Оноре де Бальзак
Poor Relations
Rossini, a brother genius to Raphael, is a striking instance in his poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence. This is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays are awarded to great poets and to great generals.
Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth's despotic rule, that love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character reappeared, the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian returned to nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the schoolmaster's rod had routed them.
For the first few months the artist adored his wife. Hortense and Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a legitimate and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release her husband from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art. And, indeed, a woman's caresses scare away the Muse, and break down the sturdy, brutal resolution of the worker.
Six or seven months slipped by, and the artist's fingers had forgotten the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt, when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable byword of the idler, "I am just going to work on it," and he lulled his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever; she dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet would be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry officer, of courage a la Murat. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that statue all the Emperor's victories were to seem a foregone conclusion. And then such workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered to the word.
By way of a statue the result was a delightful little Wenceslas.
When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model, Steinbock found one day that the Prince's clock required his presence in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home to toy with his adored wife.
Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired, complaining of this "hodman's work" and his own physical weakness. During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State – like Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X. – ought to be at the beck and call of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace, had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.
"Do not be hurried," said she to her husband, "our whole future life is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a masterpiece."
She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to him was all-important.
When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who had looked on at her husband's toil, seeing his health really suffer from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and hands – Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.
Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the test.
"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster is the manuscript, the marble is the book."
So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son. The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.
The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the young couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.
Sculpture – like dramatic art – is at once the most difficult and the easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a woman – this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.
Superficial thinkers – and there are many in the artist world – have asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed – the Polyhymnia, the Julia, and others, and we have not found one-tenth of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and see Michael Angelo's Penseroso, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and behold the Virgin by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the clothes he wears.
Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and never again, was, in painting called Raphael!
The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies it. If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his violin, spent three days without practising, he lost what he called the stops of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden frame, the strings, the bow, and himself; if he had lost this alliance, he would have been no more than an ordinary player.
Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life, for art is idealized creation. Hence great artists and perfect poets wait neither for commission nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating – to-day, to-morrow, always. The result is the habit of work, the unfailing apprehension of the difficulties which keep them in close intercourse with the Muse and her productive forces. Canova lived in his studio, as Voltaire lived in his study; and so must Homer and Phidias have lived.
While Lisbeth kept Wenceslas Steinbock in thraldom in his garret, he was on the thorny road trodden by all these great men, which leads to the Alpine heights of glory. Then happiness, in the person of Hortense, had reduced the poet to idleness – the normal condition of all artists, since to them idleness is fully occupied. Their joy is such as that of the pasha of a seraglio; they revel with ideas, they get drunk at the founts of intellect. Great artists, such as Steinbock, wrapped in reverie, are rightly spoken of as dreamers. They, like opium-eaters, all sink into poverty, whereas if they had been kept up to the mark by the stern demands of life, they might have been great men.
At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists, who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of society. This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their indifference to outer things, their devotion to their work, make simpletons regard them as egotists, and they are expected to wear the same garb as the dandy who fulfils the trivial evolutions called social duties. These men want the lions of the Atlas to be combed and scented like a lady's poodle.
These artists, who are too rarely matched to meet their fellows, fall into habits of solitary exclusiveness; they are inexplicable to the majority, which, as we know, consists mostly of fools – of the envious, the ignorant, and the superficial.
Now you may imagine what part a wife should play in the life of these glorious and exceptional beings. She ought to be what, for five years, Lisbeth had been, but with the added offering of love, humble and patient love, always ready and always smiling.
Hortense, enlightened by her anxieties as a mother, and driven by dire necessity, had discovered too late the mistakes she had been involuntarily led into by her excessive love. Still, the worthy daughter of her mother, her heart ached at the thought of worrying Wenceslas; she loved her dear poet too much to become his torturer; and she could foresee the hour when beggary awaited her, her child, and her husband.
"Come, come, my child," said Lisbeth, seeing the tears in her cousin's lovely eyes, "you must not despair. A glassful of tears will not buy a plate of soup. How much do you want?"
