The Memoirs of Two Young Wives Read online

  It is not hard to take the argument at the heart of The Memoirs of Two Young Wives as a representation of these two sides of Balzac’s creative mind, as dramatized in the friction between Louise the visionary, drawn to peak experience, uncompromising and intense in her demands upon life, and Renée the realist, strictly practical, with her iron sense of limits. Together, these two qualities were the source of what commentators have sharply noted: Balzac’s visceral presence in his work. As one of his best biographers, V. S. Pritchett, put it, “Balzac is always felt as a sanguine presence in his writing, breathless with knowledge, fantasy, and things seen.” Describing his “ubiquity” as a novelist, he adds, “There is a spry, pungent, and pervasive sense that in any scene he was there, and in the flesh.” In the range of his empathy, in the busily peopled world he creates, with characters recurring like real people from book to book, Balzac can be compared not only to Dickens but to Shakespeare. Even as spare a novel as The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, with its weighty themes but limited cast, helps explain just how he did it, for its inner drama could well be a reflection of his own divided self.

  —MORRIS DICKSTEIN

  THE MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES

  To George Sand

  Dear George, this dedication will add no luster to your name, which will rather cast its magical glow over my book, but there is neither calculation nor modesty behind it. I seek only to attest to the real friendship that we have kept up through all our travels and separations, in spite of our work and the rigors of our world. That sentiment will doubtless never change. The parade of comradely names that will accompany my works adds a pleasure to the pains caused me by their number, for they are not without their travails, to speak only of the aspersions my threatening fecundity has earned me—as if the world posing before me were not more prolific still! Will it not be a fine thing, George, if one day the archaeologist of long-lost literatures rediscovers in that parade only illustrious names, noble hearts, pure and sacred friendships, and the greatest glories of this century? May I not take more pride in that incontestable happiness than in any ever-disputable success? For those who know you well, is it not a happiness to be able to call oneself, as I do here,

  Your friend,

  de Balzac

  Paris, June 1840

  PART ONE

  1

  FROM MADEMOISELLE LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MADEMOISELLE RENÉE DE MAUCOMBE

  Paris, September [1]

  My dear doe, I too am now out in the world! And unless you have written me in Blois, I am also the first to arrive at our charming rendezvous by correspondence. Unstick your beautiful black eyes from my first sentence, and save your exclamations for a later letter, the one in which I tell you of my first love. People always talk about the first love; is there a second, then? “Hush now!” you must surely be saying, “and tell me: How did you ever escape from that convent, where you were meant to take your vows?” My dear, whatever may go on among the Carmelites, the miracle of my deliverance is the most natural thing in the world. The protests of a horrified conscience simply overruled the dictates of a long-settled design. My aunt had no desire to see me die of consumption; she won out over my mother, who was still prescribing the novitiate as the only cure for my frailty. That happy ending was hastened by the bleak melancholy I fell into after you left. And so now I am in Paris, my angel, and it is to you that I owe the joy of being here.

