Beatrix

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. To leave you at this moment to make a fifth at mouche (that is the name of the game) can only be done in the depths of Brittany – Adieu.

Your Sabine.

Guerande, May, 1838.

I take up my Odyssey. On the third day your children no longer used the ceremonious “you;” they thee’d and thou’d each other like lovers. My mother-in-law, enchanted to see us so happy, is trying to take your place to me, dear mother, and, as often happens when people play a part to efface other memories, she has been so charming that she is, almost, you to me.

I think she has guessed the heroism of my conduct, for at the beginning of our journey she tried to hide her anxiety with such care that it was visible from excessive precaution.

When I saw the towers of Guerande rising in the distance, I whispered in the ear of your son-in-law, “Have you really forgotten her?” My husband, now become my angel, can’t know anything, I think, about sincere and simple love, for the words made him wild with happiness. Still, I think the desire to put Madame de Rochefide forever out of his mind led me too far. But how could I help it? I love, and I am half a Portuguese, – for I am much more like you, mamma, than like my father.

Calyste accepts all from me as spoilt children accept things, they think it their right; he is an only child, I remember that. But, between ourselves, I will not give my daughter (if I have any daughters) to an only son. I see a variety of tyrants in an only son. So, mamma, we have rather inverted our parts, and I am the devoted half of the pair. There are dangers, I know, in devotion, though we profit by it; we lose our dignity, for one thing. I feel bound to tell you of the wreck of that semi-virtue. Dignity, after all, is only a screen set up before pride, behind which we rage as we please; but how could I help it? you were not here, and I saw a gulf opening before me. Had I remained upon my dignity, I should have won only the cold joys (or pains) of a sort of brotherhood which would soon have drifted into indifference. What sort of future might that have led to? My devotion has, I know, made me Calyste’s slave; but shall I regret it? We shall see.

As for the present, I am delighted with it. I love Calyste; I love him absolutely, with the folly of a mother, who thinks that all her son may do is right, even if he tyrannizes a trifle over her.

Guerande, May 15th.

Up to the present moment, dear mamma, I find marriage a delightful affair, I can spend all my tenderness on the noblest of men whom a foolish woman disdained for a fiddler, – for that woman evidently was a fool, and a cold fool, the worst kind! I, in my legitimate love, am charitable; I am curing his wounds while I lay my heart open to incurable ones. Yes, the more I love Calyste, the more I feel that I should die of grief if our present happiness ever ceased.

I must tell you how the whole family and the circle which meets at the hotel de Guenic adore me. They are all personages born under tapestries of the highest warp; in fact, they seem to have stepped from those old tapestries as if to prove that the impossible may exist. Some day, when we are alone together, I will describe to you my Aunt Zephirine, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel, the Chevalier du Halga, the Demoiselles de Kergarouet, and others. They all, even to the two servants, Gasselin and Mariotte (whom I wish they would let me take to Paris), regard me as an angel sent from heaven; they tremble when I speak. Dear people! they ought to be preserved under glass.

My mother-in-law has solemnly installed us in the apartments formerly occupied by herself and her late husband. The scene was touching. She said to us, – “I spent my whole married life, a happy woman, in these rooms; may the omen be a happy one for you, my children.”

She has taken Calyste’s former room for hers. Saintly soul! she seems intent on laying off her memories and all her conjugal dignities to invest us with them. The province of Brittany, this town, this family of ancient morals and ancient customs has, in spite of certain absurdities which strike the eye of a frivolous Parisian girl, something inexplicable, something grandiose even in its trifles, which can only be defined by the word sacred.

All the tenants of the vast domains of the house of Guenic, bought back, as you know, by Mademoiselle des Touches (whom we are going to visit in her convent), have been in a body to pay their respects to us. These worthy people, in their holiday costumes, expressing their genuine joy in the fact that Calyste has now become really and truly their master, made me understand Brittany, the feudal system and old France. The whole scene was a festival I can’t describe to you in writing, but I will tell you about it when we meet. The terms of the leases have been proposed by the gars themselves. We shall sign them, after making a tour of inspection round the estates, which have been mortgaged away from us for one hundred and fifty years! Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel told me that the gars have reckoned up the revenues and estimated the rentals with a veracity and justice Parisians would never believe. We start in three days on horseback for this trip. I will write you on my return, dear mother. I shall have nothing more to tell you about myself, for my happiness is at its height – and how can that be told? I shall write you only what you know already, and that is, how I love you.

Nantes, June, 1838.

