Chapter VI: Conclusion (2)

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 a whole encyclopaedia of gossip which the women have an
interest in swelling. Your wife is having an immense success. Last
evening at the opera Madame Firmiani began to repeat to me some of
the things that are being said. “Don’t talk of that,” I replied.
“You know nothing of the real truth, you people. Paul has robbed
the Bank, cheated the Treasury, murdered Ezzelin and three Medoras
in the rue Saint-Denis, and I think, between ourselves, that he is
a member of the Dix-Mille. His associate is the famous Jacques
Collin, on whom the police have been unable to lay a hand since he
escaped from the galleys. Paul gave him a room in his house; you
see he is capable of anything; in fact, the two have gone off to
India together to rob the Great Mogul.” Madame Firmiani, like the
distinguished woman that she is, saw that she ought not to convert
her beautiful lips into a mouthpiece for false denunciation.

Many persons, when they hear of these tragi-comedies of life,
refuse to believe them. They take the side of human nature and
fine sentiments; they declare that these things do not exist. But
Talleyrand said a fine thing, my dear fellow: “All things happen.”
Truly, things happen under our very noses which are more amazing
than this domestic plot of yours; but society has an interest in
denying them, and in declaring itself calumniated. Often these
dramas are played so naturally and with such a varnish of good
taste that even I have to rub the lens of my opera-glass to see to
the bottom of them. But, I repeat to you, when a man is a friend
of mine, when we have received together the baptism of champagne
and have knelt together before the altar of the Venus Commodus,
when the crooked fingers of play have given us their benediction,
if that man finds himself in a false position I’d ruin a score of
families to do him justice.

You must be aware from all this that I love you. Have I ever in my
life written a letter as long as this? No. Therefore, read with
attention what I still have to say.

Alas! Paul, I shall be forced to take to writing, for I am taking
to politics. I am going into public life. I intend to have, within
five years, the portfolio of a ministry or some embassy. There
comes an age when the only mistress a man can serve is his
country. I enter the ranks of those who intend to upset not only
the ministry, but the whole present system of government. In
short, I swim in the waters of a certain prince who is lame of the
foot only,--a man whom I regard as a statesman of genius whose
name will go down to posterity; a prince as complete in his way as
a great artist may be in his.

Several of us, Ronquerolles, Montriveau, the Grandlieus, La
Roche-Hugon, Serisy, Feraud, and Granville, have allied ourselves
against the “parti-pretre,” as the party-ninny represented by the
“Constitutionnel” has ingeniously said. We intend to overturn the
Navarreins, Lenoncourts, Vandenesses, and the Grand Almonry. In
order to succeed we shall even ally ourselves with Lafayette, the
Orleanists, and the Left,--people whom we can throttle on the
morrow of victory, for no government in the world is possible with
their principles. We are capable of anything for the good of the
country--and our own.

Personal questions as to the King’s person are mere sentimental
folly in these days; they must be cleared away. From that point of
view, the English with their sort of Doge, are more advanced than
we are. Politics have nothing to do with that, my dear fellow.
Politics consist in giving the nation an impetus by creating an
oligarchy embodying a fixed theory of government, and able to
direct public affairs along a straight path, instead of allowing
the country to be pulled in a thousand different directions, which
is what has been happening for the last forty years in our
beautiful France--at once so intelligent and so sottish, so wise
and so foolish; it needs a system, indeed, much more than men.
What are individuals in this great question? If the end is a great
one, if the country may live happy and free from trouble, what do
the masses care for the profits of our stewardship, our fortune,
privileges, and pleasures?

I am now standing firm on my feet. I have at the present moment a
hundred and fifty thousand francs a year in the Three per Cents,
and a reserve of two hundred thousand francs to repair damages.
Even this does not seem to me very much ballast in the pocket of a
man starting left foot foremost to scale the heights of power.

