Two years after the winter when Monsieur Claes returned to chemistry,
the aspect of his house was changed. Whether it were that society was
affronted by his perpetual absent-mindedness and chose to think itself
in the way, or that Madame Claes’s secret anxieties made her less
agreeable than before, certain it is that she no longer saw any but
her intimate friends. Balthazar went nowhere, shut himself up in his
laboratory all day, sometimes stayed there all night, and only appeared
in the bosom of his family at dinner-time.
After the second year he no longer passed the summer at his
country-house, and his wife was unwilling to live there alone. Sometimes
he went to walk and did not return till the following day, leaving
Madame Claes a prey to mortal anxiety during the night. After causing
a fruitless search for him through the town, whose gates, like those of
other fortified places, were closed at night, it was impossible to send
into the country, and the unhappy woman could only wait and suffer
till morning. Balthazar, who had forgotten the hour at which the gates
closed, would come tranquilly home next day, quite unmindful of the
tortures his absence had inflicted on his family; and the happiness of
getting him back proved as dangerous an excitement of feeling to his
wife as her fears of the preceding night. She kept silence and dared not
question him, for when she did so on the occasion of his first absence,
he answered with an air of surprise:--
“Well, what of it? Can I not take a walk?”
Passions never deceive. Madame Claes’s anxieties corroborated the rumors
she had taken so much pains to deny. The experience of her youth had
taught her to understand the polite pity of the world. Resolved not to
undergo it a second time, she withdrew more and more into the privacy of
her own house, now deserted by society and even by her nearest friends.
Among these many causes of distress, the negligence and disorder of
Balthazar’s dress, so degrading to a man of his station, was not the
least bitter to a woman accustomed to the exquisite nicety of Flemish
life. At first Josephine endeavored, in concert with Balthazar’s valet,
Lemulquinier, to repair the daily devastation of his clothing, but
even that she was soon forced to give up. The very day when Balthazar,
unaware of the substitution, put on new clothes in place of those that
were stained, torn, or full of holes, he made rags of them.
The poor wife, whose perfect happiness had lasted fifteen years, during
which time her jealousy had never once been roused, was apparently and
suddenly nothing in the heart where she had lately reigned. Spanish
by race, the feelings of a Spanish woman rose within her when she
discovered her rival in a Science that allured her husband from her:
torments of jealousy preyed upon her heart and renewed her love.
What could she do against Science? Should she combat that tyrannous,
unyielding, growing power? Could she kill an invisible rival? Could
a woman, limited by nature, contend with an Idea whose delights are
infinite, whose attractions are ever new? How make head against the
fascination of ideas that spring the fresher and the lovelier out of
difficulty, and entice a man so far from this world that he forgets even
his dearest loves?
At last one day, in spite of Balthazar’s strict orders, Madame Claes
resolved to follow him, to shut herself up in the garret where his life
was spent, and struggle hand to hand against her rival by sharing
her husband’s labors during the long hours he gave to that terrible
mistress. She determined to slip secretly into the mysterious laboratory
of seduction, and obtain the right to be there always. Lemulquinier
alone had that right, and she meant to share it with him; but to prevent
his witnessing the contention with her husband which she feared at the
outset, she waited for an opportunity when the valet should be out of
the way. For a while she studied the goings and comings of the man with
angry impatience; did he not know that which was denied to her--all that
her husband hid from her, all that she dared not inquire into? Even a
servant was preferred to a wife!
The day came; she approached the place, trembling, yet almost happy. For
the first time in her life she encountered Balthazar’s anger. She had
hardly opened the door before he sprang upon her, seized her, threw her
roughly on the staircase, so that she narrowly escaped rolling to the
bottom.
“God be praised! you are still alive!” he cried, raising her.
A glass vessel had broken into fragments over Madame Claes, who saw her
husband standing by her, pale, terrified, and almost livid.