Having now played the role of a chatelaine, adored by her vassals as if the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had lowered no banners; and after rides through forests, and halts at farmhouses, dinners on oaken tables, covered with centenary linen, bending under Homeric viands served on antediluvian dishes; after drinking the choicest wines in goblets to volleys of musketry, accompanied by cries of “Long live the Guenics!” till I was deafened; after balls, where the only orchestra was a bagpipe, blown by a man for ten hours; and after bouquets, and young brides who wanted us to bless them, and downright weariness, which made me find in my bed a sleep I never knew before, with delightful awakenings when love shone radiant as the sun pouring in upon me, and scintillating with a million of flies, all buzzing in the Breton dialect! – in short, after a most grotesque residence in the Chateau du Guenic, where the windows are gates and the cows graze peacefully on the grass in the halls (which castle we have sworn to repair and to inhabit for a while very year to the wild acclamations of the clan du Guenic, a gars of which bore high our banner) – ouf! I am at Nantes.

But oh! what a day was that when we arrived at the old castle! The rector came out, mother, with all his clergy, crowned with flowers, to receive us and bless us, expressing such joy, – the tears are in my eyes as I think of it. And my noble Calyste! who played his part of seigneur like a personage in Walter Scott! My lord received his tenants’ homage as if he were back in the thirteenth century. I heard the girls and the women saying to each other, “Oh, what a beautiful seigneur we have!” for all the world like an opera chorus. The old men talked of Calyste’s resemblance to the former Guenics whom they had known in their youth. Ah! noble, sublime Brittany! land of belief and faith! But progress has got its eye upon it; bridges are being built, roads made, ideas are coming, and then farewell to the sublime! The peasants will certainly not be as free and proud as I have now seen them, when progress has proved to them that they are Calyste’s equals – if, indeed, they could ever be got to believe it.

After this poem of our pacific Restoration had been sung, and the contracts and leases signed, we left that ravishing land, all flowery, gay, solemn, lonely by turns, and came here to kneel with our happiness at the feet of her who gave it to us. Calyste and I both felt the need of thanking the sister of the Visitation. In memory of her he has quartered his own arms with those of Des Touches, which are: party couped, tranche and taille or and sinople, on the latter two eagles argent. He means to take one of the eagles argent for his own supporter and put this motto in its beak: Souviegne-vous.

Yesterday we went to the convent of the ladies of the Visitation, to which we were taken by the Abbe Grimont, a friend of the du Guenic family, who told us that your dear Felicite, mamma, was indeed a saint. She could not very well be anything else to him, for her conversion, which was thought to be his doing, has led to his appointment as vicar-general of the diocese. Mademoiselle des Touches declined to receive Calyste, and would only see me. I found her slightly changed, thinner and paler; but she seemed much pleased at my visit.

“Tell Calyste,” she said, in a low voice, “that it is a matter of conscience with me not to see him, for I am permitted to do so. I prefer not to buy that happiness by months of suffering. Ah, you do not know what it costs me to reply to the question, ‘Of what are you thinking?’ Certainly the mother of the novices has no conception of the number and extent of the ideas which are rushing through my mind when she asks that question. Sometimes I am seeing Italy or Paris, with all its sights; always thinking, however, of Calyste, who is” – she said this in that poetic way you know and admire so much – “who is the sun of memory to me. I found,” she continued, “that I was too old to be received among the Carmelites, and I have entered the order of Saint-Francois de Sales solely because he said, ‘I will bare your heads instead of your feet,’ – objecting, as he did, to austerities which mortified the body only. It is, in truth, the head that sins. The saintly bishop was right to make his rule austere toward the intellect, and terrible against the will. That is what I sought; for my head was the guilty part of me. It deceived me as to my heart until I reached that fatal age of forty, when, for a few brief moments, we are forty times happier than young women, and then, speedily, fifty times more unhappy. But, my child, tell me,” she asked, ceasing with visible satisfaction to speak of herself, “are you happy?”

“You see me under all the enchantments of love and happiness,” I

answered.