A fortunate accident settled the question of my setting out on
this career, which did not particularly smile on me, for you know
my predilection for the life of the East. After thirty-five years
of slumber, my highly-respected mother woke up to the recollection
that she had a son who might do her honor. Often when a vine-stock
is eradicated, some years after shoots come up to the surface of
the ground; well, my dear boy, my mother had almost torn me up by
the roots from her heart, and I sprouted again in her head. At the
age of fifty-eight, she thinks herself old enough to think no more
of any men but her son. At this juncture she has met in some
hot-water cauldron, at I know not what baths, a delightful old maid
--English, with two hundred and forty thousand francs a year; and,
like a good mother, she has inspired her with an audacious
ambition to become my wife. A maid of six-and-thirty, my word!
Brought up in the strictest puritanical principles, a steady
sitting hen, who maintains that unfaithful wives should be
publicly burnt. ‘Where will you find wood enough?’ I asked her. I
could have sent her to the devil, for two hundred and forty
thousand francs a year are no equivalent for liberty, nor a fair
price for my physical and moral worth and my prospects. But she is
the sole heiress of a gouty old fellow, some London brewer, who
within a calculable time will leave her a fortune equal at least
to what the sweet creature has already. Added to these advantages,
she has a red nose, the eyes of a dead goat, a waist that makes
one fear lest she should break into three pieces if she falls
down, and the coloring of a badly painted doll. But--she is
delightfully economical; but--she will adore her husband, do what
he will; but--she has the English gift; she will manage my house,
my stables, my servants, my estates better than any steward. She
has all the dignity of virtue; she holds herself as erect as a
confidante on the stage of the Francais; nothing will persuade me
that she has not been impaled and the shaft broken off in her
body. Miss Stevens is, however, fair enough to be not too
unpleasing if I must positively marry her. But--and this to me is
truly pathetic--she has the hands of a woman as immaculate as the
sacred ark; they are so red that I have not yet hit on any way to
whiten them that will not be too costly, and I have no idea how to
fine down her fingers, which are like sausages. Yes; she evidently
belongs to the brew-house by her hands, and to the aristocracy by
her money; but she is apt to affect the great lady a little too
much, as rich English women do who want to be mistaken for them,
and she displays her lobster’s claws too freely.

She has, however, as little intelligence as I could wish in a
woman. If there were a stupider one to be found, I would set out
to seek her. This girl, whose name is Dinah, will never criticise
me; she will never contradict me; I shall be her Upper Chamber,
her Lords and Commons. In short, Paul, she is indefeasible
evidence of the English genius; she is a product of English
mechanics brought to their highest pitch of perfection; she was
undoubtedly made at Manchester, between the manufactory of Perry’s
pens and the workshops for steam-engines. It eats, it drinks, it
walks, it may have children, take good care of them, and bring
them up admirably, and it apes a woman so well that you would
believe it real.

When my mother introduced us, she had set up the machine so
cleverly, had so carefully fitted the pegs, and oiled the wheels
so thoroughly, that nothing jarred; then, when she saw I did not
make a very wry face, she set the springs in motion, and the woman
spoke. Finally, my mother uttered the decisive words, “Miss Dinah
Stevens spends no more than thirty thousand francs a year, and has
been traveling for seven years in order to economize.”--So there
is another image, and that one is silver.

Matters are so far advanced that the banns are to be published. We
have got as far as “My dear love.” Miss makes eyes at me that
might floor a porter. The settlements are prepared. My fortune is
not inquired into; Miss Stevens devotes a portion of hers to
creating an entail in landed estate, bearing an income of two
hundred and forty thousand francs, and to the purchase of a house,
likewise entailed. The settlement credited to me is of a million
francs. She has nothing to complain of. I leave her uncle’s money
untouched.

The worthy brewer, who has helped to found the entail, was near
bursting with joy when he heard that his niece was to be a
marquise. He would be capable of doing something handsome for my
eldest boy.

I shall sell out of the funds as soon as they are up to eighty,
and invest in land. Thus, in two years I may look to get six
hundred thousand francs a year out of real estate. So, you see,
Paul, I do not give my friends advice that I am not ready to act
upon.

If you had but listened to me, you would have an English wife,
some Nabob’s daughter, who would leave you the freedom of a
bachelor and the independence necessary for playing the whist of
ambition. I would concede my future wife to you if you were not
married already. But that cannot be helped, and I am not the man
to bid you chew the cud of the past.

All this preamble was needful to explain to you that for the
future my position in life will be such as a man needs if he wants
to play the great game of pitch-and-toss. I cannot do without you,
my friend. Now, then, my dear Paul, instead of setting sail for
India you would do a much wiser thing to navigate with me the
waters of the Seine. Believe me, Paris is still the place where
fortune, abundant fortune, can be won. Potosi is in the rue
Vivienne, the rue de la Paix, the Place Vendome, the rue de
Rivoli. In all other places and countries material works and
labors, marches and counter-marches, and sweatings of the brow are
necessary to the building up of fortune; but in Paris _thought_
suffices. Here, every man even mentally mediocre, can see a mine
of wealth as he puts on his slippers, or picks his teeth after
dinner, in his down-sitting and his up-rising. Find me another
place on the globe where a good round stupid idea brings in more
money, or is sooner understood than it is here.

If I reach the top of the ladder, as I shall, am I the man to
refuse you a helping hand, an influence, a signature? We shall
want, we young roues, a faithful friend on whom to count, if only
to compromise him and make him a scape-goat, or send him to die
like a common soldier to save his general. Government is
impossible without a man of honor at one’s side, in whom to
confide and with whom we can do and say everything.

