THE ALKAHEST
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame Josephine Delannoy nee Doumerc.
Madame, may God grant that this, my book, may live longer than I,
for then the gratitude which I owe to you, and which I hope will
equal your almost maternal kindness to me, would last beyond the
limits prescribed for human affection. This sublime privilege of
prolonging life in our hearts for a time by the life of the work
we leave behind us would be (if we could only be sure of gaining
it at last) a reward indeed for all the labor undertaken by those
who aspire to such an immortality.
Yet again I say--May God grant it!
DE BALZAC.
THE ALKAHEST
(THE HOUSE OF CLAES)
CHAPTER I
There is a house at Douai in the rue de Paris, whose aspect, interior
arrangements, and details have preserved, to a greater degree than those
of other domiciles, the characteristics of the old Flemish buildings, so
naively adapted to the patriarchal manners and customs of that excellent
land. Before describing this house it may be well, in the interest
of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic
preliminaries,--since they have roused a protest from certain ignorant
and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the
generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without
gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?
The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so closely
allied to architecture that the majority of observers can reconstruct
nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life, from the
remains of public monuments or the relics of a home. Archaeology is to
social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic
tells the tale of a society, as the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus
opens up a creative epoch. All things are linked together, and all
are therefore deducible. Causes suggest effects, effects lead back to
causes. Science resuscitates even the warts of the past ages.
Hence the keen interest inspired by an architectural description,
provided the imagination of the writer does not distort essential facts.
The mind is enabled by rigid deduction to link it with the past; and to
man, the past is singularly like the future; tell him what has been,
and you seldom fail to show him what will be. It is rare indeed that
the picture of a locality where lives are lived does not recall to
some their dawning hopes, to others their wasted faith. The comparison
between a present which disappoints man’s secret wishes and a future
which may realize them, is an inexhaustible source of sadness or of
placid content.
Thus, it is almost impossible not to feel a certain tender sensibility
over a picture of Flemish life, if the accessories are clearly given.
Why so? Perhaps, among other forms of existence, it offers the best
conclusion to man’s uncertainties. It has its social festivities, its
family ties, and the easy affluence which proves the stability of its
comfortable well-being; it does not lack repose amounting almost to
beatitude; but, above all, it expresses the calm monotony of a frankly
sensuous happiness, where enjoyment stifles desire by anticipating it.
Whatever value a passionate soul may attach to the tumultuous life
of feeling, it never sees without emotion the symbols of this Flemish
nature, where the throbbings of the heart are so well regulated that
superficial minds deny the heart’s existence. The crowd prefers
the abnormal force which overflows to that which moves with steady
persistence. The world has neither time nor patience to realize the
immense power concealed beneath an appearance of uniformity. Therefore,
to impress this multitude carried away on the current of existence,
passion, like a great artist, is compelled to go beyond the mark, to
exaggerate, as did Michael Angelo, Bianca Capello, Mademoiselle de la
Valliere, Beethoven, and Paganini. Far-seeing minds alone disapprove
such excess, and respect only the energy represented by a finished
execution whose perfect quiet charms superior men. The life of this
essentially thrifty people amply fulfils the conditions of happiness
which the masses desire as the lot of the average citizen.
A refined materialism is stamped on all the habits of Flemish life.
English comfort is harsh in tone and arid in color; whereas the
old-fashioned Flemish interiors rejoice the eye with their mellow tints,
and the feelings with their genuine heartiness. There, work implies
no weariness, and the pipe is a happy adaptation of Neapolitan
“far-niente.” Thence comes the peaceful sentiment in Art (its most
essential condition), patience, and the element which renders its
creations durable, namely, conscience. Indeed, the Flemish character
lies in the two words, patience and conscience; words which seem at
first to exclude the richness of poetic light and shade, and to make the
manners and customs of the country as flat as its vast plains, as cold
as its foggy skies. And yet it is not so. Civilization has brought her
power to bear, and has modified all things, even the effects of climate.
If we observe attentively the productions of various parts of the globe,
we are surprised to find that the prevailing tints from the temperate
zones are gray or fawn, while the more brilliant colors belong to the
products of the hotter climates. The manners and customs of a country
must naturally conform to this law of nature.
Flanders, which in former times was essentially dun-colored and
monotonous in tint, learned the means of irradiating its smoky
atmosphere through its political vicissitudes, which brought it under
the successive dominion of Burgundy, Spain, and France, and threw
it into fraternal relations with Germany and Holland. From Spain it
acquired the luxury of scarlet dyes and shimmering satins, tapestries of
vigorous design, plumes, mandolins, and courtly bearing. In exchange for
its linen and its laces, it brought from Venice that fairy glass-ware in
which wine sparkles and seems the mellower. From Austria it learned the
ponderous diplomacy which, to use a popular saying, takes three steps
backward to one forward; while its trade with India poured into it the
grotesque designs of China and the marvels of Japan.
