The Human Comedy Read online

  “Reflection has no place in such things!” cried Joseph Bridau.

  “I was seventeen years old,” de Marsay resumed. “The Restoration was beginning in earnest, and my old friends will remember the impetuous young hothead I was in those days. I was in love for the first time, and, I can say this today, I was one of the prettiest young men in Paris. I had youth, beauty, two advantages conferred by chance, and of which we are as proud as if they were hard-won. I will hold my tongue concerning the others. Like all young men, I loved a woman six years older than I. None of you,” he said, glancing around the table, “can guess her name nor recognize her. Only Ronquerolles, at the time, saw through my secret; he kept it well. I would have feared his smile, but he has left us,” said the minister, looking around him.

  “He declined the invitation to supper,” said Madame de Sérizy.

  “For six months, possessed by my love, unable to grasp that my passion was becoming my master, I gave myself over to those charming idolatries that are both the triumph and the fragile joy of youth. I kept her old gloves, I drank an infusion of the flowers she had worn, I rose at night to go and gaze up at her windows. My head grew light on inhaling the perfume she had adopted. I was a thousand leagues from the realization that every woman is a stove with a marble top.”

  “Oh! Spare us your horrible judgments, won’t you?” said Madame de Camps with a smile.

  “I believe I would have poured withering scorn on any philosopher who published that terrible, profoundly true thought,” de Marsay went on. “You all know too well what’s what for me to say anything more of it. Those few words will remind you of your own follies. A grande dame if ever there was one, and a childless widow—oh! nothing was missing!—my idol closeted herself away to stitch a mark into my linens with her hair; in short, she answered my follies with follies of her own. And how not to believe in passion, when it is vouchsafed by folly? We devoted our every thought to concealing so perfect and so beautiful a love from the eyes of the world, and we succeeded. Oh, what charms did our escapades not possess? Of her I will tell you nothing: Perfect back then, still today she is considered one of the most beautiful women of Paris, but in those days people would have signed their own death warrant for one glance from her. Her fortune was still quite sufficient for a woman worshipped and in love, but scarcely suited to her name, now that the Restoration had granted it a new luster. Things being as they were, I was too full of myself to think of being wary. Although my jealousy had the strength of a hundred and twenty Othellos, that redoubtable sentiment slumbered inside me, like the gold in a nugget. I would have ordered my servant to beat me with a stick had I been so ignoble as to doubt the purity of that angel, so frail and so strong, so blond and so naïve, pure, artless, whose adorably docile blue eyes let my gaze plunge straight into them, all the way to her heart. Not one iota of reticence in her manner, in her eyes or her words; always white, fresh, and open to her lover, like the Oriental lily in the Song of Songs! . . . Ah! my friends!” the minister cried despondently, a young man once more. “One has to crack one’s head very hard against the marble top to drive out that poetry!”

  This heartfelt lament struck a chord among the tablemates and goaded their curiosity, already so ably aroused.

  “Every morning, mounted on that fine Sultan you’d sent me from England,” he said to Lord Dudley. “I used to ride past her calèche, the horses deliberately slowed to a walk, and read the daily message written in the flowers of her bouquet, in case the opportunity for a quick exchange of words was denied us. Although we saw each other nearly every evening in society, and although she wrote me every day, we had adopted a certain code of conduct to deceive inquisitive eyes and thwart untoward remarks. Never looking at each other, avoiding each other’s company, speaking ill of each other, preening and boasting of oneself, or posing as a spurned suitor, none of those old ruses can match this: each lover openly admitting a false passion for an indifferent person and an air of indifference for the genuine idol. If two lovers choose to play that game, the world will always be duped, but they must have absolute faith in each other. Her chosen surrogate was a man then in favor, a man of the court, austere and devout, whom she never received at home. That comedy was performed for the benefit of fools and drawing rooms, and they duly laughed. Never did the question of marriage arise between us: A difference of six years might well have given her pause; she knew nothing of my fortune, which, as a matter of principle, I have always kept to myself. For my part, charmed by her wit, her ways, the breadth of her acquaintances, her worldliness, I would have married her without a second thought. Nevertheless, I liked her reserve. Had she been the first to raise the subject of marriage, I might well have found something vulgar about that ineffable soul. Six full months, a diamond of the finest water! Six good months: There is my allotted share of love in this world. One morning, laid low by the fever that accompanies an oncoming cold, I wrote her a note to postpone one of those secret sessions of merrymaking that take place beneath the roofs of Paris, invisible as pearls in the sea. No sooner had the letter been dispatched than I found myself beset by remorse. ‘She won’t believe I’m genuinely ill!’ I reflected. She often played at jealousy and suspicion. When jealousy is real,” said de Marsay, interrupting himself, “it is the unmistakable sign of an exclusive love.”

