The Works of Honore de Balzac Part 53

Thus the three grand operas of which the poor man would boast, but which an old Neapolitan cook, who was now but a patcher up of broken meats, declared to be a heap of nonsense, were scattered throughout Paris on the trucks of costermongers. But at any rate, the landlord had got his rent and the bailiffs their expenses.

According to the Neapolitan cook--who warmed up for the street-walkers of the Rue Froid-Manteau the fragments left from the most sumptuous dinners in Paris--Signora Gambara had gone off to Italy with a Milanese n.o.bleman, and no one knew what had become of her. Worn out with fifteen years of misery, she was very likely ruining the Count by her extravagant luxury, for they were so devotedly adoring that, in all his life, Giardini could recall no instance of such a pa.s.sion.

Towards the end of that very January, one evening when Giardini was chatting with a girl who had come to buy her supper, about the divine Marianna--so poor, so beautiful, so heroically devoted, and who had, nevertheless, "gone the way of them all," the cook, his wife, and the street-girl saw coming towards them a woman fearfully thin, with a sun-burned, dusty face; a nervous walking skeleton, looking at the numbers, and trying to recognize a house.

"_Ecco la Marianna!_" exclaimed the cook.

Marianna recognized Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow she saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to keep a miserable shop for second-hand food. She went in and sat down, for she had come from Fontainebleau. She had walked fourteen leagues that day, after begging her bread from Turin to Paris.

She frightened that terrible trio! Of all her wondrous beauty nothing remained but her fine eyes, dimmed and sunken. The only thing faithful to her was misfortune.

She was welcomed by the skilled old instrument mender, who greeted her with unspeakable joy.

"Why, here you are, my poor Marianna!" said he, warmly. "During your absence they sold up my instrument and my operas."

It would have been difficult to kill the fatted calf for the return of the Samaritan, but Giardini contributed the f.a.g end of a salmon, the trull paid for wine, Gambara produced some bread, Signora Giardini lent a cloth, and the unfortunates all supped together in the musician's garret.

When questioned as to her adventures, Marianna would make no reply; she only raised her beautiful eyes to heaven and whispered to Giardini:

"He married a dancer!"

"And how do you mean to live?" said the girl. "The journey has ruined you, and----"

"And made me an old woman," said Marianna. "No, that is not the result of fatigue or hardship, but of grief."

"And why did you never send your man here any money?" asked the girl.

Marianna's only answer was a look, but it went to the woman's heart.

"She is proud with a vengeance!" she exclaimed. "And much good it has done her!" she added, in Giardini's ear.

All that year musicians took especial care of their instruments, and repairs did not bring in enough to enable the poor couple to pay their way; the wife, too, did not earn much by her needle, and they were compelled to turn their talents to account in the lowest form of employment. They would go out together in the dark to the Champs elysees and sing duets, which Gambara, poor fellow, accompanied on a wretched guitar. On the way, Marianna, who on these expeditions covered her head with a sort of veil of coa.r.s.e muslin, would take her husband to a grocer's shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honore and give him two or three thimblefuls of brandy to make him tipsy; otherwise he could not play. Then they would stand up together in front of the smart people sitting on the chairs, and one of the greatest geniuses of the time, the unrecognized Orpheus of Modern Music, would perform pa.s.sages from his operas--pieces so remarkable that they could extract a few half-pence from Parisian supineness. When some _dilettante_ of comic operas happened to be sitting there and did not recognize from what work they were taken, he would question the woman dressed like a Greek priestess, who held out a bottle-stand of stamped metal in which she collected charity.

"I say, my dear, what is that music out of?"

"The opera of _Mahomet_," Marianna would reply.

As Rossini composed an opera called _Mahomet II._, the amateur would say to his wife, sitting at his side:

"What a pity it is that they will never give us at the Italiens any operas by Rossini but those we know. That is really very fine music!"

And Gambara would smile.

Only a few days since, this unhappy couple had to pay the trifling sum of thirty-six francs as arrears of rent for the c.o.c.k-loft in which they lived resigned. The grocer would not give them credit for the brandy with which Marianna plied her husband to enable him to play. Gambara was, consequently, so unendurably bad that the ears of the wealthy were irresponsive, and the tin bottle-stand remained empty.

It was nine o'clock in the evening. A handsome Italian, the Principessa Ma.s.similla Di Varese, took pity on the poor creatures; she gave them forty francs and questioned them, discerning from the woman's thanks that she was a Venetian. Prince Emilio would know the history of their woes, and Marianna told it, making no complaints of G.o.d or men.

"Madame," said Gambara, as she ended, for he was sober, "we are the victims of our own superiority. My music is good. But as soon as music transcends feeling and becomes an idea, only persons of genius should be the hearers, for they alone are capable of responding to it! It is my misfortune that I have heard the chorus of angels, and believed that men could understand those strains. The same thing happens to women when their love a.s.sumes a divine aspect: men cannot understand them."

This speech was well worth the forty francs bestowed by Ma.s.similla; she took out a second gold piece, and told Marianna she would write to Andrea Marcosini.

"Do not write to him, madame!" exclaimed Marianna. "And G.o.d grant you to be always beautiful!"

"Let us provide for them," said the Princess to her husband; "for this man has remained faithful to the Ideal which we have killed."

As he saw the gold pieces, Gambara shed tears; and then a vague reminiscence of old scientific experiments crossed his mind, and the hapless composer, as he wiped his eyes, spoke these words, which the circ.u.mstances made pathetic:

"Water is a product of burning."

PARIS, _June 1837_.