"Well, five or six thousand francs."
"I have but three thousand at the most," said Lisbeth. "And what is Wenceslas doing now?"
"He has had an offer to work in partnership with Stidmann at a table service for the Duc d'Herouville for six thousand francs. Then Monsieur Chanor will advance four thousand to repay Monsieur de Lora and Bridau – a debt of honor."
"What, you have had the money for the statue and the bas-reliefs for Marshal Montcornet's monument, and you have not paid them yet?"
"For the last three years," said Hortense, "we have spent twelve thousand francs a year, and I have but a hundred louis a year of my own. The Marshal's monument, when all the expenses were paid, brought us no more than sixteen thousand francs. Really and truly, if Wenceslas gets no work, I do not know what is to become of us. Oh, if only I could learn to make statues, I would handle the clay!" she cried, holding up her fine arms.
The woman, it was plain, fulfilled the promise of the girl; there was a flash in her eye; impetuous blood, strong with iron, flowed in her veins; she felt that she was wasting her energy in carrying her infant.
"Ah, my poor little thing! a sensible girl should not marry an artist till his fortune is made – not while it is still to make."
At this moment they heard voices; Stidmann and Wenceslas were seeing Chanor to the door; then Wenceslas and Stidmann came in again.
Stidmann, an artist in vogue in the world of journalists, famous actresses, and courtesans of the better class, was a young man of fashion whom Valerie much wished to see in her rooms; indeed, he had already been introduced to her by Claude Vignon. Stidmann had lately broken off an intimacy with Madame Schontz, who had married some months since and gone to live in the country. Valerie and Lisbeth, hearing of this upheaval from Claude Vignon, thought it well to get Steinbock's friend to visit in the Rue Vanneau.
Stidmann, out of good feeling, went rarely to the Steinbocks'; and as it happened that Lisbeth was not present when he was introduced by Claude Vignon, she now saw him for the first time. As she watched this noted artist, she caught certain glances from his eyes at Hortense, which suggested to her the possibility of offering him to the Countess Steinbock as a consolation if Wenceslas should be false to her. In point of fact, Stidmann was reflecting that if Steinbock were not his friend, Hortense, the young and superbly beautiful countess, would be an adorable mistress; it was this very notion, controlled by honor, that kept him away from the house. Lisbeth was quick to mark the significant awkwardness that troubles a man in the presence of a woman with whom he will not allow himself to flirt.
"Very good-looking – that young man," said she in a whisper to Hortense.
"Oh, do you think so?" she replied. "I never noticed him."
"Stidmann, my good fellow," said Wenceslas, in an undertone to his friend, "we are on no ceremony, you and I – we have some business to settle with this old girl."
Stidmann bowed to the ladies and went away.
"It is settled," said Wenceslas, when he came in from taking leave of Stidmann. "But there are six months' work to be done, and we must live meanwhile."
"There are my diamonds," cried the young Countess, with the impetuous heroism of a loving woman.
A tear rose in Wenceslas' eye.
"Oh, I am going to work," said he, sitting down by his wife and drawing her on to his knee. "I will do odd jobs – a wedding chest, bronze groups – "
"But, my children," said Lisbeth; "for, as you know, you will be my heirs, and I shall leave you a very comfortable sum, believe me, especially if you help me to marry the Marshal; nay, if we succeed in that quickly, I will take you all to board with me – you and Adeline. We should live very happily together. – But for the moment, listen to the voice of my long experience. Do not fly to the Mont-de-Piete; it is the ruin of the borrower. I have always found that when the interest was due, those who had pledged their things had nothing wherewith to pay up, and then all is lost. I can get you a loan at five per cent on your note of hand."
"Oh, we are saved!" said Hortense.
"Well, then, child, Wenceslas had better come with me to see the lender, who will oblige him at my request. It is Madame Marneffe. If you flatter her a little – for she is as vain as a parvenue– she will get you out of the scrape in the most obliging way. Come yourself and see her, my dear Hortense."
