Beatrix by Honoré de Balzac (story books to read TXT) 📖

on the head of Mademoiselle des Touches; but his mother, who had gone on several occasions to his room on seeing his light burning far into the night, knew by this time the secret of his conduct. Though for her love was a sealed book, and she was even unaware of her own ignorance, Fanny rose through maternal tenderness into certain ideas of it; but the depths of such sentiment being dark and obscured by clouds to her mind, she was shocked at the state in which she saw him; the solitary uncomprehended desire of his soul, which was evidently consuming him, simply terrified her. Calyste had but one thought; Beatrix was always before him. In the evenings, while cards were being played, his abstraction resembled his father's somnolence. Finding him so different from what he was when he loved Camille, the baroness became aware, with a sort of horror, of the symptoms of real love,--a species of possession which had seized upon her son,--a love unknown within the walls of that old mansion.

Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up Les Touches, and leave the two women forever.

"Not go to Les Touches!" he cried.

"Oh! yes, yes, go! do not look so, my darling!" she cried, kissing him on the eyes that had flashed such flames.

Under these circumstances Calyste often came near losing the fruit of Camille's plot through the Breton fury of his love, of which he was ceasing to be the master. Finally, he swore to himself, in spite of his promise to Felicite, to see Beatrix, and speak to her. He wanted to read her eyes, to bathe in their light, to examine every detail of her dress, breathe its perfume, listen to the music of her voice, watch the graceful composition of her movements, embrace at a glance the whole figure, and study her as a general studies the field where he means to win a decisive battle. He willed as lovers will; he was grasped by desires which closed his ears and darkened his intellect, and threw him into an unnatural state in which he was conscious of neither obstacles, nor distances, nor the existence even of his own body.

One morning he resolved to go to Les Touches at an earlier hour than that agreed upon, and endeavor to meet Beatrix in the garden. He knew she walked there daily before breakfast.

Mademoiselle des Touches and the marquise had gone, as it happened, to see the marshes and the little bay with its margin of fine sand, where the sea penetrates and lies like a lake in the midst of the dunes. They had just returned, and were walking up a garden path beside the lawn, conversing as they walked.

"If the scenery pleases you," said Camille, "we must take Calyste and make a trip to Croisic. There are splendid rocks there, cascades of granite, little bays with natural basins, charmingly unexpected and capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble fragments,--a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to dry in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris."

"What! will you really risk Calyste?" cried the marquise, laughing, in a tone which proved that Camille's ruse had answered its purpose.

"Ah, my dear," she replied, "if you did but know the angelic soul of that dear child, you would understand me. In him, mere beauty is nothing; one must enter that pure heart, which is amazed at every step it takes into the kingdom of love. What faith! what grace! what innocence! The ancients were right enough in the worship they paid to sacred beauty. Some traveller, I forget who, relates that when wild horses lose their leader they choose the handsomest horse in the herd for his successor. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of things; it is the ensign which Nature hoists over her most precious creations; it is the trust of symbols as it is the greatest of accidents. Did any one ever suppose that angels could be deformed? are they not necessarily a combination of grace and strength? What is it that makes us stand for hours before some picture in Italy, where genius has striven through years of toil to realize but one of those accidents of Nature? Come, call up your sense of the truth of things and answer me; is it not the Idea of Beauty which our souls associate with moral grandeur? Well, Calyste is one of those dreams, those visions, realized. He has the regal power of a lion, tranquilly unsuspicious of its royalty. When he feels at his ease, he is witty; and I love his girlish timidity. My soul rests in his heart away from all corruptions, all ideas of knowledge, literature, the world, society, politics,--those useless accessories under which we stifle happiness. I am what I have never been,--a child! I am sure of him, but I like to play at jealousy; he likes it too. Besides, that is part of my secret."

Beatrix walked on pensively, in silence. Camille endured unspeakable martyrdom, and she cast a sidelong look at her companion which looked like flame.

"Ah, my dear; but _you_ are happy," said Beatrix presently, laying her hand on Camille's arm like a woman wearied out with some inward struggle.

