The World's Greatest Books - Volume 1 Part 27

Seeing that his master was given over to a gloomy despair that verged upon madness, Jonathan resolved to distract his mind at all costs, and knowing that he was pa.s.sionately fond of music, he engaged a box for him at the Opera. But Raphael was afraid above all things, of falling in love. Under the illimitable desire of pa.s.sion the magic skin would shrivel up in an hour. So he used a strange, distorting opera-gla.s.s which made the loveliest face seem hideous.

With this he sat in his box, he surveyed the scene around him. Who was that old man over there, sitting beside a dancing-girl that Raphael had seen at Taillefer's? The owner of the curiosity shop! He had at last fallen in love, as Raphael had jestingly desired. No doubt the magic skin had shrunk under that wish before Raphael had measured it. A beautiful woman entered the theatre with a peer of France at her side. A murmur of admiration arose as she took her seat. She smiled at Raphael.

In spite of the distorted image on his opera-gla.s.s, Raphael knew her. It was the Countess Foedora! In a single glance of intolerable scorn the man she had played false avenged himself. He did not waste an ill-wish on her. He merely took the gla.s.ses from his eyes, and answered her smile with a look of cold contempt. Everybody observed the sudden pallor of the countess; it was a public rejection.

"Raphael!"

The marquis turned at the sound of a beloved voice. Pauline was sitting in the box next to his. How beautiful she had grown! How maidenly she was still! Putting down his opera-gla.s.ses, Raphael talked to her of old times.

"You must come and see me to-morrow," said Pauline. "I have your great work on 'The Theory of the Will.' Don't you remember leaving it in the garret?"

"I was mad and blind then," said Raphael. "But I am cured at last."

"I wish Pauline to love me!" he kept repeating to himself all the way home. "I wish Pauline to love me!"

With a strange mixture of wild anguish and fierce joy, he looked at the magic skin to see what this vehement wish had cost him. Nothing! Not a sign of shrinkage could be discerned. The fact was that even the greatest talisman could not realise a desire which had long since been fulfilled. Pauline had loved Raphael from the time when they first met; while he had been priding himself on living on twelve pounds a year, she had been painting screens up to two or three o'clock every night, in order to buy him food and firing.

"Oh, my simple-minded darling," she said to him the next day, sitting on his lap and twining her arms about his neck, "you will never know what a pleasure it was for me to pay my handsome tutor for all his kindness.

And wasn't I cunning? You never found me out."

"But I've found out now," said Raphael, "and I am going to punish you severely. Instead of marrying you in three months' time, as you suggest, I shall marry you at the end of this week."

Raphael was now the happiest man in Paris. Seeing that the magic skin had not shrunk with his last wish, he thought that the spell over his life was removed. And that morning he had thrown the talisman down a disused well in the garden.

At the end of the week, Pauline was sitting at breakfast with Raphael in the conservatory overlooking the garden. She was wearing a light dressing-gown; her long hair was all dishevelled, and her little, white, blue-veined feet peeped out of their velvet slippers. She gave a little cry of dismay, when the gardener appeared.

"I've just found this strange thing at the bottom of one of the wells,"

he said.

He gave Raphael the magic skin. It was now scarcely as large as a rose leaf.

"Leave me, Pauline! Leave me at once!" cried Raphael. "If you remain I shall die before your eyes."

"Die?" she said. "Die? You cannot. I love you--I love you!"

"Yes, die!" he exclaimed, showing her the little bit of skin. "Look, dearest. This is a talisman which represents the length of my life, and accomplishes my wishes. You see how little is left."

Pauline thought he had suddenly grown mad. She bent over him, and took up the magic skin. As Raphael saw her, beautiful with love and terror, he lost all control over his desires. To possess her again, and die on her breast!

"Come to me Pauline!" he said.

She felt the skin tickling her hand as it rapidly shrivelled up. She rushed into the bedroom, and closed the door.

"Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, stumbling after her. "I love you! I want you! I wish to die for you!"

With extraordinary strength--the last outburst of life--he tore the door off the hinges, and saw Pauline in agony on a sofa. She had stabbed herself.

"If I die, he will live!" she was crying.

Raphael staggered across the room, and fell into the arms of beautiful Pauline, dead.

The Quest of the Absolute

"La Recherche de l'Absolu" was published in 1834, with a touching dedication to Madame Josephine Delannoy: "Madame, may it please G.o.d that this, my book, may live when I am dead, that the grat.i.tude which is due from me to you, and which equals, I trust, your motherlike generosity to me, may hope to endure beyond the limits set to human love." The novel became a part of the "Human Comedy" in 1845. The struggle of Balthazar Claes in his quest for the Absolute, his disregard of all else save his work, and the heroic devotion of Josephine and Marguerite, are characteristic features of Balzac's art; the sordidness of life and the mad pa.s.sion for the unattainable are admirably relieved, as in "Eugenie Grandet" and "Old Goriot," by a certain n.o.bility and purity of motive. The novel is generally acknowledged one of Balzac's masterpieces, both in vigour of portraiture and minuteness of detail. Perhaps no one was ever better fitted to depict the ruin wrought by a fixed idea than Balzac himself, who wasted much of his laborious life in struggling to discover a short cut to wealth.

