Honore de Balzac - Analytical Studies

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"In truth, madame," he says with acrimony as he enters his wife's
room, where she is finishing her toilette, "you seem to have lost your
habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty
persons will soon learn--"

"That you are director-general!" she cries, showing him a royal
despatch.

He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now
another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.

"I well know," he says, "that justice would be rendered me under
whatever ministers I served."

"Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
and his eminence the Cardinal de ----- of whom he is the--"

"M. de Villeplaine?"

This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the
smile of a director-general:

"Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!"

"Ah! don't thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to
you."

On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring
rain, or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the
cafe, or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried
away by an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There
he sank into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as
if he would say:

"Well, after all, she is my wife!"

The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it
with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then,
with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke,
with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and
master. Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on
hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with,
madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting
the hare.

"Where the devil did she get that--but it's a random shot!" he says to
himself.

From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee.
Madame retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is
interesting, and this husband, a very superior man, is quite
astonished to discover the wit of his wife, in other respects, an
accomplished woman; the right word occurs to her with wonderful
readiness; her tact and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo with
charming originality. She is no longer the same woman. She notices the
effect she produces upon her husband, and both to avenge herself for
his neglect and to win his admiration for the lover from whom she has
received, so to speak, the treasures of her intellect, she exerts
herself, and becomes actually dazzling. The husband, better able than
any one else to appreciate a species of compensation which may have
some influence on his future, is led to think that the passions of
women are really necessary to their mental culture.

But how shall we treat those compensations which are most pleasing to
husbands?

Between the moment when the last symptoms appear, and the epoch of
conjugal peace, which we will not stop to discuss, almost a dozen
years have elapsed. During this interval and before the married couple
sign the treaty which, by means of a sincere reconciliation of the
feminine subject with her lawful lord, consecrates their little
matrimonial restoration, in order to close in, as Louis XVIII said,
the gulf of revolutions, it is seldom that the honest woman has but
one lover. Anarchy has its inevitable phases. The stormy domination of
tribunes is supplanted by that of the sword and the pen, for few loves
are met with whose constancy outlives ten years. Therefore, since our
calculations prove that an honest woman has merely paid strictly her
physiological or diabolical dues by rendering but three men happy, it
is probable that she has set foot in more than one region of love.
Sometimes it may happen that in an interregnum of love too long
protracted, the wife, whether from whim, temptation or the desire of
novelty, undertakes to seduce her own husband.

Imagine charming Mme. de T-----, the heroine of our Meditation of
_Strategy_, saying with a fascinating smile:

"I never before found you so agreeable!"

By flattery after flattery, she tempts, she rouses curiosity, she
soothes, she rouses in you the faintest spark of desire, she carries
you away with her, and makes you proud of yourself. Then the right of
indemnifications for her husband comes. On this occasion the wife
confounds the imagination of her husband. Like cosmopolitan travelers
she tells tales of all the countries which she had traversed. She
intersperses her conversation with words borrowed from several
languages. The passionate imagery of the Orient, the unique emphasis
of Spanish phraseology, all meet and jostle one another. She opens out
the treasures of her notebook with all the mysteries of coquetry, she
is delightful, you never saw her thus before! With that remarkable art
which women alone possess of making their own everything that has been
told them, she blends all shades and variations of character so as to
create a manner peculiarly her own. You received from the hands of
Hymen only one woman, awkward and innocent; the celibate returns you a
dozen of them. A joyful and rapturous husband sees his bed invaded by
the giddy and wanton courtesans, of whom we spoke in the Meditation on
_The First Symptoms_. These goddesses come in groups, they smile and
sport under the graceful muslin curtains of the nuptial bed. The
Phoenician girl flings to you her garlands, gently sways herself to
and fro; the Chalcidian woman overcomes you by the witchery of her
fine and snowy feet; the Unelmane comes and speaking the dialect of
fair Ionia reveals the treasures of happiness unknown before, and in
the study of which she makes you experience but a single sensation.

Filled with regret at having disdained so many charms, and frequently
tired of finding too often as much perfidiousness in priestesses of
Venus as in honest women, the husband sometimes hurries on by his
gallantry the hour of reconciliation desired of worthy people. The
aftermath of bliss is gathered even with greater pleasure, perhaps,
than the first crop. The Minotaur took your gold, he makes restoration
in diamonds. And really now seems the time to state a fact of the
utmost importance. A man may have a wife without possessing her. Like
most husbands you had hitherto received nothing from yours, and the
powerful intervention of the celibate was needed to make your union
complete. How shall we give a name to this miracle, perhaps the only
one wrought upon a patient during his absence? Alas, my brothers, we
did not make Nature!

