The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac. The griffin classics
“Which is the poet?” asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she heard the wheels.
“The one who walks like a drum-major,” answered the lieutenant.
“Ah!” said the notary’s wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him, — as all women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself that they pleased that “grande dame,” whose taste was law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis “dragged the time.” He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call “balancoires,” — the picturesque phrase of an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.
These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover’s age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome, — without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as minister of foreign affairs, “Your excellency was truly sublime!” Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration of non-success in little doses.
These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected diction — magniloquence, if you please to call it so — are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type. Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France. Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character, — as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic; it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-class vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went, — an error shared by several of the great men of Paris.
While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.
“Ha! do I see my soldier?” said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women. “Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?” he said, offering his hand effusively; “I comprehend them to their fullest extent after seeing mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of angels.”
All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this speech.
“I shall always consider it a triumph,” resumed the poet, observing that everybody wished for an explanation, “to have stirred to mention on of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal to be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this triumph — why should I be proud of it? — I count for nothing. It was the triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay, your heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form in which Napoleon’s idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what remains? The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go without revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian, the writer, futurity would have no knowledge of those heroic days. Therefore your fifteen years of war are now ideas and nothing more; that which preserves the Empire forever is the poem that the poets make of them. A nation that can win such battles must know how to sing them.”
Canalis paused, to gather by a glance that ran round the circle the tribute of amazement which he expected of provincials.
“You must be aware, monsieur, of the regret I feel at not seeing you,” said Madame Mignon, “since you compensate me with the pleasure of hearing you.”
Modeste, determined to think Canalis sublime, sat motionless with amazement; the embroidery slipped from her fingers, which held it only by the needleful of thread.
“Modeste, this is Monsieur Ernest de La Briere. Monsieur Ernest, my daughter,” said the count, thinking the secretary too much in the background.
The young girl bowed coldly, giving Ernest a glance that was meant to prove to every one present that she saw him for the first time.
“Pardon me, monsieur,” she said without blushing; “the great admiration I feel for the greatest of our poets is, in the eyes of my friends, a sufficient excuse for seeing only him.”
The pure, fresh voice, with accents like that of Mademoiselle Mars, charmed the poor secretary, already dazzled by Modeste’s beauty, and in his sudden surprise he answered by a phrase that would have been sublime, had it been true.
“He is my friend,” he said.
“Ah, then you do pardon me,” she replied.
“He is more than a friend,” cried Canalis taking Ernest by the shoulder and leaning upon it like Alexander on Hephaestion, “we love each other as though we were brothers — ”
Madame Latournelle cut