And yet, in spite of its patience in gathering such treasures, its
tenacity in parting with no possession once gained, its endurance of all
things, Flanders was considered nothing more than the general storehouse
of Europe, until the day when the discovery of tobacco brought into
one smoky outline the scattered features of its national physiognomy.
Thenceforth, and notwithstanding the parcelling out of their territory,
the Flemings became a people homogeneous through their pipes and
beer.[*]
[*] Flanders was parcelled into three divisions; of which Eastern
Flanders, capital Ghent, and Western Flanders, capital Bruges, are
two provinces of Belgium. French Flanders, capital Lille, is the
Departement du Nord of France. Douai, about twenty miles from
Lille, is the chief town of the arrondissement du Nord.
After assimilating, by constant sober regulation of conduct, the
products and the ideas of its masters and its neighbors, this country of
Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for itself
an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which
bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its ideality and
produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of
comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and
epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and
trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight
oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment. There men look
exclusively to the thing that is: their thoughts are so scrupulously
bent on supplying the wants of this life that they have never risen, in
any direction, above the level of this present earth. The sole idea
they have ever conceived of the future is that of a thrifty, prosaic
statecraft: their revolutionary vigor came from a domestic desire to
live as they liked, with their elbows on the table, and to take their
ease under the projecting roofs of their own porches.
The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence which
comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere, that
craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus the
compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted
on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in
the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is half-done,--neither
houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a
monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and that
of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient industry,
are hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked to show in
human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no better
than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was
proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way, and without the
incitements of glory, for the welfare of his Free-town.
Yet we shall find a tender and poetic side to this patriarchal life,
which will come naturally to the surface in the description of an
ancient house which, at the period when this history begins, was one of
the last in Douai to preserve the old-time characteristics of Flemish
life.
Of all the towns in the Departement du Nord, Douai is, alas, the most
modernized: there the innovating spirit has made the greatest strides,
and the love of social progress is the most diffused. There the old
buildings are daily disappearing, and the manners and customs of
a venerable past are being rapidly obliterated. Parisian ideas and
fashions and modes of life now rule the day, and soon nothing will be
left of that ancient Flemish life but the warmth of its hospitality, its
traditional Spanish courtesy, and the wealth and cleanliness of Holland.
Mansions of white stone are replacing the old brick buildings, and
the cosy comfort of Batavian interiors is fast yielding before the
capricious elegance of Parisian novelties.
The house in which the events of this history occurred stands at about
the middle of the rue de Paris, and has been known at Douai for more
than two centuries as the House of Claes. The Van Claes were formerly
one of the great families of craftsmen to whom, in various lines of
production, the Netherlands owed a commercial supremacy which it has
never lost. For a long period of time the Claes lived at Ghent, and
were, from generation to generation, the syndics of the powerful Guild
of Weavers. When the great city revolted under Charles V., who tried
to suppress its privileges, the head of the Claes family was so deeply
compromised in the rebellion that, foreseeing a catastrophe and bound to
share the fate of his associates, he secretly sent wife, children, and
property to France before the Emperor invested the town. The syndic’s
forebodings were justified. Together with other burghers who were
excluded from the capitulation, he was hanged as a rebel, though he was,
in reality, the defender of the liberties of Ghent.
The death of Claes and his associates bore fruit. Their needless
execution cost the King of Spain the greater part of his possessions in
the Netherlands. Of all the seed sown in the earth, the blood of martyrs
gives the quickest harvest. When Philip the Second, who punished revolt
through two generations, stretched his iron sceptre over Douai, the
Claes preserved their great wealth by allying themselves in marriage
with the very noble family of Molina, whose elder branch, then poor,
thus became rich enough to buy the county of Nourho which they had long
held titularly in the kingdom of Leon.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after vicissitudes which
are of no interest to our present purpose, the family of Claes was
represented at Douai in the person of Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina,
Comte de Nourho, who preferred to be called simply Balthazar Claes. Of
the immense fortune amassed by his ancestors, who had kept in motion
over a thousand looms, there remained to him some fifteen thousand
francs a year from landed property in the arrondissement of Douai, and
the house in the rue de Paris, whose furniture in itself was a fortune.