“My dear, I forbade you to come here,” he said, sitting down on the
stairs, as though prostrated. “The saints have saved your life! By what
chance was it that my eyes were on the door when you opened it? We have
just escaped death.”
“Then I might have been happy!” she exclaimed.
“My experiment has failed,” continued Balthazar. “You alone could I
forgive for that terrible disappointment. I was about to decompose
nitrogen. Go back to your own affairs.”
Balthazar re-entered the laboratory and closed the door.
“Decompose nitrogen!” said the poor woman as she re-entered her chamber,
and burst into tears.
The phrase was unintelligible to her. Men, trained by education to have
a general conception of everything, have no idea how distressing it is
for a woman to be unable to comprehend the thought of the man she loves.
More forbearing than we, these divine creatures do not let us know when
the language of their souls is not understood by us; they shrink from
letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and hide their pain
as gladly as they silence their wishes: but, having higher ambitions in
love than men, they desire to wed not only the heart of a husband, but
his mind.
To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which absorbed
her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty of a rival
might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman gives to her who
loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a mortification
like this only proved Madame Claes’s powerlessness and humiliated the
feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she had reached a
point where her ignorance parted her from her husband. Worse than all,
last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he was often in
danger--near her, yet far away, and she might not share, nor even know,
his peril. Her position became, like hell, a moral prison from which
there was no issue, in which there was no hope. Madame Claes resolved
to know at least the outward attractions of this fatal science, and
she began secretly to study chemistry in the books. From this time the
family became, as it were, cloistered.
Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon
the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which
we find it at the moment when this history begins.
The situation grew daily more complicated. Like all passionate
women, Madame Claes was disinterested. Those who truly love know that
considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are
reluctantly associated with them. Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear
without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand
francs upon his property. The apparent authenticity of the transaction,
the rumors and conjectures spread through the town, forced Madame
Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband’s notary and,
disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret anxieties or let him
guess them, and even ask her the humiliating question,--
“How is it that Monsieur Claes has not told you of this?”
Happily, the notary was almost a relation,--in this wise: The
grandfather of Monsieur Claes had married a Pierquin of Antwerp, of the
same family as the Pierquins of Douai. Since the marriage the latter,
though strangers to the Claes, claimed them as cousins. Monsieur
Pierquin, a young man twenty-six years of age, who had just succeeded
to his father’s practice, was the only person who now had access to the
House of Claes.
Madame Balthazar had lived for several months in such complete solitude
that the notary was obliged not only to confirm the rumor of the
disasters, but to give her further particulars, which were now well
known throughout the town. He told her that it was probably that her
husband owed considerable sums of money to the house which furnished him
with chemicals. That house, after making inquiries as to the fortune and
credit of Monsieur Claes, accepted all his orders and sent the supplies
without hesitation, notwithstanding the heavy sums of money which became
due. Madame Claes requested Pierquin to obtain the bill for all the
chemicals that had been furnished to her husband.
Two months later, Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, manufacturers
of chemical products, sent in a schedule of accounts rendered, which
amounted to over one hundred thousand francs. Madame Claes and Pierquin
studied the document with an ever-increasing surprise. Though
some articles, entered in commercial and scientific terms, were
unintelligible to them, they were frightened to see entries of precious
metals and diamonds of all kinds, though in small quantities. The large
sum total of the debt was explained by the multiplicity of the articles,
by the precautions needed in transporting some of them, more especially
valuable machinery, by the exorbitant price of certain rare chemicals,
and finally by the cost of instruments made to order after the designs
of Monsieur Claes himself.
The notary had made inquiries, in his client’s interest, as to Messieurs
Protez and Chiffreville, and found that their known integrity was
sufficient guarantee as to the honesty of their operations with Monsieur
Claes, to whom, moreover, they frequently sent information of results
obtained by chemists in Paris, for the purpose of sparing him expense.
