A DAUGHTER OF EVE
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame la Comtesse Bolognini, nee Vimercati.
If you remember, madame, the pleasure your conversation gave to a
traveller by recalling Paris to his memory in Milan, you will not
be surprised to find him testifying his gratitude for many
pleasant evenings passed beside you by laying one of his works at
your feet, and begging you to protect it with your name, as in
former days that name protected the tales of an ancient writer
dear to the Milanese.
You have an Eugenie, already beautiful, whose intelligent smile
gives promise that she has inherited from you the most precious
gifts of womanhood, and who will certainly enjoy during her
childhood and youth all those happinesses which a rigid mother
denied to the Eugenie of these pages. Though Frenchmen are taxed
with inconstancy, you will find me Italian in faithfulness and
memory. While writing the name of “Eugenie,” my thoughts have
often led me back to that cool stuccoed salon and little garden in
the Vicolo dei Cappucini, which echoed to the laughter of that
dear child, to our sportive quarrels and our chatter. But you have
left the Corso for the Tre Monasteri, and I know not how you are
placed there; consequently, I am forced to think of you, not among
the charming things with which no doubt you have surrounded
yourself, but like one of those fine figures due to Raffaelle,
Titian, Correggio, Allori, which seem abstractions, so distant are
they from our daily lives.
If this book should wing its way across the Alps, it will prove to
you the lively gratitude and respectful friendship of
Your devoted servant,
De Balzac.
A DAUGHTER OF EVE
CHAPTER I. THE TWO MARIES
In one of the finest houses of the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at half-past
eleven at night, two young women were sitting before the fireplace of
a boudoir hung with blue velvet of that tender shade, with shimmering
reflections, which French industry has lately learned to fabricate. Over
the doors and windows were draped soft folds of blue cashmere, the tint
of the hangings, the work of one of those upholsterers who have
just missed being artists. A silver lamp studded with turquoise, and
suspended by chains of beautiful workmanship, hung from the centre of
the ceiling. The same system of decoration was followed in the smallest
details, and even to the ceiling of fluted blue silk, with long bands
of white cashmere falling at equal distances on the hangings, where
they were caught back by ropes of pearl. A warm Belgian carpet, thick
as turf, of a gray ground with blue posies, covered the floor. The
furniture, of carved ebony, after a fine model of the old school,
gave substance and richness to the rather too decorative quality, as
a painter might call it, of the rest of the room. On either side of a
large window, two etageres displayed a hundred precious trifles, flowers
of mechanical art brought into bloom by the fire of thought. On
a chimney-piece of slate-blue marble were figures in old Dresden,
shepherds in bridal garb, with delicate bouquets in their hands, German
fantasticalities surrounding a platinum clock, inlaid with arabesques.
Above it sparkled the brilliant facets of a Venice mirror framed in
ebony, with figures carved in relief, evidently obtained from some
former royal residence. Two jardinieres were filled with the exotic
product of a hot-house, pale, but divine flowers, the treasures of
botany.
In this cold, orderly boudoir, where all things were in place as if
for sale, no sign existed of the gay and capricious disorder of a happy
home. At the present moment, the two young women were weeping. Pain
seemed to predominate. The name of the owner, Ferdinand du Tillet, one
of the richest bankers in Paris, is enough to explain the luxury of the
whole house, of which this boudoir is but a sample.
Though without either rank or station, having pushed himself forward,
heaven knows how, du Tillet had married, in 1831, the daughter of
the Comte de Granville, one of the greatest names in the French
magistracy,--a man who became peer of France after the revolution of
July. This marriage of ambition on du Tillet’s part was brought about
by his agreeing to sign an acknowledgment in the marriage contract of a
dowry not received, equal to that of her elder sister, who was married
to Comte Felix de Vandenesse. On the other hand, the Granvilles obtained
the alliance with de Vandenesse by the largeness of the “dot.” Thus the
bank repaired the breach made in the pocket of the magistracy by rank.
Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen himself, three years later, the
brother-in-law of a Sieur Ferdinand DU Tillet, so-called, he might not
have married his wife; but what man of rank in 1828 foresaw the strange
upheavals which the year 1830 was destined to produce in the political
condition, the fortunes, and the customs of France? Had any one
predicted to Comte Felix de Vandenesse that his head would lose the
coronet of a peer, and that of his father-in-law acquire one, he would
have thought his informant a lunatic.
