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

treasure, — not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if

need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with

armor of proof on which is engraved the word “Disdain.” I have the

deepest horror of all that is calculating, — of all that is not

pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,

the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart

of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various

things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about

Society and social life.

For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why

seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,

but your mind, your heart I know ; they please me, and I feel an

infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius

for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be

wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a

precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You

will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl’s

thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering

to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good

fortune of the soul, — the honest confidences of an honest girl.

Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in

her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters

warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await

you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the

castle, the palace — I don’t know yet what sort of bower it will

be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be

possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and

that Mademoiselle d’Este has a complying disposition. Has she not

left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the

salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high

emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?

No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me

when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I

have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear

friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have

known through the experience of another all the horrors and the

delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can

contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have

no illusions; but I have something better, something real, — I have

beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.

Whoever I marry — provided I choose him for myself — may sleep in

peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his

return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;

and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he

has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to

follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the

divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why

should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the

life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that

woman be who thwarts the man she loves? — an illness, a disease,

not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour

a pleasure.

But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.

Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an

expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family

life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is

possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as

women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now

no longer a chimera.

Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the

reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable

fortress. I have read your last verses in the “Revue,” — ah! with

what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of

your secret soul.

Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;

that you are her solitary thought, — without a rival except in her

father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject

these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but

yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet

that your confidences — provided they are full and true — will

suffice for the happiness of your

O. d’Este M.

“Good heavens! can I be in love already?” cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. “What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?”

Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.

Mademoiselle, — Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in

the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him

if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless

regrets, — showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it

only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?

I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you

have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man

can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines

such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with

so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your

first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain

my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble

the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the

little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble

remonstrances.

Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less

true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less

insincere, — for those which we write to each other are the

expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the

general tenor of our lives, — do you believe, I say, that beautiful

as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we

could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily

intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the

heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,

to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of

at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to

harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark

in passing, is very rare.

The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul