Оноре де Бальзак
Analytical Studies
FORCED SMILES
On your arrival in this latitude, you enjoy numerous little scenes, which, in the grand opera of marriage, represent the intermezzos, and of which the following is a type:
You are one evening alone after dinner, and you have been so often alone already that you feel a desire to say sharp little things to each other, like this, for instance:
"Take care, Caroline," says Adolphe, who has not forgotten his many vain efforts to please her. "I think your nose has the impertinence to redden at home quite well as at the restaurant."
"This is not one of your amiable days!"
General Rule. – No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
"Perhaps it's because you are laced too tight. Women make themselves sick that way."
The moment a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that woman, – who knows that stays will bend, – seizes her corset by the lower end, and bends it out, saying, with Caroline:
"Look, you can get your hand in! I never lace tight."
"Then it must be your stomach."
"What has the stomach got to do with the nose?"
"The stomach is a centre which communicates with all the organs."
"So the nose is an organ, is it?"
"Yes."
"Your organ is doing you a poor service at this moment." She raises her eyes and shrugs her shoulders. "Come, Adolphe, what have I done?"
"Nothing. I'm only joking, and I am unfortunate enough not to please you," returns Adolphe, smiling.
"My misfortune is being your wife! Oh, why am I not somebody else's!"
"That's what I say!"
"If I were, and if I had the innocence to say to you, like a coquette who wishes to know how far she has got with a man, 'the redness of my nose really gives me anxiety,' you would look at me in the glass with all the affectations of an ape, and would reply, 'O madame, you do yourself an injustice; in the first place, nobody sees it: besides, it harmonizes with your complexion; then again we are all so after dinner!' and from this you would go on to flatter me. Do I ever tell you that you are growing fat, that you are getting the color of a stone-cutter, and that I prefer thin and pale men?"
They say in London, "Don't touch the axe!" In France we ought to say,
"Don't touch a woman's nose."
"And all this about a little extra natural vermilion!" exclaims Adolphe. "Complain about it to Providence, whose office it is to put a little more color in one place than another, not to me, who loves you, who desires you to be perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!"
"You love me too much, then, for you've been trying, for some time past, to find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me down under the pretext of making me perfect – people said I was perfect, five years ago."
"I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!"
"With too much vermilion?"
Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife's face, sits down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to go away, gives her gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a separation. This motion is performed by some women with a provoking impertinence: but it has two significations; it is, as whist players would say, either a signal for trumps or a renounce. At this time, Caroline renounces.
"What is the matter?" says Adolphe.
"Will you have a glass of sugar and water?" asks Caroline, busying herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.
"What for?"
"You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke of it as an excellent remedy."
"How anxious you are about my stomach!"
"It's a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act upon your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue."
Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him of Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy with an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to faint.
"Are you sick?" asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place where women always have us.
"It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you: you are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men are more or less cracked."
Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with its crop of nettles and mullen stalks.
"What, are you pouting?" asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour's observation of her husband's countenance.
"No, I am meditating," replied Adolphe.
"Oh, what an infernal temper you've got!" she returns, with a shrug of the shoulders. "Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape and your digestion? Don't you see that I was only paying you back for your vermilion? You'll make me think that men are as vain as women. [Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it's an idea that a man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to something wrong in your digestion. It's not my Dolph, it's his stomach that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a ventriloquist, that's all."
Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he were glued.
"No, he won't laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having character. Oh, how much better we are!"
She goes and sits down in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.
"Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong," she says. "Why pout? Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as when I married you, and slenderer perhaps."
"Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry, do you know what it means?"
"What does it mean?" asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe's dramatic attitude.
"That they love each other less."
"Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me believe you loved me!"
Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he can – by a laugh.
"Why give me pain?" she says. "If I am wrong in anything, isn't it better to tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises her voice], 'Your nose is getting red!' No, that is not right! To please you, I will use an expression of the fair Fischtaminel, 'It's not the act of a gentleman!'"
Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but instead of discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will attach her to him, he finds out what attaches him to her.
NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA
Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country) are innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they like. But in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in seeing a man wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her caprices – three expressions for the same thing! – and anxiously going round and round, half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost his master.
They call this being loved, poor things! And a good many of them say to themselves, as did Caroline, "How will he manage?"
Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife inaugurate a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume – things which a tilbury will set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of a blue sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the effect. They breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy Norman horse, animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach Marnes, beyond Ville d'Avray, where the Deschars are spreading themselves in a villa copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by Swiss meadows, though without all the objectionable features of the Alps.
"Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!" exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts Marnes and Ville d'Avray. "It makes your eyes as happy as if they had a heart in them."
Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who becomes her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like a fawn, and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable school-girl that she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her bonnet, and holds it by the strings! She is young, pink and white again. Her eyes smile, her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with sensibility, with a sensibility which seems quite fresh.
"So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?" says Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she leans upon him as if to show the flexibility of her form.
"What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no extravagance! Seize an opportunity like the Deschars."
"To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure, such is the constant study of your own Dolph."
They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of endearment, and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.
"Does he really want to please his little girly?" says Caroline, resting her head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead, saying to himself, "Gad! I've got her now!"
Axiom. – When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only knows which has got the other.
The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars gives utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so stern, prudish and devout.
"Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very amiable."