But how many other compensations, not less precious, are there, by
which the noble and generous soul of the young celibate may many a
time purchase his pardon! I recollect witnessing one of the most
magnificent acts of reparation which a lover should perform toward the
husband he is minotaurizing.

One warm evening in the summer of 1817, I saw entering one of the
rooms of Tortoni one of the two hundred young men whom we confidently
style our friends; he was in the full bloom of his modesty. A lovely
woman, dressed in perfect taste, and who had consented to enter one of
the cool parlors devoted to people of fashion, had stepped from an
elegant carriage which had stopped on the boulevard, and was
approaching on foot along the sidewalk. My young friend, the celibate,
then appeared and offered his arm to his queen, while the husband
followed holding by the hand two little boys, beautiful as cupids. The
two lovers, more nimble than the father of the family, reached in
advance of him one of the small rooms pointed out by the attendant. In
crossing the vestibule the husband knocked up against some dandy, who
claimed that he had been jostled. Then arose a quarrel, whose
seriousness was betrayed by the sharp tones of the altercation. The
moment the dandy was about to make a gesture unworthy of a
self-respecting man, the celibate intervened, seized the dandy by the
arm, caught him off his guard, overcame and threw him to the ground;
it
was magnificent. He had done the very thing the aggressor was
meditating, as he exclaimed:

"Monsieur!"

This "Monsieur" was one of the finest things I have ever heard. It was
as if the young celibate had said: "This father of a family belongs to
me; as I have carried off his honor, it is mine to defend him. I know
my duty, I am his substitute and will fight for him." The young woman
behaved superbly! Pale, and bewildered, she took the arm of her
husband, who continued his objurgations; without a word she led him
away to the carriage, together with her children. She was one of those
women of the aristocracy, who also know how to retain their dignity
and self-control in the midst of violent emotions.

"O Monsieur Adolphe!" cried the young lady as she saw her friend with
an air of gayety take his seat in the carriage.

"It is nothing, madame, he is one of my friends; we have shaken
hands."

Nevertheless, the next morning, the courageous celibate received a
sword thrust which nearly proved fatal, and confined him six months to
his bed. The attentions of the married couple were lavished upon him.
What numerous compensations do we see here! Some years afterwards, an
old uncle of the husband, whose opinions did not fit in with those of
the young friend of the house, and who nursed a grudge against him on
account of some political discussion, undertook to have him driven
from the house. The old fellow went so far as to tell his nephew to
choose between being his heir and sending away the presumptuous
celibate. It was then that the worthy stockbroker said to his uncle:

"Ah, you must never think, uncle, that you will succeed in making me
ungrateful! But if I tell him to do so this young man will let himself
be killed for you. He has saved my credit, he would go through fire
and water for me, he has relieved me of my wife, he has brought me
clients, he has procured for me almost all the business in the Villele
loans--I owe my life to him, he is the father of my children; I can
never forget all this."

In this case the compensations may be looked upon as complete; but
unfortunately there are compensations of all kinds. There are those
which must be considered negative, deluding, and those which are both
in one.

I knew a husband of advanced years who was possessed by the demon of
gambling. Almost every evening his wife's lover came and played with
him. The celibate gave him a liberal share of the pleasures which come
from games of hazard, and knew how to lose to him a certain number of
francs every month; but madame used to give them to him, and the
compensation was a deluding one.

You are a peer of France, and you have no offspring but daughters.
Your wife is brought to bed of a boy! The compensation is negative.

The child who is to save your name from oblivion is like his mother.
The duchess persuades you that the child is yours. The negative
compensation becomes deluding.

Here is one of the most charming compensations known. One morning the
Prince de Ligne meets his wife's lover and rushes up to him, laughing
wildly:

"My friend," he says to him, "I cuckolded you, last night!"

If some husbands attain to conjugal peace by quiet methods, and carry
so gracefully the imaginary ensigns of matrimonial pre-eminence, their
philosophy is doubtless based on the _comfortabilisme_ of accepting
certain compensations, a _comfortabilisme_ which indifferent men
cannot imagine. As years roll by the married couple reach the last
stage in that artificial existence to which their union has condemned
them.