"Yes, happy indeed!" replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.

The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.

"Yes, you are happy, but I!" she said,--"to know of Conti's infidelities, and have to bear them!"

"Why not leave him?" said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike a decisive blow.

"Can I?"

"Oh! poor boy!"

Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.

Camille rose.

"I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite," she said.

"Our conversation has taken away mine," remarked Beatrix.

The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the dark greens of the foliage. Calyste, who had slipped through the salon into the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he were meeting her by accident. Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as he approached her.

"Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?" he said, after the first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.

"But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me," she said, in a gentle voice.

The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words encouraged Calyste.

"Am I so indifferent to you?" he said in a troubled voice, as the tears came into his eyes.

"Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?" replied the marquise. "Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?"

"Oh!" cried Calyste, "if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love her no longer."

"Then why are you shut up together every morning?" she said, with a treacherous smile. "I don't suppose that Camille, in spite of her passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their romances."

"So then you know--" began the guileless young Breton, his face glowing with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.

"Calyste!" cried Camille, angrily, suddenly appearing and interrupting him. She took his arm and drew him away to some distance. "Calyste, is this what you promised me?"

Beatrix heard these words of reproach as Mademoiselle des Touches disappeared toward the house, taking Calyste with her. She was stupefied by the young man's assertion, and could not comprehend it; she was not as strong as Claude Vignon. In truth, the part being played by Camille Maupin, as shocking as it was grand, is one of those wicked grandeurs which women only practise when driven to extremity. By it their hearts are broken; in it the feelings of their sex are lost to them; it begins an abnegation which ends by either plunging them to hell, or lifting them to heaven.

During breakfast, which Calyste was invited to share, the marquise, whose sentiments could be noble and generous, made a sudden return upon herself, resolving to stifle the germs of love which were rising in her heart. She was neither cold nor hard to Calyste, but gently indifferent,--a course which tortured him. Felicite brought forward a proposition that they should make, on the next day but one, an excursion into the curious and interesting country lying between Les Touches, Croisic, and the village of Batz. She begged Calyste to employ himself on the morrow in hiring a boat and sailors to take them across the little bay, undertaking herself to provide horses and provisions, and all else that was necessary for a party of pleasure, in which there was to be no fatigue. Beatrix stopped the matter short, however, by saying that she did not wish to make excursions round the country. Calyste's face, which had beamed with delight at the prospect, was suddenly overclouded.

"What are you afraid of, my dear?" asked Camille.

"My position is so delicate I do not wish to compromise--I will not say my reputation, but my happiness," she said, meaningly, with a glance at the young Breton. "You know very well how suspicious Conti can be; if he knew--"

"Who will tell him?"

"He is coming back here to fetch me," said Beatrix.

Calyste turned pale. In spite of all that Camille could urge, in spite of Calyste's entreaties, Madame de Rochefide remained inflexible, and showed what Camille had called her obstinacy. Calyste left Les Touches the victim of one of those depressions of love which threaten, in certain men, to turn into madness. He began to revolve in his mind some decided means of coming to an explanation with Beatrix.


XII. CORRESPONDENCE

When Calyste reached home, he did not leave his room until dinner time; and after dinner he went back to it. At ten o'clock his mother, uneasy at his absence, went to look for him, and found him writing in the midst of a pile of blotted and half-torn paper. He was writing to Beatrix, for distrust of Camille had come into his mind. The air and manner of the marquise during their brief interview in the garden had singularly encouraged him.

No first love-letter ever was or ever will be, as may readily be supposed, a brilliant effort of the mind. In all young men not tainted by corruption such a letter is written with gushings from the heart, too overflowing, too multifarious not to be the essence, the elixir of many other letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.

Here is the one that Calyste finally composed and which he read aloud to his poor, astonished mother. To her the old mansion seemed to have taken fire; this love of her son flamed up in it like the glare of a conflagration.

Calyste to Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.

Madame,--I loved you when you were to me but a dream; judge,
therefore, of the force my love acquired when I saw you. The dream
was far surpassed by the reality. It is my grief and my misfortune
to have nothing to say to