M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is to be sold at Ville d'Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country house is a weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This weakness, or disease, has its course and its cure. Adolphe is a husband, but not a doctor. He buys the house and takes possession with Caroline, who has become once more his Caroline, his Carola, his fawn, his treasure, his girly girl.
The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful rapidity: a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is anhydrous, as the chemists say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres than at Paris, if you carefully examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be had at any price. A fine pear costs more in the country than in the (anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet's window.
Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow measuring two square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look as if they were borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the most rural authorities, being consulted on the point, declare that you must spend a great deal of money, and – wait five years! Vegetables dash out of the husbandman's garden to reappear at the city market. Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and taxes to pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts and pledges of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at Paris are a month in advance of those in the country.
From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don't know what to do, on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.
Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes, wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three thousand francs a year. He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed himself to be so caught! For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.
It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated nuisance.
"I don't see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it," says Caroline.
"The way to get along in the country," replies a little retired grocer, "is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and then everything changes."
On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, "What an idea that was of yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the country is to go there on visits to other people."
Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, "Don't have a newspaper or a country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots who will have them for you."
"Bah!" returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women's logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, "you are right: but then you know the baby is in splendid health, here."
Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline's susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe being absent on business, she waits for him from five o'clock to seven, and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office. She talks for three-quarters of an hour of her anxieties. She was afraid to go from the house to the office. Is it proper for a young woman to be left alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.
The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which deserves a chapter to itself.
TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE
Axiom. – There are parentheses in worry.
EXAMPLE – A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its peculiar vexation.
Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband's absences, perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last, Adolphe, who comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded, observes a slight coating of hoar frost upon Caroline's visage. After making sure that the coldness of her manner has been observed, Caroline puts on a counterfeit air of interest, – the well-known expression of which possesses the gift of making a man inwardly swear, – and says: "You must have had a good deal of business to-day, dear?"
"Oh, lots!"
"Did you take many cabs?"
"I took seven francs' worth."
"Did you find everybody in?"
"Yes, those with whom I had appointments."
"When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is dried up; it's like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in moistening it, and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark bundles with for the East Indies."
Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.
"It is probable that I wrote them at Paris – "
"What business was it, Adolphe?"
"Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there's Chaumontel's affair – "
"I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland – "
"Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer – "
"Didn't you do anything else but business?" asks Caroline, interrupting Adolphe.
Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into her husband's eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.
"What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into debt, or embroidered a sampler?"
"Oh, dear, I don't know. And I can't even guess. I am too dull, you've told me so a hundred times."
"There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How like a woman that is!"
"Have you concluded anything?" she asks, pretending to take an interest in business.
"No, nothing,"
"How many persons have you seen?"
"Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets."
"How you answer me!"
"Yes, and how you question me! As if you'd been following the trade of an examining judge for the last ten years!"
"Come, tell me all you've done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to try to please me while you are here! I'm dull enough when you leave me alone all day long."
"You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?"
"Formerly, you told me everything – "
This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day. Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to induce the belief that she is not listening.
"But you said just now," she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is getting into a snarl, "that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and you now talk of a hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do your business in a hack?" she asks, railingly.
"Why should hacks be interdicted?" inquires Adolphe, resuming his narrative.
"Haven't you been to Madame de Fischtaminel's?" she asks in the middle of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words out of your mouth.
"Why should I have been there?"
"It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor is done."
"It is."
"Ah! then you have been there?"
"No, her upholsterer told me."
"Do you know her upholsterer?"
"Yes."
"Who is it?"
"Braschon."
"So you met the upholsterer?"
"Yes."
"You said you only went in carriages."
"Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and – "
"Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was – one or the other is equally probable."
"You won't listen," exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story will lull Caroline's suspicions.
"I've listened too much already. You've been lying for the last hour, worse than a drummer."
"Well, I'll say nothing more."
"I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you've seen lawyers, notaries, bankers: now you haven't seen one of them! Suppose I were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what she would say?"
Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish up a clue.
"Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How wretched we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business! Fine business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business a little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?"
Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini's codas:
"Yes, it's a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves two objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I'll take the woods and their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let's say no more about it."
Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
"Have you done, dear?" he asks, profiting by an instant in which she tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.
Then Caroline concludes thus: "I've had enough of the villa, and I'll never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you'll keep it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods. What is a Villa Adolphini where you get nauseated if you go six times round the lawn? where they've planted chair-legs and broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It's like a furnace: the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours a day! That's what a country seat means!"
"Listen to me, Caroline."
"I wouldn't so much mind, if you would only confess what you did to-day. You don't know me yet: come, tell me, I won't scold you. I pardon you beforehand for all that you've done."
Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make one to his wife, replies – "Well, I'll tell you."
"That's a good fellow – I shall love you better."
"I was three hours – "
"I was sure of it – at Madame de Fischtaminel's!"
"No, at our notary's, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not come to terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I went to Braschon's, to see how much we owed him – "
"You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the face! I'll go to see Braschon to-morrow."
Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.
"You can't help laughing, you monster!"
"I laugh at your obstinacy."
"I'll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel's."
"Oh, go wherever you like!"
"What brutality!" says Caroline, rising and going away with her handkerchief at her eyes.
The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a diabolical invention of Adolphe's, a trap into which the fawn has fallen.
Since Adolphe's discovery that it is impossible to reason with Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.
Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two thousand francs for seven thousand! But he gains this by the adventure – he finds out that the country is not the thing that Caroline wants.
The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests, its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted to abdicate and take Caroline's part himself.