MEDITATION XXIX.

OF CONJUGAL PEACE.

My imagination has followed marriage through all the phases of its
fantastic life in so fraternal a spirit, that I seem to have grown old
with the house I made my home so early in life at the commencement of
this work.

After experiencing in thought the ardor of man's first passion; and
outlining, in however imperfect a way, the principal incidents of
married life; after struggling against so many wives that did not
belong to me, exhausting myself in conflict with so many personages
called up from nothingness, and joining so many battles, I feel an
intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything in life hang, as
it were, in mournful crape. I seem to have a catarrh, to look at
everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled,
as if I must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my
book in apologizing for the follies of the first half.

I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father,
and seated beside a wife I never married. I think I can feel wrinkles
furrowing my brow. The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if
in derision, the room is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with
sudden fright as I lay my hand upon my heart, and ask myself: "Is
that, too, withered?"

I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never
accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic
maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.
No face can delude me. I am melancholy and overcast with gloom. I know
the world and it has no more illusions for me. My closest friends have
proved traitors. My wife and myself exchange glances of profound
meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which
pierces the heart of the other through and through. I stagnate in a
dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old man
possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is
growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to
philosophers, dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to
cheat death; for that which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can
it be called life?

Oh, to die young and throbbing with life! 'Tis a destiny enviable
indeed! For is not this, as a delightful poet has said, "to take away
with one all one's illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with
all one's jewels and treasures, with all that makes the fortune of
humanity!"

How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent
spirit that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which
nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe
the soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of
touch, in making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing
our humors so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as
we were to the beginnings of life, this maternal care which she
lavishes on our frail tabernacle of clay, she also exhibits in regard
to the emotions of man, and to the double existence which is created
by conjugal love. She first sends us Confidence, which with extended
hand and open heart says to us: "Behold, I am thine forever!"
Lukewarmness follows, walking with languid tread, turning aside her
blonde face with a yawn, like a young widow obliged to listen to the
minister of state who is ready to sign for her a pension warrant. Then
Indifference comes; she stretches herself on the divan, taking no care
to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire but now lifted so
chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with
modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it
is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae
with which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical
Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful
brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of
life's incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous
combat. She reckons up the arrearages, with farmers, and calculates
the dowry of a child. She materializes everything. By a touch of her
wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now
it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts,
it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing
paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and
happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity,
in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other,
and the sluggish organs perform their functions.

"This is horrible!" I cried; "I am young and full of life! Perish all
the books in the world rather than my illusions should perish!"

I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris. As I saw the
fairest faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old. The first
young woman who appeared before me, lovely in face and form and
dressed to perfection, with one glance of fire made all the sorcery
whose spells I had voluntarily submitted to vanish into thin air.
Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place
which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of
the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book.
Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as
I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator
himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as I then saw
before me.

Imagine a woman of fifty, dressed in a jacket of reddish brown merino,
holding in her left hand a green cord, which was tied to the collar of
an English terrier, and with her right arm linked with that of a man
in knee-breeches and silk stockings, whose hat had its brim
whimsically turned up, while snow-white tufts of hair like pigeon
plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed
about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it
could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This
couple assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband,
who was at least seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier
began to gambol. I hastened to pass this living impersonation of my
Meditation, and was surprised to the last degree to recognize the
Marquis de T-----, friend of the Comte de Noce, who had owed me for a
long time the end of the interrupted story which I related in the
_Theory of the Bed_. [See Meditation XVII.]

"I have the honor to present to you the Marquise de T-----," he said
to me.

I made a low bow to a lady whose face was pale and wrinkled; her
forehead was surmounted by a toupee, whose flattened ringlets, ranged
around it, deceived no one, but only emphasized, instead of
concealing, the wrinkles by which it was deeply furrowed. The lady was
slightly roughed, and had the appearance of an old country actress.

"I do not see, sir, what you can say against a marriage such as ours,"
said the old man to me.

"The laws of Rome forefend!" I cried, laughing.

The marchioness gave me a look filled with inquietude as well as
disapprobation, which seemed to say, "Is it possible that at my age I
have become but a concubine?"

