The Marriage Contract by Honoré de Balzac (ink ebook reader TXT) 📕

/> in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was
beginning just as I left Paris. I saw the first gleams even then
of your misfortune. But what gentleman is base enough to open such
a subject unless appealed to? Who shall dare to injure a woman, or
break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing
at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Illusions are the riches
of the heart.

Your wife, dear friend, is, I believe I may say, in the fullest
application of the word, a fashionable woman. She thinks of
nothing but her social success, her dress, her pleasures; she goes
to opera and theatre and balls; she rises late and drives to the
Bois, dines out, or gives a dinner-party. Such a life seems to me
for women very much what war is for men; the public sees only the
victors; it forgets the dead. Many delicate women perish in this
conflict; those who come out of it have iron constitutions,
consequently no heart, but good stomachs. There lies the reason of
the cold insensibility of social life. Fine souls keep themselves
reserved, weak and tender natures succumb; the rest are
cobblestones which hold the social organ in its place, water-worn
and rounded by the tide, but never worn-out. Your wife has
maintained that life with ease; she looks made for it; she is
always fresh and beautiful. To my mind the deduction is plain,
--she has never loved you; and you have loved her like a madman.

To strike out love from that siliceous nature a man of iron was
needed. After standing, but without enduring, the shock of Lady
Dudley, Felix was the fitting mate to Natalie. There is no great
merit in divining that to you she was indifferent. In love with
her yourself, you have been incapable of perceiving the cold
nature of a young woman whom you have fashioned and trained for a
man like Vandenesse. The coldness of your wife, if you perceived
it, you set down, with the stupid jurisprudence of married people,
to the honor of her reserve and her innocence. Like all husbands,
you thought you could keep her virtuous in a society where women
whisper from ear to ear that which men are afraid to say.

No, your wife has liked the social benefits she derived from
marriage, but the private burdens of it she found rather heavy.
Those burdens, that tax was--you! Seeing nothing of all this, you
have gone on digging your abysses (to use the hackneyed words of
rhetoric) and covering them with flowers. You have mildly obeyed
the law which rules the ruck of men; from which I desired to
protect you. Dear fellow! only one thing was wanting to make you
as dull as the bourgeois deceived by his wife, who is all
astonishment or wrath, and that is that you should talk to me of
your sacrifices, your love for Natalie, and chant that psalm:
"Ungrateful would she be if she betrayed me; I have done this, I
have done that, and more will I do; I will go to the ends of the
earth, to the Indies for her sake. I--I--" etc. My dear Paul, have
you never lived in Paris, have you never had the honor of
belonging by ties of friendship to Henri de Marsay, that you
should be so ignorant of the commonest things, the primitive
principles that move the feminine mechanism, the a-b-c of their
hearts? Then hear me:--

Suppose you exterminate yourself, suppose you go to Saint-Pelagie
for a woman's debts, suppose you kill a score of men, desert a
dozen women, serve like Laban, cross the deserts, skirt the
galleys, cover yourself with glory, cover yourself with shame,
refuse, like Nelson, to fight a battle until you have kissed the
shoulder of Lady Hamilton, dash yourself, like Bonaparte, upon the
bridge at Arcola, go mad like Roland, risk your life to dance five
minutes with a woman--my dear fellow, what have all those things
to do with _love_? If love were won by samples such as those
mankind would be too happy. A spurt of prowess at the moment of
desire would give a man the woman that he wanted. But love, _love_,
my good Paul, is a faith like that in the Immaculate conception of
the Holy Virgin; it comes, or it does not come. Will the mines of
Potosi, or the shedding of our blood, or the making of our fame
serve to waken an involuntary, an inexplicable sentiment? Young
men like you, who expect to be loved as the balance of your
account, are nothing else than usurers. Our legitimate wives owe
us virtue and children, but they don't owe us love.

