Alkaest
AlkaestCHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVICopyright
Alkaest
Honore De Balzac
CHAPTER I
There is a house at Douai in the rue de Paris, whose aspect,
interior arrangements, and details have preserved, to a greater
degree than those of other domiciles, the characteristics of the
old Flemish buildings, so naively adapted to the patriarchal
manners and customs of that excellent land. Before describing this
house it may be well, in the interest of other writers, to explain
the necessity for such didactic preliminaries,—since they have
roused a protest from certain ignorant and voracious readers who
want emotions without undergoing the generating process, the flower
without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art supposed to
have higher powers than Nature?
The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so
closely allied to architecture that the majority of observers can
reconstruct nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of
life, from the remains of public monuments or the relics of a home.
Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to
organized nature. A mosaic tells the tale of a society, as the
skeleton of an ichthyosaurus opens up a creative epoch. All things
are linked together, and all are therefore deducible. Causes
suggest effects, effects lead back to causes. Science resuscitates
even the warts of the past ages.
Hence the keen interest inspired by an architectural description,
provided the imagination of the writer does not distort essential
facts. The mind is enabled by rigid deduction to link it with the
past; and to man, the past is singularly like the future; tell him
what has been, and you seldom fail to show him what will be. It is
rare indeed that the picture of a locality where lives are lived
does not recall to some their dawning hopes, to others their wasted
faith. The comparison between a present which disappoints man's
secret wishes and a future which may realize them, is an
inexhaustible source of sadness or of placid content.
Thus, it is almost impossible not to feel a certain tender
sensibility over a picture of Flemish life, if the accessories are
clearly given. Why so? Perhaps, among other forms of existence, it
offers the best conclusion to man's uncertainties. It has its
social festivities, its family ties, and the easy affluence which
proves the stability of its comfortable well-being; it does not
lack repose amounting almost to beatitude; but, above all, it
expresses the calm monotony of a frankly sensuous happiness, where
enjoyment stifles desire by anticipating it. Whatever value a
passionate soul may attach to the tumultuous life of feeling, it
never sees without emotion the symbols of this Flemish nature,
where the throbbings of the heart are so well regulated that
superficial minds deny the heart's existence. The crowd prefers the
abnormal force which overflows to that which moves with steady
persistence. The world has neither time nor patience to realize the
immense power concealed beneath an appearance of uniformity.
Therefore, to impress this multitude carried away on the current of
existence, passion, like a great artist, is compelled to go beyond
the mark, to exaggerate, as did Michael Angelo, Bianca Capello,
Mademoiselle de la Valliere, Beethoven, and Paganini. Far-seeing
minds alone disapprove such excess, and respect only the energy
represented by a finished execution whose perfect quiet charms
superior men. The life of this essentially thrifty people amply
fulfils the conditions of happiness which the masses desire as the
lot of the average citizen.
A refined materialism is stamped on all the habits of Flemish life.
English comfort is harsh in tone and arid in color; whereas the
old-fashioned Flemish interiors rejoice the eye with their mellow
tints, and the feelings with their genuine heartiness. There, work
implies no weariness, and the pipe is a happy adaptation of
Neapolitan "far-niente." Thence comes the peaceful sentiment in Art
(its most essential condition), patience, and the element which
renders its creations durable, namely, conscience. Indeed, the
Flemish character lies in the two words, patience and conscience;
words which seem at first to exclude the richness of poetic light
and shade, and to make the manners and customs of the country as
flat as its vast plains, as cold as its foggy skies. And yet it is
not so. Civilization has brought her power to bear, and has
modified all things, even the effects of climate. If we observe
attentively the productions of various parts of the globe, we are
surprised to find that the prevailing tints from the temperate
zones are gray or fawn, while the more brilliant colors belong to
the products of the hotter climates. The manners and customs of a
country must naturally conform to this law of nature.