Bending forward on one of those low chairs then called “chaffeuses,” in
the attitude of a listener, Madame du Tillet was pressing to her bosom
with maternal tenderness, and occasionally kissing, the hand of her
sister, Madame Felix de Vandenesse. Society added the baptismal name
to the surname, in order to distinguish the countess from her
sister-in-law, the Marquise Charles de Vandenesse, wife of the former
ambassador, who had married the widow of the Comte de Kergarouet,
Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine.
Half lying on a sofa, her handkerchief in the other hand, her breathing
choked by repressed sobs, and with tearful eyes, the countess had been
making confidences such as are made only from sister to sister when
two sisters love each other; and these two sisters did love each other
tenderly. We live in days when sisters married into such antagonist
spheres can very well not love each other, and therefore the historian
is bound to relate the reasons of this tender affection, preserved
without spot or jar in spite of their husbands’ contempt for each other
and their own social disunion. A rapid glance at their childhood will
explain the situation.
Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind,
a “devote” who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!), had
fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and Marie
Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the first at
eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever leaving the
domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled them. Up to that
time they had never been to a play; the churches of Paris were their
theatre. Their education in their mother’s house had been as rigorous as
it would have been in a convent. From infancy they had slept in a room
adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the door of which stood
always open. The time not occupied by the care of their persons, their
religious duties and the studies considered necessary for well-bred
young ladies, was spent in needlework done for the poor, or in walks
like those an Englishwoman allows herself on Sunday, saying, apparently,
“Not so fast, or we shall seem to be amusing ourselves.”
Their education did not go beyond the limits imposed by confessors, who
were chosen by their mother from the strictest and least tolerant of
the Jansenist priests. Never were girls delivered over to their husbands
more absolutely pure and virgin than they; their mother seemed to
consider that point, essential as indeed it is, the accomplishment of
all her duties toward earth and heaven. These two poor creatures had
never, before their marriage, read a tale, or heard of a romance; their
very drawings were of figures whose anatomy would have been masterpieces
of the impossible to Cuvier, designed to feminize the Farnese Hercules
himself. An old maid taught them drawing. A worthy priest instructed
them in grammar, the French language, history, geography, and the very
little arithmetic it was thought necessary in their rank for women
to know. Their reading, selected from authorized books, such as the
“Lettres Edifiantes,” and Noel’s “Lecons de Litterature,” was done aloud
in the evening; but always in presence of their mother’s confessor, for
even in those books there did sometimes occur passages which,
without wise comments, might have roused their imagination. Fenelon’s
“Telemaque” was thought dangerous.
The Comtesse de Granville loved her daughters sufficiently to wish to
make them angels after the pattern of Marie Alacoque, but the poor girls
themselves would have preferred a less virtuous and more amiable mother.
This education bore its natural fruits. Religion, imposed as a yoke and
presented under its sternest aspect, wearied with formal practice these
innocent young hearts, treated as sinful. It repressed their feelings,
and was never precious to them, although it struck its roots deep down
into their natures. Under such training the two Maries would either
have become mere imbeciles, or they must necessarily have longed for
independence. Thus it came to pass that they looked to marriage as soon
as they saw anything of life and were able to compare a few ideas. Of
their own tender graces and their personal value they were absolutely
ignorant. They were ignorant, too, of their own innocence; how, then,
could they know life? Without weapons to meet misfortune, without
experience to appreciate happiness, they found no comfort in the
maternal jail, all their joys were in each other. Their tender
confidences at night in whispers, or a few short sentences exchanged if
their mother left them for a moment, contained more ideas than the words
themselves expressed. Often a glance, concealed from other eyes, by
which they conveyed to each other their emotions, was like a poem
of bitter melancholy. The sight of a cloudless sky, the fragrance of
flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were their joys. The
finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a source of enjoyment.
Their mother’s social circle, far from opening resources to their hearts
or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and depressed
them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and graceless, whose
conversation turned on the differences which distinguished various
preachers and confessors, on their own petty indispositions, on
religious events insignificant even to the “Quotidienne” or “l’Ami de
la Religion.” As for the men who appeared in the Comtesse de Granville’s
salon, they extinguished any possible torch of love, so cold and sadly
resigned were their faces. They were all of an age when mankind is sulky
and fretful, and natural sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table
and on the things relating to personal comfort. Religious egotism had
long dried up those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched
behind pious practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole
evening, and the two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim
enforced by maternal severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages
about them with their hollow eyes and scowling faces.