Madame Claes begged the notary to keep the nature of these purchases
from the knowledge of the people of Douai, lest they should declare the
whole thing a mania; but Pierquin replied that he had already delayed to
the very last moment the notarial deeds which the importance of the
sum borrowed necessitated, in order not to lessen the respect in which
Monsieur Claes was held. He then revealed the full extent of the evil,
telling her plainly that if she could not find means to prevent her
husband from thus madly making way with his property, in six months the
patrimonial fortune of the Claes would be mortgaged to its full value.
As for himself, he said, the remonstrances he had already made to his
cousin, with all the consideration due to a man so justly respected, had
been wholly unavailing. Balthazar had replied, once for all, that he was
working for the fame and the fortune of his family.
Thus, to the tortures of the heart which Madame Claes had borne for two
years--one following the other with cumulative suffering--was now added
a dreadful and ceaseless fear which made the future terrifying. Women
have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous. Why do they fear
so much more than they hope in matters that concern the interests of
this life? Why is their faith given only to religious ideas of a future
existence? Why do they so ably foresee the catastrophes of fortune and
the crises of fate? Perhaps the sentiment which unites them to the
men they love gives them a sense by which they weigh force, measure
faculties, understand tastes, passions, vices, virtues. The perpetual
study of these causes in the midst of which they live gives them, no
doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing effects in all possible relations
of earthly life. What they see of the present enables them to judge
of the future with an intuitive ability explained by the perfection
of their nervous system, which allows them to seize the lightest
indications of thought and feeling. Their whole being vibrates in
communion with great moral convulsions. Either they feel, or they see.
Now, although separated from her husband for over two years, Madame
Claes foresaw the loss of their property. She fully understood the
deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of
Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he
was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute
indifference. But what was he really seeking? Up to this time maternal
feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this woman
that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had never come
between them. Suddenly she found herself at times more mother than wife,
though hitherto she had been more wife than mother. However ready she
had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her children to the man who
had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to whom she was still the
only woman in the world, the remorse she felt for the weakness of her
maternal love threw her into terrible alternations of feeling. As a
wife, she suffered in heart; as a mother, through her children; as a
Christian, for all.
She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul. Her husband,
sole arbiter of the family fate, was the master by whose will it must be
guided; he was responsible to God only. Besides, could she reproach him
for the use he now made of his fortune, after the disinterestedness he
had shown to her for many happy years? Was she to judge his purposes?
And yet her conscience, in keeping with the spirit of the law, told
her that parents were the depositaries and guardians of property, and
possessed no right to alienate the material welfare of the children. To
escape replying to such stern questions she preferred to shut her eyes,
like one who refuses to see the abyss into whose depths he knows he is
about to fall.
For more than six months her husband had given her no money for the
household expenses. She sold secretly, in Paris, the handsome diamond
ornaments her brother had given her on her marriage, and placed
the family on a footing of the strictest economy. She sent away the
governess of her children, and even the nurse of little Jean. Formerly
the luxury of carriages and horses was unknown among the burgher
families, so simple were they in their habits, so proud in their
feelings; no provision for that modern innovation had therefore been
made at the House of Claes, and Balthazar was obliged to have his stable
and coach-house in a building opposite to his own house: his present
occupations allowed him no time to superintend that portion of his
establishment, which belongs exclusively to men. Madame Claes suppressed
the whole expense of equipages and servants, which her present isolation
from the world rendered unnecessary, and she did so without pretending
to conceal the retrenchment under any pretext. So far, facts had
contradicted her assertions, and silence for the future was more
becoming: indeed the change in the family mode of living called for no
explanation in a country where, as in Flanders, any one who lives up to
his income is considered a madman.