Here is what I propose. Let the “Belle-Amelie” sail without you;
come back here like a thunderbolt; I’ll arrange a duel for you
with Vandenesse in which you shall have the first shot, and you
can wing him like a pigeon. In France the husband who shoots his
rival becomes at once respectable and respected. No one ever
cavils at him again. Fear, my dear fellow, is a valuable social
element, a means of success for those who lower their eyes before
the gaze of no man living. I who care as little to live as to
drink a glass of milk, and who have never felt the emotion of
fear, I have remarked the strange effects produced by that
sentiment upon our modern manners. Some men tremble to lose the
enjoyments to which they are attached, others dread to leave a
woman. The old adventurous habits of other days when life was
flung away like a garment exist no longer. The bravery of a great
many men is nothing more than a clever calculation on the fear of
their adversary. The Poles are the only men in Europe who fight
for the pleasure of fighting; they cultivate the art for the art’s
sake, and not for speculation.

Now hear me: kill Vandenesse, and your wife trembles, your
mother-in-law trembles, the public trembles, and you recover your
position, you prove your grand passion for your wife, you subdue
society, you subdue your wife, you become a hero. Such is France.
As for your embarrassments, I hold a hundred thousand francs for
you; you can pay your principal debts, and sell what property you
have left with a power of redemption, for you will soon obtain an
office which will enable you by degrees to pay off your creditors.
Then, as for your wife, once enlightened as to her character you
can rule her. When you loved her you had no power to manage her;
not loving her, you will have an unconquerable force. I will
undertake, myself, to make your mother-in-law as supple as a
glove; for you must recover the use of the hundred and fifty
thousand francs a year those two women have squeezed out of you.

Therefore, I say, renounce this expatriation which seems to me no
better than a pan of charcoal or a pistol to your head. To go away
is to justify all calumnies. The gambler who leaves the table to
get his money loses it when he returns; we must have our gold in
our pockets. Let us now, you and I, be two gamblers on the green
baize of politics; between us loans are in order. Therefore take
post-horses, come back instantly, and renew the game. You’ll win
it with Henri de Marsay for your partner, for Henri de Marsay
knows how to will, and how to strike.

See how we stand politically. My father is in the British
ministry; we shall have close relations with Spain through the
Evangelistas, for, as soon as your mother-in-law and I have
measured claws she will find there is nothing to gain by fighting
the devil. Montriveau is our lieutenant-general; he will certainly
be minister of war before long, and his eloquence will give him
great ascendancy in the Chamber. Ronquerolles will be minister of
State and privy-councillor; Martial de la Roche-Hugon is minister
to Germany and peer of France; Serisy leads the Council of State,
to which he is indispensable; Granville holds the magistracy, to
which his sons belong; the Grandlieus stand well at court; Ferraud
is the soul of the Gondreville coterie,--low intriguers who are
always on the surface of things, I’m sure I don’t know why. Thus
supported, what have we to fear? The money question is a mere
nothing when this great wheel of fortune rolls for us. What is a
woman?--you are not a schoolboy. What is life, my dear fellow, if
you let a woman be the whole of it? A boat you can’t command,
without a rudder, but not without a magnet, and tossed by every
wind that blows. Pah!

The great secret of social alchemy, my dear Paul, is to get the
most we can out of each age of life through which we pass; to have
and to hold the buds of our spring, the flowers of our summer, the
fruits of our autumn. We amused ourselves once, a few good fellows
and I, for a dozen or more years, like mousquetaires, black, red,
and gray; we denied ourselves nothing, not even an occasional
filibustering here and there. Now we are going to shake down the
plums which age and experience have ripened. Be one of us; you
shall have your share in the _pudding_ we are going to cook.

Come; you will find a friend all yours in the skin of

H. de Marsay.

As Paul de Manerville ended the reading of this letter, which fell like the blows of a pickaxe on the edifice of his hopes, his illusions, and his love, the vessel which bore him from France was beyond the Azores. In the midst of this utter devastation a cold and impotent anger laid hold of him.

“What had I done to them?” he said to himself.

That is the question of fools, of feeble beings, who, seeing nothing, can nothing foresee. Then he cried aloud: “Henri! Henri!” to his loyal friend. Many a man would have gone mad; Paul went to bed and slept that heavy sleep which follows immense disasters,--the sleep that seized Napoleon after Waterloo.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Casa-Real, Duc de
The Quest of the Absolute

Claes, Josephine de Temninck, Madame
The Quest of the Absolute

Magus, Elie
The Vendetta
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Pierre Grassou
Cousin Pons

Manerville, Paul Francois-Joseph, Comte de
The Thirteen
The Ball at Sceaux
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Manerville, Comtesse Paul de
The Lily of the Valley
A Daughter of Eve

Marsay, Henri de
The Thirteen
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve

Maulincour, Baronne de
The Thirteen

Stevens, Dinah
Cousin Pons

Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
The Lily of the Valley
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Cesar Birotteau
Letters of Two Brides
A Start in Life
The Secrets of a Princess
Another Study of Woman
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Marriage Contract, by Honore de Balzac