  My Renée, had you seen me the day I found myself without you, you would have been proud to inspire such deep emotion in so young a heart. So much did we dream as one, so often did we spread our wings together, so long did we live a shared life that I believe our souls were knit one to the other, like those two Hungarian girls[2] whose death was recounted to us by Monsieur Beauvisage, who certainly did not live up to his name—was there ever a man better suited to be a convent doctor! And did you perhaps suffer right along with your darling? Listless and despondent, I could only think of the many bonds that united us, counting them off one by one; I feared they’d been broken forever by the distance between us, and I conceived a loathing for existence, like a heartbroken lovebird. Death seemed to me a sweet relief, and I made my way toward it without complaint. Oh, the thought of being alone at the Carmelite convent of Blois, the terror of taking my vows in that place without a prologue like Mademoiselle de la Vallière’s,[3] and without my Renée! It was an affliction, a mortal affliction. That unchanging existence, in which every hour brings a duty, a prayer, a task so perfectly identical that no matter where you may be in the world you know just what a Carmelite is doing at any hour of the day or night; that horrible existence in which it matters not that the things around us are or are not, had for us become an existence of the greatest variety: our soaring spirits knew no boundaries, fantasy had given us the key to its kingdoms. By turns, we each made a charming hippogriff[4] for the other, the livelier of us rousing the sleepier, and our souls frolicked in tandem as they laid claim to the world that had been forbidden us. Even in the Lives of the Saints we could find an aid to the understanding of the most secret things! The day your sweet company was stolen from me, I became what a Carmelite is in our eyes, a modern-day Danaïd who does not seek to fill a bottomless barrel but rather, day after day, hoists an empty bucket from I know not what well, hoping to find it full. My aunt had no idea of our secret inner life. She could not understand my weariness of existence, she who has made a heavenly world for herself in the two arpents of her convent. If it is to be embraced at our age, the religious life demands an excessive simplicity that you and I, my doe, do not have, or the sort of burning devotion that makes my aunt so sublime. My aunt sacrificed herself for the sake of a cherished brother, but who can sacrifice herself for the sake of strangers, or of ideas?

  For what will soon be two weeks, I have had so many free-spirited words trapped inside me, so many meditations buried deep in my heart, so many observations to express and stories to tell that can only be told to you, that without the stopgap of written confidences standing in for our precious chats, I would suffocate. How vitally we require the life of the heart! I begin my chronicle this morning imagining that yours has already been started, that very soon I will live in the heart of your beautiful valley of Gémenos,[5] of which I know only what you have told me, just as you will live in Paris, of which you know only what we dreamt of together.

  Well then, my lovely child, on a morning that will remain forever signaled by a pink marker in the book of my life, my grandmother’s last valet, Philippe, came from Paris with a lady’s maid to take me away. When my aunt summoned me to her room and told me the news, I stood speechless with joy; I could only stare in disbelief.

  “My child,” she said to me in her hoarse voice, “I can see that you do not regret leaving me, but this is not the final farewell. We shall see each other again. God has marked your brow with the sign of the elect; you have the sort of pride that can lead just as well to hell as to heaven, but you are too noble to descend! I know you better than you know yourself: passion will not be for you what it is for ordinary women.”

  She gently drew me to her and kissed my brow, stamping it with the flame that devours her, that has dimmed the azure of her pupils, wrinkled her flaxen temples, left her eyelids drooping and her beautiful face sallow. She gave me gooseflesh.

  I kissed her hands, then answered, “Dear aunt, if your wonderful kindness has not made me find in your Paraclete[6] a place salubrious to the body and comforting to the heart, I will have to shed so many tears before I return to it that you would never wish to see me again. I will come back to this place only when I have been betrayed by a Louis XIV of my own, and if ever I catch hold of one, only death will tear him from my arms! I fear no Madame de Montespan.”

  “Go on, then, you mad girl,” she said with a smile, “do not leave those silly ideas here, take them away with you, and know that you are more a Montespan than a La Vallière.”

  I gave her a kiss. That poor, frail woman could not resist seeing me to the carriage
, her gaze fixed now on the paternal coat of arms, now on me.

  Night came upon me unawares in Beaugency, lost as I was in a bemusement provoked by that singular farewell. What would I find in this world I so longed for? As it turned out, the first thing I found was no one to welcome me. All the preparations I had made in my heart were for naught. My mother was at the Bois de Boulogne, my father at the Council of State; I was told that my brother the Duke de Rhétoré comes home only to dress for dinner. I was shown to my rooms by Miss Griffith (she has claws)[7] and Philippe.