And yet, as her eldest daughter, Marguerite, approached her sixteenth
birthday, Madame Claes longed to procure for her a good marriage, and to
place her in society in a manner suitable to a daughter of the Molinas,
the Van Ostron-Temnincks, and the Casa-Reals. A few days before the
one on which this story opens, the money derived from the sale of the
diamonds had been exhausted. On the very day, at three o’clock in the
afternoon, as Madame Claes was taking her children to vespers, she met
Pierquin, who was on his way to see her, and who turned and accompanied
her to the church, talking in a low voice of her situation.
“My dear cousin,” he said, “unless I fail in the friendship which binds
me to your family, I cannot conceal from you the peril of your position,
nor refrain from begging you to speak to your husband. Who but you can
hold him back from the gulf into which he is plunging? The rents from
the mortgaged estates are not enough to pay the interest on the sums he
has borrowed. If he cuts the wood on them he destroys your last chance
of safety in the future. My cousin Balthazar owes at this moment thirty
thousand francs to the house of Protez and Chiffreville. How can you pay
them? What will you live on? If Claes persists in sending for reagents,
retorts, voltaic batteries, and other such playthings, what will become
of you? Your whole property, except the house and furniture, has been
dissipated in gas and carbon; yesterday he talked of mortgaging the
house, and in answer to a remark of mine, he cried out, ‘The devil!’ It
was the first sign of reason I have known him show for three years.”
Madame Claes pressed the notary’s arm, and said in a tone of suffering,
“Keep it secret.”
Overwhelmed by these plain words of startling clearness, the poor woman,
pious as she was, could not pray; she sat still on her chair between
her children, with her prayer-book open, but not turning its leaves; her
mind was sunk in meditations as absorbing as those of her husband. The
Spanish sense of honor, the Flemish integrity, resounded in her
soul with a peal louder than any organ. The ruin of her children was
accomplished! Between them and their father’s honor she must no longer
hesitate. The necessity of a coming struggle with her husband terrified
her; in her eyes he was so great, so majestic, that the mere prospect of
his anger made her tremble as at a vision of the divine wrath. She must
now depart from the submission she had sacredly practised as a wife. The
interests of her children compelled her to oppose, in his most cherished
tastes, the man she idolized. Must she not daily force him back to
common matters from the higher realms of Science; drag him forcibly from
a smiling future and plunge him into a materialism hideous to artists
and great men? To her, Balthazar Claes was a Titan of science, a man big
with glory; he could only have forgotten her for the riches of a mighty
hope. Then too, was he not profoundly wise? she had heard him talk
with such good sense on every subject that he must be sincere when he
declared he worked for the glory and prosperity of his family. His love
for his wife and family was not only vast, it was infinite. That feeling
could not be extinct; it was magnified, and reproduced in another form.
Noble, generous, timid as she was, she prepared herself to ring into the
ears of this noble man the word and the sound of money, to show him the
sores of poverty, and force him to hear cries of distress when he was
listening only for the melodious voice of Fame. Perhaps his love for her
would lessen! If she had had no children, she would bravely and joyously
have welcomed the new destiny her husband was making for her. Women who
are brought up in opulence are quick to feel the emptiness of material
enjoyments; and when their hearts, more wearied than withered, have once
learned the happiness of a constant interchange of real feelings, they
feel no shrinking from reduced outward circumstances, provided they
are still acceptable to the man who has loved them. Their wishes, their
pleasures, are subordinated to the caprices of that other life outside
of their own; to them the only dreadful future is to lose him.
At this moment, therefore, her children came between Pepita and her true
life, just as Science had come between herself and Balthazar. And thus,
when she reached home after vespers, and threw herself into the deep
armchair before the window of the parlor, she sent away her children,
directing them to keep perfectly quiet, and despatched a message to her
husband, through Lemulquinier, saying that she wished to see him.
But although the old valet did his best to make his master leave the
laboratory, Balthazar scarcely heeded him. Madame Claes thus gained time
for reflection. She sat thinking, paying no attention to the hour nor
the light. The thought of owing thirty thousand francs that could not be
paid renewed her past anguish and joined it to that of the present
and the future. This influx of painful interests, ideas, and feelings
overcame her, and she wept.