  “Why is that?” Princess de Cadignan briskly asked.

  “True, exclusive love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of bodily inertia, in harmony with our meditative mood. The mind then complicates everything, it tortures itself, it conceives wild fancies, it transforms them into realities and torments, and such a jealousy is as delightful as it is distressing.”

  A foreign minister smiled, glimpsing the truth of this observation by the light of a memory.

  “Besides, I asked myself, how could I say no to a moment of bliss?” said de Marsay, returning to his tale. “Was it not better to go with a raging fever? Besides, on learning I was ill she might have come running to my side and compromised herself. I summoned my strength, wrote a second letter, and carried it myself, for my valet had gone off. We were separated by the river, I had all of Paris to cross, but finally, at a suitable distance from her home, I spied an errand boy and enjoined him to have the letter brought up to her straightaway, and I had the fine idea of passing by her front door in a fiacre to see if she might not by chance receive the two messages at once. Just as I pulled up, at two o’clock, the main door is being opened for a carriage, and whose carriage is it, do you suppose? The surrogate’s!” Fifteen years have gone by . . . and yet, as he tells it to you now, the world-weary orator, the minister hardened by long experience with matters of state, still feels a tumult in his heart and a fire in his diaphragm. “An hour later, I passed by again: The carriage was still in the courtyard! My note must have stayed with the porter. Finally, at half past three, the carriage set off, affording me an opportunity to study my rival’s expression: He was somber, not a trace of a smile on his face; but he was in love, and no doubt it was some private concern that was troubling him. I went to our meeting place, and the queen of my heart comes as well, and I find her calm, pure, serene. Here I must confess that I’ve always thought Othello not only a fool but also a man without taste. Only a half Negro could do such a thing. Indeed, Shakespeare sensed this quite clearly, since he titled his play The Moor of Venice. The sight of a woman we adore comes as such a balm for the heart that it can only dispel all our sorrow, our doubts, and our grievances. My anger subsided, my smile returned. At my present age, such a demeanor would be a vile dissimulation, but at that time, it simply reflected my youth and my love. All jealousy stilled, I found the strength to observe her. My ill health was plain to see, and the dreadful doubts tormenting me had aggravated it still further. At last I found an opportune moment to slip in these words: ‘So you had no callers this morning?’—justifying the question by my fear that she might have made other plans for her day on reading my first note.

  “‘Ah!’ she sai
d, ‘only a man could have such ideas! Do you really believe I could think of anything but your misery? Until that second word came, I did nothing but try to find some way of coming to see you.’

  “‘And you were alone?’

  “‘Alone,’ she said, looking at me with an air of the most perfect innocence. It must have been just such a look that drove the Moor to do in Desdemona. As she was the sole resident of her hôtel particulier, that word was clearly an ignoble lie. One single falsehood shatters the perfect confidence that is, for some at least, the very foundation of love. In order to grasp what was taking place within me at that moment, let us imagine that we each have an inner self of which the visible us is the sheath, and that this self, brilliant as light, is also as delicate as a shadow . . . well, that fine me was then garbed in crepe for all eternity. Yes, I felt a cold, fleshless hand drape the shroud of experience over me, sentence me to the eternal mourning that a first betrayal injects into our soul. Lowering my eyes lest she note my distress, I steadied myself with this prideful thought: ‘If she is untrue to you, she is unworthy of you!’ I blamed the sudden redness of my face and the tears in my eyes on an abrupt aggravation of my symptoms, and that sweet creature insisted on accompanying me home, with the coach shades carefully drawn. On the way, her tenderness and solicitude would have deceived that same Moor of Venice I’ve been using as a point of comparison. Indeed, as any intelligent spectator can see, if that overgrown child hesitates two seconds longer, he will be begging Desdemona’s forgiveness. From which we may conclude that killing a woman is truly the act of a child! She wept as we parted, distraught that she couldn’t minister to me herself. She wished she were my valet, whose happiness was for her a subject of undying jealousy—and all this said with such turns of phrase, oh! precisely like what a happy Clarissa would have written. Even in the prettiest and most angelic of women, there is always an ape!”