“Calyste is as good and simple as he is noble and beautiful,” she said, gravely. “I have made you my heiress in more things than property; you now possess the double ideal of which I dreamed. I rejoice in what I have done,” she continued, after a pause. “But, my child, make no mistake; do yourself no wrong. You have easily won happiness; you have only to stretch out your hand to take it, and it is yours; but be careful to preserve it. If you had come here solely to carry away with you the counsels that my knowledge of your husband alone can give you, the journey would be well repaid. Calyste is moved at this moment by a communicated passion, but you have not inspired it. To make your happiness lasting, try, my dear child, to give him something of his former emotions. In the interests of both of you, be capricious, be coquettish; to tell you the truth, you must be. I am not advising any odious scheming, or petty tyranny; this that I tell you is the science of a woman’s life. Between usury and prodigality, my child, is economy. Study, therefore, to acquire honorably a certain empire over Calyste. These are the last words on earthly interests that I shall ever utter, and I have kept them to say as we part; for there are times when I tremble in my conscience lest to save Calyste I may have sacrificed you. Bind him to you, firmly, give him children, let him respect their mother in you – and,” she added, in a low and trembling voice, “manage, if you can, that he shall never again see Beatrix.”

That name plunged us both into a sort of stupor; we looked into each other’s eyes, exchanging a vague uneasiness.

“Do you return to Guerande?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Never go to Les Touches. I did wrong to give him that property.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Child!” she answered, “Les Touches for you is Bluebeard’s chamber. There is nothing so dangerous as to wake a sleeping passion.”

I have given you, dear mamma, the substance, or at any rate, the meaning of our conversation. If Mademoiselle des Touches made me talk to her freely, she also gave me much to think of; and all the more because, in the delight of this trip, and the charm of these relations with my Calyste, I had well-nigh forgotten the serious situation of which I spoke to you in my first letter, and about which you warned me.

But oh! mother, it is impossible for me to follow these counsels. I cannot put an appearance of opposition or caprice into my love; it would falsify it. Calyste will do with me what he pleases. According to your theory, the more I am a woman the more I make myself his toy; for I am, and I know it, horribly weak in my happiness; I cannot resist a single glance of my lord. But no! I do not abandon myself to love; I only cling to it, as a mother presses her infant to her breast, fearing some evil.

Note. – When “Beatrix” was first published, in 1839, the volume ended with the following paragraph: “Calyste, rich and married to the most beautiful woman in Paris, retains a sadness in his soul which nothing dissipates, – not even the birth of a son at Guerande, in 1839, to the great joy of Zephirine du Guenic. Beatrix lives still in the depths of his heart, and it is impossible to foresee what disasters might result should he again meet with Madame de Rochefide.” In 1842 this concluding paragraph was suppressed and the story continued as here follows. – TR.

XVIII. THE END OF A HONEY-MOON

Guerande, July, 1838

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:

Ah, my dear mamma! at the end of three months to know what it is to be jealous! My heart completes its experience; I now feel the deepest hatred and the deepest love! I am more than betrayed, – I am not loved. How fortunate for me to have a mother, a heart on which to cry out as I will!

It is enough to say to wives who are still half girls: “Here’s a key rusty with memories among those of your palace; go everywhere, enjoy everything, but keep away from Les Touches!” to make us eager to go there hot-foot, our eyes shining with the curiosity of Eve. What a root of bitterness Mademoiselle des Touches planted in my love! Why did she forbid me to go to Les Touches? What sort of happiness is mine if it depends on an excursion, on a visit to a paltry house in Brittany? Why should I fear? Is there anything to fear? Add to this reasoning of Mrs. Blue-Beard the desire that nips all women to know if their power is solid or precarious, and you’ll understand how it was that I said one day, with an unconcerned little air: —

“What sort of place is Les Touches?”

“Les Touches belongs to you,” said my divine, dear mother-in-law.

“If Calyste had never set foot in Les Touches!” – cried my aunt Zephirine, shaking her head.

“He would not be my husband,” I added.

“Then you know what happened there?” said my mother-in-law, slyly.

“It is a place of perdition!” exclaimed Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.

“Mademoiselle des Touches committed many sins there, for which she is now asking the pardon of God.”

“But they saved the soul of that noble woman, and made the fortune of a convent,” cried the Chevalier du Halga. “The Abbe Grimont told me she had given a hundred thousand francs to the nuns of the Visitation.”

“Should you like to go to Les Touches?” asked my mother-in-law.

“It is worth seeing.”

“No, no!” I said hastily.

Doesn’t this little scene read to you like a page out of some diabolical drama?

It was repeated again and again under various pretexts. At last my mother-in-law said to me: “I understand why you do not go to Les Touches, and I think you are right.”

Oh! you must admit, mamma, that an involuntary, unconscious stab like that would have decided you to find out if your happiness rested on such a frail foundation that it would perish at a mere touch. To do Calyste justice, he never proposed to me to visit that hermitage, now his property. But as soon as we love we are creatures devoid of common-sense, and this silence, this reserve piqued me; so I said to him one day: “What are you afraid of at Les Touches, that you alone never speak of the place?”

