Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Rossini.
THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT
CHAPTER I. PRO AND CON
Monsieur de Manerville, the father, was a worthy Norman gentleman,
well known to the Marechael de Richelieu, who married him to one of the
richest heiresses of Bordeaux in the days when the old duke reigned in
Guienne as governor. The Norman then sold the estate he owned in Bessin,
and became a Gascon, allured by the beauty of the chateau de Lanstrac,
a delightful residence owned by his wife. During the last days of the
reign of Louis XV., he bought the post of major of the Gate Guards, and
lived till 1813, having by great good luck escaped the dangers of the
Revolution in the following manner.
Toward the close of the year, 1790, he went to Martinque, where his wife
had interests, leaving the management of his property in Gascogne to an
honest man, a notary’s clerk, named Mathias, who was inclined to--or
at any rate did--give into the new ideas. On his return the Comte de
Manerville found his possessions intact and well-managed. This sound
result was the fruit produced by grafting the Gascon on the Norman.
Madame de Manerville died in 1810. Having learned the importance of
worldly goods through the dissipations of his youth, and, giving them,
like many another old man, a higher place than they really hold in life,
Monsieur de Manerville became increasingly economical, miserly, and
sordid. Without reflecting that the avarice of parents prepares the way
for the prodigalities of children, he allowed almost nothing to his son,
although that son was an only child.
Paul de Manerville, coming home from the college of Vendome in 1810,
lived under close paternal discipline for three years. The tyranny by
which the old man of seventy oppressed his heir influenced, necessarily,
a heart and a character which were not yet formed. Paul, the son,
without lacking the physical courage which is vital in the air of
Gascony, dared not struggle against his father, and consequently lost
that faculty of resistance which begets moral courage. His thwarted
feelings were driven to the depths of his heart, where they remained
without expression; later, when he felt them to be out of harmony with
the maxims of the world, he could only think rightly and act mistakenly.
He was capable of fighting for a mere word or look, yet he trembled at
the thought of dismissing a servant,--his timidity showing itself in
those contests only which required a persistent will. Capable of doing
great things to fly from persecution, he would never have prevented it
by systematic opposition, nor have faced it with the steady employment
of force of will. Timid in thought, bold in actions, he long preserved
that inward simplicity which makes a man the dupe and the voluntary
victim of things against which certain souls hesitate to revolt,
preferring to endure them rather than complain. He was, in point of
fact, imprisoned by his father’s old mansion, for he had not enough
money to consort with young men; he envied their pleasures while unable
to share them.
The old gentleman took him every evening, in an old carriage drawn
by ill-harnessed old horses, attended by ill-dressed old servants, to
royalist houses, where he met a society composed of the relics of the
parliamentary nobility and the martial nobility. These two nobilities
coalescing after the Revolution, had now transformed themselves into
a landed aristocracy. Crushed by the vast and swelling fortunes of the
maritime cities, this Faubourg Saint-Germain of Bordeaux responded
by lofty disdain to the sumptuous displays of commerce, government
administrations, and the military. Too young to understand social
distinctions and the necessities underlying the apparent assumption
which they create, Paul was bored to death among these ancients, unaware
that the connections of his youth would eventually secure to him that
aristocratic pre-eminence which Frenchmen will forever desire.
He found some slight compensations for the dulness of these evenings in
certain manual exercises which always delight young men, and which his
father enjoined upon him. The old gentleman considered that to know the
art of fencing and the use of arms, to ride well on horseback, to play
tennis, to acquire good manners,--in short, to possess all the frivolous
accomplishments of the old nobility,--made a young man of the present
day a finished gentleman. Accordingly, Paul took a fencing-lesson every
morning, went to the riding-school, and practised in a pistol-gallery.
The rest of his time was spent in reading novels, for his father would
never have allowed the more abstruse studies now considered necessary to
finish an education.
So monotonous a life would soon have killed the poor youth if the death
of the old man had not delivered him from this tyranny at the moment
when it was becoming intolerable. Paul found himself in possession of
considerable capital, accumulated by his father’s avarice, together with
landed estates in the best possible condition. But he now held Bordeaux
in horror; neither did he like Lanstrac, where his father had taken him
to spend the summers, employing his whole time from morning till night
in hunting.
As soon as the estate was fairly settled, the young heir, eager for
enjoyment, bought consols with his capital, left the management of the
landed property to old Mathias, his father’s notary, and spent the next
six years away from Bordeaux. At first he was attached to the French
embassy at Naples; after that he was secretary of legation at Madrid,
and then in London,--making in this way the tour of Europe.
After seeing the world and life, after losing several illusions, after
dissipating all the loose capital which his father had amassed, there
came a time when, in order to continue his way of life, Paul was forced
to draw upon the territorial revenues which his notary was laying by. At
this critical moment, seized by one of the so-called virtuous impulses,
he determined to leave Paris, return to Bordeaux, regulate his affairs,
lead the life of a country gentleman at Lanstrac, improve his property,
marry, and become, in the end, a deputy.
