Authors: Honore de Balzac
“Ah, it is true, I forgot that you let yourself be caught in her web. You are wasting a love on her that you could better employ elsewhere. I could give you ten women who are worth a thousand times more than this titled courtesan, who does with her head what other, franker women do—”
“What are you saying, my dear fellow?” Armand interrupted Ronquerolles. “The duchess is an angel of innocence.”
Ronquerolles began to laugh.
“Since you have brought it up, my dear fellow,” he said, “I must enlighten you. Just a word; there’s no harm in it between us. Does the duchess belong to you? In this case, I will have nothing to say. Come on, confide in me. It is a question of not wasting your time grafting your great soul onto an ungrateful stock when all your hopes of cultivation will come to nothing.”
When Armand had naïvely made a general report on the state of the situation in which he enumerated the rights he had so painfully won, Ronquerolles burst into a peal of laughter so cruel that in another man it would have cost him his life. But to see how these two men were looking at each other and conversing at the corner of a wall, as far removed from others as if they might be in the middle of a desert, it was easy to assume that they were united in a boundless friendship and that no earthly cause could estrange them.
“My dear Armand, why have you not told me that you are confused by the duchess? I would have given you advice that would have helped you in this intrigue. First, you must know that women of our Faubourg love, like all other women, to bask in love, but they want to possess without being possessed. They have made a sort of bargain with nature. The laws of the parish have allowed them almost everything, save positive sin. The sweets this duchess of yours enjoys are venial sins, which she washes off in the waters of penitence. But if you had the impertinence to desire in all seriousness the great mortal sin to which you must naturally attach the highest importance, you would see with what utter disdain the door to the boudoir and to the house would be impetuously closed to you. The tender Antoinette would have forgotten everything between you, and you would be less than zero to her. Your kisses, my dear friend, would be wiped away with the indifference a woman feels toward the items of her toilette. The duchess would wash the love off her cheeks along with her rouge. We know women like this, the pure Parisienne.
“Have you ever noticed a shopgirl trotting daintily through the streets? Her head is as pretty as a picture: a delightful bonnet, pink cheeks, charming hairdo, lovely smile, and the rest is relatively neglected. Is this not an accurate portrait? That’s the Parisienne for you—she knows that her head alone will be seen. And so she devotes all her care, finery, and vanity to her head. Well, your duchess is all head, she feels only through her head, she has a heart in her brain, a voice in her head, all fondness is felt through her head. We call this poor thing a courtesan of the intellect. You have been played with like a child. If you doubt it, you will have proof this evening, this morning, this instant. Go to her, try to demand, to insist imperiously what you have been refused. Even if you go about it like the late Monsieur de Richelieu, you will get nothing for your pains.”
Armand was struck dumb.
“Has your desire reached the point of foolishness?”
“I want her at any cost,” cried Montriveau desperately.
“Very well. Now look here. Be as implacable as she is herself. Try to humiliate her, to wound her vanity. Do not try to move her heart or her soul but the woman’s nerves and temperament, for she is both nervous and lymphatic. If you can once awaken desire in her, you are saved. But let go of these romantic boyish notions of yours. Once you have her in your eagle’s talons, if you yield a point or draw back, if you so much as twitch an eyelid, if she thinks that she can regain her domination of you, she will slip out of your clutches like a fish, and you will never catch her again. Be as pitiless as the law. Show no more charity than the executioner. Hit hard, then hit again. Strike and keep on striking as if you were giving her the lash. Duchesses are made of hard stuff, my dear Armand, there is a sort of feminine nature that is only softened by repeated blows. And as suffering develops a heart in women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod. You must persevere. Ah! When pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and softened the fibers that you take to be so pliant and yielding, when a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under this discipline, when the brain has capitulated—then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and swoons and melting phrases. Then you shall see a most magnificent conflagration (always supposing that the chimney ignites). The steel feminine system will glow red-hot like iron in the forge; that kind of heat lasts longer than any other, and the glow may possibly turn to love.
