Beatrix - Honoré de Balzac (best book reader TXT) 📗

appeared with bouquets on their breasts and ribbons on their hats, which the Duc de Grandlieu had the utmost difficulty in making them relinquish, even by bribing them with money. The French postilion is eminently intelligent, but he likes his fun. These fellows took their bribes and replaced their ribbons at the barrier.

"Well, good-bye, Sabine," said the duchess; "remember your promise; write to me often. Calyste, I say nothing more to you, but you understand me."

Clotilde, leaning on the youngest sister Athenais, who was smiling to the Vicomte de Grandlieu, cast a reflecting look through her tears at the bride, and followed the carriage with her eyes as it disappeared to the clacking of four whips, more noisy than the shots of a pistol gallery. In a few minutes the gay convoy had reached the esplanade of the Invalides, the barrier of Passy by the quay of the Pont d'Iena, and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.

Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage ceremony? The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along; the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods, banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money lasts. A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer sense of modesty,--that which hides from the public eye and inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers. One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to escape both the world and their family. The love which begins a marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband's heart, do not, as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage, they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons when they say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be made;" "Never laugh at such things;" "No lady ever flings herself on a sofa; she sits down quietly;" "Pray give up such detestable ways;" "My dear, that is a thing which is never done," etc.

Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to use their opera-glasses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as interesting a young woman as the heroine of the "Memoirs of two young Married Women." Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind and temperament.

Guerande, April, 1838.

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:

Dear Mamma,--You will understand why I did not write to you during
the journey,--our wits are then like wheels. Here I am, for the
last two days, in the depths of Brittany, at the hotel du Guenic,
--a house as covered with carving as a sandal-wood box. In spite
of the affectionate devotion of Calyste's family, I feel a keen
desire to fly to you, to tell you many things which can only be
trusted to a mother.

Calyste married, dear mamma, with a great sorrow in his heart. We
all knew that, and you did not hide from me the difficulties of my
position; but alas! they are greater than you thought. Ah! my dear
mother, what experience we acquire in the short space of a few
days--I might even say a few hours! All your counsels have proved
fruitless; you will see why from one sentence: I love Calyste as
if he were not my husband,--that is to say, if I were married to
another, and were travelling with Calyste, I should love Calyste
and hate my husband.

Now think of a man beloved so completely, involuntarily,
absolutely, and all the other adverbs you may choose to employ,
and you will see that my servitude is established in spite of your
good advice. You told me to be grand, noble, dignified, and
self-respecting in order to obtain from Calyste the feelings that
are never subject to the chances and changes of life,--esteem, honor,
and the consideration which sanctifies a woman in the bosom of her
family. I remember how you blamed, I dare say justly, the young
women of the present day, who, under pretext of living happily
with their husbands, begin by compliance, flattery, familiarity,
an abandonment, you called it, a little too wanton (a word I did
not fully understand), all of which, if I must believe you, are
relays that lead rapidly to indifference and possibly to contempt.
"Remember that you are a Grandlieu!" yes, I remember that you told
me all that--

But oh! that advice, filled with the maternal eloquence of a
female Daedelus has had the fate of all things mythological. Dear,
beloved mother, could you ever have supposed it possible that I
should begin by the catastrophe which, according to you, ends the
honeymoon of the young women of the present day?

When Calyste and I were fairly alone in the travelling carriage,
we felt rather foolish in each other's company, understanding the
importance of the first word, the first look; and we both,
bewildered by the solemnity, looked out of our respective windows.
It became so ridiculous that when we reached the barrier monsieur
began, in a rather troubled tone of voice, a set discourse,
prepared, no doubt, like other improvisations, to which I listened
with a beating heart, and which I take the liberty of here
abridging.

"My dear Sabine," he said, "I want you to be happy, and, above
all, do I wish you to be happy in your own way. Therefore, in the
situation in which we are, instead of deceiving ourselves mutually
about our characters and our feelings by noble compliances, let us
endeavor to be to each other at once what we should be years
hence. Think always that you have a friend and a brother in me, as
I shall feel I have a sister and a friend in you."

Though it was all said with the utmost delicacy, I found nothing
in this first conjugal love-speech which responded to the feelings
in my soul, and I remained pensive after replying that I was
animated by the same sentiments. After this declaration of our
rights to mutual coldness, we talked of weather, relays, and
scenery in the most charming manner,--I with rather a forced
little laugh, he absent-mindedly.

At last, as we were leaving Versailles, I turned to Calyste--whom
I called my dear Calyste, and he called me my dear Sabine--and
asked him plainly to tell me the events which had led him to the
point of death, and to which I was aware that I owed the happiness
of being his wife. He hesitated long. In fact, my request gave
rise to a little argument between us, which lasted through three
relays,--I endeavoring to maintain the part of an obstinate girl,
and trying to sulk; he debating within himself the question which
the newspapers used to put to Charles X.: "Must the king yield or
not?" At last, after passing Verneuil, and exchanging oaths enough
to satisfy three dynasties never to reproach him for his folly,
and never to treat him coldly, etc., etc., he related to me his
love for Madame de Rochefide.

"I do not wish," he said, in conclusion, "to have any secrets
between us."

Poor, dear Calyste, it seems, was ignorant that his friend,
Mademoiselle des Touches, and you had thought it right to tell me
the truth. Well, mother,--for I can tell all to a mother as tender
as you,--I was deeply hurt by perceiving that he had yielded less
to my request than to his own desire to talk of that strange
passion. Do you blame me, darling mother, for having wished to
reconnoitre the extent of the grief, the open wound of the heart
of which you warned me?

So, eight hours after receiving the rector's blessing at
Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, your Sabine was in the rather false position of
a young wife listening to a confidence, from the very lips of her
husband, of his misplaced love for an unworthy rival. Yes, there I
was, in the drama of a young woman learning, officially, as it
were, that she owed her marriage to the disdainful rejection of an
old and faded beauty!

Still, I gained what I sought. "What was that?" you will ask. Ah!
mother dear, I have seen too much of love going on around me not
to know how to put a little of it into practice. Well, Calyste
ended the poem of his miseries with the warmest protestations of
an absolute forgetting of what he called his madness. All kinds of
affirmations have to be signed, you know. The happy unhappy one
took my hand, carried it to his lips, and, after that, he kept it
for a long time clasped in his own. A declaration followed. _That
one_ seemed to me more conformable than the first to the demands
of our new condition, though our lips never said a word. Perhaps I
owed it to the vigorous indignation I felt and showed at the bad
taste of a woman foolish enough not to love my beautiful, my
glorious Calyste.

They are calling me to play a game of cards, which I do not yet
understand. I will finish my letter to-morrow.