Paul was a count; nobility was once more of matrimonial value; he could,
and he ought to make a good marriage. While many women desire a title,
many others like to marry a man to whom a knowledge of life is familiar.
Now Paul had acquired, in exchange for the sum of seven hundred thousand
francs squandered in six years, that possession, which cannot be bought
and is practically of more value than gold and silver; a knowledge
which exacts long study, probation, examinations, friends, enemies,
acquaintances, certain manners, elegance of form and demeanor, a
graceful and euphonious name,--a knowledge, moreover, which means
many love-affairs, duels, bets lost on a race-course, disillusions,
deceptions, annoyances, toils, and a vast variety of undigested
pleasures. In short, he had become what is called elegant. But in spite
of his mad extravagance he had never made himself a mere fashionable
man. In the burlesque army of men of the world, the man of fashion holds
the place of a marshal of France, the man of elegance is the equivalent
of a lieutenant-general. Paul enjoyed his lesser reputation,
of elegance, and knew well how to sustain it. His servants were
well-dressed, his equipages were cited, his suppers had a certain vogue;
in short, his bachelor establishment was counted among the seven or
eight whose splendor equalled that of the finest houses in Paris.
But--he had not caused the wretchedness of any woman; he gambled without
losing; his luck was not notorious; he was far too upright to deceive
or mislead any one, no matter who, even a wanton; never did he leave
his billets-doux lying about, and he possessed no coffer or desk for
love-letters which his friends were at liberty to read while he tied
his cravat or trimmed his beard. Moreover, not willing to dip into his
Guienne property, he had not that bold extravagance which leads to great
strokes and calls attention at any cost to the proceedings of a young
man. Neither did he borrow money, but he had the folly to lend to
friends, who then deserted him and spoke of him no more either for good
or evil. He seemed to have regulated his dissipations methodically. The
secret of his character lay in his father’s tyranny, which had made him,
as it were, a social mongrel.
So, one morning, he said to a friend named de Marsay, who afterwards
became celebrated:--
“My dear fellow, life has a meaning.”
“You must be twenty-seven years of age before you can find it out,”
replied de Marsay, laughing.
“Well, I am twenty-seven; and precisely because I am twenty-seven I mean
to live the life of a country gentleman at Lanstrac. I’ll transport
my belongings to Bordeaux into my father’s old mansion, and I’ll spend
three months of the year in Paris in this house, which I shall keep.”
“Will you marry?”
“I will marry.”
“I’m your friend, as you know, my old Paul,” said de Marsay, after a
moment’s silence, “and I say to you: settle down into a worthy father
and husband and you’ll be ridiculous for the rest of your days. If you
could be happy and ridiculous, the thing might be thought of; but
you will not be happy. You haven’t a strong enough wrist to drive a
household. I’ll do you justice and say you are a perfect horseman; no
one knows as well as you how to pick up or thrown down the reins, and
make a horse prance, and sit firm to the saddle. But, my dear fellow,
marriage is another thing. I see you now, led along at a slapping
pace by Madame la Comtesse de Manerville, going whither you would not,
oftener at a gallop than a trot, and presently unhorsed!--yes, unhorsed
into a ditch and your legs broken. Listen to me. You still have some
forty-odd thousand francs a year from your property in the Gironde.
Good. Take your horses and servants and furnish your house in Bordeaux;
you can be king of Bordeaux, you can promulgate there the edicts that
we put forth in Paris; you can be the correspondent of our stupidities.
Very good. Play the rake in the provinces; better still, commit follies;
follies may win you celebrity. But--don’t marry. Who marries now-a-days?
Only merchants, for the sake of their capital, or to be two to drag the
cart; only peasants who want to produce children to work for them; only
brokers and notaries who want a wife’s ‘dot’ to pay for their practice;
only miserable kings who are forced to continue their miserable
dynasties. But we are exempt from the pack, and you want to shoulder it!
And why DO you want to marry? You ought to give your best friend
your reasons. In the first place, if you marry an heiress as rich as
yourself, eighty thousand francs a year for two is not the same thing as
forty thousand francs a year for one, because the two are soon three or
four when the children come. You haven’t surely any love for that silly
race of Manerville which would only hamper you? Are you ignorant of what
a father and mother have to be? Marriage, my old Paul, is the silliest
of all the social immolations; our children alone profit by it, and
don’t know its price until their horses are nibbling the flowers on our
grave. Do you regret your father, that old tyrant who made your first
years wretched? How can you be sure that your children will love you?
The very care you take of their education, your precautions for their
happiness, your necessary sternness will lessen their affection.
