Array The griffin classics - The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac

imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,

perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where

you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which

drives all poetry from the manuscript?

But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life

you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose

mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can

equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that

no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,

what will you gain, — you, a young girl, brought up to be the

virtuous mother of a family, — if you learn to comprehend the

terrible agitations of a poet’s life in this dreadful capital,

which may be defined by one sentence, — the hell in which men love.

If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl

thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and

write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of

degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one

of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?

Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within

you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,

alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too

much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.

Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,

tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you

have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious

ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet

of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what

every pure young girl should be, — a good woman, the virtuous

mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can

make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound

a woman’s proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no

experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before

she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,

to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such

qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.

Hear the whole truth, — do I not owe it to you in return for your

intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great

renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man

to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore

poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He

becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we

say: “I thought her far more lovely.” She has not warranted the

portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter, — the

fairy whose name is Imagination.

Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a

sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the

burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears

them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now

when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will

suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a

distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining

summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world

of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once

admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.

I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised

entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can

take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing

from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an

unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.

Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all

women, even those who are disguised and masked.

So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an imagination on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one, — fancying all things, except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep?

All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air. The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness of the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. “Ah, there is the poet!” thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing the wheezing voice of the outer world.

“He is right, and I am wrong,” she said to herself. “But who could ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but one of Moliere’s old men?”

When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, “flagrante delicto,” she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been misguided, — partly by her reading, partly by her sister’s sorrows, and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life, — was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the hearts of young girls.

CHAPTER VIII. BLADE TO BLADE

To Monsieur de Canalis:

Monsieur, — You are certainly a great poet, and you are something

more, — an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a

young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you

enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following

question?

Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine,

— would your ideas, your language have been the same, — had some

one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.

d’Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a

master?

Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with

yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing

that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your

confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an

answer to your first letter.

Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do

homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to

remain always,

Your humble servant, O. d’Este M.

When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have settled the matter in a single phrase, “The girl is a little hussy.” But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways energetically.