Hortense looked at her husband with the expression a man condemned to death must wear on his way to the scaffold.
"Claude Vignon took Stidmann there," said Wenceslas. "He says it is a very pleasant house."
Hortense's head fell. What she felt can only be expressed in one word; it was not pain; it was illness.
"But, my dear Hortense, you must learn something of life!" exclaimed Lisbeth, understanding the eloquence of her cousin's looks. "Otherwise, like your mother, you will find yourself abandoned in a deserted room, where you will weep like Calypso on the departure of Ulysses, and at an age when there is no hope of Telemachus – " she added, repeating a jest of Madame Marneffe's. "We have to regard the people in the world as tools which we can make use of or let alone, according as they can serve our turn. Make use of Madame Marneffe now, my dears, and let her alone by and by. Are you afraid lest Wenceslas, who worships you, should fall in love with a woman four or five years older than himself, as yellow as a bundle of field peas, and – ?"
"I would far rather pawn my diamonds," said Hortense. "Oh, never go there, Wenceslas! – It is hell!"
"Hortense is right," said Steinbock, kissing his wife.
"Thank you, my dearest," said Hortense, delighted. "My husband is an angel, you see, Lisbeth. He does not gamble, he goes nowhere without me; if he only could stick to work – oh, I should be too happy. Why take us on show to my father's mistress, a woman who is ruining him and is the cause of troubles that are killing my heroic mother?"
"My child, that is not where the cause of your father's ruin lies. It was his singer who ruined him, and then your marriage!" replied her cousin. "Bless me! why, Madame Marneffe is of the greatest use to him. However, I must tell no tales."
"You have a good word for everybody, dear Betty – "
Hortense was called into the garden by hearing the child cry; Lisbeth was left alone with Wenceslas.
"You have an angel for your wife, Wenceslas!" said she. "Love her as you ought; never give her cause for grief."
"Yes, indeed, I love her so well that I do not tell her all," replied Wenceslas; "but to you, Lisbeth, I may confess the truth. – If I took my wife's diamonds to the Monte-de-Piete, we should be no further forward."
"Then borrow of Madame Marneffe," said Lisbeth. "Persuade Hortense, Wenceslas, to let you go there, or else, bless me! go there without telling her."
"That is what I was thinking of," replied Wenceslas, "when I refused for fear of grieving Hortense."
"Listen to me; I care too much for you both not to warn you of your danger. If you go there, hold your heart tight in both hands, for the woman is a witch. All who see her adore her; she is so wicked, so inviting! She fascinates men like a masterpiece. Borrow her money, but do not leave your soul in pledge. I should never be happy again if you were false to Hortense – here she is! not another word! I will settle the matter."
"Kiss Lisbeth, my darling," said Wenceslas to his wife. "She will help us out of our difficulties by lending us her savings."
And he gave Lisbeth a look which she understood.
"Then, I hope you mean to work, my dear treasure," said Hortense.
"Yes, indeed," said the artist. "I will begin to-morrow."
"To-morrow is our ruin!" said his wife, with a smile.
"Now, my dear child! say yourself whether some hindrance has not come in the way every day; some obstacle or business?"
"Yes, very true, my love."
"Here!" cried Steinbock, striking his brow, "here I have swarms of ideas! I mean to astonish all my enemies. I am going to design a service in the German style of the sixteenth century; the romantic style: foliage twined with insects, sleeping children, newly invented monsters, chimeras – real chimeras, such as we dream of! – I see it all! It will be undercut, light, and yet crowded. Chanor was quite amazed. – And I wanted some encouragement, for the last article on Montcornet's monument had been crushing."
At a moment in the course of the day when Lisbeth and Wenceslas were left together, the artist agreed to go on the morrow to see Madame Marneffe – he either would win his wife's consent, or he would go without telling her.