  Those rooms once belonged to my beloved grandmother the Princess de Vaurémont, to whom I owe some manner of fortune, of which no one has ever told me. In the lines that follow, you will feel all the sadness that seized me on entering that place hallowed by my memories. Everything was just as she left it! I was to sleep in the bed that she died in. I sat on the edge of her chaise longue and wept, little caring that I was not alone, remembering the many times I had sat at her knees, the better to hear her words, seeing her face swathed in discolored lace, emaciated by age as much as by the torments of her final illness. I thought I could still feel the warmth she imparted to that room. How is it possible that Mademoiselle Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu should be obliged, like a peasant girl, to sleep in her mother’s bed, almost on the very day she died? For to me that princess, who died in 1817, might have expired only the day before. I found the room cluttered with things that had no place there, proving how little those occupied with the kingdom’s affairs care for their own, and how rarely they thought of that noble woman once she was dead, she who will be remembered as one of the truly great women of the eighteenth century. Philippe seemed to understand the reason for my tears. He told me that the princess had bequeathed her furniture to me in her will, and that my father had still not undertaken to erase the ravages of the Revolution from the house’s grand apartments. I rose to my feet, and Philippe opened the door to the little salon that gives on to the reception room. I found it in the dilapidated state I knew so well: no precious paintings set into the walls above the doors but only bare beams; the marble mantels broken; the mirrors pulled down. As a child I was afraid to climb the great staircase and cross through the vast solitude of these high-ceilinged rooms; when I wanted to visit the princess, I used a little staircase that descends under the vault of the larger one and leads to the hidden door of her boudoir.

  Her apartment, made up of a drawing room, a bedroom, and that pretty vermillion-and-gold study I told you of, occupies the wing on the Invalides side. The house is separated from the boulevard only by a vine-covered wall and a magnificent row of trees whose boughs interlace with those of the elms on the boulevard’s side street. Were it not for the gray façades and blue-and-gold dome of Les Invalides, one might think oneself in a forest. The style and placement of those three rooms show them to be the former parade apartment of the duchesses of Chaulieu, with the dukes’ no doubt in the facing wing, kept at a proper distance by two central buildings and the front pavilion, which holds those huge, dark, echoing rooms Philippe had shown me, still stripped of their splendor, just as I saw them in my childhood. Noting the astonishment on my face, Philippe took on a confidential air. My dear, in this diplomatic house, everyone is discreet and mysterious. He told me that the family was awaiting a law by which those who emigrated during the Revolution would be reimbursed for the value of their property; my father will restore his house only when that restitution comes. The king’s architect put the cost at three hundred thousand livres.[8] That revelation fairly threw me to the sofa in my drawing room. So my father was prepared to let me perish in the convent rather than devote that sum to my dowry? There is the thought that greeted me in that doorway. Ah, Renée, how I lay my head on your shoulder, and how I thought back to the days when my grandmother animated these two rooms! She who exists only in my heart, you who are at Maucombe, two hundred leagues away, those are the only creatures in this world who love me, or who once did.