Children love a weak or a prodigal father, whom they will despise in
after years. You’ll live betwixt fear and contempt. No man is a good
head of a family merely because he wants to be. Look round on all our
friends and name to me one whom you would like to have for a son. We
have known a good many who dishonor their names. Children, my dear Paul,
are the most difficult kind of merchandise to take care of. Yours, you
think, will be angels; well, so be it! Have you ever sounded the gulf
which lies between the lives of a bachelor and a married man? Listen. As
a bachelor you can say to yourself: ‘I shall never exhibit more than
a certain amount of the ridiculous; the public will think of me what
I choose it to think.’ Married, you’ll drop into the infinitude of the
ridiculous! Bachelor, you can make your own happiness; you enjoy some
to-day, you do without it to-morrow; married, you must take it as it
comes; and the day you want it you will have to go without it. Marry,
and you’ll grow a blockhead; you’ll calculate dowries; you’ll talk
morality, public and religious; you’ll think young men immoral and
dangerous; in short, you’ll become a social academician. It’s pitiable!
The old bachelor whose property the heirs are waiting for, who fights
to his last breath with his nurse for a spoonful of drink, is blest in
comparison with a married man. I’m not speaking of all that will
happen to annoy, bore, irritate, coerce, oppose, tyrannize, narcotize,
paralyze, and idiotize a man in marriage, in that struggle of two beings
always in one another’s presence, bound forever, who have coupled each
other under the strange impression that they were suited. No, to tell
you those things would be merely a repetition of Boileau, and we know
him by heart. Still, I’ll forgive your absurd idea if you will promise
me to marry “en grand seigneur”; to entail your property; to have two
legitimate children, to give your wife a house and household absolutely
distinct from yours; to meet her only in society, and never to return
from a journey without sending her a courier to announce it. Two hundred
thousand francs a year will suffice for such a life and your antecedents
will enable you to marry some rich English woman hungry for a title.
That’s an aristocratic life which seems to me thoroughly French; the
only life in which we can retain the respect and friendship of a woman;
the only life which distinguishes a man from the present crowd,--in
short, the only life for which a young man should even think of
resigning his bachelor blessings. Thus established, the Comte de
Manerville may advise his epoch, place himself above the world, and be
nothing less than a minister or an ambassador. Ridicule can never touch
him; he has gained the social advantages of marriage while keeping all
the privileges of a bachelor.”
“But, my good friend, I am not de Marsay; I am plainly, as you yourself
do me the honor to say, Paul de Manerville, worthy father and husband,
deputy of the Centre, possibly peer of France,--a destiny extremely
commonplace; but I am modest and I resign myself.”
“Yes, but your wife,” said the pitiless de Marsay, “will she resign
herself?”
“My wife, my dear fellow, will do as I wish.”
“Ah! my poor friend, is that where you are? Adieu, Paul. Henceforth, I
refuse to respect you. One word more, however, for I cannot agree coldly
to your abdication. Look and see in what the strength of our position
lies. A bachelor with only six thousand francs a year remaining to him
has at least his reputation for elegance and the memory of success.
Well, even that fantastic shadow has enormous value in it. Life still
offers many chances to the unmarried man. Yes, he can aim at anything.
But marriage, Paul, is the social ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no
farther.’ Once married you can never be anything but what you then
are--unless your wife should deign to care for you.”
“But,” said Paul, “you are crushing me down with exceptional theories. I
am tired of living for others; of having horses merely to exhibit them;
of doing all things for the sake of what may be said of them; of wasting
my substance to keep fools from crying out: ‘Dear, dear! Paul is still
driving the same carriage. What has he done with his fortune? Does
he squander it? Does he gamble at the Bourse? No, he’s a millionaire.
Madame such a one is mad about him. He sent to England for a harness
which is certainly the handsomest in all Paris. The four-horse
equipages of Messieurs de Marsay and de Manerville were much noticed
at Longchamps; the harness was perfect’--in short, the thousand silly
things with which a crowd of idiots lead us by the nose. Believe me, my
dear Henri, I admire your power, but I don’t envy it. You know how to
judge of life; you think and act as a statesman; you are able to place
yourself above all ordinary laws, received ideas, adopted conventions,
and acknowledged prejudices; in short, you can grasp the profits of
a situation in which I should find nothing but ill-luck. Your cool,
systematic, possibly true deductions are, to the eyes of the masses,
shockingly immoral. I belong to the masses. I must play my game of life
according to the rules of the society in which I am forced to live.
While putting yourself above all human things on peaks of ice, you still
have feelings; but as for me, I should freeze to death. The life of that
great majority, to which I belong in my commonplace way, is made up
of emotions of which I now have need. Often a man coquets with a dozen
women and obtains none. Then, whatever be his strength, his cleverness,
his knowledge of the world, he undergoes convulsions, in which he is
crushed as between two gates. For my part, I like the peaceful chances
and changes of life; I want that wholesome existence in which we find a
woman always at our side.”
