A Prince of Bohemia by Honoré de Balzac (books to read fiction .TXT) 📖

race. There was still something of the opera girl
in my gowns, in my way of dressing my hair. In a moment I saw the
distance between me and good taste. Next time you will receive a
duchess, you shall not know me again! Ah! how good you have been
to your Claudine! How many and many a time I have thanked you for
telling me those things! What interest lay in those few words! You
have taken thought for that thing belonging to you called
Claudine? _This_ imbecile would never have opened my eyes; he
thinks that everything I do is right; and besides, he is much too
humdrum, too matter-of-fact to have any feeling for the beautiful.

"'Tuesday is very slow of coming for my impatient mind! On
Tuesday I shall be with you for several hours. Ah! when it comes I
will try to think that the hours are months, that it will be so
always. I am living in hope of that morning now, as I shall live
upon the memory of it afterwards. Hope is memory that craves; and
recollection, memory sated. What a beautiful life within life
thought makes for us in this way!

"'Sometimes I dream of inventing new ways of tenderness all my
own, a secret which no other woman shall guess. A cold sweat
breaks out over me at the thought that something may happen to
prevent this morning. Oh, I would break with _him_ for good, if
need was, but nothing here could possibly interfere; it would be
from your side. Perhaps you may decide to go out, perhaps to go to
see some other woman. Oh! spare me this Tuesday for pity's sake.
If you take it from me, Charles, you do not know what _he_ will
suffer; I should drive him wild. But even if you do not want me,
or you are going out, let me come, all the same, to be with you
while you dress; only to see you, I ask no more than that; only to
show you that I love you without a thought of self.

"'Since you gave me leave to love you, for you gave me leave,
since I am yours; since that day I loved and love you with the
whole strength of my soul; and I shall love you for ever, for once
having loved _you_, no one could, no one ought to love another.
And, you see, when those eyes that ask nothing but to see you are
upon you, you will feel that in your Claudine there is a something
divine, called into existence by you.

"'Alas! with you I can never play the coquette. I am like a
mother with her child; I endure anything from you; I, that was
once so imperious and proud. I have made dukes and princes fetch
and carry for me; aides-de-camp, worth more than all the court of
Charles X. put together, have done my errands, yet I am treating
you as my spoilt child. But where is the use of coquetry? It would
be pure waste. And yet, monsieur, for want of coquetry I shall
never inspire love in you. I know it; I feel it; yet I do as
before, feeling a power that I cannot withstand, thinking that
this utter self-surrender will win me the sentiment innate in all
men (so _he_ tells me) for the thing that belongs to them.

"_Wednesday_.

"'Ah! how darkly sadness entered my heart yesterday when I found
that I must give up the joy of seeing you. One single thought held
me back from the arms of Death!--It was thy will! To stay away was
to do thy will, to obey an order from thee. Oh! Charles, I was so
pretty; I looked a lovelier woman for you than that beautiful
German princess whom you gave me for an example, whom I have
studied at the Opera. And yet--you might have thought that I had
overstepped the limits of my nature. You have left me no
confidence in myself; perhaps I am plain after all. Oh! I loathe
myself, I dream of my radiant Charles Edward, and my brain turns.
I shall go mad, I know I shall. Do not laugh, do not talk to me of
the fickleness of women. If we are inconstant, _you_ are strangely
capricious. You take away the hours of love that made a poor
creature's happiness for ten whole days; the hours on which she
drew to be charming and kind to all that came to see her! After
all, you were the source of my kindness to _him_; you do not know
what pain you give him. I wonder what I must do to keep you, or
simply to keep the right to be yours sometimes.... When I think
that you never would come here to me!... With what delicious
emotion I would wait upon you!--There are other women more favored
than I. There are women to whom you say, 'I love you.' To me you
have never said more than 'You are a good girl.' Certain speeches
of yours, though you do not know it, gnaw at my heart. Clever men
sometimes ask me what I am thinking.... I am thinking of my
self-abasement--the prostration of the poorest outcast in the
presence of the Saviour.

"There are still three more pages, you see. La Palferine allowed me to take the letter, with the traces of tears that still seemed hot upon it! Here was proof of the truth of his story. Marcas, a shy man enough with women, was in ecstacies over a second which he read in his corner before lighting his pipe with it.