As Balthazar entered at last through the panelled door, the expression
of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more distracted
than she had yet seen it. When he made her no answer she was magnetized
for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied of all expression,
by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled from that bald brow.
Under the shock of this impression she wished to die. But when she heard
the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish at the moment when her
heart was breaking, her courage came back to her; she resolved to
struggle with that awful power which had torn a lover from her arms, a
father from her children, a fortune from their home, happiness from all.
And yet she could not repress a trepidation which made her quiver; in
all her life no such solemn scene as this had taken place. This dreadful
moment--did it not virtually contain her future, and gather within it
all the past?
Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies
the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily before
the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the rush of
thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the feelings
under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her husband slowly
crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women know that agony of
inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was writhing. Even one whose
heart has been tried by nothing worse than the declaration to a husband
of some extravagance, or a debt to a dress-maker, will understand how
its pulses swell and quicken when the matter is one of life itself.
A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her husband’s
feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief; but to Madame
Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her fears. When she
saw Balthazar about to leave the room, her impulse was to spring towards
him; then a cruel thought restrained her--she should stand before him!
would she not seem ridiculous in the eyes of a man no longer under the
glamour of love--who might see true? She resolved to avoid all dangerous
chances at so solemn a moment, and remained seated, saying in a clear
voice,
“Balthazar.”
He turned mechanically and coughed; then, paying no attention to his
wife, he walked to one of the little square boxes that are placed at
intervals along the wainscoting of every room in Holland and Belgium,
and spat in it. This man, who took no thought of other persons, never
forgot the inveterate habit of using those boxes. To poor Josephine,
unable to find a reason for this singularity, the constant care which
her husband took of the furniture caused her at all times an unspeakable
pang, but at this moment the pain was so violent that it put her beside
herself and made her exclaim in a tone of impatience, which expressed
her wounded feelings,--
“Monsieur, I am speaking to you!”
“What does that mean?” answered Balthazar, turning quickly, and casting
a look of reviving intelligence upon his wife, which fell upon her like
a thunderbolt.
“Forgive me, my friend,” she said, turning pale. She tried to rise and
put out her hand to him, but her strength gave way and she fell back. “I
am dying!” she cried in a voice choked by sobs.
At the sight Balthazar had, like all abstracted persons, a vivid
reaction of mind; and he divined, so to speak, the secret cause of this
attack. Taking Madame Claes at once in his arms, he opened the door
upon the little antechamber, and ran so rapidly up the ancient wooden
staircase that his wife’s dress having caught on the jaws of one of the
griffins that supported the balustrade, a whole breadth was torn off
with a loud noise. He kicked in the door of the vestibule between their
chambers, but the door of Josephine’s bedroom was locked.
He gently placed her on a chair, saying to himself, “My God! the key,
where is the key?”
“Thank you, dear friend,” said Madame Claes, opening her eyes. “This
is the first time for a long, long while that I have been so near your
heart.”
“Good God!” cried Claes, “the key!--here come the servants.”
Josephine signed to him to take a key that hung from a ribbon at her
waist. After opening the door, Balthazar laid his wife on a sofa, and
left the room to stop the frightened servants from coming up by giving
them orders to serve the dinner; then he went back to Madame Claes.
“What is it, my dear life?” he said, sitting down beside her, and taking
her hand and kissing it.
“Nothing--now,” she answered. “I suffer no longer. Only, I would I had
the power of God to pour all the gold of the world at thy feet.”
“Why gold?” he asked. He took her in his arms, pressed her to him and
kissed her once more upon the forehead. “Do you not give me the greatest
of all riches in loving me as you do love me, my dear and precious
wife?”
“Oh! my Balthazar, will you not drive away the anguish of our lives as
your voice now drives out the misery of my heart? At last, at last, I
see that you are still the same.”
“What anguish do you speak of, dear?”