Flanders, which in former times was essentially dun-colored and
monotonous in tint, learned the means of irradiating its smoky
atmosphere through its political vicissitudes, which brought it
under the successive dominion of Burgundy, Spain, and France, and
threw it into fraternal relations with Germany and Holland. From
Spain it acquired the luxury of scarlet dyes and shimmering satins,
tapestries of vigorous design, plumes, mandolins, and courtly
bearing. In exchange for its linen and its laces, it brought from
Venice that fairy glass-ware in which wine sparkles and seems the
mellower. From Austria it learned the ponderous diplomacy which, to
use a popular saying, takes three steps backward to one forward;
while its trade with India poured into it the grotesque designs of
China and the marvels of Japan.
And yet, in spite of its patience in gathering such treasures, its
tenacity in parting with no possession once gained, its endurance
of all things, Flanders was considered nothing more than the
general storehouse of Europe, until the day when the discovery of
tobacco brought into one smoky outline the scattered features of
its national physiognomy. Thenceforth, and notwithstanding the
parcelling out of their territory, the Flemings became a people
homogeneous through their pipes and beer.[*]
[*] Flanders was parcelled into three divisions; of which
Eastern
Flanders, capital Ghent, and Western Flanders, capital Bruges,
are
two provinces of Belgium. French Flanders, capital Lille, is
the
Departement du Nord of France. Douai, about twenty miles from
Lille, is the chief town of the arrondissement du Nord.
After assimilating, by constant sober regulation of conduct, the
products and the ideas of its masters and its neighbors, this
country of Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked
out for itself an original existence, with characteristic manners
and customs which bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped
off its ideality and produced form alone. We may seek in vain for
plastic grace, the swing of comedy, dramatic action, musical
genius, or the bold flight of ode and epic. On the other hand, the
people are fertile in discoveries, and trained to scientific
discussions which demand time and the midnight oil. All things bear
the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment. There men look exclusively to
the thing that is: their thoughts are so scrupulously bent on
supplying the wants of this life that they have never risen, in any
direction, above the level of this present earth. The sole idea
they have ever conceived of the future is that of a thrifty,
prosaic statecraft: their revolutionary vigor came from a domestic
desire to live as they liked, with their elbows on the table, and
to take their ease under the projecting roofs of their own
porches.
The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence
which comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere,
that craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus
the compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education
grafted on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body
of men in the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is
half-done,—neither houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor
revolutions; and they hold a monopoly of all that they undertake.
The manufacture of linen, and that of lace, a work of patient
agriculture and still more patient industry, are hereditary like
their family fortunes. If we were asked to show in human form the
purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no better than
point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was proved
again and again, of dying in a commonplace way, and without the
incitements of glory, for the welfare of his Free-town.
Yet we shall find a tender and poetic side to this patriarchal
life, which will come naturally to the surface in the description
of an ancient house which, at the period when this history begins,
was one of the last in Douai to preserve the old-time
characteristics of Flemish life.
Of all the towns in the Departement du Nord, Douai is, alas, the
most modernized: there the innovating spirit has made the greatest
strides, and the love of social progress is the most diffused.
There the old buildings are daily disappearing, and the manners and
customs of a venerable past are being rapidly obliterated. Parisian
ideas and fashions and modes of life now rule the day, and soon
nothing will be left of that ancient Flemish life but the warmth of
its hospitality, its traditional Spanish courtesy, and the wealth
and cleanliness of Holland. Mansions of white stone are replacing
the old brick buildings, and the cosy comfort of Batavian interiors
is fast yielding before the capricious elegance of Parisian
novelties.
The house in which the events of this history occurred stands at
about the middle of the rue de Paris, and has been known at Douai
for more than two centuries as the House of Claes. The Van Claes
were formerly one of the great families of craftsmen to whom, in
various lines of production, the Netherlands owed a commercial
supremacy which it has never lost. For a long period of time the
Claes lived at Ghent, and were, from generation to generation, the
syndics of the powerful Guild of Weavers. When the great city
revolted under Charles V., who tried to suppress its privileges,
the head of the Claes family was so deeply compromised in the
rebellion that, foreseeing a catastrophe and bound to share the
fate of his associates, he secretly sent wife, children, and
property to France before the Emperor invested the town. The
syndic's forebodings were justified. Together with other burghers
who were excluded from the capitulation, he was hanged as a rebel,
though he was, in reality, the defender of the liberties of
Ghent.