On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a
music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that
music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed
within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music.
A spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a
neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the
eldest girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the
importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the
value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of a
devote’s character to make a merit of doing her duty.
The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem
all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his brown,
sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless in its
dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of
springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally
like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain
solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he
was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary
gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not the
slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to
concern themselves with such materialities. This great unknown artist
belonged to the kindly class of the self-forgetting, who give their time
and their soul to others, just as they leave their gloves on every table
and their umbrella at all doors. His hands were of the kind that are
dirty as soon as washed. In short, his old body, badly poised on its
knotted old legs, proving to what degree a man can make it the mere
accessory of his soul, belonged to those strange creations which have
been properly depicted only by a German,--by Hoffman, the poet of that
which seems not to exist but yet has life.
Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach; a
musical genius, who was now examined by a council of devotes, and asked
if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer, “Look at
me!” but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist
confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in the lives
of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand and
simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere
comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave him
an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed to pay
for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred francs a year and
his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never found courage to confide
his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young
girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and
the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the
two Maries.
No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered
the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as
mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found
a music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and
address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This
tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were
lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen. His
artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty, reappeared.
He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches in his
German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said with an
air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a laugh
to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy had
penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully ridiculous
had he failed in being so by nature.
According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within
their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for
reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct
of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to
overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they
flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent
themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three daughters
of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk with music,
were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials; they
made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives. Mozart,
Beethoven, Gluck, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain secondary
geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion which never
passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts, though it permeated
that other creation through which, in spirit, they winged their flight.
When they had executed some great work in a manner that their master
declared was almost faultless, they embraced each other in ecstasy and
the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.
The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years
of age, and then only four times a year in special houses. They were not
allowed to leave their mother’s side without instructions as to their
behavior with their partners; and so severe were those instructions that
they dared say only yes or no during a dance. The eye of the countess
never left them, and she seemed to know from the mere movement of their
lips the words they uttered. Even the ball-dresses of these poor little
things were piously irreproachable; their muslin gowns came up to their
chins with an endless number of thick ruches, and the sleeves came down
to their wrists. Swathing in this way their natural charms, this costume
gave them a vague resemblance to Egyptian hermae; though from these
blocks of muslin rose enchanting little heads of tender melancholy.
They felt themselves the objects of pity, and inwardly resented it. What
woman, however innocent, does not desire to excite envy?
No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of
their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red,
and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the
hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they
went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving
the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with
whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night. To
their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they
were to go than the maternal convent.
Why did the father of these poor girls, the Comte de Granville, a wise
and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics), refrain
from protecting the helpless little creatures from such crushing
despotism? Alas! by mutual understanding, about ten years after
marriage, he and his wife were separated while living under one roof.
The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons, leaving
that of the daughters to his wife. He saw less danger for women than for
men in the application of his wife’s oppressive system. The two Maries,
destined as women to endure tyranny, either of love or marriage, would
be, he thought, less injured than boys, whose minds ought to have freer
play, and whose manly qualities would deteriorate under the powerful
compression of religious ideas pushed to their utmost consequences. Of
four victims the count saved two.
The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the
slightest intimacy with their sisters. All communication between the
poor children was therefore strictly watched. When the boys came home
from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house. The
boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after that
the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or, during
the summer season, into the country. Except on the solemn days of some
family festival, such as the countess’s birthday or New Year’s day, or
the day of the distribution of prizes, when the boys remained in their
father’s house and slept there, the sisters saw so little of their
brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them. On those days
the countess never left them for an instant alone together. Calls
of “Where is Angelique?”--“What is Eugenie about?”--“Where are my
daughters?” resounded all day. As for the mother’s sentiments towards
her sons, the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes, as
if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.
Her exclamations, and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,
were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah, and completely
deceived the sisters, who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed to
perdition.