Love, my dear Paul, is the sense of pleasure given and received,
and the certainty of giving and receiving it; love is a desire
incessantly moving and growing, incessantly satisfied and
insatiable. The day when Vandenesse stirred the cord of a desire
in your wife's heart which you had left untouched, all your
self-satisfied affection, your gifts, your deeds, your money, ceased
to be even memories; one emotion of love in your wife's heart has
cast out the treasures of your own passion, which are now nothing
better than old iron. Felix has the virtues and the beauties in
her eyes, and the simple moral is that blinded by your own love
you never made her love you.

Your mother-in-law is on the side of the lover against the
husband,--secretly or not; she may have closed her eyes, or she
may have opened them; I know not what she has done--but one thing
is certain, she is for her daughter, and against you. During the
fifteen years that I have observed society, I have never yet seen
a mother who, under such circumstances, abandons her daughter.
This indulgence seems to be an inheritance transmitted in the
female line. What man can blame it? Some copyist of the Civil
code, perhaps, who sees formulas only in the place of feelings.

As for your present position, the dissipation into which the life
of a fashionable woman cast you, and your own easy nature,
possibly your vanity, have opened the way for your wife and her
mother to get rid of you by this ruin so skilfully contrived. From
all of which you will conclude, my good friend, that the mission
you entrusted to me, and which I would all the more faithfully
fulfil because it amused me, is, necessarily, null and void. The
evil you wish me to prevent is accomplished,--"consummatum est."

Forgive me, dear friend, if I write to you, as you say, a la de
Marsay on subjects which must seem to you very serious. Far be it
from me to dance upon the grave of a friend, like heirs upon that
of a progenitor. But you have written to me that you mean to act
the part of a man, and I believe you; I therefore treat you as a
man of the world, and not as a lover. For you, this blow ought to
be like the brand on the shoulder of a galley-slave, which flings
him forever into a life of systematic opposition to society. You
are now freed of one evil; marriage possessed you; it now behooves
you to turn round and possess marriage.

Paul, I am your friend in the fullest acceptation of the word. If
you had a brain in an iron skull, if you had the energy which has
come to you too late, I would have proved my friendship by telling
you things that would have made you walk upon humanity as upon a
carpet. But when I did talk to you guardedly of Parisian
civilization, when I told you in the disguise of fiction some of
the actual adventures of my youth, you regarded them as mere
romance and would not see their bearing. When I told you that
history of a lawyer at the galleys branded for forgery, who
committed the crime to give his wife, adored like yours, an income
of thirty thousand francs, and whom his wife denounced that she
might be rid of him and free to love another man, you exclaimed,
and other fools who were supping with us exclaimed against me.
Well, my dear Paul, you were that lawyer, less the galleys.

Your friends here are not sparing you. The sister of the two
Vandenesses, the Marquise de Listomere and all her set, in which,
by the bye, that little Rastignac has enrolled himself,--the scamp
will make his way!--Madame d'Aiglemont and her salon, the
Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Ferraud, Madame d'Espard, the Nucingens,
the Spanish ambassador, in short, all the cliques in society are
flinging mud upon you. You are a bad man, a gambler, a dissipated
fellow who has squandered his property. After paying your debts a
great many times, your wife, an angel of virtue, has just redeemed
your notes for one hundred thousand francs, although her property
was separate from yours. Luckily, you had done the best you could
do by disappearing. If you had stayed here you would have made her
bed in the straw; the poor woman would have been the victim of her
conjugal devotion!

When a man attains to power, my dear Paul, he has all the virtues
of an epitaph; let him fall into poverty, and he has more sins
than the Prodigal Son; society at the present moment gives you the
vices of a Don Juan. You gambled at the Bourse, you had licentious
tastes which cost you fabulous sums of money to gratify; you paid
enormous interests to money-lenders. The two Vandenesses have told
everywhere how Gigonnet gave you for six thousand francs an ivory
frigate, and made your valet buy it back for three hundred in
order to sell it to you again. The incident did really happen to
Maxime de Trailles about nine years ago; but it fits your present
circumstances so well that Maxime has forever lost the command of
his frigate.

In short, I can't tell you one-half that is said; you have
supplied