Honoré de Balzac

“ Ah! the greatest of men have been mistaken there!” added the princess, with one of those meaning smiles which the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci alone has rendered.
“Fools love well, sometimes,” returned the marquise.
“But in this case,” said the princess, “fools wouldn’t have enough credulity in their nature.”
“You are right,” said the marquise. “But what we ought to look for is neither a fool nor even a man of talent. To solve our problem we need a man of genius. Genius alone has the faith of childhood, the religion of love, and willingly allows us to band its eyes. ”

“ Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.
“Can I? ought I?” she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at d’Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness. “Men have so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little bound to be discreet!” ”

“ Ah! you little think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in families apparently united. You are wholly ignorant of certain gilded sorrows.”
“I know all!” he cried.
“No, you know nothing.”
D’Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees, at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her. ”

“ In Blondet and Rastignac he certainly had two acolytes of the first quality to bring forth the delicacy of his wit and the breadth of his intellect. As for the two women, they had long been counted among the cleverest in society. This evening was like a halt in the oasis of a desert,—a rare enjoyment, and well appreciated by these four persons, habitually victimized to the endless caution entailed by the world of salons and politics. There are beings who have the privilege of passing among men like beneficent stars, whose light illumines the mind, while its rays send a glow to the heart. ”

“ Society covers great horrors with the flowers of its elegance, the embroidery of its gossip, the wit of its lies. We writers invent no more than the truth. Poor Diane! Michel had penetrated that enigma; he said that beneath her covering of ice there lay volcanoes! Bianchon and Rastignac were right; when a man can join the grandeurs of the ideal and the enjoyments of human passion in loving a woman of perfect manners, of intellect, of delicacy, it must be happiness beyond words. ”

“ With what lucidity had Michel Chrestien read into that soul, that heart, illumined by the fires of love! Thus the princess acquired, in d’Arthez’s eyes, another charm; a halo of poesy surrounded her.
As the dinner proceeded, Daniel called to mind the various confidences of his friend, his despair, his hopes, the noble poems of a true sentiment sung to his ear alone, in honor of this woman. It is rare that a man passes without remorse from the position of confidant to that of rival, and d’Arthez was free to do so without dishonor. ”

“ A writer who rises to his level, accustoms himself to free thought, and forgets that in society all things cannot be said; it is impossible for such a man to observe the restraint of persons who live in the world perpetually; but as his eccentricities of thought bore the mark of originality, no one felt inclined to complain. This zest, this piquancy, rare in mere talent, this youthfulness and simplicity of soul which made d’Arthez so nobly original, gave a delightful charm to this evening. He left the house with Rastignac, who, as they drove home, asked him how he liked the princess. ”

“ D’Arthez went to the princess, who was awaiting him with the keenest anxiety. The result of this experiment, which Diane had herself brought about, might be fatal to her. For the first time in her life this woman suffered in her heart. She knew not what she should do in case d’Arthez believed the world which spoke the truth, instead of believing her who lied; for never had so noble a nature, so complete a man, a soul so pure, a conscience so ingenuous come beneath her hand. ”

“ She must henceforth remain to him the actress who had played that comedy to blind his eyes.
When she heard Daniel’s step in the dining-room a violent commotion, a shudder which reached to her very vitals came over her. That convulsion, never felt during all the years of her adventurous existence, told her that she had staked her happiness on this issue. Her eyes, gazing into space, took in the whole of d’Arthez’s person; their light poured through his flesh, she read his soul; suspicion had not so much as touched him with its bat’s-wing. ”

“ Madame d’Espard went to see the princess as soon as she had received this answer.
“My dear, do you feel yourself in full beauty and coquetry?” she said. “If so, come and dine with me a few days hence, and I’ll serve up d’Arthez. Our man of genius is by nature, it seems, a savage; he fears women, and has never loved! Make your plans on that. He is all intellect, and so simple that he’ll mislead you into feeling no distrust. But his penetration, which is wholly retrospective, acts later, and frustrates calculation. You may hoodwink him to-day, but to-morrow nothing can dupe him.” ”

“ I was surfeited with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart. I have found all the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of them ever caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur, no delicacy. I wish I could have met with one man able to inspire me with respect.”
“Then are you like me, my dear?” asked the marquise; “have you never felt the emotion of love while trying to love?”
“Never,” replied the princess, laying her hand on the arm of her friend. ”

“ Each had uttered one of those sayings that are solemn to women who have reached their age.
“Like you,” resumed the princess, “I have received more love than most women; but through all my many adventures, I have never found happiness. I committed great follies, but they had an object, and that object retreated as fast as I approached it. I feel to-day in my heart, old as it is, an innocence which has never been touched. Yes, under all my experience, lies a first love intact,—just as I myself, in spite of all my losses and fatigues, feel young and beautiful. We may love and not be happy ”