The death of Claes and his associates bore fruit. Their needless
execution cost the King of Spain the greater part of his
possessions in the Netherlands. Of all the seed sown in the earth,
the blood of martyrs gives the quickest harvest. When Philip the
Second, who punished revolt through two generations, stretched his
iron sceptre over Douai, the Claes preserved their great wealth by
allying themselves in marriage with the very noble family of
Molina, whose elder branch, then poor, thus became rich enough to
buy the county of Nourho which they had long held titularly in the
kingdom of Leon.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after vicissitudes
which are of no interest to our present purpose, the family of
Claes was represented at Douai in the person of Monsieur Balthazar
Claes-Molina, Comte de Nourho, who preferred to be called simply
Balthazar Claes. Of the immense fortune amassed by his ancestors,
who had kept in motion over a thousand looms, there remained to him
some fifteen thousand francs a year from landed property in the
arrondissement of Douai, and the house in the rue de Paris, whose
furniture in itself was a fortune. As to the family possessions in
Leon, they had been in litigation between the Molinas of Douai and
the branch of the family which remained in Spain. The Molinas of
Leon won the domain and assumed the title of Comtes de Nourho,
though the Claes alone had a legal right to it. But the pride of a
Belgian burgher was superior to the haughty arrogance of Castile:
after the civil rights were instituted, Balthazar Claes cast aside
the ragged robes of his Spanish nobility for his more illustrious
descent from the Ghent martyr.
The patriotic sentiment was so strongly developed in the families
exiled under Charles V. that, to the very close of the eighteenth
century, the Claes remained faithful to the manners and customs and
traditions of their ancestors. They married into none but the
purest burgher families, and required a certain number of aldermen
and burgomasters in the pedigree of every bride-elect before
admitting her to the family. They sought their wives in Bruges or
Ghent, in Liege or in Holland; so that the time-honored domestic
customs might be perpetuated around their hearthstones. This social
group became more and more restricted, until, at the close of the
last century, it mustered only some seven or eight families of the
parliamentary nobility, whose manners and flowing robes of office
and magisterial gravity (partly Spanish) harmonized well with the
habits of their life.
The inhabitants of Douai held the family in a religious esteem that
was well-nigh superstition. The sturdy honesty, the untainted
loyalty of the Claes, their unfailing decorum of manners and
conduct, made them the objects of a reverence which found
expression in the name,—the House of Claes. The whole spirit of
ancient Flanders breathed in that mansion, which afforded to the
lovers of burgher antiquities a type of the modest houses which the
wealthy craftsmen of the Middle Ages constructed for their
homes.
The chief ornament of the facade was an oaken door, in two
sections, studded with nails driven in the pattern of a quineunx,
in the centre of which the Claes pride had carved a pair of
shuttles. The recess of the doorway, which was built of freestone,
was topped by a pointed arch bearing a little shrine surmounted by
a cross, in which was a statuette of Sainte-Genevieve plying her
distaff. Though time had left its mark upon the delicate
workmanship of portal and shrine, the extreme care taken of it by
the servants of the house allowed the passers-by to note all its
details.
The casing of the door, formed by fluted pilasters, was dark gray
in color, and so highly polished that it shone as if varnished. On
either side of the doorway, on the ground-floor, were two windows,
which resembled all the other windows of the house. The casing of
white stone ended below the sill in a richly carved shell, and rose
above the window in an arch, supported at its apex by the
head-piece of a cross, which divided the glass sashes in four
unequal parts; for the transversal bar, placed at the height of
that in a Latin cross, made the lower sashes of the window nearly
double the height of the upper, the latter rounding at the sides
into the arch. The coping of the arch was ornamented with three
rows of brick, placed one above the other, the bricks alternately
projecting or retreating to the depth of an inch, giving the effect
of a Greek moulding. The glass panes, which were small and
diamond-shaped, were set in very slender leading, painted red. The
walls of the house, of brick jointed with white mortar, were braced
at regular distances, and at the angles of the house, by stone
courses.