_I.--Claes, the Alchemist_

In Douai, situated in the Rue de Paris, there is a house which stands out from all the rest in the city by reason of its purely Flemish character. In all its details, this tall and handsome house expresses the manners of the domesticated people of the Low Countries. The name of the house for some two centuries has been Maison Claes, after the great family of craftsmen who occupied it. These Van Claes had ama.s.sed fortunes, played a part in politics, and had suffered many vicissitudes in the course of history without losing their place in the mighty bourgeois world of commerce. They were substantial people, princes of trade.

At the end of the eighteenth century the representative of this ancient and affluent family was Balthazar Claes, a tall and handsome young man, who after some years' residence in Paris, where he saw the fashionable world and made acquaintance with many of the great savants, including Lavoisier the chemist, returned to his home in Douai, and set himself to find a wife.

It was on a visit to a relation in Ghent that he heard gossip concerning a young lady living in Brussels, which made him curious to see so interesting a person. Rumour had two tales to tell of this Mlle.

Josephine Temninck. She was beautiful, but she was deformed. Could deformity be triumphed over by beauty of face? A relative of Claes thought that it could, and maintained this opinion against the opposite camp. This relative spoke of Mlle. Temninck's character, telling how the sweet girl had surrendered her share of the family estate that her younger brother might make a great marriage, and how she had quite resigned herself, even on the threshold of her life, to the idea of spinsterhood and narrow means.

Claes sought out this n.o.ble soul. He found her inexpressibly beautiful, and the malformation of one of her shoulders appeared as nothing in his eyes. He lost his heart to Josephine, and made pa.s.sionate love to her.

Distracted by such adoration, the beautiful cripple was now lifted to dizzy heights of joy and now plunged into abysmal depths of despair. She had deemed herself irreparably plain; in the eyes of a charming young man, she found herself beautiful. But, could such love endure through life? To be loved was delicious, but to be deceived after so surprising a release from solitude would be terrible.

Conscious of her deformity, intimidated by the future, she became in the purity of her soul a coquette. She dissimulated her feelings, became exacting, and hid from her lover the pa.s.sion of joy which was consuming her; indeed, she only revealed her true self after marriage had shown her the steadfast n.o.bility of her husband's character, when she could no longer doubt of his affection. He loved her with fidelity and ardour.

She realised all his ideals, and no consideration of duty entered into their pa.s.sionate affection. She was Spanish, and had the secret of charm in her variety of attraction; ill-educated though she was, like most daughters of Spanish n.o.blemen, she was engaging and bewildering in the force of her own nature and the religion of her absorbing love. In society she was dull; for her husband alone she was enchanting. No couple could have been happier.

They had four children, two boys and two girls; the eldest a girl named Marguerite.

Fourteen years after their marriage, in the year 1809, a change appeared in Balthazar, but so gradually that Mme. Claes did not at first question it. He became thoughtful, reflective, silent, preoccupied. When Josephine Claes noticed this change, it was too late for her to ask questions; she waited for Balthazar to speak. She began to fear.

Balthazar, whose whole heaven had lain in the happiness of the family life, who had loved to play with his children, to attend to his tulips, to sun himself in the dark eyes of Josephine, seemed now to forget the existence of them all. He was indifferent to everything.

People who questioned her were put off with the brave story that Balthazar had a great work in hand, which would bring fame one day to his native town. Josephine's hazard was founded on truth. Workmen had been engaged for some time in the garret of the house, and there Claes spent the greater part of his time. But the poor lady was to learn the full truth from the neighbours she had attempted to hoodwink. They asked her if she meant to see herself and her children ruined, adding that her husband was spending a fortune on scientific instruments, machinery, books, and materials in a search for the Philosopher's Stone.

Humiliated that the neighbours should know more than she did, and terrified by the prospect in front of her, Josephine at last spoke to her husband.

"My dear," he said, "you would not understand what I am about. I am studying chemistry, and I am perfectly happy."

Things went from bad to worse. Claes became more taciturn and more invisible to his family. He was slovenly in dress and untidy in his habits. Only his servant Lemulquinier, or Mulquinier, as he was often called, was allowed to enter the attic and share his master's secrets.

Mme. Claes had a rival. It was science.

One day she went to the garret, but Claes repulsed her with wrath and roughness.

"My experiment is absolutely spoilt," he cried vehemently. "In another minute I might have resolved nitrogen."

_II.--The Riddle of Existence_