The Lesser Bourgeoisie by Honore de Balzac (best ereader for graphic novels TXT) 📕

Brigitte had capitalized sixty thousand francs, that sum can be

explained by the rise in the Funds, and there is no need to have

recourse to accusations more or less well founded, which have nothing

to do with our present history.

From the first days of the marriage, Brigitte subdued the unfortunate

Madame Thuillier with a touch of the spur and a jerk of the bit, both

of which she made her feel severely. A further display of tyranny was

useless; the victim resigned herself at once. Celeste, thoroughly

understood by Brigitte, a girl without mind or education, accustomed

to a sedentary life and a tranquil atmosphere, was extremely gentle by

nature; she was pious in the fullest acceptation of the word; she

would willingly have expiated by the hardest punishments the

involuntary wrong of giving pain to her neighbor. She was utterly

ignorant of life; accustomed to be waited on by her mother, who did

the whole service of the house, for Celeste was unable to make much

exertion, owing to a lymphatic constitution which the least toil

wearied. She was truly a daughter of the people of Paris, where

children, seldom handsome, and of no vigor, the product of poverty and

toil, of homes without fresh air, without freedom of action, without

any of the conveniences of life, meet us at every turn.

At the time of the marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman,

fair and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the

countenance. Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested

water on the brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably

too small and ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some

people fear she would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her eyes,

which were light blue, and her lips, always fixed in a smile, did not

contradict that idea. On the solemn occasion of her marriage she had

the manner, air, and attitude of a person condemned to death, whose

only desire is that it might all be over speedily.

"She is rather round," said Colleville to Thuillier.

Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her

own formed the strongest contrast. Mademoiselle Thuillier was

remarkable for her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by

toil which, from her very childhood, had bent her down to painful,

thankless tasks, and by the secret privations she imposed upon herself

in order to amass her little property. Her complexion, early

discolored, had something the tint of steel. Her brown eyes were

framed in brown; on the upper lip was a brown floss like a sort of

smoke. Her lips were thin, and her imperious forehead was surmounted

by hair once black, now turning to chinchilla. She held herself as

straight as the fairest beauty; but all things else about her showed

the hardiness of her life, the deadening of her natural fire, the cost

of what she was!

To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future

mother to rule, one more subject in her empire. She soon reproached

her for being _weak_, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous

old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in

her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the languid

inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her

sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to

help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted

to her, nursed her like a beloved sister, and would say, in presence of

Thuillier: "You haven't any strength, my child; you must never do

anything again." She showed up Celeste's incapacity by that display of

sympathy with which strength, seeming to pity weakness, finds means to

boast of its own powers.

But, as all despotic natures liking to exercise their strength are

full of tenderness for physical sufferings, Brigitte took such real

care of her sister-in-law as to satisfy Celeste's mother when she came

to see her daughter. After Madame Thuillier recovered, however, she

called her, in Celeste's hearing, "a helpless creature, good for

nothing!" which sent the poor thing crying to her room. When Thuillier

found her there, drying her eyes, he excused her sister, saying:--

"She is an excellent woman, but rather hasty; she loves you in her own

way; she behaves just so with me."

Celeste, remembering the maternal care of her sister-in-law during her

illness, forgave the wound. Brigitte always treated her brother as the

king of the family; she exalted him to Celeste, and made him out an

autocrat, a Ladislas, an infallible pope. Madame Thuillier having lost

her father and grandfather, and being well-nigh deserted by her

mother, who came to see her on Thursdays only (she herself spending

Sundays at Auteuil in summer), had no one left to love except her

husband, and she did love him,--in the first place, because he was her

husband, and secondly, because he still remained to her "that handsome

Thuillier." Besides, he sometimes treated her like a wife, and all

these reasons together made her adore him. He seemed to her all the

more perfect because he often took up her defence and scolded his

sister, not from any real interest in his wife, but for pure

selfishness, and in order to have peace in the household during the

very few moments that he stayed there.

In fact, that handsome Thuillier was never at home except at dinner,

after which meal he went out, returning very late at night. He went to

balls and other social festivities by himself, precisely as if he were

still a bachelor. Thus the two women were always alone together.

Celeste insensibly fell into a passive attitude, and became what

Brigitte wanted her,--a helot. The Queen Elizabeth of the household

then passed from despotism to a sort of pity for the poor victim who

was always sacrificed. She ended by softening her haughty ways, her

cutting speech, her contemptuous tones, as soon as she was certain

that her sister-in-law was completely under the yoke. When she saw the

wounds it made on the neck of her victim, she took care of her as a

thing of her own, and Celeste entered upon happier days. Comparing the

end with the beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer.