  That dear old woman always tried to rouse herself on hearing my voice, her gaze still youthful. How well we got on! That memory immediately brought a change to my mood. I found something holy in what I had a moment before seen as a profanation. I took comfort in the vague lingering odor of wig powder, in the idea of sleeping in the protection of those yellow-and-white damask curtains, on which her gaze and her breath must have left something of her soul. I directed Philippe to restore all these old things to their former beauty, that I might have rooms fit to live in. I told him myself exactly what I wanted, assigning everything a place. I inspected the furnishings one by one, making them mine, advising Philippe how those antiques I so love could be made new again. The white walls have gone a little dull with age, just as the gold of the frolicsome arabesques is tarnished here and there, but those effects harmonize with the faded colors of the Savonnerie rug given to my grandmother by Louis XV, along with his portrait. The clock is a gift from Marshal de Saxe. The porcelains on the mantelpiece come from Marshal de Richelieu. Ringed by an oval frame, my grandmother’s portrait, painted when she was twenty-five, faces the king’s. The prince is nowhere to be seen. I like that forthright omission, which depicts her delicious character with a single stroke. Once, when my aunt was gravely ill, her confessor insisted that the prince be allowed in from the drawing room where he was waiting. “Along with the doctor and his prescriptions,” said the princess. The bed has a canopy and a padded headboard; the drape of the pulled-back curtains is wonderfully sumptuous; the furniture is of gilded wood, upholstered in that same yellow damask with white flowers that also covers the windows, lined with a white silk that resembles moiré. I have no idea who did the paintings over the door, but they depict a sunrise and a moonlit night. The treatment of the fireplace is quite curious. Clearly much of life was lived by the fireside in the last century: great things happened there. The hearth of gilded copper is a sculptural marvel, the mantelpiece is lavishly finished, the shovel and tongs are deliciously worked, the bellows are a thing of beauty. The fire screen’s tapestry comes from Les Gobelins, and its frame is exquisite; the most wonderful figures meander along it, on the feet, on the footrest, on the branches; everything is as intricate as a fan. Who gave her that magnificent thing that she so loved? I wish I knew. How many times I saw her sunk deep in her bergère, one foot on that footrest, the hem of her gown hiked up halfway to her knee, picking up, putting down, then once again picking up the snuffbox on the little table between her box of lozenges and her fingerless silk gloves! Was she a coquette? Until the day she died she kept herself up as if that fine portrait had been painted only the day before, as if she were awaiting the cream of the court that forever gravitated around her. Looking at that bergère, I remembered the inimitable movement she gave to her skirts as she sank into it. Those women of bygone days carried off with them certain secrets that paint an entire picture of their age. The princess had a particular way of cocking her head, of casting a glance or tossing out a word, a whole private language that I never saw in my mother. There was a finesse about it, and a congeniality too, full of meaning but never posturing; her conversation was at once garrulous and laconic, she knew how to tell a story, and she could draw a portrait with three words.

  Above all, she had an absolute freedom of opinion that must certainly have shaped my own turn of mind. From seven to ten years of age, I lived at her side. She loved having me in her rooms no less than I loved being there. That predilection was the cause of more than one quarrel between her and my mother, but nothing whips up the flames of fondness like the cold wind of persecution. How graciously she used to say “There you are, little mask!” when the serpent of curiosity lent me its undulations so that I might slip through her doors and go to her. She felt she was loved, she loved my naive adoration, which brought a ray of sunlight into her winter. I know not what went on in her rooms in the evening, but she had a great deal of company; tiptoeing into her drawing room the next morning to see if the day had begun there, I saw the furniture out of place
, the gaming tables set up, piles of tobacco here and there. The style of that room is the same as the bedroom. The furniture is singularly turned, the wood decorated with concave moldings and hoof feet. Richly sculpted, wonderfully distinctive garlands of flowers wend their way between the mirrors and hang down in festoons. There are fine Chinese vases on the sideboards. All of this is set against walls of white and poppy red. My grandmother was a proud, piquant brunette, and her choice of colors gives an idea of her skin tone. I found in that drawing room a writing table set with tooled silver, whose forms greatly occupied my eye when I was small. It was given to her by a Lomellini of Genoa.[9] The four sides of that table represent the occupations of the four seasons; the characters are in relief, and there are hundreds in each scene. I spent two hours recapturing my memories, all alone in that sanctuary, which saw the last moments of one of the most remarkable women of Louis XV’s court, celebrated as much for her mind as for her beauty. You know how abruptly I was snatched away from her, from one day to the next, in 1816. “Go say goodbye to your grandmother,” my mother told me. I found the princess unsurprised at my going away, and outwardly impassive. She received me just as she usually did. “You are bound for the convent, my treasure,” she told me. “You will be with your aunt, an excellent woman. I shall see to it that you are not sacrificed, you will be independent and in a position to wed whomever you like.” She died six months later; she’d entrusted her will to the most faithful of her old friends, Prince de Talleyrand, who, while paying a call on Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, had her convey to me that my grandmother forbade me to take my vows. I do hope that sooner or later I will meet that prince, who no doubt will have more to tell me.