Read Online The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac - Free Book Online Page B

have been hard-pressed for a chance to break it off with me. It’s time we went our separate ways, for the duke is a man of severe virtue. If you want my advice, you shall have to become a proper lady. The duke is vain, he’ll be proud of his wife.’ ‘Ah!’ she said to me, tears flowing. ‘Henri, if only you’d said something! Yes, if you’d wanted it’—it was all my fault, do you see?—‘we could have run away to some quiet spot and lived out our lives, married and happy, for all the world to see.’ ‘Ah well, it’s too late for that now,’ I answered, kissing her hands and striking an afflicted pose. ‘My God! But I can call it all off,’ she said. ‘No, you’ve come too far with the duke. I must leave on a journey to seal our separation. Otherwise we would both have to fear the force of our love.’ ‘Do you believe the duke suspects, Henri?’ I was still Henri, but no longer tu . ‘I think not,’ I answered, adopting the manner and tone of a friend , ‘but you must be perfectly devout, you must recommit yourself to God, for the duke is looking for signs, he’s wavering, and you must make up his mind for him.’ She rose, paced two or three times around the boudoir in real or feigned distress; then she found a pose and a gaze to suit this new state of affairs, for she stopped before me, held out her hand, and in a voice thick with emotion, said, ‘Well, Henri, you’re a loyal, noble, and charming man: I shall never forget you.’ An admirable bit of strategy! The position she wanted to occupy with respect to me required a change on her part, and she was ravishing in that new guise. I adopted the posture, the expression, and the gaze of a man so deeply tormented that I saw a weakening in her newfound rectitude; she looked at me, took me by the hand, led me to the divan, almost threw me down, but gently, and after a moment of silence said, ‘I am profoundly sad, my child. You love me?’ ‘Oh yes!’ ‘But what will become of you?’”
    Here all the women exchanged a glance.
    “While the memory of her betrayal pained me for some time to come, I still laugh today at the absolute certainty and quiet satisfaction with which she foresaw, if not my imminent demise, then at least a life of undying sorrow,” de Marsay went on. “Oh! don’t laugh yet,” he told his audience, “the best is yet to come. After a pause, I gave her a long, reverent look and said, ‘Yes, I have asked myself that very question.’ ‘Well, what will you do?’ ‘So I wondered, the day after my cold.’ ‘And?’ she said, visibly anxious. ‘And I made my arrangements with that little creature I was supposedly courting.’ Charlotte leapt up from the divan like a startled doe, trembled like a leaf, shot me one of those looks in which women forget all their dignity, all their discretion, their finesse, even their beauty, the gleaming stare of a cornered viper, and answered, ‘And to think that I loved this man! That I struggled! To think that I . . . ’ She followed that third thought, which I will allow you to guess for yourselves, with the most majestically ringing silence I have ever heard. ‘My God!’ she cried. ‘Poor women! We can never be loved. In the purest sentiments, you men see nothing serious. But, you realize, even when you deceive us, you remain our dupes.’ ‘I can see that all too clearly,’ I said, with a chastened air. ‘Your rage is too neatly phrased for your heart to be suffering in earnest.’ This modest epigram redoubled her fury; she found tears of spite to shed. ‘You’re tarnishing all existence in my eyes, the whole world,’ she said, ‘you’re shattering my illusions, you’re poisoning my heart.’ Everything I had a right to say to her, she was saying to me with a guileless effrontery, an innocent audacity that would certainly have left any other man wholly disarmed. ‘What will become of us, we poor women, in this society Louis XVIII’s new Charter is creating!’