To gain some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher

in the household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the

poor helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.

Celeste had no child. This barrenness, which, from month to month,

brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of

Brigitte's scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit

for nothing, not even to bear children. The old maid, who had longed

to love her brother's child as if it were her own, was unable, for

years, to reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.

At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then

forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of

never being a mother. And here is a strange thing. After twenty-five

years of this life, in which victory had ended by first dulling and

then breaking its own knife, Brigitte loved Celeste as much as Celeste

loved Brigitte. Time, ease, and the perpetual rubbing of domestic

life, had worn off the angles and smoothed the asperities; Celeste's

resignation and lamb-like gentleness had brought, at last, a serene

and peaceful autumn. The two women were still further united by the

one sentiment that lay within them, namely, their adoration for the

lucky and selfish Thuillier.

Moreover, these two women, both childless, had each, like all women

who have vainly desired children, fallen in love with a child. This

fictitious motherhood, equal in strength to a real motherhood, needs

an explanation which will carry us to the very heart of our drama, and

will show the reason of the new occupation which Mademoiselle

Thuillier provided for her brother. 

Thuillier had entered the ministry of finance as supernumerary at the

same time as Colleville, who has been mentioned already as his

intimate friend. In opposition to the well-regulated, gloomy household

of Thuillier, social nature had provided that of Colleville; and if it

is impossible not to remark that this fortuitous contrast was scarcely

moral, we must add that, before deciding that point, it would be well

to wait for the end of this drama, unfortunately too true, for which

the present historian is not responsible.

Colleville was the only son of a talented musician, formerly first

violin at the Opera under Francoeur and Rebel, who related, at least

six times a month during his lifetime, anecdotes concerning the

representations of the "Village Seer"; and mimicked Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, taking him off to perfection. Colleville and Thuillier were

inseparable friends; they had no secrets from each other, and their

friendship, begun at fifteen years of age, had never known a cloud up

to the year 1839. The former was one of those employees who are

called, in the government offices, pluralists. These clerks are

remarkable for their industry. Colleville, a good musician, owed to

the name and influence of his father a situation as first clarionet at

the Opera-Comique, and so long as he was a bachelor, Colleville, who

was rather richer than Thuillier, shared his means with his friend.

But, unlike Thuillier, Colleville married for love a Mademoiselle

Flavie, the natural daughter of a celebrated danseuse at the Opera;

her reputed father being a certain du Bourguier, one of the richest

contractors of the day. In style and origin, Flavie was apparently

destined for a melancholy career, when Colleville, often sent to her

mother's apartments, fell in love with her and married her. Prince

Galathionne, who at that time was "protecting" the danseuse, then

approaching the end of her brilliant career, gave Flavie a "dot" of

twenty thousand francs, to which her mother added a magnificent

trousseau. Other friends and opera-comrades sent jewels and

silver-ware, so that the Colleville household was far richer in

superfluities than in capital. Flavie, brought up in opulence, began

her married life in a charming apartment, furnished by her mother's

upholsterer, where the young wife, who was full of taste for art and

for artists, and possessed a certain elegance, ruled, a queen.

Madame Colleville was pretty and piquant, clever, gay, and graceful;

to express her in one sentence,--a charming creature. Her mother, the

danseuse, now forty-three years old, retired from the stage and went

to live in the country,--thus depriving her daughter of the resources

derived from her wasteful extravagance. Madame Colleville kept a very

agreeable but extremely free and easy household. From 1816 to 1826 she

had five children. Colleville, a musician in the evening, kept the

books of a merchant from seven to nine in the morning, and by ten

o'clock he was at his ministry. Thus, by blowing into a bit of wood by

night, and writing double-entry accounts in the early morning, he

managed to eke out his earnings to seven or eight thousand francs a

year.

Madame Colleville played the part of a "comme il faut" woman; she

received on Wednesdays, gave a concert once a month and a dinner every

fortnight. She never saw Colleville except at dinner and at night,

when he returned about twelve o'clock, at which hour she was

frequently not at home herself. She went to the theatres, where boxes

were sometimes given to her; and she would send word to Colleville to

come and fetch her from such or such a house, where she was supping

and dancing. At her own house, guests found excellent cheer, and her

society, though rather mixed, was very amusing; she received and

welcomed actresses, artists, men of letters, and a few rich men.

Madame Colleville's elegance was on a par with that of Tullia, the

leading prima-donna, with whom she was intimate; but though the

Collevilles encroached on their capital and were often in difficulty

by the end of the month, Flavie was never in debt.

Colleville was very happy; he still loved his wife, and he made

himself