Letters of Two Brides. Honore de Balzac

      DEDICATION

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      To George Sand

       Your name, dear George, while casting a reflected radiance on my

       book, can gain no new glory from this page. And yet it is neither

       self-interest nor diffidence which has led me to place it there,

       but only the wish that it should bear witness to the solid

       friendship between us, which has survived our wanderings and

       separations, and triumphed over the busy malice of the world. This

       feeling is hardly likely now to change. The goodly company of

       friendly names, which will remain attached to my works, forms an

       element of pleasure in the midst of the vexation caused by their

       increasing number. Each fresh book, in fact, gives rise to fresh

       annoyance, were it only in the reproaches aimed at my too prolific

       pen, as though it could rival in fertility the world from which I

       draw my models! Would it not be a fine thing, George, if the

       future antiquarian of dead literatures were to find in this

       company none but great names and generous hearts, friends bound by

       pure and holy ties, the illustrious figures of the century? May I

       not justly pride myself on this assured possession, rather than on

       a popularity necessarily unstable? For him who knows you well, it

       is happiness to be able to sign himself, as I do here,

       Your friend,

       DE BALZAC.

       PARIS, June 1840.

LETTERS OF TWO BRIDES

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FIRST PART

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I. LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE MAUCOMBE. PARIS, September.

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      Sweetheart, I too am free! And I am the first too, unless you have written to Blois, at our sweet tryst of letter-writing.

      Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?

      Don't go running on like this, you will say, but tell me rather how you made your escape from the convent where you were to take your vows. Well, dear, I don't know about the Carmelites, but the miracle of my own deliverance was, I can assure you, most humdrum. The cries of an alarmed conscience triumphed over the dictates of a stern policy—there's the whole mystery. The sombre melancholy which seized me after you left hastened the happy climax, my aunt did not want to see me die of a decline, and my mother, whose one unfailing cure for my malady was a novitiate, gave way before her.

      So I am in Paris, thanks to you, my love! Dear Renee, could you have seen me the day I found myself parted from you, well might you have gloried in the deep impression you had made on so youthful a bosom. We had lived so constantly together, sharing our dreams and letting our fancy roam together, that I verily believe our souls had become welded together, like those two Hungarian girls, whose death we heard about from M. Beauvisage—poor misnamed being! Never surely was man better cut out by nature for the post of convent physician!

      Tell me, did you not droop and sicken with your darling?

      In my gloomy depression, I could do nothing but count over the ties which bind us. But it seemed as though distance had loosened them; I wearied of life, like a turtle-dove widowed of her mate. Death smiled sweetly on me, and I was proceeding quietly to die. To be at Blois, at the Carmelites, consumed by dread of having to take my vows there, a Mlle. de la Valliere, but without her prelude, and without my Renee! How could I not be sick—sick unto death?

      How different it used to be! That monotonous existence, where every hour brings its duty, its prayer, its task, with such desperate regularity