  Here the women lowered their eyes, as if wounded by that cruel truth, so cruelly put.

  “I will say nothing to you of the night that ensued, nor the week,” de Marsay resumed. “It was then that I realized I was a politician.”

  This quip was so neatly said that a gesture of admiration escaped us all.

  “Reviewing, in a diabolical mood, all the cruel vengeances one can exact on a woman,” de Marsay continued, “and, since we were in love, some of them were terrible indeed, and irreparable, I felt only contempt for myself, I felt vulgar, little by little I was drawing up a horrible code, the code of indulgence. When we seek vengeance for the sake of a woman, are we not acknowledging that there is only one woman for us, that we cannot do without her? And in that case, is vengeance the way to win her back? If one does not think her indispensable, if there are others, then why not allow her the same right to change that we claim for ourselves? This, let me be clear, applies only to extramarital passion; otherwise it would do harm to society, and nothing better proves the necessity of an unbreakable marriage bond than the instability of passion. The two sexes must be chained, like the fierce beasts they are, by unyielding laws, deaf and mute. Take away vengeance, and betrayal is of no import in love. Those who believe there is only one woman in all the world for them must choose vengeance, and in that case there is only one, Othello’s. Here is mine.”

  These last words provoked in us all that slight stirring in our seats that journalists represent in parliamentary speeches with the word commotion.

  “Cured of my cold and of absolute, pure, divine love, I inaugurated an adventure with a most charming heroine, her beauty of a sort perfectly counter to that of my fickle angel. I was careful not to break it off with that woman, that brilliant, unflappable actress, for I’m not sure that true love holds any pleasure so sweet as those afforded by faithlessness. Such duplicity is as good as virtue. I do not speak for you Englishwomen, milady.” This last comment the minister interjected sotto voce to Lady Barimore, Lord Dudley’s daughter. “In short, I tried to remain the same lover as before. My new angel required a keepsake fashioned from my locks. I thus called on a skilled artist who lived, at the time, on rue Boucher. This man had the monopoly on capillary souvenirs, and I provide his address for those who have little hair of their own: He has it in all colors and of every sort. Once he had heard me describe what I wished, he showed me his wares, among which I saw works of patience surpassing anything folktales attribute to fairies, any prisoner’s pastime. He told me of the caprices and fashions that governed the hair-worker’s trade. ‘For the past year,’ he said, ‘the rage has been to mark linens with a stitching of hair. Happily, I have a fine collection of hair and some excellent seamstresses.’ Suspicion takes hold of me on hearing these words. I pull out my handkerchief and say, ‘Then this was done in your establishment and with false hair?’ He looked at the handkerchief and said, ‘Oh! She was a most difficult customer, she insisted that the match with her own hair be perfect. My wife stitched those handkerchiefs herself. You have here, monsieur, one of the finest pieces ever produced.’ Before this last ray of light, I might still have believed in something, I might still have paid heed to a lady’s word. I left that place still believing in pleasure, but where love was concerned, I had become as atheistic as a mathematician. Two months later, I was sitting alongside that exquisite woman, in her boudoir, on her divan. I held one of her hands clasped in my own, and such lovely hands they were; we were scaling the Alps of emotion, picking the prettiest flowers, pulling the petals from daisies (one always ends up pulling the petals from daisies, even in a drawing room, without a daisy in sight). At the peak of tenderness, when one is most in love, love is so aware of its fleetingness that each lover feels an imperious need to ask, ‘Do you love me? Will you love me forever?’ I seized that elegiac moment, so warm, so florid, so radiant, to make her tell her most wonderful lies, in that glittering language of exquisite poetry and purple prose peculiar to love. Charlotte laid out all her prettiest falsehoods: She couldn’t live without me; I was the only man for her in all the world; she feared she might bore me, as my presence stripped her of her wit; when I was beside her, her every faculty turned solely to love; she was too full of tenderness not to be frightened; for six months she’d been seeking the manner to bind me to her eternally, and for that, the good Lord above alone knew the way—in short, she made of me her god!”

  The women listening to de Marsay seemed put out to see themselves so skillfully mimicked, for he accompanied these words with expressions, simperings, and sidelong glances that created the perfect illusion.

