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

“Ah, good morning, dear Hortense!” said Mademoiselle d’Herouville, kissing the duchess with the sympathy that united their haughty natures; “let me present to you and to the dear duke our little angel, Mademoiselle de La Bastie.”

“We have heard so much of you, mademoiselle,” said the duchess, “that we were in haste to receive you.”

“And regret the time lost,” added the Duc de Verneuil, with courteous admiration.

“Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie,” said the grand equerry, taking the colonel by the arm and presenting him to the duke and duchess, with an air of respect in his tone and gesture.

“I am glad to welcome you, Monsieur le comte!” said Monsieur de Verneuil. “You possess more than one treasure,” he added, looking at Modeste.

The duchess took Modeste under her arm and led her into an immense salon, where a dozen or more women were grouped about the fireplace. The men of the party remained with the duke on the terrace, except Canalis, who respectfully made his way to the superb Eleonore. The Duchesse de Chaulieu, seated at an embroidery-frame, was showing Mademoiselle de Verneuil how to shade a flower.

If Modeste had run a needle through her finger when handling a pin-cushion she could not have felt a sharper prick than she received from the cold and haughty and contemptuous stare with which Madame de Chaulieu favored her. For an instant she saw nothing but that one woman, and she saw through her. To understand the depths of cruelty to which these charming creatures, whom our passions deify, can go, we must see women with each other. Modeste would have disarmed almost any other than Eleonore by the perfectly stupid and involuntary admiration which her face betrayed. Had she not known the duchess’s age she would have thought her a woman of thirty-six; but other and greater astonishments awaited her.

The poet had run plump against a great lady’s anger. Such anger is the worst of sphinxes; the face is radiant, all the rest menacing. Kings themselves cannot make the exquisite politeness of a mistress’s cold anger capitulate when she guards it with steel armor. Canalis tried to cling to the steel, but his fingers slipped on the polished surface, like his words on the heart; and the gracious face, the gracious words, the gracious bearing of the duchess hid the steel of her wrath, now fallen to twenty-five below zero, from all observers. The appearance of Modeste in her sublime beauty, and dressed as well as Diane de Maufrigneuse herself, had fired the train of gunpowder which reflection had been laying in Eleonore’s mind.

All the women had gone to the windows to see the new wonder get out of the royal carriage, attended by her three suitors.

“Do not let us seem so curious,” Madame de Chaulieu had said, cut to the heart by Diane’s exclamation, — ”She is divine! where in the world does she come from?” — and with that the bevy flew back to their seats, resuming their composure, though Eleonore’s heart was full of hungry vipers all clamorous for a meal.

Mademoiselle d’Herouville said in a low voice and with much meaning to the Duchesse de Verneuil, “Eleonore receives her Melchior very ungraciously.”

“The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse thinks there is a coolness between them,” said Laure de Verneuil, with simplicity.

Charming phrase! so often used in the world of society, — how the north wind blows through it.

“Why so?” asked Modeste of the pretty young girl who had lately left the Sacre-Coeur.

“The great poet,” said the pious duchess — making a sign to her daughter to be silent — ”left Madame de Chaulieu without a letter for more than two weeks after he went to Havre, having told her that he went there for his health — ”

Modeste made a hasty movement, which caught the attention of Laure, Helene, and Mademoiselle d’Herouville.

“ — and during that time,” continued the devout duchess, “she was endeavoring to have him appointed commander of the Legion of honor, and minister at Baden.”

“Oh, that was shameful in Canalis; he owes everything to her,” exclaimed Mademoiselle d’Herouville.

“Why did not Madame de Chaulieu come to Havre?” asked Modeste of Helene, innocently.

“My dear,” said the Duchesse de Verneuil, “she would let herself be cut in little pieces without saying a word. Look at her, — she is regal; her head would smile, like Mary Stuart’s, after it was cut off; in fact, she has some of that blood in her veins.”

“Did she not write to him?” asked Modeste.

“Diane tells me,” answered the duchess, prompted by a nudge from Mademoiselle d’Herouville, “that in answer to Canalis’s first letter she made a cutting reply a few days ago.”

This explanation made Modeste blush with shame for the man before her; she longed, not to crush him under her feet, but to revenge herself by one of those malicious acts that are sharper than a dagger’s thrust. She looked haughtily at the Duchesse de Chaulieu —

“Monsieur Melchior!” she said.

All the women snuffed the air and looked alternately at the duchess, who was talking in an undertone to Canalis over the embroidery-frame, and then at the young girl so ill brought up as to disturb a lovers’ meeting, — a think not permissible in any society. Diane de Maufrigneuse nodded, however, as much as to say, “The child is in the right of it.” All the women ended by smiling at each other; they were enraged with a woman who was fifty-six years old and still handsome enough to put her fingers into the treasury and steal the dues of youth. Melchior looked at Modeste with feverish impatience, and made the gesture of a master to a valet, while the duchess lowered her head with the movement of a lioness disturbed at a meal; her eyes, fastened on the canvas, emitted red flames in the direction of the poet, which stabbed like epigrams, for each word revealed to her a triple insult.

“Monsieur Melchior!” said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its right to be heard.

“What, mademoiselle?” demanded the poet.

Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa. What bitter reflections came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from Eleonore. If he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between himself and his protectress. Not to obey her was to avow his slavery, to lose the chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and to disregard the plainest laws of decency and civility. The greater the folly, the more imperatively the duchess exacted it. Modeste’s beauty and money thus pitted against Eleonore’s rights and influence made this hesitation between the man and his honor as terrible to witness as the peril of a matador in the arena. A man seldom feels such palpitations as those which now came near causing Canalis an aneurism, except, perhaps, before the green table, where his fortune or his ruin is about to be decided.

“Mademoiselle d’Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left behind me,” said Modeste to Canalis, “my handkerchief — ”

Canalis shrugged his shoulders significantly.

“And,” continued Modeste, taking no notice of his gesture, “I had tied into one corner of it the key of a desk which contains the fragment of an important letter; have the kindness, Monsieur Melchior, to get it for me.”

Between an angel and a tiger equally enraged Canalis, who had turned livid, no longer hesitated, — the tiger seemed to him the least dangerous of the two; and he was about to do as he was told, and commit himself irretrievably, when La Briere appeared at the door of the salon, seeming to his anguished mind like the archangel Gabriel tumbling from heaven.