As to the family possessions in Leon, they had been in litigation
between the Molinas of Douai and the branch of the family which remained
in Spain. The Molinas of Leon won the domain and assumed the title of
Comtes de Nourho, though the Claes alone had a legal right to it. But
the pride of a Belgian burgher was superior to the haughty arrogance of
Castile: after the civil rights were instituted, Balthazar Claes cast
aside the ragged robes of his Spanish nobility for his more illustrious
descent from the Ghent martyr.
The patriotic sentiment was so strongly developed in the families exiled
under Charles V. that, to the very close of the eighteenth century, the
Claes remained faithful to the manners and customs and traditions of
their ancestors. They married into none but the purest burgher families,
and required a certain number of aldermen and burgomasters in the
pedigree of every bride-elect before admitting her to the family. They
sought their wives in Bruges or Ghent, in Liege or in Holland; so that
the time-honored domestic customs might be perpetuated around their
hearthstones. This social group became more and more restricted, until,
at the close of the last century, it mustered only some seven or eight
families of the parliamentary nobility, whose manners and flowing robes
of office and magisterial gravity (partly Spanish) harmonized well with
the habits of their life.
The inhabitants of Douai held the family in a religious esteem that was
well-nigh superstition. The sturdy honesty, the untainted loyalty of
the Claes, their unfailing decorum of manners and conduct, made them the
objects of a reverence which found expression in the name,--the House
of Claes. The whole spirit of ancient Flanders breathed in that mansion,
which afforded to the lovers of burgher antiquities a type of the modest
houses which the wealthy craftsmen of the Middle Ages constructed for
their homes.
The chief ornament of the facade was an oaken door, in two sections,
studded with nails driven in the pattern of a quineunx, in the centre of
which the Claes pride had carved a pair of shuttles. The recess of the
doorway, which was built of freestone, was topped by a pointed arch
bearing a little shrine surmounted by a cross, in which was a statuette
of Sainte-Genevieve plying her distaff. Though time had left its mark
upon the delicate workmanship of portal and shrine, the extreme care
taken of it by the servants of the house allowed the passers-by to note
all its details.
The casing of the door, formed by fluted pilasters, was dark gray in
color, and so highly polished that it shone as if varnished. On either
side of the doorway, on the ground-floor, were two windows, which
resembled all the other windows of the house. The casing of white stone
ended below the sill in a richly carved shell, and rose above the window
in an arch, supported at its apex by the head-piece of a cross, which
divided the glass sashes in four unequal parts; for the transversal bar,
placed at the height of that in a Latin cross, made the lower sashes of
the window nearly double the height of the upper, the latter rounding
at the sides into the arch. The coping of the arch was ornamented with
three rows of brick, placed one above the other, the bricks alternately
projecting or retreating to the depth of an inch, giving the effect of
a Greek moulding. The glass panes, which were small and diamond-shaped,
were set in very slender leading, painted red. The walls of the house,
of brick jointed with white mortar, were braced at regular distances,
and at the angles of the house, by stone courses.
The first floor was pierced by five windows, the second by three,
while the attic had only one large circular opening in five divisions,
surrounded by a freestone moulding and placed in the centre of the
triangular pediment defined by the gable-roof, like the rose-window of
a cathedral. At the peak was a vane in the shape of a weaver’s shuttle
threaded with flax. Both sides of the large triangular pediment which
formed the wall of the gable were dentelled squarely into something like
steps, as low down as the string-course of the upper floor, where the
rain from the roof fell to right and left of the house through the jaws
of a fantastic gargoyle. A freestone foundation projected like a step at
the base of the house; and on either side of the entrance, between the
two windows, was a trap-door, clamped by heavy iron bands, through which
the cellars were entered,--a last vestige of ancient usages.
From the time the house was built, this facade had been carefully
cleaned twice a year. If a little mortar fell from between the bricks,
the crack was instantly filled up. The sashes, the sills, the copings,
were dusted oftener than the most precious sculptures in the Louvre. The
front of the house bore no signs of decay; notwithstanding the deepened
color which age had given to the bricks, it was as well preserved as
a choice old picture, or some rare book cherished by an amateur, which
would be ever new were it not for the blistering of our climate and the
effect of gases, whose pernicious breath threatens our own health.
The cloudy skies and humid atmosphere of Flanders, and the shadows
produced by the narrowness of the street, sometimes diminished the
brilliancy which the old house derived from its cleanliness; moreover,
the very care bestowed upon it made it rather sad and chilling to the
eye. A poet might have wished some leafage about the shrine, a little
moss in the crevices of the freestone, a break in the even courses of
the brick; he would have longed for a swallow to build her nest in
the red coping that roofed the arches of the windows. The precise and
immaculate air of this facade, a little worn by perpetual rubbing, gave
the house a tone of severe propriety and estimable decency which would
have driven a romanticist out of the neighborhood, had he happened to
take lodgings over the way.