  “Just when I was on the point of believing those adorable untruths, still holding her moist hand in mine, I asked, ‘And when do you marry the duke?’ That stab was so point-blank, my eyes staring so straight into hers, and her hand so gently laid in my own, that the start she then gave, however slight, could not be entirely concealed; her gaze faltered, and a faint blush tinged her cheeks. ‘The duke! Why, what do you mean?’ she answered, feigning astonishment. ‘I know all,’ I told her, ‘and my advice is to delay no longer. He’s a rich man, a duke, but he’s not merely devout, he’s religious! Thanks to his scruples, I’ve no doubt you’ve been faithful to me. I can’t tell you how urgent it is that you compromise him before himself and before God, otherwise you’ll never be done with it.’ ‘Am I dreaming?’ she said, clapping her hand against her brow—La Malibran’s celebrated gesture, fifteen years before La Malibran. ‘Come now, my angel, don’t be childish,’ I said, attempting to take her hands in mine. But she crossed her arms over her waist with an air of offended virtue. ‘Marry him, I have no objection,’ I went on, answering her gesture with a polite vous. ‘You can do better than me, and I urge you to do so.’ ‘But,’ she said, falling to her knees, ‘there’s been some terrible misunderstanding: You’re all I love in this world; you may ask me to prove it however you like.’ ‘Stand up, my dear, and do me the honor of speaking the truth.’ ‘As if before God.’ ‘Do you doubt my love?’ ‘No.’ ‘My fidelity?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, I have committed the gravest of all crimes,’
I answered. ‘I have doubted your love and fidelity. Between two moments of bliss, I began to look around me dispassionately.’ ‘Dispassionately!’ she cried, with a mournful sigh. ‘That’s all I need to know. Henri, you don’t love me anymore.’ As you see, she’d already found a way out. In these sorts of scenes, an adverb is a most dangerous thing. But fortunately curiosity compelled her to ask, ‘And what did you see? Have I ever spoken to the duke other than in society? Did you once glimpse, in my eye—’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘in his. And eight times you took me to Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin to see you hearing the same mass as he.’ ‘Ah!’ she cried at last, ‘so I’ve made you jealous.’ ‘Oh! I’d be happy to be jealous,’ I said, admiring the agility of her intelligence, those acrobatics that succeed in dazzling only the blind. ‘But all those hours in church made me skeptical. The day of my first cold and your first deception, when you thought me in bed, the duke called on you here, and you told me you’d seen no one.’ ‘Do you realize your behavior is abominable?’ ‘In what way? I consider your marriage with the duke an excellent bargain: It gives you a very fine name, and the only place in society worthy of you, a glorious and eminent rank. You’ll be one of the queens of Paris. I would be doing you wrong if I stood in the way of that arrangement, that honorable existence, that excellent alliance. Ah! One day you’ll thank me, Charlotte, when you realize how different my character is from other young men’s . . . You would have had no choice but to deceive me . . . He keeps a close watch on you: You would have been hard-pressed for a chance to break it off with me. It’s time we went our separate ways, for the duke is a man of severe virtue. If you want my advice, you shall have to become a proper lady. The duke is vain, he’ll be proud of his wife.’ ‘Ah!’ she said to me, tears flowing. ‘Henri, if only you’d said something! Yes, if you’d wanted it’—it was all my fault, do you see?—‘we could have run away to some quiet spot and lived out our lives, married and happy, for all the world to see.’ ‘Ah well, it’s too late for that now,’ I answered, kissing her hands and striking an afflicted pose. ‘My God! But I can call it all off,’ she said. ‘No, you’ve come too far with the duke. I must leave on a journey to seal our separation. Otherwise we would both have to fear the force of our love.’ ‘Do you believe the duke suspects, Henri?’ I was still Henri, but no longer tu. ‘I think not,’ I answered, adopting the manner and tone of a friend, ‘but you must be perfectly devout, you must recommit yourself to God, for the duke is looking for signs, he’s wavering, and you must make up his mind for him.’ She rose, paced two or three times around the boudoir in real or feigned distress; then she found a pose and a gaze to suit this new state of affairs, for she stopped before me, held out her hand, and in a voice thick with emotion, said, ‘Well, Henri, you’re a loyal, noble, and charming man: I shall never forget you.’ An admirable bit of strategy! The position she wanted to occupy with respect to me required a change on her part, and she was ravishing in that new guise. I adopted the posture, the expression, and the gaze of a man so deeply tormented that I saw a weakening in her newfound rectitude; she looked at me, took me by the hand, led me to the divan, almost threw me down, but gently, and after a moment of silence said, ‘I am profoundly sad, my child. You love me?’ ‘Oh yes!’ ‘But what will become of you?’”