SERAPHITA

AND OTHER STORIES

INTRODUCTION

The contents of the present volume stand alone in the _Comedie Humaine_, or nearly alone; but they are very closely connected with each other. And to those who care to trace the connection of an author's nature and his work (without tracing--useless as it may be in some cases, and superfluous in most--it will never be possible for any one to appreciate Balzac to the full), they have an interest not inferior to that of any other portion. In one of them, moreover, _Seraphita_, we shall find Balzac's most successful and brilliant essays of style as style--essays so different from his general practice, that they have raised some curious speculations. It is known that, in the early thirties, Balzac and Gautier were a good deal together, and even worked in some sort of collaboration. In one of his books, _Beatrix_, Balzac has printed a pa.s.sage which, as it happens, is known to be Gautier's, and there is a good deal in _Seraphita_ which may be suspected of a similar origin.

To those who care for the story, or who are attracted to the _Comedie_ as a varied storehouse of observation of ordinary life, this volume must seem, and, I believe, almost invariably does seem, rather dreary and repellent stuff. To others, it yields in interest to no volume of the _Comedie_, though the interest may be of a peculiar and special kind. As most people who know anything at all about Balzac are aware, Louis Lambert is Balzac himself; the _Traite de la Volonte_ was actually written, and destroyed by an irate schoolmaster; and most of the incidents brought in have more or less foundation in fact. The same, of course, cannot be said of _Les Proscrits_ and _Seraphita_. But the former, while belonging in kind generally to the _etudes Philosophiques_, connects itself on another side with the _Contes Drolatiques_, and with Balzac's not rare studies of the Middle Ages. About these he seems always to have had a hankering to write, which was due partly to his lifelong cult of Sir Walter, and partly to a curious delusion that he was himself a born historical novelist.

_Seraphita_, on the other hand, has a sort of kinship with other products of the 1830 period.

But all the books are perhaps most interesting to us, first, as showing Balzac's specially "philosophic" velleities; and secondly, as exhibiting a side of him which is apt to be overlooked--his character as a reader and a student.

The "philosophy" has been rather variously judged. It has seldom been taken very seriously; but attempts have sometimes been made to discover in it antic.i.p.ations of later discoveries or, to adopt a much safer word, theories. These antic.i.p.ation-hunts rarely send the hunter home with an empty bag, but it is as rarely that the game is of certain quality. Indeed, if we remember that even in the widest and vaguest sense, "philosophy" was practically exhausted many hundred years ago--that new philosophies are only the old ones with their coats and trousers turned, scoured, dyed, and altered somewhat in fashion--it would be very odd if a clever man, even with no regular training or special vocation, did not antic.i.p.ate more or less what others of his contemporaries are going to think. For the rest, Balzac's philosophy is of a distinctly loose sort, and may very well have occurred to him in whole or in part when he was a studious, if irregularly studious, school-boy. It is, indeed, very much of the kind to which schoolboys of some brains are as p.r.o.ne as men of riper years, and in which they are perhaps as likely to attain a result, or what looks like it.

The second bearing of these curious books is more tangible. It is certain that Balzac, unlike d.i.c.kens, his fellow _voyant_, and still more unlike most of the "realists" who claim kindred with him, was a very great reader.

In his period of production, despite the enormous expense of time which his methods of writing imposed on him, he seems to have read a great deal; in his boyhood and in the ten years of his apprenticeship he seems to have read enormously. He certainly never attained to exact scientific or scholarly knowledge of any subject by means of books. He did not know literature or history, much less philosophy, as he knew legal procedure and the theory of speculation, the signboards of Paris, and not a little of what went on inside Parisian waistcoats and under Parisian hats. But he had a vast amount of "fine confused" reading, as the Swedenborgian learning of _Seraphita_, no less than the not altogether alien lore of _Sur Catherine de Medicis_, shows. He was even, as not a few pa.s.sages in his reviews, in his other miscellaneous writings, and in his letters show, rather inclined to overvalue and plume himself upon this reading. Nor was it without effect, both good and bad, on his work. On the one hand, it added to that slightly undigested character which, with rare exceptions, is characteristic of him; on the other, it largely helped the appearance of variety, fulness, encyclopaedic knowledge, and interest which is the complement and atonement of this undigestedness. Balzac was really a "full"

man in reading as well as thought; and of this reading fulness, the batch of books before us is perhaps the most striking example.

_Louis Lambert_ appeared first (as _Notice Biographique sur L. L._) in 1832, in the _Nouveaux Contes Philosophiques_; then in February 1833 as a small volume by itself, a good deal enlarged, and ent.i.tled _Histoire intellectuelle de L. L._; then, with its actual dimensions, in a collection ent.i.tled _Le Livre Mystique_, published by Werdet in 1835. In 1842, with _Seraphita_, but apparently (I have not seen the book) not with _Les Proscrits_, it was again published by Charpentier; and in 1846 it joined the _Comedie_. _Les Proscrits_ first appeared in the _Revue de Paris_ for May 1831, and was almost immediately included in the _Romans et Contes Philosophiques_. Its fortunes, after it was joined to its companions, have been told, as have those of _Seraphita_. This last appeared first in the _Revue de Paris_ for June and July 1834. In 1840 it became an _etude Philosophique_ with _Les Proscrits_, _Gambara_, and _Ma.s.similla Doni_.

G. S.

In order to heighten the narrative tone of this volume, we append here two of Balzac's freshest short stories, though written--at any rate, published--about the same time. They belong to the _Marana_ group, which includes some of the finest of the smaller efforts.

_Maitre Cornelius_, which, by the way, is interesting in its dedication to Count Georges Mniszech, partakes of the character of a "Conte drolatique"