Beatrix

Honore de Balzac 

"Farewell, my dear Camille; I leave tomorrow. I am not angry with
you, my dear; I think you the greatest of women, but if I continued to
serve you as a screen, or a shield," said Claude, with two significant
inflections of his voice, "you would despise me. We can part now
without pain or remorse; we have neither happiness to regret nor hopes
betrayed. To you, as with some few but rare men of genius, love is not
what Nature made it,--an imperious need, to the satisfaction of which
she attaches great and passing joys, which die. You see love such as
Christianity has created it,--an ideal kingdom, full of noble
sentiments, of grand weaknesses, poesies, spiritual sensations,
devotions of moral fragrance, entrancing harmonies, placed high above
all vulgar coarseness, to which two creatures as one angel fly on the
wings of pleasure. This is what I hoped to share; I thought I held in
you a key to that door, closed to so many, by which we may advance
toward the infinite. You were there already. In this you have misled
me. I return to my misery,--to my vast prison of Paris. Such a
deception as this, had it come to me earlier in life, would have made
me flee from existence; to-day it puts into my soul a disenchantment
which will plunge me forever into an awful solitude. I am without the
faith which helped the Fathers to people theirs with sacred images. It
is to this, my dear Camille, to this that the superiority of our mind
has brought us; we may, both of us, sing that dreadful hymn which a
poet has put into the mouth of Moses speaking to the Almighty: 'Lord
God, Thou hast made me powerful and solitary.'"

At this moment Calyste appeared.

"I ought not to leave you ignorant that I am here," he said.

Mademoiselle des Touches showed the utmost fear; a sudden flush
colored her impassible face with tints of fire. During this strange
scene she was more beautiful than at any other moment of her life.

"We thought you gone, Calyste," said Claude. "But this involuntary
discretion on both sides will do no harm; perhaps, indeed, you may be
more at your ease at Les Touches by knowing Felicite as she is. Her
silence shows me I am not mistaken as to the part she meant me to
play. As I told you before, she loves you, but it is for yourself, not
for herself,--a sentiment that few women are able to conceive and
practise; few among them know the voluptuous pleasure of sufferings
born of longing,--that is one of the magnificent passions reserved for
man. But she is in some sense a man," he added, sardonically. "Your
love for Beatrix will make her suffer and make her happy too."

Tears were in the eyes of Mademoiselle des Touches, who was unable to
look either at the terrible Vignon or the ingenuous Calyste. She was
frightened at being understood; she had supposed to impossible for
a man, however keen his perception, to perceive a delicacy so
self-immolating, a heroism so lofty as her own. Her evident humiliation
at this unveiling of her grandeur made Calyste share the emotion of the
woman he had held so high, and now beheld so stricken down. He threw
himself, from an irresistible impulse, at her feet, and kissed her
hands, laying his face, covered with tears, upon them.

"Claude," she said, "do not abandon me, or what will become of me?"

"What have you to fear?" replied the critic. "Calyste has fallen in
love at first sight with the marquise; you cannot find a better
barrier between you than that. This passion of his is worth more to
you than I. Yesterday there might have been some danger for you and
for him; to-day you can take a maternal interest in him," he said,
with a mocking smile, "and be proud of his triumphs."

Mademoiselle des Touches looked at Calyste, who had raised his head
abruptly at these words. Claude Vignon enjoyed, for his sole
vengeance, the sight of their confusion.

"You yourself have driven him to Madame de Rochefide," continued
Claude, "and he is now under the spell. You have dug your own grave.
Had you confided in me, you would have escaped the sufferings that
await you."

"Sufferings!" cried Camille Maupin, taking Calyste's head in her
hands, and kissing his hair, on which her tears fell plentifully. "No,
Calyste; forget what you have heard; I count for nothing in all this."

She rose and stood erect before the two men, subduing both with the
lightning of her eyes, from which her soul shone out.

"While Claude was speaking," she said, "I conceived the beauty and the
grandeur of love without hope; it is the sentiment that brings us
nearest God. Do not love me, Calyste; but I will love you as no woman
will!"

It was the cry of a wounded eagle seeking its eyrie. Claude himself
knelt down, took Camille's hand, and kissed it.

"Leave us now, Calyste," she said, "it is late, and your mother will
be uneasy."

Calyste returned to Guerande with lagging steps, turning again and
again, to see the light from the windows of the room in which was
Beatrix. He was surprised himself to find how little pity he felt for
Camille. But presently he felt once more the agitations of that scene,
the tears she had left upon his hair; he suffered with her suffering;
he fancied he heard the moans of that noble woman, so beloved, so
desired but a few short days before.

When he opened the door of his paternal home, where total silence
reigned, he saw his mother through the window, as she sat sewing by
the light of the curiously constructed lamp while she awaited him.
Tears moistened the lad's eyes as he looked at her.

"What has happened?" cried Fanny, seeing his emotion, which filled her
with horrible anxiety.

For all answer, Calyste took his mother in his arms, and kissed her on
her cheeks, her forehead and hair, with one of those passionate
effusions of feeling that comfort mothers, and fill them with the
subtle flames of the life they have given.

"It is you I love, you!" cried Calyste,--"you, who live for me; you,
whom I long to render happy!"

"But you are not yourself, my child," said the baroness, looking at
him attentively. "What has happened to you?"

"Camille loves me, but I love her no longer," he answered.

The next day, Calyste told Gasselin to watch the road to
Saint-Nazaire, and let him know if the carriage of Mademoiselle des
Touches passed over it. Gasselin brought word that the carriage had
passed.

"How many persons were in it?" asked Calyste.

"Four,--two ladies and two gentlemen."

"Then saddle my horse and my father's."

Gasselin departed.

"My, nephew, what mischief is in you now?" said his Aunt Zephirine.

"Let the boy amuse himself, sister," cried the baron. "Yesterday he
was dull as an owl; to-day he is gay as a lark."

"Did you tell him that our dear Charlotte was to arrive to-day?" said
Zephirine, turning to her sister-in-law.

"No," replied the baroness.

"I thought perhaps he was going to meet her," said Mademoiselle du
Guenic, slyly.

"If Charlotte is to stay three months with her aunt, he will have
plenty of opportunities to see her," said his mother.

"Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel wants me to marry Charlotte, to save me from
perdition," said Calyste, laughing. "I was on the mall when she and
the Chevalier du Halga were talking about it. She can't see that it
would be greater perdition for me to marry at my age--"

"It is written above," said the old maid, interrupting Calyste, "that
I shall not die tranquil or happy. I wanted to see our family
continued, and some, at least, of the estates brought back; but it is
not to be. What can you, my fine nephew, put in the scale against such
duties? Is it that actress at Les Touches?"

"What?" said the baron; "how can Mademoiselle des Touches hinder
Calyste's marriage, when it becomes necessary for us to make it? I
shall go and see her."

"I assure you, father," said Calyste, "that Felicite will never be an
obstacle to my marriage."

Gasselin appeared with the horses.

"Where are you going, chevalier?" said his father.

"To Saint-Nazaire."

"Ha, ha! and when is the marriage to be?" said the baron, believing
that Calyste was really in a hurry to see Charlotte de Kergarouet. "It
is high time I was a grandfather. Spare the horses," he continued, as
he went on the portico with Fanny to see Calyste mount; "remember that
they have more than thirty miles to go."

Calyste started with a tender farewell to his mother.

"Dear treasure!" she said, as she saw him lower his head to ride
through the gateway.

"God keep him!" replied the baron; "for we cannot replace him."

The words made the baroness shudder.