When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which hung
from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the servant-woman,
coming from within, had admitted him through the side of the double-door
in which was a small grated loop-hole, that half of the door escaped
from her hand and swung back by its own weight with a solemn, ponderous
sound that echoed along the roof of a wide paved archway and through the
depths of the house, as though the door had been of iron. This archway,
painted to resemble marble, always clean and daily sprinkled with fresh
sand, led into a large court-yard paved with smooth square stones of
a greenish color. On the left were the linen-rooms, kitchens, and
servants’ hall; to the right, the wood-house, coal-house, and offices,
whose doors, walls, and windows were decorated with designs kept
exquisitely clean. The daylight, threading its way between four red
walls chequered with white lines, caught rosy tints and reflections
which gave a mysterious grace and fantastic appearance to faces, and
even to trifling details.
A second house, exactly like the building on the street, and called in
Flanders the “back-quarter,” stood at the farther end of the court-yard,
and was used exclusively as the family dwelling. The first room on the
ground-floor was a parlor, lighted by two windows on the court-yard,
and two more looking out upon a garden which was of the same size as the
house. Two glass doors, placed exactly opposite to each other, led at
one end of the room to the garden, at the other to the court-yard, and
were in line with the archway and the street door; so that a visitor
entering the latter could see through to the greenery which draped the
lower end of the garden. The front building, which was reserved for
receptions and the lodging-rooms of guests, held many objects of art and
accumulated wealth, but none of them equalled in the eyes of a Claes,
nor indeed in the judgment of a connoisseur, the treasures contained in
the parlor, where for over two centuries the family life had glided on.
The Claes who died for the liberties of Ghent, and who might in these
days be thought a mere ordinary craftsman if the historian omitted to
say that he possessed over forty thousand silver marks, obtained by
the manufacture of sail-cloth for the all-powerful Venetian navy,--this
Claes had a friend in the famous sculptor in wood, Van Huysum of Bruges.
The artist had dipped many a time into the purse of the rich craftsman.
Some time before the rebellion of the men of Ghent, Van Huysum, grown
rich himself, had secretly carved for his friend a wall-decoration in
ebony, representing the chief scenes in the life of Van Artevelde,--that
brewer of Ghent who, for a brief hour, was King of Flanders. This
wall-covering, of which there were no less than sixty panels, contained
about fourteen hundred principal figures, and was held to be Van
Huysum’s masterpiece. The officer appointed to guard the burghers
whom Charles V. determined to hang when he re-entered his native town,
proposed, it is said, to Van Claes to let him escape if he would give
him Van Huysum’s great work; but the weaver had already despatched it to
Douai.
The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving, which
Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr’s memory, came to Douai to
frame in wood painted in lapis-lazuli with threads of gold, is therefore
the most complete work of this master, whose least carvings now sell for
nearly their weight in gold. Hanging over the fire-place, Van Claes
the martyr, painted by Titian in his robes as president of the Court
of Parchons, still seemed the head of the family, who venerated him as
their greatest man. The chimney-piece, originally in stone with a very
high mantle-shelf, had been made over in marble during the last century;
on it now stood an old clock and two candlesticks with five twisted
branches, in bad taste, but of solid silver. The four windows were
draped by wide curtains of red damask with a flowered black design,
lined with white silk; the furniture, covered with the same material,
had been renovated in the time of Louis XIV. The floor, evidently
modern, was laid in large squares of white wood bordered with strips
of oak. The ceiling, formed of many oval panels, in each of which Van
Huysum had carved a grotesque mask, had been respected and allowed to
keep the brown tones of the native Dutch oak.
In the four corners of this parlor were truncated columns, supporting
candelabra exactly like those on the mantle-shelf; and a round table
stood in the middle of the room. Along the walls card-tables were
symmetrically placed. On two gilded consoles with marble slabs there
stood, at the period when this history begins, two glass globes filled
with water, in which, above a bed of sand and shells, red and gold and
silver fish were swimming about. The room was both brilliant and sombre.
The ceiling necessarily absorbed the light and reflected none. Although
on the garden side all was bright and glowing, and the sunshine danced
upon the ebony carvings, the windows on the court-yard admitted
so little light that the gold threads in the lapis-lazuli scarcely
glittered on the opposite wall. This parlor, which could be gorgeous
on a fine day, was usually, under the Flemish skies, filled with soft
shadows and melancholy russet tones, like those shed by the sun on the
tree-tops of the forests in autumn.
It is unnecessary to continue this description of the House of Claes, in
other parts of which many scenes of this history will occur: at present,
it is enough to make known its general arrangement.