The first floor was pierced by five windows, the second by three,
while the attic had only one large circular opening in five
divisions, surrounded by a freestone moulding and placed in the
centre of the triangular pediment defined by the gable-roof, like
the rose-window of a cathedral. At the peak was a vane in the shape
of a weaver's shuttle threaded with flax. Both sides of the large
triangular pediment which formed the wall of the gable were
dentelled squarely into something like steps, as low down as the
string-course of the upper floor, where the rain from the roof fell
to right and left of the house through the jaws of a fantastic
gargoyle. A freestone foundation projected like a step at the base
of the house; and on either side of the entrance, between the two
windows, was a trap-door, clamped by heavy iron bands, through
which the cellars were entered,—a last vestige of ancient
usages.
From the time the house was built, this facade had been carefully
cleaned twice a year. If a little mortar fell from between the
bricks, the crack was instantly filled up. The sashes, the sills,
the copings, were dusted oftener than the most precious sculptures
in the Louvre. The front of the house bore no signs of decay;
notwithstanding the deepened color which age had given to the
bricks, it was as well preserved as a choice old picture, or some
rare book cherished by an amateur, which would be ever new were it
not for the blistering of our climate and the effect of gases,
whose pernicious breath threatens our own health.
The cloudy skies and humid atmosphere of Flanders, and the shadows
produced by the narrowness of the street, sometimes diminished the
brilliancy which the old house derived from its cleanliness;
moreover, the very care bestowed upon it made it rather sad and
chilling to the eye. A poet might have wished some leafage about
the shrine, a little moss in the crevices of the freestone, a break
in the even courses of the brick; he would have longed for a
swallow to build her nest in the red coping that roofed the arches
of the windows. The precise and immaculate air of this facade, a
little worn by perpetual rubbing, gave the house a tone of severe
propriety and estimable decency which would have driven a
romanticist out of the neighborhood, had he happened to take
lodgings over the way.
When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which
hung from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the
servant-woman, coming from within, had admitted him through the
side of the double-door in which was a small grated loop-hole, that
half of the door escaped from her hand and swung back by its own
weight with a solemn, ponderous sound that echoed along the roof of
a wide paved archway and through the depths of the house, as though
the door had been of iron. This archway, painted to resemble
marble, always clean and daily sprinkled with fresh sand, led into
a large court-yard paved with smooth square stones of a greenish
color. On the left were the linen-rooms, kitchens, and servants'
hall; to the right, the wood-house, coal-house, and offices, whose
doors, walls, and windows were decorated with designs kept
exquisitely clean. The daylight, threading its way between four red
walls chequered with white lines, caught rosy tints and reflections
which gave a mysterious grace and fantastic appearance to faces,
and even to trifling details.
A second house, exactly like the building on the street, and called
in Flanders the "back-quarter," stood at the farther end of the
court-yard, and was used exclusively as the family dwelling. The
first room on the ground-floor was a parlor, lighted by two windows
on the court-yard, and two more looking out upon a garden which was
of the same size as the house. Two glass doors, placed exactly
opposite to each other, led at one end of the room to the garden,
at the other to the court-yard, and were in line with the archway
and the street door; so that a visitor entering the latter could
see through to the greenery which draped the lower end of the
garden. The front building, which was reserved for receptions and
the lodging-rooms of guests, held many objects of art and
accumulated wealth, but none of them equalled in the eyes of a
Claes, nor indeed in the judgment of a connoisseur, the treasures
contained in the parlor, where for over two centuries the family
life had glided on.
The Claes who died for the liberties of Ghent, and who might in
these days be thought a mere ordinary craftsman if the historian
omitted to say that he possessed over forty thousand silver marks,
obtained by the manufacture of sail-cloth for the all-powerful
Venetian navy,—this Claes had a friend in the famous sculptor in
wood, Van Huysum of Bruges. The artist had dipped many a time into
the purse of the rich craftsman. Some time before the rebellion of
the men of Ghent, Van Huysum, grown rich himself, had secretly
carved for his friend a wall-decoration in ebony, representing the
chief scenes in the life of Van Artevelde,—that brewer of Ghent
who, for a brief hour, was King of Flanders. This wall-covering, of
which there were no less than sixty panels, contained about
fourteen hundred principal figures, and was held to be Van Huysum's
masterpiece. The officer appointed to guard the burghers whom
Charles V. determined to hang when he re-entered his native town,
proposed, it is said, to Van Claes to let him escape if he would
give him Van Huysum's great work; but the weaver had already
despatched it to Douai.