When the boys were eighteen years of age, the count gave them rooms
in his own part of the house, and sent them to study law under the
supervision of a solicitor, his former secretary. The two Maries knew
nothing therefore of fraternity, except by theory. At the time of the
marriage of the sisters, both brothers were practising in provincial
courts, and both were detained by important cases. Domestic life in
many families which might be expected to be intimate, united, and
homogeneous, is really spent in this way. Brothers are sent to a
distance, busy with their own careers, their own advancement, occupied,
perhaps, about the good of the country; the sisters are engrossed in
a round of other interests. All the members of such a family live
disunited, forgetting one another, bound together only by some feeble
tie of memory, until, perhaps, a sentiment of pride or self-interest
either joins them or separates them in heart as they already are in
fact. Modern laws, by multiplying the family by the family, has created
a great evil,--namely, individualism.
In the depths of this solitude where their girlhood was spent, Angelique
and Eugenie seldom saw their father, and when he did enter the grand
apartment of his wife on the first floor, he brought with him a saddened
face. In his own home he always wore the grave and solemn look of a
magistrate on the bench. When the little girls had passed the age of
dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to use their minds (an
epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke) they divined the secret
of the cares that lined their father’s forehead, and they recognized
beneath that mask of sternness the relics of a kind heart and a fine
character. They vaguely perceived how he had yielded to the forces of
religion in his household, disappointed as he was in his hopes of a
husband, and wounded in the tenderest fibres of paternity,--the love of
a father for his daughters. Such griefs were singularly moving to the
hearts of the two young girls, who were themselves deprived of all
tenderness. Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters,
with an arm round each little waist, and stepping with their own short
steps, the father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight
of the house, and kiss them on their foreheads; his eyes, his lips, his
whole countenance expressing the deepest commiseration.
“You are not very happy, my dear little girls,” he said one day; “but I
shall marry you early. It will comfort me to have you leave home.”
“Papa,” said Eugenie, “we have decided to take the first man who
offers.”
“Ah!” he cried, “that is the bitter fruit of such a system. They want to
make saints, and they make--” he stopped without ending his sentence.
Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father’s
“Adieu,” or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home. They pitied
that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.
This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the two
sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the hand
of Nature. Many men, driven to marriage, prefer a girl taken from a
convent, and saturated with piety, to a girl brought up to worldly
ideas. There seems to be no middle course. A man must marry either an
educated girl, who reads the newspapers and comments upon them, who
waltzes with a dozen young men, goes to the theatre, devours novels,
cares nothing for religion, and makes her own ethics, or an ignorant and
innocent young girl, like either of the two Maries. Perhaps there may
be as much danger with the one kind as with the other. Yet the vast
majority of men who are not so old as Arnolphe, prefer a religious Agnes
to a budding Celimene.
The two Maries, who were small and slender, had the same figure, the
same foot, the same hand. Eugenie, the younger, was fair-haired, like
her mother, Angelique was dark-haired, like the father. But they both
had the same complexion,--a skin of the pearly whiteness which shows the
richness and purity of the blood, where the color rises through a
tissue like that of the jasmine, soft, smooth, and tender to the touch.
Eugenie’s blue eyes and the brown eyes of Angelique had an expression of
artless indifference, of ingenuous surprise, which was rendered by the
vague manner with which the pupils floated on the fluid whiteness of
the eyeball. They were both well-made; the rather thin shoulders would
develop later. Their throats, long veiled, delighted the eye when their
husbands requested them to wear low dresses to a ball, on which occasion
they both felt a pleasing shame, which made them first blush behind
closed doors, and afterwards, through a whole evening in company.
On the occasion when this scene opens, and the eldest, Angelique, was
weeping, while the younger, Eugenie, was consoling her, their hands and
arms were white as milk. Each had nursed a child,--one a boy, the other
a daughter. Eugenie, as a girl, was thought very giddy by her mother,
who had therefore treated her with especial watchfulness and severity.
In the eyes of that much-feared mother, Angelique, noble and proud,
appeared to have a soul so lofty that it would guard itself, whereas,
the more lively Eugenie needed restraint. There are many charming beings
misused by fate,--beings who ought by rights to prosper in this life,
but who live and die unhappy, tortured by some evil genius, the victims
of unfortunate circumstances. The innocent and naturally light-hearted
Eugenie had fallen into the hands and beneath the malicious despotism of
a self-made man on leaving the maternal prison. Angelique, whose nature
inclined her to deeper sentiments, was thrown into the upper spheres of
Parisian social life, with the bridle lying loose upon her neck.