you, toward evening, by the door of my house, as a
messenger from Himself, bearing my punishment and my pardon.

Heed this confession of a woman to whom fame has been like a
pharos, warning her of the only true path. Be wise, be noble;
sacrifice your fancy to your duties, as head of your race, as
husband, as father. Raise the fallen standard of the old du
Guenics; show to this century of irreligion and want of principle
what a gentleman is in all his grandeur and his honor. Dear child
of my soul, let me play the part of a mother to you; your own
mother will not be jealous of this voice from a tomb, these hands
uplifted to heaven, imploring blessings on you. To-day, more than
ever, does rank and nobility need fortune. Calyste, accept a part
of mine, and make a worthy use of it. It is not a gift; it is a
trust I place in your hands. I have thought more of your children
and of your old Breton house than of you in offering you the
profits which time has brought to my property in Paris.

"Let us now sign the contract," said the young baron, returning to the assembled company.

The Abbe Grimont, to whom the honor of the conversion of this celebrated woman was attributed, became, soon after, vicar-general of the diocese.

The following week, after the marriage ceremony, which, according to the custom of many families of the faubourg Saint-Germain, was celebrated at seven in the morning at the church of Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Calyste and Sabine got into their pretty travelling-carriage, amid the tears, embraces, and congratulations of a score of friends, collected under the awning of the hotel de Grandlieu. The congratulations came from the four witnesses, and the men present; the tears were in the eyes of the Duchesse de Grandlieu and her daughter Clotilde, who both trembled under the weight of the same thought,--

"She is launched upon the sea of life! Poor Sabine! at the mercy of a man who does not marry entirely of his own free will."

Marriage is not wholly made up of pleasures,--as fugitive in that relation as in all others; it involves compatibility of temper, physical sympathies, harmonies of character, which make of that social necessity an eternal problem. Marriageable daughters, as well as mothers, know the terms as well as the dangers of this lottery; and that is why women weep at a wedding while men smile; men believe that they risk nothing, while women know, or very nearly know, what they risk.

In another carriage, which preceded the married pair, was the Baronne du Guenic, to whom the duchess had said at parting,--

"You are a mother, though you have only had one son; try to take my place to my dear Sabine."

On the box of the bridal carriage sat a _chasseur_, who acted as courier, and in the rumble were two waiting-maids. The four postilions dressed in their finest uniforms, for each carriage was drawn by four horses,