“Still,” he continued, “I have my doubts. And after all, is it worthwhile taking so much trouble with the duchess? Between ourselves, a man of my stamp should first take her in hand and break her in; I would make a charming woman of her; she is a thoroughbred. You two, left to yourselves, will never get beyond the A B C of love. But you are in love with her, and just now you might not perhaps share my views on this subject . . . A pleasant time to you, my children,” added Ronquerolles, after a pause. Then with a laugh: “For myself I prefer easy beauties; they are tender, and at any rate, the natural woman appears in their love without any of your social seasonings. A woman who haggles over herself, my poor boy, and only means to inspire love—well, have her like an extra horse, for show. The match between the sofa and the confessional, black and white, queen and knight, conscientious scruples and pleasure is an uncommonly amusing game of chess. A man who’s a bit of a rake, who knows the game, wins in three moves. Now if I undertook a woman of that sort, I should start with the deliberate purpose of . . .” His voice sank to a whisper over the last words in Armand’s ear, and he left quickly, before there was time to reply.
As for Montriveau, he sprang at a bound across the courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeais and went unannounced upstairs, straight to the duchess’s bedroom.
“This is unheard-of,” she said, hastily wrapping her dressing gown around her. “Armand! This is abominable of you! Come, leave the room, I beg you. Just go out, and go at once. Wait for me in the drawing room. Come now!”
“Dear angel, has a plighted lover no privilege whatsoever?”
“But monsieur, it is in the worst possible taste for a plighted lover or a husband to break in like this on his wife.”
He came to the duchess, took her in his arms, and held her tightly to him.
“Forgive me, my dear Antoinette, but a host of dreadful suspicions are tearing at my heart.”
“Doubts? Never . . . never!”
“Suspicions all but justified. If you loved me, would you quarrel with me like this? Would you not be glad to see me? Would your heart fail to be moved? I, who am not a woman, feel a thrill deep inside at the mere sound of your voice. Often in a ballroom a longing has come over me to rush to your side and put my arms around your neck.”
“Oh! If you suspect me so long as I am not ready to rush into your arms before the world, I shall be suspect all my life, I suppose. Why, Othello was a mere child compared with you!”
“Ah!” he cried despairingly. “You do not love me.”
“Admit, at any rate, that at this moment you are not lovable.”
“Then I must still find favor in your sight?”
“Oh, I should think so. Come,” she added with an imperious air, “go out of the room, leave me. I am not like you; I wish always to find favor in your eyes.”
Never did a woman better understand the art of mingling charm and insolence, charm doubling the effect. Would this not infuriate the coolest of men? At this moment, her eyes, the sound of her voice, her attitude bore witness to a kind of perfect freedom that a loving woman never feels in the presence of the man who alone makes her heart leap at the mere sight of him. Enlightened by Ronquerolles’s advice, helped also by a sort of second sight that passion brings at moments to the least instructed—while fuller with the strong—he guessed the terrible truth betrayed by the duchess’s nonchalance, and his heart swelled with a storm of rage, like a lake rising in flood.
“If you were telling the truth yesterday, be mine, my dear Antoinette,” he cried, “I want—”
“First of all,” she said, pushing him away forcefully and calmly when she saw him advancing, “do not compromise me. My chambermaid might overhear you. Respect me, I beg you. Your familiarity is all very well in my boudoir in the evening. But here, no. And what does this ‘I want’ mean? I want! No one has yet spoken to me like that. It seems to me quite ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous.”
“You will not grant me anything on this point?”
“Ah! You call our freedom to dispose ourselves ‘a point’—a point indeed. You will allow me to be entirely my own mistress on this point.”
“And if, believing in your promises to me, I required it?”
“Ah! Then you would prove that I had been greatly in the wrong to make you the slightest promise, I would not be fool enough to keep it, and I would beg you to leave me in peace.”
Montriveau blanched, about to throw himself on her; the duchess rang, her chambermaid appeared, and smiling with mocking grace the duchess told him, “Please be good enough to come back when I am ready to be seen.”
Armand de Montriveau felt then the hardness of this cold and steely woman, crushing in her contempt. In a moment she had broken the bonds that held firm only for her lover. The duchess had read on Armand’s brow the secret demands of this visit, and had judged that the moment had come to make this imperial soldier feel that duchesses could certainly lend themselves to love but did not give themselves to it, and that their conquest was more difficult to accomplish than the conquest of Europe.
“Madame,” said Armand, “I have no time to wait. I am, as you yourself have said, a spoiled child. When I seriously resolve to have what we were just speaking about, I will have it.”
“You will have it?” she said, with a haughtiness mingled with some surprise.
“I will have it.”