“ During the fifteen years of the Restoration she had amused herself far too much to think of her son; but on taking refuge in obscurity, this illustrious egoist bethought her that the maternal sentiment, developed to its extreme, might be an absolution for her past follies in the eyes of sensible persons, who pardon everything to a good mother. She loved her son all the more because she had nothing else to love. Georges de Maufrigneuse was, moreover, one of those children who flatter the vanities of a mother; and the princess had, accordingly, made all sorts of sacrifices for him. ”

“ What a home is that of a man accustomed to the adulation of women of the world, when he finds neither incense nor censer in his own house! dead to all! and yet, perhaps for that very reason, jealous. I wished—when Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was wholly mine—I wished to be a good wife, but I found myself repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by a man who treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating my self-respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. ”

“ Besides, there are moments when the desire to please gives an increase of beauty to women. The will is not without influence on the variations of the face. If violent emotions have the power to yellow the white tones of persons of bilious and melancholy temperament, and to green lymphatic faces, shall we not grant to desire, hope, and joy, the faculty of clearing the skin, giving brilliancy to the eye, and brightening the glow of beauty with a light as jocund as that of a lovely morning? The celebrated faintness of the princess had taken on a ripeness which now made her seem more august. ”

“ One must be a queen to know how to abdicate, and to descend with dignity from a lofty position which is never wholly lost. Those only who have an inner consciousness of being nothing in themselves, show regrets in falling, or struggle, murmuring, to return to a past which can never return,—a fact of which they themselves are well aware. Compelled to do without the choice exotics in the midst of which she had lived, and which set off so charmingly her whole being (for it is impossible not to compare her to a flower) , the princess had wisely chosen a ground-floor apartment ”

“ The Duc de Maufrigneuse, like a true son of the old Prince de Cadignan, is a tall, lean man, of elegant shape, very graceful, a sayer of witty things, colonel by the grace of God, and a good soldier by accident; brave as a Pole, which means without sense or discernment, and hiding the emptiness of his mind under the jargon of good society. ”

“ When one thinks of what the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had been under the Restoration,—one of the queens of Paris, a dazzling queen, whose luxurious existence equalled that of the richest women of fashion in London,—there was something touching in the sight of her in that humble little abode in the rue de Miromesnil, a few steps away from her splendid mansion, which no amount of fortune had enabled her to keep, and which the hammer of speculators has since demolished. ”

“ Michel Chrestien attributed to men of genius the power of transforming the most massive creatures into sylphs, fools into clever women, peasants into countesses; the more accomplished a woman was, the more she lost her value in their eyes, for, according to Michel, their imagination had the less to do. In his opinion love, a mere matter of the senses to inferior beings, was to great souls the most immense of all moral creations and the most binding. To justify d’Arthez, he instanced the example of Raffaele and the Fornarina. ”

“ This friendly little warfare had been going on for several months between Daniel and his friends, when Madame d’Espard asked Rastignac and Blondet to induce d’Arthez to come and dine with her, telling them that the Princesse de Cadignan had a great desire to see that celebrated man. Such curiosities are to certain women what magic lanterns are to children,—a pleasure to the eyes, but rather shallow and full of disappointments. The more sentiments a man of talent excites at a distance, the less he responds to them on nearer view ”

“ She came to Madame d’Espard’s dinner with the intention of being a gentle, simple woman, to whom life was known only through its deceptions: a woman full of soul, and calumniated, but resigned,—in short, a wounded angel.
She arrived early, so as to pose on a sofa near the fire beside Madame d’Espard, as she wished to be first seen: that is, in one of those attitudes in which science is concealed beneath an exquisite naturalness ”

“ Paris was then so carried away by the whirling current of events that the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, buried in the Princesse de Cadignan, a change of name unknown to most of the new actors brought upon the stage of society by the revolution of July, did really become a stranger in her own city.
In Paris the title of duke ranks all others, even that of prince; though, in heraldic theory, free of all sophism, titles signify nothing; there is absolute equality among gentlemen. This fine equality was formerly maintained by the House of France itself ”

“ Yes, it is a sweet, a precious triumph for women like ourselves to end our woman’s life in this way; to rest in an ardent, pure, devoted, complete and absolute love; above all, when we have sought it long. ”

“ Like all men younger than their actual age, d’Arthez was a prey to those agitating irresolutions which are caused by the force of desires and the terror of displeasing,—a situation which a young woman does not comprehend when she shares it, but which the princess had too often deliberately produced not to enjoy its pleasures. ”

“ These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility. D’Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels. ”