The Deserted Woman - Honoré de Balzac (top 20 books to read TXT) 📗

how to love, I am utterly ignorant of
ways of attracting and winning a woman's love, but in my own heart
I know raptures of adoration of her. I am irresistibly drawn to
you by the great happiness that I feel through you; my thoughts
turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us draw nearer to
the fire of life when we find it. I do not imagine that I am
worthy of you; it seems impossible that I, young, ignorant, and
shy, could bring you one-thousandth part of the happiness that I
drink in at the sound of your voice and the sight of you. For me
you are the only woman in the world. I cannot imagine life without
you, so I have made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my
life till I lose it in some desperate enterprise, in the Indies,
in Africa, I care not where. How can I quell a love that knows no
limits save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you
will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your
friendship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you
require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen
hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness to be
cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will suffice to
enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. Have I
presumed too much upon your generosity by this entreaty to suffer
an intercourse in which all the gain is mine alone? You could find
ways of showing the world, to which you sacrifice so much, that I
am nothing to you; you are so clever and so proud! What have you
to fear? If I could only lay bare my heart to you at this moment,
to convince you that it is with no lurking afterthought that I
make this humble request! Should I have told you that my love was
boundless, while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I had any
hope of your sharing this feeling in the depths of my soul? No,
while I am with you, I will be whatever you will, if only I may be
with you. If you refuse (as you have the power to refuse), I will
not utter one murmur, I will go. And if, at a later day, any other
woman should enter into my life, you will have proof that you were
right; but if I am faithful till death, you may feel some regret
perhaps. The hope of causing you a regret will soothe my agony,
and that thought shall be the sole revenge of a slighted
heart...."

Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribulations of youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two white pinions, the nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid imagination, can realize the horrors that seized upon Gaston de Nueil when he had reason to suppose that his ultimatum was in Mme. de Beauseant's hands. He saw the Vicomtesse, wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love, as those can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could have wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There were a thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that he might have said, things infinitely better and more moving than those stilted phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he had been thirty years old, he might have got drunk, but the innocence of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources of opium nor of the expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he at hand one of those good friends of the Parisian pattern who understand so well how to say _Poete, non dolet!_ by producing a bottle of champagne, or alleviate the agony of suspense by carrying you off somewhere to make a night of it. Capital fellows are they, always in low water when you are in funds, always off to some watering-place when you go to look them up, always with some bad bargain in horse-flesh to sell you; it is true, that when you want to borrow of them, they have always just lost their last louis at play; but in all other respects they are the best fellows on earth, always ready to embark with you on one of the steep down-grades where you lose your time, your soul, and your life!

At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instrumentality of Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy on the scented seal, a letter written on vellum notepaper.

He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and re-read _her_ letter:--

"You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for the
friendliness of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the
attraction which intellect always has for me. I put confidence in
the generosity of youth, and you have disappointed me. And yet, if
I did not speak unreservedly (which would have been perfectly
ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly of my position, so that
you might imagine that I was not to be touched by a young soul. My
distress is the keener for my interest in you. I am naturally
tender-hearted and kindly, but circumstances force me to act
unkindly. Another woman would have flung your letter, unread, into
the fire; I read it, and I am answering it. My answer will make it
clear to you that while I am not untouched by the expression of
this feeling which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am
still far from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take
will show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish
besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were,
which you give me over your life; and I desire to exercise it this
once to draw aside the veil from your eyes.

"I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely
two-and-twenty. You yourself cannot know what your thoughts will
be at my age. The vows that you make so lightly to-day may seem a
very heavy burden to you then. I am quite willing to believe that
at this moment you would give me your whole life without a regret,
you would even be ready to die for a little brief happiness; but
at the age of thirty experience will take from you the very power
of making daily sacrifices for my sake, and I myself should feel
deeply humiliated if I accepted them. A day would come when
everything, even Nature, would bid you leave me, and I have
already told you that death is preferable to desertion. Misfortune
has taught me to calculate; as you see, I am arguing perfectly
dispassionately. You force me to tell you that I have no love for
you; I ought not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too late
to yield, as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the
heart, too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations
spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the
melancholy insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too clearly
to accept your proffered friendship. It is only instinct. I
forgive the boyish ruse, for which you are not responsible as yet.
In the name of this passing fancy of yours, for the sake of your
career and my own peace of mind, I bid you stay in your own
country; you must not spoil a fair and honorable life for an
illusion which, by its very nature, cannot last. At a later day,
when you have accomplished your real destiny, in the fully
developed manhood that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer
of mine, though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You
will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will
certainly be sweet and precious to you then; a friendship untried
by the extremes of passion and the disenchanting processes of
life; a friendship which noble thoughts and thoughts of religion
will keep pure and sacred. Farewell; do my bidding with the
thought that your success will bring a gleam of pleasure into my
solitude, and only think of me as we think of absent friends."

Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following lines:--

"MADAME,--If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
fear to carry a remorse all through your own----"

When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked him with whom he left the note?

"I gave it to Mme. la Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in her carriage and just about to start."

"For the town?"

"I don't think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post-horses."

"Ah! then she is going away," said the Baron.

"Yes, sir," the man answered.

Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. de Beauseant. She led the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion that he followed. And he? Amid the many thoughts that assailed him during that journey, one all-absorbing problem filled his mind--"Why did she go away?" Theories grew thickly on such ground for supposition, and naturally he inclined to the one that flattered his hopes--"If the Vicomtesse cares for me, a clever woman would, of course, choose Switzerland, where nobody knows either of us, in preference to France, where she would find censorious critics."

An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel attracted to a woman clever enough to choose her own ground; such women are too clever. However, there is nothing to prove that there was any truth in Gaston's supposition.

The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. As soon as she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer evening in the twilight. Jacques, that flunkey in grain, showed no sign of surprise, and announced _M. le Baron de Nueil_ like a discreet domestic well