Seraphita by Honoré de Balzac (best way to read an ebook .TXT) 📕

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"My dear Seraphita, are you ill?" he said. "You look paler than usual."

She turned slowly towards him, tossing back her hair like a pretty woman whose aching head leaves her no strength even for complaint.

"I was foolish enough to cross the fiord with Minna," she said. "We ascended the Falberg."

"Do you mean to kill yourself?" he said with a lover's terror.

"No, my good Wilfrid; I took the greatest care of your Minna."

Wilfrid struck his hand violently on a table, rose hastily, and made several steps towards the door with an exclamation full of pain; then he returned and seemed about to remonstrate.

"Why this disturbance if you think me ill?" she said.

"Forgive me, have mercy!" he cried, kneeling beside her. "Speak to me harshly if you will; exact all that the cruel fancies of a woman lead you to imagine I least can bear; but oh, my beloved, do not doubt my love. You take Minna like an axe to hew me down. Have mercy!"

"Why do you say these things, my friend, when you know that they are useless?" she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light, the shimmer of which was like the last vibrations of an Italian song.

"Ah! no man dies of anguish!" he murmured.

"You are suffering?" she said in a voice whose intonations produced upon his heart the same effect as that of her look. "Would I could help you!"

"Love me as I love you."

"Poor Minna!" she replied.

"Why am I unarmed!" exclaimed Wilfrid, violently.

"You are out of temper," said Seraphita, smiling. "Come, have I not spoken to you like those Parisian women whose loves you tell of?"

Wilfrid sat down, crossed his arms, and looked gloomily at Seraphita. "I forgive you," he said; "for you know not what you do."

"You mistake," she replied; "every woman from the days of Eve does good and evil knowingly."

"I believe it," he said.

"I am sure of it, Wilfrid. Our instinct is precisely that which makes us perfect. What you men learn, we feel."

"Why, then, do you not feel how much I love you?"

"Because you do not love me."

"Good God!"

"If you did, would you complain of your own sufferings?"

"You are terrible to-night, Seraphita. You are a demon."

"No, but I am gifted with the faculty of comprehending, and it is awful. Wilfrid, sorrow is a lamp which illumines life."

"Why did you ascend the Falberg?"

"Minna will tell you. I am too weary to talk. You must talk to me,--you who know so much, who have learned all things and forgotten nothing; you who have passed through every social test. Talk to me, amuse me, I am listening."

"What can I tell you that you do not know? Besides, the request is ironical. You allow yourself no intercourse with social life; you trample on its conventions, its laws, its customs, sentiments, and sciences; you reduce them all to the proportions such things take when viewed by you beyond this universe."

"Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong to love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No, we can never come to terms."

"You are more maliciously unkind to-night than I have ever known you."

"Unkind!" she said, with a look which seemed to blend all feelings into one celestial emotion, "no, I am ill, I suffer, that is all. Leave me, my friend; it is your manly right. We women should ever please you, entertain you, be gay in your presence and have no whims save those that amuse you. Come, what shall I do for you, friend? Shall I sing, shall I dance, though weariness deprives me of the use of voice and limbs?--Ah! gentlemen, be we on our deathbeds, we yet must smile to please you; you call that, methinks, your right. Poor women! I pity them. Tell me, you who abandon them when they grow old, is it because they have neither hearts nor souls? Wilfrid, I am a hundred years old; leave me! leave me! go to Minna!"

"Oh, my eternal love!"

"Do you know the meaning of eternity? Be silent, Wilfrid. You desire me, but you do not love me. Tell me, do I not seem to you like those coquettish Parisian women?"

"Certainly I no longer find you the pure celestial maiden I first saw in the church of Jarvis."

At these words Seraphita passed her hands across her brow, and when she removed them Wilfrid was amazed at the saintly expression that overspread her face.

"You are right, my friend," she said; "I do wrong whenever I set my feet upon your earth."

"Oh, Seraphita, be my star! stay where you can ever bless me with that clear light!"

As he spoke, he stretched forth his hand to take that of the young girl, but she withdrew it, neither disdainfully nor in anger. Wilfrid rose abruptly and walked to the window that she might not see the tears that rose to his eyes.

"Why do you weep?" she said. "You are not a child, Wilfrid. Come back to me. I wish it. You are annoyed if I show just displeasure. You see that I am fatigued and ill, yet you force me to think and speak, and listen to persuasions and ideas that weary me. If you had any real perception of my nature, you would have made some music, you would have lulled my feelings--but no, you love me for yourself and not for myself."

