The Marriage Contract - Honoré de Balzac (hardest books to read TXT) 📗

this paper as an endorsement of your claim to my income. If the
revenues of the entail do not pay this loan as quickly as I now
expect, you and I will settle on my return. The sum I ask for is
absolutely necessary to enable me to seek my fortune in India; and
if I know you, I shall receive it in Bordeaux the night before I
sail.

I have acted as you would have acted in my place. I held firm to
the last moment, letting no one suspect my ruin. Before the news
of the seizure of my property at Bordeaux reached Paris, I had
attempted, with one hundred thousand francs which I obtained on
notes, to recover myself by play. Some lucky stroke might still
have saved me. I lost.

How have I ruined myself? By my own will, Henri. From the first
month of my married life I saw that I could not keep up the style
in which I started. I knew the result; but I chose to shut my
eyes; I could not say to my wife, "We must leave Paris and live at
Lanstrac." I have ruined myself for her as men ruin themselves for
a mistress, but I knew it all along. Between ourselves, I am
neither a fool nor a weak man. A fool does not let himself be
ruled with his eyes open by a passion; and a man who starts for
India to reconstruct his fortune, instead of blowing out his
brains, is not weak.

I shall return rich, or I shall never return at all. Only, my dear
friend, as I want wealth solely for _her_, as I must be absent six
years at least, and as I will not risk being duped in any way, I
confide to you my wife. I know no better guardian. Being
childless, a lover might be dangerous to her. Henri! I love her
madly, basely, without proper pride. I would forgive her, I think,
an infidelity, not because I am certain of avenging it, but
because I would kill myself to leave her free and happy--since I
could not make her happiness myself. But what have I to fear?
Natalie feels for me that friendship which is independent of love,
but which preserves love. I have treated her like a petted child.
I took such delight in my sacrifices, one led so naturally to
another, that she can never be false; she would be a monster if
she were. Love begets love.

Alas! shall I tell you all, my dear Henri? I have just written her
a letter in which I let her think that I go with heart of hope and
brow serene; that neither jealousy, nor doubt, nor fear is in my
soul,--a letter, in short, such as a son might write to his
mother, aware that he is going to his death. Good God! de Marsay,
as I wrote it hell was in my soul! I am the most wretched man on
earth. Yes, yes, to you the cries, to you the grinding of my
teeth! I avow myself to you a despairing lover; I would rather
live these six years sweeping the streets beneath her windows than
return a millionaire at the end of them--if I could choose. I
suffer agony; I shall pass from pain to pain until I hear from you
that you will take the trust which you alone can fulfil or
accomplish.

Oh! my dear de Marsay, this woman is indispensable to my life; she
is my sun, my atmosphere. Take her under your shield and buckler,
keep her faithful to me, even if she wills it not. Yes, I could be
satisfied with a half-happiness. Be her guardian, her chaperon,
for I could have no distrust of you. Prove to her that in
betraying me she would do a low and vulgar thing, and be no better
than the common run of women; tell her that faithfulness will
prove her lofty spirit.

She probably has fortune enough to continue her life of luxury and
ease. But if she lacks a pleasure, if she has caprices which she
cannot satisfy, be her banker, and do not fear, I _will_ return with
wealth.

But, after all, these fears are in vain! Natalie is an angel of
purity and virtue. When Felix de Vandenesse fell deeply in love
with her and began to show her certain attentions, I had only to
let her see the danger, and she instantly thanked me so
affectionately that I was moved to tears. She said that her
dignity and reputation demanded that she should not close her
doors abruptly to any man, but that she knew well how to dismiss
him. She did, in fact, receive him so coldly that the affair all
ended for the best. We have never had any other subject of dispute
--if, indeed, a friendly talk could be called a dispute--in all
our married life.

And now, my dear Henri, I bid you farewell in the spirit of a man.
Misfortune has come. No matter what the cause, it is here. I strip
to meet it. Poverty and Natalie are two irreconcilable terms. The
balance may be close between my assets and my liabilities, but no
one shall have cause to complain of me. But, should any unforeseen
event occur to imperil my honor, I count on you.

Send letters under cover to the Governor of India at Calcutta. I
have friendly relations with his family, and some one there will
care for all letters that come to me from Europe. Dear friend, I
hope to find you the same de Marsay on my return,--the man who
scoffs at everything and yet is receptive of the feelings of
others when they accord with the grandeur he is conscious of in
himself. You stay in Paris, friend; but when you read these words,
I shall be crying out, "To Carthage!"


The Marquis Henri de Marsay to Comte Paul de Manerville:

So, so, Monsieur le comte, you have made a wreck of it! Monsieur
l'ambassadeur has gone to the bottom! Are these the fine things
that you were doing?

Why, Paul, why have you kept away from me? If you had said a
single word, my poor old fellow, I would have made your position
plain to you. Your wife has refused me her endorsement. May that
one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn
that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur
Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in
Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for
jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is
the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs,
on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only seventy
thousand. Compared with Madame Evangelista, papa Gobseck is
flannel, velvet, vanilla cream, a sleeping draught. Your vineyard
of Belle-Rose is to fall into the clutches of your wife, to whom
her mother pays the difference between the price it goes for at
the auction sale and the amount of her dower claim upon it. Madame
Evangelista will also have the farms at Guadet and Grassol, and
the mortgages on your house in Bordeaux already belong to her, in
the names of straw men provided by Solonet.

Thus these two excellent women will make for themselves a united
income of one hundred and twenty thousand francs a year out of
your misfortunes and forced sale of property, added to the revenue
of some thirty-odd thousand on the Grand-livre which these cats
already possess.

The endorsement of your wife was not needed; for this morning the
said Sieur Lecuyer came to offer me a return of the sum I had lent
you in exchange for a legal transfer of my rights. The vintage of
1825 which your mother-in-law keeps in the cellars at Lanstrac
will suffice to pay me.

These two women have calculated, evidently, that you are now upon
the ocean; but I send this letter by courier, so that you may have
time to follow the advice I now give you.

I made Lecuyer talk. I disentangled from his lies, his language,
and his reticence, the threads I lacked to bring to light the
whole plot of the domestic conspiracy hatched against you. This
evening, at the Spanish embassy, I shall offer my admiring
compliments to your mother-in-law and your wife. I shall pay
court to Madame Evangelista; I intend to desert you basely, and
say sly things to your discredit,--nothing openly, or that
Mascarille in petticoats would detect my purpose. How did you make
her such an enemy? That is what I want to know. If you had had the
wit to be in love with that woman before you married her daughter,
you would to-day be peer of France, Duc de Manerville, and,
possibly, ambassador to Madrid.

If you had come to me at the time of your marriage, I would have
helped you to analyze and know the women to whom you were binding
yourself; out of our mutual observations safety might have been
yours. But, instead of that, these women judged me, became afraid
of me, and separated us. If you had not stupidly given in to them
and turned me the cold shoulder, they would never have been able
to ruin you. Your wife brought on the coldness between us,
instigated by her mother, to whom she wrote two letters a week,--a
fact to which you paid no attention. I recognized my Paul when I
heard that detail.

Within a month I shall be so intimate with your mother-in-law that
I shall hear from her the reasons of the hispano-italiano hatred
which she feels for you,--for you, one of the best and kindest men
on earth! Did she hate you before her daughter fell in love with
Felix de Vandenesse; that's a question in my mind. If I had not
taken a fancy to go to the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and
a few other good fellows of your acquaintance, I should have been