“My friend, we are ruined.”
“Ruined!” he repeated. Then, with a smile, he stroked her hand, holding
it within his own, and said in his tender voice, so long unheard:
“To-morrow, dear love, our wealth may perhaps be limitless. Yesterday,
in searching for a far more important secret, I think I found the means
of crystallizing carbon, the substance of the diamond. Oh, my dear
wife! in a few days’ time you will forgive me all my forgetfulness--I
am forgetful sometimes, am I not? Was I not harsh to you just now? Be
indulgent for a man who never ceases to think of you, whose toils are
full of you--of us.”
“Enough, enough!” she said, “let us talk of it all to-night, dear
friend. I suffered from too much grief, and now I suffer from too much
joy.”
“To-night,” he resumed; “yes, willingly: we will talk of it. If I fall
into meditation, remind me of this promise. To-night I desire to leave
my work, my researches, and return to family joys, to the delights of
the heart--Pepita, I need them, I thirst for them!”
“You will tell me what it is you seek, Balthazar?”
“Poor child, you cannot understand it.”
“You think so? Ah! my friend, listen; for nearly four months I have
studied chemistry that I might talk of it with you. I have read
Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Chaptal, Nollet, Rouelle, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac,
Spallanzani, Leuwenhoek, Galvani, Volta,--in fact, all the books
about the science you worship. You can tell me your secrets, I shall
understand you.”
“Oh! you are indeed an angel,” cried Balthazar, falling at her feet,
and shedding tears of tender feeling that made her quiver. “Yes, we will
understand each other in all things.”
“Ah!” she cried, “I would throw myself into those hellish fires which
heat your furnaces to hear these words from your lips and to see you
thus.” Then, hearing her daughter’s step in the anteroom, she sprang
quickly forward. “What is it, Marguerite?” she said to her eldest
daughter.
“My dear mother, Monsieur Pierquin has just come. If he stays to dinner
we need some table-linen; you forgot to give it out this morning.”
Madame Claes drew from her pocket a bunch of small keys and gave them
to the young girl, pointing to the mahogany closets which lined the
ante-chamber as she said:
“My daughter, take a set of the Graindorge linen; it is on your right.”
“Since my dear Balthazar comes back to me, let the return be complete,”
she said, re-entering her chamber with a soft and arch expression on her
face. “My friend, go into your own room; do me the kindness to dress for
dinner, Pierquin will be with us. Come, take off this ragged clothing;
see those stains! Is it muratic or sulphuric acid which left these
yellow edges to the holes? Make yourself young again,--I will send you
Mulquinier as soon as I have changed my dress.”
Balthazar attempted to pass through the door of communication,
forgetting that it was locked on his side. He went out through the
anteroom.
“Marguerite, put the linen on a chair, and come and help me dress; I
don’t want Martha,” said Madame Claes, calling her daughter.
Balthazar had caught Marguerite and turned her towards him with a joyous
action, exclaiming: “Good-evening, my child; how pretty you are in your
muslin gown and that pink sash!” Then he kissed her forehead and pressed
her hand.
“Mamma, papa has kissed me!” cried Marguerite, running into her mother’s
room. “He seems so joyous, so happy!”
“My child, your father is a great man; for three years he has toiled for
the fame and fortune of his family: he thinks he has attained the object
of his search. This day is a festival for us all.”
“My dear mamma,” replied Marguerite, “we shall not be alone in our joy,
for the servants have been so grieved to see him unlike himself. Oh! put
on another sash, this is faded.”
“So be it; but make haste, I want to speak to Pierquin. Where is he?”
“In the parlor, playing with Jean.”
“Where are Gabriel and Felicie?”
“I hear them in the garden.”
“Run down quickly and see that they do not pick the tulips; your father
has not seen them in flower this year, and he may take a fancy to look
at them after dinner. Tell Mulquinier to go up and assist your father in
dressing.”