The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving,
which Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr's memory, came to
Douai to frame in wood painted in lapis-lazuli with threads of
gold, is therefore the most complete work of this master, whose
least carvings now sell for nearly their weight in gold. Hanging
over the fire-place, Van Claes the martyr, painted by Titian in his
robes as president of the Court of Parchons, still seemed the head
of the family, who venerated him as their greatest man. The
chimney-piece, originally in stone with a very high mantle-shelf,
had been made over in marble during the last century; on it now
stood an old clock and two candlesticks with five twisted branches,
in bad taste, but of solid silver. The four windows were draped by
wide curtains of red damask with a flowered black design, lined
with white silk; the furniture, covered with the same material, had
been renovated in the time of Louis XIV. The floor, evidently
modern, was laid in large squares of white wood bordered with
strips of oak. The ceiling, formed of many oval panels, in each of
which Van Huysum had carved a grotesque mask, had been respected
and allowed to keep the brown tones of the native Dutch oak.
In the four corners of this parlor were truncated columns,
supporting candelabra exactly like those on the mantle-shelf; and a
round table stood in the middle of the room. Along the walls
card-tables were symmetrically placed. On two gilded consoles with
marble slabs there stood, at the period when this history begins,
two glass globes filled with water, in which, above a bed of sand
and shells, red and gold and silver fish were swimming about. The
room was both brilliant and sombre. The ceiling necessarily
absorbed the light and reflected none. Although on the garden side
all was bright and glowing, and the sunshine danced upon the ebony
carvings, the windows on the court-yard admitted so little light
that the gold threads in the lapis-lazuli scarcely glittered on the
opposite wall. This parlor, which could be gorgeous on a fine day,
was usually, under the Flemish skies, filled with soft shadows and
melancholy russet tones, like those shed by the sun on the
tree-tops of the forests in autumn.
It is unnecessary to continue this description of the House of
Claes, in other parts of which many scenes of this history will
occur: at present, it is enough to make known its general
arrangement.
CHAPTER II
Towards the end of August, 1812, on a Sunday evening after vespers,
a woman was sitting in a deep armchair placed before one of the
windows looking out upon the garden. The sun's rays fell obliquely
upon the house and athwart the parlor, breaking into fantastic
lights on the carved panellings of the wall, and wrapping the woman
in a crimson halo projected through the damask curtains which
draped the window. Even an ordinary painter, had he sketched this
woman at this particular moment, would assuredly have produced a
striking picture of a head that was full of pain and melancholy.
The attitude of the body, and that of the feet stretched out before
her, showed the prostration of one who loses consciousness of
physical being in the concentration of powers absorbed in a fixed
idea: she was following its gleams in the far future, just as
sometimes on the shores of the sea, we gaze at a ray of sunlight
which pierces the clouds and draws a luminous line to the
horizon.
The hands of this woman hung nerveless outside the arms of her
chair, and her head, as if too heavy to hold up, lay back upon its
cushions. A dress of white cambric, very full and flowing, hindered
any judgment as to the proportions of her figure, and the bust was
concealed by the folds of a scarf crossed on the bosom and
negligently knotted. If the light had not thrown into relief her
face, which she seemed to show in preference to the rest of her
person, it would still have been impossible to escape riveting the
attention exclusively upon it. Its expression of stupefaction,
which was cold and rigid despite hot tears that were rolling from
her eyes, would have struck the most thoughtless mind. Nothing is
more terrible to behold than excessive grief that is rarely allowed
to break forth, of which traces were left on this woman's face like
lava congealed about a crater. She might have been a dying mother
compelled to leave her children in abysmal depths of wretchedness,
unable to bequeath them to any human protector.