“A trifle indecorous, your marriage!” exclaimed de Marsay.
Paul was not to be put out of countenance, and continued: “Laugh if you
like; I shall feel myself a happy man when my valet enters my room
in the morning and says: ‘Madame is awaiting monsieur for breakfast’;
happier still at night, when I return to find a heart--”
“Altogether indecorous, my dear Paul. You are not yet moral enough to
marry.”
“--a heart in which to confide my interests and my secrets. I wish
to live in such close union with a woman that our affection shall not
depend upon a yes or a no, or be open to the disillusions of love. In
short, I have the necessary courage to become, as you say, a worthy
husband and father. I feel myself fitted for family joys; I wish to put
myself under the conditions prescribed by society; I desire to have a
wife and children.”
“You remind me of a hive of honey-bees! But go your way, you’ll be a
dupe all your life. Ha, ha! you wish to marry to have a wife! In other
words, you wish to solve satisfactorily to your own profit the most
difficult problem invented by those bourgeois morals which were created
by the French Revolution; and, what is more, you mean to begin your
attempt by a life of retirement. Do you think your wife won’t crave the
life you say you despise? Will _she_ be disgusted with it, as you are?
If you won’t accept the noble conjugality just formulated for your
benefit by your friend de Marsay, listen, at any rate, to his final
advice. Remain a bachelor for the next thirteen years; amuse yourself
like a lost soul; then, at forty, on your first attack of gout, marry a
widow of thirty-six. Then you may possibly be happy. If you now take a
young girl to wife, you’ll die a madman.”
“Ah ca! tell me why!” cried Paul, somewhat piqued.
“My dear fellow,” replied de Marsay, “Boileau’s satire against women is
a tissue of poetical commonplaces. Why shouldn’t women have defects? Why
condemn them for having the most obvious thing in human nature? To my
mind, the problem of marriage is not at all at the point where Boileau
puts it. Do you suppose that marriage is the same thing as love, and
that being a man suffices to make a wife love you? Have you gathered
nothing in your boudoir experience but pleasant memories? I tell you
that everything in our bachelor life leads to fatal errors in the
married man unless he is a profound observer of the human heart. In the
happy days of his youth a man, by the caprice of our customs, is always
lucky; he triumphs over women who are all ready to be triumphed over
and who obey their own desires. One thing after another--the obstacles
created by the laws, the sentiments and natural defences of women--all
engender a mutuality of sensations which deceives superficial persons as
to their future relations in marriage, where obstacles no longer exist,
where the wife submits to love instead of permitting it, and frequently
repulses pleasure instead of desiring it. Then, the whole aspect of a
man’s life changes. The bachelor, who is free and without a care, need
never fear repulsion; in marriage, repulsion is almost certain and
irreparable. It may be possible for a lover to make a woman reverse an
unfavorable decision, but such a change, my dear Paul, is the Waterloo
of husbands. Like Napoleon, the husband is thenceforth condemned to
victories which, in spite of their number, do not prevent the first
defeat from crushing him. The woman, so flattered by the perseverance,
so delighted with the ardor of a lover, calls the same things brutality
in a husband. You, who talk of marrying, and who will marry, have you
ever meditated on the Civil Code? I myself have never muddied my feet
in that hovel of commentators, that garret of gossip, called the
Law-school. I have never so much as opened the Code; but I see its
application on the vitals of society. The Code, my dear Paul, makes
woman a ward; it considers her a child, a minor. Now how must we govern
children? By fear. In that one word, Paul, is the curb of the
beast. Now, feel your own pulse! Have you the strength to play the
tyrant,--you, so gentle, so kind a friend, so confiding; you, at whom
I have laughed, but whom I love, and love enough to reveal to you my
science? For this is science. Yes, it proceeds from a science which
the Germans are already calling Anthropology. Ah! if I had not already
solved the mystery of life by pleasure, if I had not a profound
antipathy for those who think instead of act, if I did not despise the
ninnies who are silly enough to believe in the truth of a book, when
the sands of the African deserts are made of the ashes of I know not
how many unknown and pulverized Londons, Romes, Venices, and Parises, I
would write a book on modern marriages made under the influence of the
Christian system, and I’d stick a lantern on that heap of sharp stones
among which lie the votaries of the social ‘multiplicamini.’ But the
question is, Does humanity require even an hour of my time? And besides,
isn’t the more reasonable use of ink that of snaring hearts by writing
love-letters?--Well, shall you bring the Comtesse de Manerville here,
and let us see her?”
“Perhaps,” said Paul.
“We shall still be friends,” said de Marsay.
“If--” replied Paul.
“Don’t be uneasy; we will treat you politely, as Maison-Rouge treated
the English at Fontenoy.”