Valerie, informed the same evening of this success, insisted that Hulot should go to invite Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Steinbock to dinner; for she was beginning to tyrannize over him as women of that type tyrannize over old men, who trot round town, and go to make interest with every one who is necessary to the interests or the vanity of their task-mistress.
Next evening Valerie armed herself for conquest by making such a toilet as a Frenchwoman can devise when she wishes to make the most of herself. She studied her appearance in this great work as a man going out to fight a duel practises his feints and lunges. Not a speck, not a wrinkle was to be seen. Valerie was at her whitest, her softest, her sweetest. And certain little "patches" attracted the eye.
It is commonly supposed that the patch of the eighteenth century is out of date or out of fashion; that is a mistake. In these days women, more ingenious perhaps than of yore, invite a glance through the opera-glass by other audacious devices. One is the first to hit on a rosette in her hair with a diamond in the centre, and she attracts every eye for a whole evening; another revives the hair-net, or sticks a dagger through the twist to suggest a garter; this one wears velvet bands round her wrists, that one appears in lace lippets. These valiant efforts, an Austerlitz of vanity or of love, then set the fashion for lower spheres by the time the inventive creatress has originated something new. This evening, which Valerie meant to be a success for her, she had placed three patches. She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade. Madame Steinbock's was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her. This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled her followers so much, that Montes asked her:
"What have you done to yourself this evening?" – Then she put on a rather wide black velvet neck-ribbon, which showed off the whiteness of her skin. One patch took the place of the assassine of our grandmothers. And Valerie pinned the sweetest rosebud into her bodice, just in the middle above the stay-busk, and in the daintiest little hollow! It was enough to make every man under thirty drop his eyelids.
"I am as sweet as a sugar-plum," said she to herself, going through her attitudes before the glass, exactly as a dancer practises her curtesies.
Lisbeth had been to market, and the dinner was to be one of those superfine meals which Mathurine had been wont to cook for her Bishop when he entertained the prelate of the adjoining diocese.
Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together, just at six. An ordinary, or, if you will, a natural woman would have hastened at the announcement of a name so eagerly longed for; but Valerie, though ready since five o'clock, remained in her room, leaving her three guests together, certain that she was the subject of their conversation or of their secret thoughts. She herself had arranged the drawing-room, laying out the pretty trifles produced in Paris and nowhere else, which reveal the woman and announce her presence: albums bound in enamel or embroidered with beads, saucers full of pretty rings, marvels of Sevres or Dresden mounted exquisitely by Florent and Chanor, statues, books, all the frivolities which cost insane sums, and which passion orders of the makers in its first delirium – or to patch up its last quarrel.
Besides, Valerie was in the state of intoxication that comes of triumph. She had promised to marry Crevel if Marneffe should die; and the amorous Crevel had transferred to the name of Valerie Fortin bonds bearing ten thousand francs a year, the sum-total of what he had made in railway speculations during the past three years, the returns on the capital of a hundred thousand crowns which he had at first offered to the Baronne Hulot. So Valerie now had an income of thirty-two thousand francs.
Crevel had just committed himself to a promise of far greater magnitude than this gift of his surplus. In the paroxysm of rapture which his Duchess had given him from two to four – he gave this fine title to Madame de Marneffe to complete the illusion – for Valerie had surpassed herself in the Rue du Dauphin that afternoon, he had thought well to encourage her in her promised fidelity by giving her the prospect of a certain little mansion, built in the Rue Barbette by an imprudent contractor, who now wanted to sell it. Valerie could already see herself in this delightful residence, with a fore-court and a garden, and keeping a carriage!
"What respectable life can ever procure so much in so short a time, or so easily?" said she to Lisbeth as she finished dressing. Lisbeth was to dine with Valerie that evening, to tell Steinbock those things about the lady which nobody can say about herself.
Madame Marneffe, radiant with satisfaction, came into the drawing-room with modest grace, followed by Lisbeth dressed in black and yellow to set her off.
"Good-evening, Claude," said she, giving her hand to the famous old critic.