The countenance of this lady, then about forty years of age and not
nearly so far from handsome as she had been in her youth, bore none
of the characteristics of a Flemish woman. Her thick black hair
fell in heavy curls upon her shoulders and about her cheeks. The
forehead, very prominent, and narrow at the temples, was yellow in
tint, but beneath it sparkled two black eyes that were capable of
emitting flames. Her face, altogether Spanish, dark skinned, with
little color and pitted by the small-pox, attracted the eye by the
beauty of its oval, whose outline, though slightly impaired by
time, preserved a finished elegance and dignity, and regained at
times its full perfection when some effort of the soul restored its
pristine purity. The most noticeable feature in this strong face
was the nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, and so sharply
curved at the middle as to give the idea of an interior
malformation; yet there was an air of indescribable delicacy about
it, and the partition between the nostrils was so thin that a rosy
light shone through it. Though the lips, which were large and
curved, betrayed the pride of noble birth, their expression was one
of kindliness and natural courtesy.
The beauty of this vigorous yet feminine face might indeed be
questioned, but the face itself commanded attention. Short,
deformed, and lame, this woman remained all the longer unmarried
because the world obstinately refused to credit her with gifts of
mind. Yet there were men who were deeply stirred by the passionate
ardor of that face and its tokens of ineffable tenderness, and who
remained under a charm that was seemingly irreconcilable with such
personal defects.
She was very like her grandfather, the Duke of Casa-Real, a grandee
of Spain. At this moment, when we first see her, the charm which in
earlier days despotically grasped the soul of poets and lovers of
poesy now emanated from that head with greater vigor than at any
former period of her life, spending itself, as it were, upon the
void, and expressing a nature of all-powerful fascination over men,
though it was at the same time powerless over destiny.
When her eyes turned from the glass globes, where they were gazing
at the fish they saw not, she raised them with a despairing action,
as if to invoke the skies. Her sufferings seemed of a kind that are
told to God alone. The silence was unbroken save for the chirp of
crickets and the shrill whirr of a few locusts, coming from the
little garden then hotter than an oven, and the dull sound of
silver and plates, and the moving of chairs in the adjoining room,
where a servant was preparing to serve the dinner.
At this moment, the distressed woman roused herself from her
abstraction and listened attentively; she took her handkerchief,
wiped away her tears, attempted to smile, and so resolutely effaced
the expression of pain that was stamped on every feature that she
presently seemed in the state of happy indifference which comes
with a life exempt from care. Whether it were that the habit of
living in this house to which infirmities confined her enabled her
to perceive certain natural effects that are imperceptible to the
senses of others, but which persons under the influence of
excessive feeling are keen to discover, or whether Nature, in
compensation for her physical defects, had given her more delicate
sensations than better organized beings,—it is certain that this
woman had heard the steps of a man in a gallery built above the
kitchens and the servants' hall, by which the front house
communicated with the "back-quarter." The steps grew more distinct.
Soon, without possessing the power of this ardent creature to
abolish space and meet her other self, even a stranger would have
heard the foot-fall of a man upon the staircase which led down from
the gallery to the parlor.
The sound of that step would have startled the most heedless being
into thought; it was impossible to hear it coolly. A precipitate,
headlong step produces fear. When a man springs forward and cries,
"Fire!" his feet speak as loudly as his voice. If this be so, then
a contrary gait ought not to cause less powerful emotion. The slow
approach, the dragging step of the coming man might have irritated
an unreflecting spectator; but an observer, or a nervous person,
would undoubtedly have felt something akin to terror at the
measured tread of feet that seemed devoid of life, and under which
the stairs creaked loudly, as though two iron weights were striking
them alternately. The mind recognized at once either the heavy,
undecided step of an old man or the majestic tread of a great
thinker bearing the worlds with him.
When the man had reached the lowest stair, and had planted both
feet upon the tiled floor with a hesitating, uncertain movement, he
stood still for a moment on the wide landing which led on one side
to the servants' hall, and on the other to the parlor through a
door concealed in the panelling of that room,—as was another door,
leading from the parlor to the dining-room. At this moment a slight
shudder, like the sensation caused by an electric spark, shook the
woman seated in the armchair; then a soft smile brightened her
lips, and her face, moved by the expectation of a pleasure, shone
like that of an Italian Madonna. She suddenly gained strength to
drive her terrors back into the depths of her heart. Then she
turned her face to the panel of the wall which she knew was about
to open, and which in fact was now pushed in with such brusque
violence that the poor woman herself seemed jarred by the
shock.