The storm which convulsed the young man's heart calmed down at these words. He slowly approached her, letting his eyes take in the seductive creature who lay exhausted before him, her head resting in her hand and her elbow on the couch.

"You think that I do not love you," she resumed. "You are mistaken. Listen to me, Wilfrid. You are beginning to know much; you have suffered much. Let me explain your thoughts to you. You wished to take my hand just now"; she rose to a sitting posture, and her graceful motions seemed to emit light. "When a young girl allows her hand to be taken it is as though she made a promise, is it not? and ought she not to fulfil it? You well know that I cannot be yours. Two sentiments divide and inspire the love of all the women of the earth. Either they devote themselves to suffering, degraded, and criminal beings whom they desire to console, uplift, redeem; or they give themselves to superior men, sublime and strong, whom they adore and seek to comprehend, and by whom they are often annihilated. You have been degraded, though now you are purified by the fires of repentance, and to-day you are once more noble; but I know myself too feeble to be your equal, and too religious to bow before any power but that On High. I may refer thus to your life, my friend, for we are in the North, among the clouds, where all things are abstractions."

"You stab me, Seraphita, when you speak like this. It wounds me to hear you apply the dreadful knowledge with which you strip from all things human the properties that time and space and form have given them, and consider them mathematically in the abstract, as geometry treats substances from which it extracts solidity."

"Well, I will respect your wishes, Wilfrid. Let the subject drop. Tell me what you think of this bearskin rug which my poor David has spread out."

"It is very handsome."

"Did you ever see me wear this 'doucha greka'?"

She pointed to a pelisse made of cashmere and lined with the skin of the black fox,--the name she gave it signifying "warm to the soul."

"Do you believe that any sovereign has a fur that can equal it?" she asked.

"It is worthy of her who wears it."

"And whom you think beautiful?"

"Human words do not apply to her. Heart to heart is the only language I can use."

"Wilfrid, you are kind to soothe my griefs with such sweet words--which you have said to others."

"Farewell!"

"Stay. I love both you and Minna, believe me. To me you two are as one being. United thus you can be my brother or, if you will, my sister. Marry her; let me see you both happy before I leave this world of trial and of pain. My God! the simplest of women obtain what they ask of a lover; they whisper 'Hush!' and he is silent; 'Die' and he dies; 'Love me afar' and he stays at a distance, like courtiers before a king! All I desire is to see you happy, and you refuse me! Am I then powerless?--Wilfrid, listen, come nearer to me. Yes, I should grieve to see you marry Minna but--when I am here no longer, then--promise me to marry her; heaven destined you for each other."

"I listen to you with fascination, Seraphita. Your words are incomprehensible, but they charm me. What is it you mean to say?"

"You are right; I forget to be foolish,--to be the poor creature whose weaknesses gratify you. I torment you, Wilfrid. You came to these Northern lands for rest, you, worn-out by the impetuous struggle of genius unrecognized, you, weary with the patient toils of science, you, who well-nigh dyed your hands in crime and wore the fetters of human justice--"

Wilfrid dropped speechless on the carpet. Seraphita breathed softly on his forehead, and in a moment he fell asleep at her feet.

"Sleep! rest!" she said, rising.

She passed her hands over Wilfrid's brow; then the following sentences escaped her lips, one by one,--all different in tone and accent, but all melodious, full of a Goodness that seemed to emanate from her head in vaporous waves, like the gleams the goddess chastely lays upon Endymion sleeping.

"I cannot show myself such as I am to thee, dear Wilfrid,--to thee who art strong.

"The hour is come; the hour when the effulgent lights of the future cast their reflections backward on the soul; the hour when the soul awakes into freedom.

"Now am I permitted to tell thee how I love thee. Dost thou not see the nature of my love, a love without self-interest; a sentiment full of thee, thee only; a love which follows thee into the future to light that future for thee--for it is the one True Light. Canst thou now conceive with what ardor I would have thee leave this life which weighs thee down, and behold thee nearer than thou art to that world where Love is never-failing? Can it be aught but suffering to love for one life only? Hast thou not felt a thirst for the eternal love? Dost thou not feel the bliss to which a creature rises when, with twin-soul, it loves the Being who betrays not love, Him before whom we kneel in adoration?

"Would I had wings to cover thee, Wilfrid; power to give thee strength to enter now into that world where all the purest joys of purest earthly attachments are but shadows in the Light that shines, unceasing,