Claude Vignon, like many another, had become a political personage – a word describing an ambitious man at the first stage of his career. The political personage of 1840 represents, in some degree, the Abbe of the eighteenth century. No drawing-room circle is complete without one.
"My dear, this is my cousin, Count Steinbock," said Lisbeth, introducing Wenceslas, whom Valerie seemed to have overlooked.
"Oh yes, I recognized Monsieur le Comte," replied Valerie with a gracious bow to the artist. "I often saw you in the Rue du Doyenne, and I had the pleasure of being present at your wedding. – It would be difficult, my dear," said she to Lisbeth, "to forget your adopted son after once seeing him. – It is most kind of you, Monsieur Stidmann," she went on, "to have accepted my invitation at such short notice; but necessity knows no law. I knew you to be the friend of both these gentlemen. Nothing is more dreary, more sulky, than a dinner where all the guests are strangers, so it was for their sake that I hailed you in – but you will come another time for mine, I hope? – Say that you will."
And for a few minutes she moved about the room with Stidmann, wholly occupied with him.
Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named Beauvisage.
This individual, a provincial Crevel, one of the men created to make up the crowd in the world, voted under the banner of Giraud, a State Councillor, and Victorin Hulot. These two politicians were trying to form a nucleus of progressives in the loose array of the Conservative Party. Giraud himself occasionally spent the evening at Madame Marneffe's, and she flattered herself that she should also capture Victorin Hulot; but the puritanical lawyer had hitherto found excuses for refusing to accompany his father and father-in-law. It seemed to him criminal to be seen in the house of the woman who cost his mother so many tears. Victorin Hulot was to the puritans of political life what a pious woman is among bigots.
Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to pick up the Paris style. This man, one of the outer stones of the Chamber, was forming himself under the auspices of this delicious and fascinating Madame Marneffe. Introduced here by Crevel, he had accepted him, at her instigation, as his model and master. He consulted him on every point, took the address of his tailor, imitated him, and tried to strike the same attitudes. In short, Crevel was his Great Man.
Valerie, surrounded by these bigwigs and the three artists, and supported by Lisbeth, struck Wenceslas as a really superior woman, all the more so because Claude Vignon spoke of her like a man in love.
"She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon's petticoats!" said the veteran critic. "You may please her in an evening if you have the wit; but as for making her love you – that would be a triumph to crown a man's ambition and fill up his life."
Valerie, while seeming cold and heedless of her former neighbor, piqued his vanity, quite unconsciously indeed, for she knew nothing of the Polish character. There is in the Slav a childish element, as there is in all these primitively wild nations which have overflowed into civilization rather than that they have become civilized. The race has spread like an inundation, and has covered a large portion of the globe. It inhabits deserts whose extent is so vast that it expands at its ease; there is no jostling there, as there is in Europe, and civilization is impossible without the constant friction of minds and interests. The Ukraine, Russia, the plains by the Danube, in short, the Slav nations, are a connecting link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism. Thus the Pole, the wealthiest member of the Slav family, has in his character all the childishness and inconsistency of a beardless race. He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench and sweep away buildings, like those aerial avalanches he is lost in the first pool and melts into water. Man always assimilates something from the surroundings in which he lives. Perpetually at strife with the Turk, the Pole has imbibed a taste for Oriental splendor; he often sacrifices what is needful for the sake of display. The men dress themselves out like women, yet the climate has given them the tough constitution of Arabs.
The Pole, sublime in suffering, has tired his oppressors' arms by sheer endurance of beating; and, in the nineteenth century, has reproduced the spectacle presented by the early Christians. Infuse only ten per cent of English cautiousness into the frank and open Polish nature, and the magnanimous white eagle would at this day be supreme wherever the two-headed eagle has sneaked in. A little Machiavelism would have hindered Poland from helping to save Austria, who has taken a share of it; from borrowing from Prussia, the usurer who had undermined it; and from breaking up as soon as a division was first made.