The Muse of the Department by Honoré de Balzac (reading the story of the txt) 📖

next
day in this iron cage. All through
the day I bellowed with rage in the

OR ROMAN REVENGE
225

darkness of this cellar, over which
is the Duchess' bedroom. At night
an ingenious counterpoise acting as
a lift raised me through the floor,
and I saw the Duchess in her lover's
arms. She threw me a piece of
bread, my daily pittance.

"Thus have I lived for thirty
months! From this marble prison
my cries can reach no ear. There is
no chance for me. I will hope no
more. Indeed, the Duchess' room is
at the furthest end of the palace,
and when I am carried up there
none can hear my voice. Each time
I see my wife she shows me the

226
OLYMPIA

poison I had prepared for her and
her lover. I crave it for myself, but
she will not let me die; she gives
me bread, and I eat it.

"I have done well to eat and live;
I had not reckoned on robbers!"

"Yes, Eccellenza, when those fools
the honest men are asleep, we are
wide awake."

"Oh, Rinaldo, all I possess shall
be yours; we will share my treasure
like brothers; I would give you
everything--even to my Duchy----"

"Eccellenza, procure from the
Pope an absolution _in articulo mor-
tis_. It would be of more use to me
in my walk of life."

OR ROMAN REVENGE
227

"What you will. Only file
through the bars of my cage and
lend me your dagger. We have but
little time, quick, quick! Oh, if my
teeth were but files!--I have tried
to eat through this iron."

"Eccellenza," said Rinaldo, "I
have already filed through one bar."

"You are a god!"

"Your wife was at the fete given
by the Princess Villaviciosa. She
brought home her little Frenchman;
she is drunk with love.--You have
plenty of time."

"Have you done?"

"Yes."

228
OLYMPIA

"Your dagger?" said the Duke
eagerly to the brigand.

"Here it is."

"Good. I hear the clatter of the
spring."

"Do not forget me!" cried the
robber, who knew what gratitude
was.

"No more than my father," cried
the Duke.

"Good-bye!" said Rinaldo. "Lord!
How he flies up!" he added to him-
self as the Duke disappeared.--"No
more than his father! If that is
all he means to do for me.--And I

OR ROMAN REVENGE
229

had sworn a vow never to injure a
woman!"

But let us leave the robber for a
moment to his meditations and go
up, like the Duke, to the rooms in
the palace.


"Another tailpiece, a Cupid on a snail! And page 230 is blank," said the journalist. "Then there are two more blank pages before we come to the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as to be a novelist--_Conclusion_!


CONCLUSION

Never had the Duchess been more
lovely; she came from her bath
clothed like a goddess, and on seeing

234
OLYMPIA

Adolphe voluptuously reclining on
piles of cushions--

"You are beautiful," said she.

"And so are you, Olympia!"

"And you still love me?"

"More and more," said he.

"Ah, none but a Frenchman
knows how to love!" cried the
Duchess. "Do you love me well to-
night?"

"Yes."

"Then come!"

And with an impulse of love and
hate--whether it was that Cardinal
Borborigano had reminded her of
her husband, or that she felt un-
wonted passion to display, she
pressed the springs and held out her
arms.


"That is all," said Lousteau, "for the foreman has torn off the rest in wrapping up my proofs. But it is enough to show that the author was full of promise."

"I cannot make head or tail of it," said Gatien Boirouge, who was the first to break the silence of the party from Sancerre.

"Nor I," replied Monsieur Gravier.

"And yet it is a novel of the time of the Empire," said Lousteau.

"By the way in which the brigand is made to speak," said Monsieur Gravier, "it is evident that the author knew nothing of Italy. Banditti do not allow themselves such graceful conceits."

Madame Gorju came up to Bianchon, seeing him pensive, and with a glance towards her daughter Mademoiselle Euphemie Gorju, the owner of a fairly good fortune--"What a rhodomontade!" said she. "The prescriptions you write are worth more than all that rubbish."

The Mayoress had elaborately worked up this speech, which, in her opinion, showed strong judgment.

"Well, madame, we must be lenient, we have but twenty pages out of a thousand," said Bianchon, looking at Mademoiselle Gorju, whose figure threatened terrible things after the birth of her first child.

"Well, Monsieur de Clagny," said Lousteau, "we were talking yesterday of the forms of revenge invented by husbands. What do you say to those invented by wives?"

"I say," replied the Public Prosecutor, "that the romance is not by a Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness _Frankenstein_ by Mrs. Shelley, _Leone Leoni_ by George Sand, the works of Anne Radcliffe, and the _Nouveau Promethee_ (New Prometheus) of Camille de Maupin."

Dinah looked steadily at Monsieur de Clagny, making him feel, by an expression that gave him a chill, that in spite of the illustrious examples he had quoted, she regarded this as a reflection on _Paquita la Sevillane_.

"Pooh!" said little Baudraye, "the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the arms of her lover, will kill her--and do you call that revenge?--Our laws and our society are far more cruel."

"Why, little La Baudraye is talking!" said Monsieur Boirouge to his wife.

"Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her--the two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman," said the little old man.

"But she has happiness!" said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.

"No," said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed, "for she has a lover."

"For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk," said Lousteau.

"Well, he must have something!" replied Bianchon.

Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon's remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman's life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.

But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained for her in her husband's little speech, which her kind old Abbe Duret, if he had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La Baudraye had detected in Dinah's eyes, when she glanced at the journalist returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous flash of tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman's eye when prudence is cast to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah paid no more heed to her husband's hint to her to observe the proprieties than Lousteau had done to Dinah's significant warnings on the day of his arrival.

Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau's immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even nettled at Dinah's marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to similitude. Everything was against the physician--his frankness, his simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to love--and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved--have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind--"The doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him."

Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering whether a woman could ever be anything but a _subject_ to a medical man, who saw so many subjects in the course of a day's work. The first sentence of the aphorism written by Bianchon in her album was a medical observation striking so directly at woman, that Dinah could not fail to be hit by it. And then Bianchon was leaving on the morrow; his practice required his return. What woman, short of having Cupid's mythological dart in her heart, could decide in so short a time?

These little things, which lead to such great catastrophes--having been seen in a mass by Bianchon, he pronounced the verdict he had come to as to Madame de la Baudraye in a few words to Lousteau, to the journalist's great amazement.

While the two friends stood talking together, a storm was gathering in the Sancerre circle, who could not in the least understand Lousteau's paraphrases and commentaries, and who vented it on their hostess. Far from finding in his talk the romance which the Public Prosecutor, the Sous-prefet, the Presiding Judge, and his deputy, Lebas, had discovered there--to say nothing of Monsieur de la Baudraye and Dinah--the ladies now gathered round the tea-table, took the matter as a practical joke, and accused the Muse of Sancerre of having a finger in it. They had all looked forward to a delightful evening, and had all strained in vain every faculty of their mind. Nothing makes provincial folks so angry as the notion of having been a laughing-stock for Paris folks.

Madame Piedefer left the table to say to her daughter, "Do go and talk to the ladies; they are quite annoyed by your behavior."

Lousteau could not fail to see Dinah's great superiority over the best women of Sancerre; she was better dressed, her movements were graceful, her complexion was exquisitely white by candlelight--in short, she stood out against this background of old faces, shy and ill-dressed girls, like a queen in the midst of her court. Visions of Paris faded from his brain; Lousteau was accepting the provincial surroundings; and while he had too much imagination to remain unimpressed by the