Balthazar Claes suddenly appeared, made a few steps forward, did
not look at the woman, or if he looked at her did not see her, and
stood erect in the middle of the parlor, leaning his half-bowed
head on his right hand. A sharp pang to which the woman could not
accustom herself, although it was daily renewed, wrung her heart,
dispelled her smile, contracted the sallow forehead between the
eyebrows, indenting that line which the frequent expression of
excessive feeling scores so deeply; her eyes filled with tears, but
she wiped them quickly as she looked at Balthazar.
It was impossible not to be deeply impressed by this head of the
family of Claes. When young, he must have resembled the noble
family martyr who had threatened to be another Artevelde to Charles
V.; but as he stood there at this moment, he seemed over sixty
years of age, though he was only fifty; and this premature old age
had destroyed the honorable likeness. His tall figure was slightly
bent,—either because his labors, whatever they were, obliged him to
stoop, or that the spinal column was curved by the weight of his
head. He had a broad chest and square shoulders, but the lower
parts of his body were lank and wasted, though nervous; and this
discrepancy in a physical organization evidently once perfect
puzzled the mind which endeavored to explain this anomalous figure
by some possible singularities of the man's life.
His thick blond hair, ill cared-for, fell over his shoulders in the
Dutch fashion, and its very disorder was in keeping with the
general eccentricity of his person. His broad brow showed certain
protuberances which Gall identifies with poetic genius. His clear
and full blue eyes had the brusque vivacity which may be noticed in
searchers for occult causes. The nose, probably perfect in early
life, was now elongated, and the nostrils seemed to have gradually
opened wider from an involuntary tension of the olfactory muscles.
The cheek-bones were very prominent, which made the cheeks
themselves, already withered, seem more sunken; his mouth, full of
sweetness, was squeezed in between the nose and a short chin, which
projected sharply. The shape of the face, however, was long rather
than oval, and the scientific doctrine which sees in every human
face a likeness to an animal would have found its confirmation in
that of Balthazar Claes, which bore a strong resemblance to a
horse's head. The skin clung closely to the bones, as though some
inward fire were incessantly drying its juices. Sometimes, when he
gazed into space, as if to see the realization of his hopes, it
almost seemed as though the flames that devoured his soul were
issuing from his nostrils.
The inspired feelings that animate great men shone forth on the
pale face furrowed with wrinkles, on the brow haggard with care
like that of an old monarch, but above all they gleamed in the
sparkling eye, whose fires were fed by chastity imposed by the
tyranny of ideas and by the inward consecration of a great
intellect. The cavernous eyes seemed to have sunk in their orbits
through midnight vigils and the terrible reaction of hopes
destroyed, yet ceaselessly reborn. The zealous fanaticism inspired
by an art or a science was evident in this man; it betrayed itself
in the strange, persistent abstraction of his mind expressed by his
dress and bearing, which were in keeping with the anomalous
peculiarities of his person.
His large, hairy hands were dirty, and the nails, which were very
long, had deep black lines at their extremities. His shoes were not
cleaned and the shoe-strings were missing. Of all that Flemish
household, the master alone took the strange liberty of being
slovenly. His black cloth trousers were covered with stains, his
waistcoat was unbuttoned, his cravat awry, his greenish coat ripped
at the seams,—completing an array of signs, great and small, which
in any other man would have betokened a poverty begotten of vice,
but which in Balthazar Claes was the negligence of genius.
Vice and Genius too often produce the same effects; and this
misleads the common mind. What is genius but a long excess which
squanders time and wealth and physical powers, and leads more
rapidly to a hospital than the worst of passions? Men even seem to
have more respect for vices than for genius, since to the latter
they refuse credit. The profits accruing from the hidden labors of
the brain are so remote that the social world fears to square
accounts with the man of learning in his lifetime, preferring to
get rid of its obligations by not forgiving his misfortunes or his
poverty.
If, in spite of this inveterate forgetfulness of the present,
Balthazar Claes had abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some
sweet and companionable meaning had revisited that thoughtful
countenance, if the fixed eyes had lost their rigid strain and
shone with feeling, if he had ever looked humanly about him and
returned to the real life of common things, it would indeed have
been difficult not to do involuntary homage to the winning beauty
of his face and the gracious soul that would then have shone from
it. As it was, all who looked at him regretted that the man
belonged no more to the world at large, and said to one another:
"He must have been very handsome in his youth." A vulgar error!