"'Why, any woman in love will write that sort of thing!' cried La Palferine. 'Love gives all women intelligence and style, which proves that here in France style proceeds from the matter and not from the words. See now how well this is thought out, how clear-headed sentiment is'--and with that he reads us another letter, far superior to the artificial and labored productions which we novelists write.

"One day poor Claudine heard that La Palferine was in a critical position; it was a question of meeting a bill of exchange. An unlucky idea occurred to her; she put a tolerably large sum in gold into an exquisitely embroidered purse and went to him.

"'Who has taught you as to be so bold as to meddle with my household affairs?' La Palferine cried angrily. 'Mend my socks and work slippers for me, if it amuses you. So!--you will play the duchess, and you turn the story of Danae against the aristocracy.'

"He emptied the purse into his hand as he spoke, and made as though he would fling the money in her face. Claudine, in her terror, did not guess that he was joking; she shrank back, stumbled over a chair, and fell with her head against the corner of the marble chimney-piece. She thought she should have died. When she could speak, poor woman, as she lay on the bed, all that she said was, 'I deserved it, Charles!'

"For a moment La Palferine was in despair; his anguish revived Claudine. She rejoiced in the mishap; she took advantage of her suffering to compel La Palferine to take the money and release him from an awkward position. Then followed a variation on La Fontaine's fable, in which a man blesses the thieves that brought him a sudden impulse of tenderness from his wife. And while we are upon this subject, another saying will paint the man for you.

"Claudine went home again, made up some kind of tale as best she could to account for her bruised forehead, and fell dangerously ill. An abscess formed in the head. The doctor--Bianchon, I believe--yes, it was Bianchon--wanted to cut off her hair. The Duchesse de Berri's hair is not more beautiful than Claudine's; she would not hear of it, she told Bianchon in confidence that she could not allow it to be cut without leave from the Comte de Palferine. Bianchon went to Charles Edward. Charles Edward heard him with much seriousness. The doctor had explained the case at length, and showed that it was absolutely necessary to sacrifice the hair to insure the success of the operation.

"'Cut off Claudine's hair!' cried he in peremptory tones. 'No. I would sooner lose her.'

"Even now, after a lapse of four years, Bianchon still quotes that speech; we have laughed over it for half an hour together. Claudine, informed of the verdict, saw in it a proof of affections; she felt sure that she was loved. In the face of her weeping family, with her husband on his knees, she was inexorable. She kept the hair. The strength that came with the belief that she was loved came to her aid, the operation succeeded perfectly. There are stirrings of the inner life which throw all the calculations of surgery into disorder and baffle the laws of medical science.

"Claudine wrote a delicious letter to La Palferine, a letter in which the orthography was doubtful and the punctuation all to seek, to tell him of the happy result of the operation, and to add that Love was wiser than all the sciences.

"'Now,' said La Palferine one day, 'what am I to do to get rid of Claudine?'

"'Why, she is not at all troublesome; she leaves you master of your actions,' objected we.

"'That is true,' returned La Palferine, 'but I do not choose that anything shall slip into my life without my consent.'

"From that day he set himself to torment Claudine. It seemed that he held the bourgeoise, the nobody, in utter horror; nothing would satisfy him but a woman with a title. Claudine, it was true, had made progress; she had learned to dress as well as the best-dressed woman of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; she had freed her bearing of the unhallowed traces; she walked with a chastened, inimitable grace; but this was not enough. This praise of her enabled Claudine to swallow down the rest.

"But one day La Palferine said, 'If you wish to be the mistress of one La Palferine, poor, penniless, and without prospects as he is, you ought at least to represent him worthily. You should have a carriage and liveried servants and a title. Give me all the gratifications of vanity that will never be mine in my own person. The woman whom I honor with my regard ought never to go on foot; if she is bespattered with mud, I suffer. That is how I am made. If she is mine, she must be admired of all Paris. All Paris shall envy me my good fortune. If some little whipper-snapper seeing a brilliant countess pass in her brilliant carriage shall say to himself, "Who can call such a divinity his?" and grow thoughtful--why, it will double my pleasure.'

"La Palferine owned to us that he