“Ah! You would do me a great pleasure by ‘resolving’ to have it. For curiosity’s sake, I would be charmed to know how you will go about it.”
“I am delighted,” replied Montriveau, laughing in a way that frightened the duchess, “to inject some interest in your life. Will you permit me to escort you to the ball this evening?”
“A thousand thanks, but Monsieur de Marsay has already asked, and I have promised.”
Montriveau bowed gravely and withdrew.
“So Ronquerolles was right,” he thought, “we are now going to play a game of chess.”
From this moment on, he hid his emotions beneath complete composure. No man was strong enough to bear such changes, which make the soul swing quickly from the greatest sense of well-being to supreme misery. Had he glimpsed such happiness only to feel more intensely the emptiness of his former life? This was a terrible storm, but he knew how to suffer and endured the assault of his tumultuous thoughts the way a granite boulder endures the breakers of the angry sea.
“I had nothing to say. In her presence I lose my wits. She does not know how vile and contemptible she is. No one has dared to bring this creature face-to-face with herself. She has certainly toyed brilliantly with men, and I will avenge them all.”
For the first time, perhaps, love and vengeance mingled in a man’s heart so equally that Montriveau found it impossible to know whether he was carried away by vengeance or love. That very evening he was at the ball where the Duchesse de Langeais was supposed to be, and he was nearly desperate to touch her heart. He was tempted to attribute something demonic to this woman, who was gracious to him and full of agreeable smiles, surely because she had no wish to let society think that she had compromised herself with Monsieur de Montriveau. Coolness on both sides is a sign of love. But while the duchess was the same as ever and the marquis was sullen and morose, was it not plain to everyone that she had conceded nothing? Society knows how to read the unhappiness of rejected men and not to mistake it for the distance that certain women order their lovers to display with the hope of concealing a mutual love. And everyone mocked Montriveau, who had not consulted his minder and remained abstracted and uneasy. Monsieur de Ronquerolles would perhaps have prescribed some compromise with the duchess by responding to her false gestures of friendship with passionate demonstrations. But Armand de Montriveau left the ball filled with a horror of human nature, and still he could hardly believe in such utter perversity.
“If there is no executioner for such crimes,” he said, as he looked up at the lit window of the ballroom where the most enchanting women in Paris were dancing, laughing, and chatting, “I will take you by the back of your neck, madame la duchesse, and make you feel an iron more biting than the blade of the
place de Grève
. Steel against steel—we shall see whose heart will be cut more deeply.”
3.
THE TRUE WOMAN
For a week or so, Madame de Langeais hoped to see the Marquis de Montriveau, but Armand was content to send his card to the Hôtel de Langeais each morning. And each time this card was brought to the duchess, she could not stop herself from trembling, struck by dark thoughts that were as yet somewhat vague, like a presentiment of unhappiness. Reading his name, sometimes she thought she felt this implacable man’s hand in her hair, sometimes his name foretold vengeance, and her lively mind would surrender to atrocious imaginings. She had studied him too well not to fear him. Would she be assassinated? Would this bull-necked man eviscerate her by flinging her over his head? Trample her under his feet? When, where, how would he catch her? Would he make her suffer horribly, and what kind of suffering was he thinking to impose on her?
She repented. At certain hours, if he had come she would have thrown herself into his arms with complete abandon. Every evening, as she was falling asleep, she would see Montriveau’s face from a different angle. Sometimes his bitter smile, sometimes the Jupiter-like contraction of his brows, his leonine look, or some haughty movement of his shoulders made him terrible to her. The next day, his card seemed covered with blood. She became agitated by this name more than she had been by the spirited, opinionated, demanding lover. Then her apprehensions grew greater in the silence, and she was forced to prepare herself alone for a hideous, unspeakable struggle. This soul, proud and hard, was more sensitive to the titillations of hatred than she had been formerly to the caresses of love. Ha! If the general could have seen his mistress at the moment when her brow was creased with lines as she was plunged into bitter thoughts, in the depths of that boudoir where he had tasted such joys, perhaps he might have had great hopes. Is pride not one of the human feelings that can engender only noble acts? Although Madame de Langeais kept her thoughts secret, we are allowed to suppose that Monsieur de Montriveau was no longer an object of indifference. Is it not an immense conquest for a man to be constantly in a woman’s thoughts? He is bound to make progress one way or the other.