Never was Balthazar Claes's appearance more poetic than at this
moment. Lavater, had he seen him, would fain have studied that head
so full of patience, of Flemish loyalty, and pure morality,—where
all was broad and noble, and passion seemed calm because it was
strong.
The conduct of this man could not be otherwise than pure; his word
was sacred, his friendships seemed undeviating, his
self-devotedness complete: and yet the will to employ those
qualities in patriotic service, for the world or for the family,
was directed, fatally, elsewhere. This citizen, bound to guard the
welfare of a household, to manage property, to guide his children
towards a noble future, was living outside the line of his duty and
his affections, in communion with an attendant spirit. A priest
might have thought him inspired by the word of God; an artist would
have hailed him as a great master; an enthusiast would have taken
him for a seer of the Swedenborgian faith.
At the present moment, the dilapidated, uncouth, and ruined clothes
that he wore contrasted strangely with the graceful elegance of the
woman who was sadly admiring him. Deformed persons who have
intellect, or nobility of soul, show an exquisite taste in their
apparel. Either they dress simply, convinced that their charm is
wholly moral, or they make others forget their imperfections by an
elegance of detail which diverts the eye and occupies the mind. Not
only did this woman possess a noble soul, but she loved Balthazar
Claes with that instinct of the woman which gives a foretaste of
the communion of angels. Brought up in one of the most illustrious
families of Belgium, she would have learned good taste had she not
possessed it; and now, taught by the desire of constantly pleasing
the man she loved, she knew how to clothe herself admirably, and
without producing incongruity between her elegance and the defects
of her conformation. The bust, however, was defective in the
shoulders only, one of which was noticeably much larger than the
other.
She looked out of the window into the court-yard, then towards the
garden, as if to make sure she was alone with Balthazar, and
presently said, in a gentle voice and with a look full of a Flemish
woman's submissiveness,—for between these two love had long since
driven out the pride of her Spanish nature:—
"Balthazar, are you so very busy? this is the thirty-third Sunday
since you have been to mass or vespers."
Claes did not answer; his wife bowed her head, clasped her hands,
and waited: she knew that his silence meant neither contempt nor
indifference, only a tyrannous preoccupation. Balthazar was one of
those beings who preserve deep in their souls and after long years
all their youthful delicacy of feeling; he would have thought it
criminal to wound by so much as a word a woman weighed down by the
sense of physical disfigurement. No man knew better than he that a
look, a word, suffices to blot out years of happiness, and is the
more cruel because it contrasts with the unfailing tenderness of
the past: our nature leads us to suffer more from one discord in
our happiness than pleasure coming in the midst of trouble can
bring us joy.
Presently Balthazar appeared to waken; he looked quickly about him,
and said,—
"Vespers? Ah, yes! the children are at vespers."
He made a few steps forward, and looked into the garden, where
magnificent tulips were growing on all sides; then he suddenly
stopped short as if brought up against a wall, and cried
out,—
"Why should they not combine within a given time?"
"Is he going mad?" thought the wife, much terrified.
To give greater interest to the present scene, which was called
forth by the situation of their affairs, it is absolutely necessary
to glance back at the past lives of Balthazar Claes and the
granddaughter of the Duke of Casa-Real.
Towards the year 1783, Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina de Nourho,
then twenty-two years of age, was what is called in France a fine
man. He came to finish his education in Paris, where he acquired
excellent manners in the society of Madame d'Egmont, Count Horn,
the Prince of Aremberg, the Spanish ambassador, Helvetius, and
other Frenchmen originally from Belgium, or coming lately thence,
whose birth or wealth won them admittance among the great seigneurs
who at that time gave the tone to social life. Young Claes found
several relations and friends ready to launch him into the great
world at the very moment when that world was about to fall. Like
other young men, he was at first more attracted by glory and
science than by the vanities of life. He frequented the society of
scientific men, particularly Lavoisier, who at that time was better
known to the world for his enormous fortune as a "fermier-general"
than for his discoveries in chemistry,—though later the great
chemist was to eclipse the man of wealth.