“Let us go there,” he replied.

So there I was caught, – like other women who want to be caught, and who trust to chance to cut the Gordian knot of their indecision. So to Les Touches we went. It is enchanting, in a style profoundly artistic. I took delight in that place of horror where Mademoiselle des Touches had so earnestly forbidden me to go. Poisonous flowers are all charming; Satan sowed them – for the devil has flowers as well as God; we have only to look within our souls to see the two shared in the making of us. What delicious acrity in a situation where I played, not with fire, but – with ashes! I studied Calyste; the point was to know if that passion was thoroughly extinct. I watched, as you may well believe, every wind that blew; I kept an eye upon his face as he went from room to room and from one piece of furniture to another, exactly like a child who is looking for some hidden thing. Calyste seemed thoughtful, but at first I thought that I had vanquished the past. I felt strong enough to mention Madame de Rochefide-whom in my heart I called la Rocheperfide. At last we went to see the famous bush were Beatrix was caught when he flung her into the sea that she might never belong to another man.

“She must be light indeed to have stayed there,” I said laughing. Calyste kept silence, so I added, “We’ll respect the dead.” Still Calyste was silent.

“Have I displeased you?” I asked.

“No; but cease to galvanize that passion,” he answered.

What a speech! Calyste, when he saw me all cast down by it, redoubled his care and tenderness.

August.

I was, alas! at the edge of a precipice, amusing myself, like the innocent heroines of all melodramas, by gathering flowers. Suddenly a horrible thought rode full tilt through my happiness, like the horse in the German ballad. I thought I saw that Calyste’s love was increasing through his reminiscences; that he was expending on me the stormy emotions I revived by reminding him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix, – just think of it! that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby, something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to call itself Beatrix, Beatrice!

Already, dearest mother, I am forced to keep one eye open to suspicion, when my heart is all Calyste’s; and isn’t it a great catastrophe when the eye gets the better of the heart, and suspicion at last finds itself justified? It came to pass in this way: —

“This place is dear to me,” I said to Calyste one morning, “because I owe my happiness to it; and so I forgive you for taking me sometimes for another woman.”

The loyal Breton blushed, and I threw my arms around his neck. But all the same I have left Les Touches, and never will I go back there again.

The very strength of hatred which makes me long for Madame de Rochefide’s death – ah, heavens! a natural death, pleurisy, or some accident – makes me also understand to its fullest extent the power of my love for Calyste. That woman has appeared to me to trouble my sleep, – I see her in a dream; shall I ever encounter her bodily? Ah! the postulant of the Visitation was right, – Les Touches is a fatal spot; Calyste has there recovered his past emotions, and they are, I see it plainly, more powerful than the joys of our love. Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany. Poor Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious rival! But this is prostitution! I am not myself; I am ashamed of it all. A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande and those sands of Croisic.

August 25th.

I am determined to go and live in the ruins of the old chateau. Calyste, worried by my restlessness, agrees to take me. Either he knows life so little that he guesses nothing, or he does know the cause of my flight, in which case he cannot love me. I tremble so with fear lest I find the awful certainty I seek that, like a child, I put my hands before my eyes not to hear the explosion —

Oh, mother! I am not loved with the love that I feel in my heart. Calyste is charming to me, that’s true! but what man, unless he were a monster, would not be, as Calyste is, amiable and gracious when receiving all the flowers of the soul of a young girl of twenty, brought up by you, pure, loving, and beautiful, as many women have said to you that I am.

Guenic, September 18.

Has he forgotten her? That’s the solitary thought which echoes through my soul like a remorse. Ah! dear mamma, have all women to struggle against memories as I do? None but innocent young men should be married to pure young girls. But that’s a deceptive Utopia; better have one’s rival in the past than in the future. Ah! mother, pity me, though at this moment I am happy as a woman who fears to lose her happiness and so clings fast to it, – one way of killing it, says that profoundly wise Clotilde.

I notice that for the last five months I think only of myself, that is, of Calyste. Tell sister Clotilde that her melancholy bits of wisdom often recur to me. She is happy in being faithful to the dead; she fears no rival. A kiss to my dear Athenais, about whom I see Juste is beside himself. From what you told me in your last letter it is evident he fears you will not give her to him. Cultivate that fear as a precious product. Athenais will be sovereign lady; but I who fear lest I can never win Calyste back from himself shall always be a servant.