The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac. The griffin classics
to watch you in the
salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high
emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me
when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear
friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have
known through the experience of another all the horrors and the
delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can
contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have
no illusions; but I have something better, something real, — I have
beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
Whoever I marry — provided I choose him for myself — may sleep in
peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his
return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he
has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
woman be who thwarts the man she loves? — an illness, a disease,
not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
a pleasure.
But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
no longer a chimera.
Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
fortress. I have read your last verses in the “Revue,” — ah! with
what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
your secret soul.
Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
that you are her solitary thought, — without a rival except in her
father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
that your confidences — provided they are full and true — will
suffice for the happiness of your
O. d’Este M.
“Good heavens! can I be in love already?” cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. “What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?”
Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.
Mademoiselle, — Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in
the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him
if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless
regrets, — showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it
only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you
have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
remonstrances.
Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
insincere, — for those which we write to each other are the
expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
general tenor of our lives, — do you believe, I say, that beautiful
as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
in passing, is very rare.
The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social