We sat down upon a bench, in the gloomy clump of trees planted at the
corner of the high terrace which commands La Place Louis XV, on the
side of the Garde-Meuble. Autumn had already begun to strip the trees
of their foliage, and was scattering before our eyes the yellow leaves
of his garland; but the sun nevertheless filled the air with grateful
warmth.

"Well, is your work finished?" asked the old man, in the unctuous
tones peculiar to men of the ancient aristocracy.

And with these words he gave a sardonic smile, as if for commentary.

"Very nearly, sir," I replied. "I have come to the philosophic
situation, which you appear to have reached, but I confess that I--"

"You are searching for ideas?" he added--finishing for me a sentence,
which I confess I did not know how to end.

"Well," he continued, "you may boldly assume, that on arriving at the
winter of his life, a man--a man who thinks, I mean--ends by denying
that love has any existence, in the wild form with which our illusions
invested it!"

"What! would you deny the existence of love on the day after that of
marriage?"

"In the first place, the day after would be the very reason; but my
marriage was a commercial speculation," replied he, stooping to speak
into my ear. "I have thereby purchased the care, the attention, the
services which I need; and I am certain to obtain all the
consideration my age demands; for I have willed all my property to my
nephew, and as my wife will be rich only during my life, you can
imagine how--"

I turned on the old marquis a look so piercing that he wrung my hand
and said: "You seem to have a good heart, for nothing is certain in
this life--"

"Well, you may be sure that I have arranged a pleasant surprise for
her in my will," he replied, gayly.

"Come here, Joseph," cried the marchioness, approaching a servant who
carried an overcoat lined with silk. "The marquis is probably feeling
the cold."

The old marquis put on his overcoat, buttoned it up, and taking my
arm, led me to the sunny side of the terrace.

"In your work," he continued, "you have doubtless spoken of the love
of a young man. Well, if you wish to act up to the scope which you
give to your work--in the word ec--elec--"

"Eclectic," I said, smiling, seeing he could not remember this
philosophic term.

"I know the word well!" he replied. "If then you wish to keep your vow
of eclecticism, you should be willing to express certain virile ideas
on the subject of love which I will communicate to you, and I will not
grudge you the benefit of them, if benefit there be; I wish to
bequeath my property to you, but this will be all that you will get of
it."

"There is no money fortune which is worth as much as a fortune of
ideas if they be valuable ideas! I shall, therefore, listen to you
with a grateful mind."

"There is no such thing as love," pursued the old man, fixing his gaze
upon me. "It is not even a sentiment, it is an unhappy necessity,
which is midway between the needs of the body and those of the soul.
But siding for a moment with your youthful thoughts, let us try to
reason upon this social malady. I suppose that you can only conceive
of love as either a need or a sentiment."

I made a sign of assent.

"Considered as a need," said the old man, "love makes itself felt last
of all our needs, and is the first to cease. We are inclined to love
in our twentieth year, to speak in round numbers, and we cease to do
so at fifty. During these thirty years, how often would the need be
felt, if it were not for the provocation of city manners, and the
modern custom of living in the presence of not one woman, but of women
in general? What is our debt to the perpetuation of the race? It
probably consists in producing as many children as we have breasts--so
that if one dies the other may live. If these two children were always
faithfully produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of
people would constitute a population too great for France, for the
soil is not sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against
misery and hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of
throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of
travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of
marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only
profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now
demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness
of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our
existence. Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the
other hand, refuses absolutely to grant the excess which our
imagination sometimes craves in love. It is, therefore, the last of
our needs, and the only one which may be forgotten without causing any
disturbance in the economy of the body. Love is a social luxury like
lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it as a sentiment, we find two
distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure and passion. Now analyze
pleasure. Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction and
repulsion. Attraction is a universal feeling for those things which
flatter our instinct of self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise
of the same instinct when it tells us that something is near which
threatens it with injury. Everything which profoundly moves our
organization gives us a deeper sense of our existence; such a thing is
pleasure. It is contracted of desire, of effort, and the joy of
possessing something or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of
pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always
precludes the enjoyment of all others. Now, love is the least keen and
the least durable of our pleasures. In what would you say the pleasure
of love consists? Does it lie in the beauty of the beloved? In one
evening you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques; but at the
end of a month you will in this way have burnt out all your sentiment
for all time. Would you love a women because she is well dressed,
elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit? Do not call
this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism. Do you love her because
she is intellectual? You are in that case merely obeying the dictates
of literary sentiment."

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