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The Alkahest

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1453 · 423,866 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Alkahest

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #1453]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1453

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALKAHEST ***

THE ALKAHEST


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



  DEDICATION

  To Madame Josephine Delannoy nee Doumerc.

  Madame, may God grant that this, my book, may live longer than I,
  for then the gratitude which I owe to you, and which I hope will
  equal your almost maternal kindness to me, would last beyond the
  limits prescribed for human affection. This sublime privilege of
  prolonging life in our hearts for a time by the life of the work
  we leave behind us would be (if we could only be sure of gaining
  it at last) a reward indeed for all the labor undertaken by those
  who aspire to such an immortality.

  Yet again I say--May God grant it!

  DE BALZAC.





THE ALKAHEST

(THE HOUSE OF CLAES)




CHAPTER I

There is a house at Douai in the rue de Paris, whose aspect, interior
arrangements, and details have preserved, to a greater degree than those
of other domiciles, the characteristics of the old Flemish buildings, so
naively adapted to the patriarchal manners and customs of that excellent
land. Before describing this house it may be well, in the interest
of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic
preliminaries,--since they have roused a protest from certain ignorant
and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the
generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without
gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so closely
allied to architecture that the majority of observers can reconstruct
nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life, from the
remains of public monuments or the relics of a home. Archaeology is to
social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic
tells the tale of a society, as the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus
opens up a creative epoch. All things are linked together, and all
are therefore deducible. Causes suggest effects, effects lead back to
causes. Science resuscitates even the warts of the past ages.

Hence the keen interest inspired by an architectural description,
provided the imagination of the writer does not distort essential facts.
The mind is enabled by rigid deduction to link it with the past; and to
man, the past is singularly like the future; tell him what has been,
and you seldom fail to show him what will be. It is rare indeed that
the picture of a locality where lives are lived does not recall to
some their dawning hopes, to others their wasted faith. The comparison
between a present which disappoints man’s secret wishes and a future
which may realize them, is an inexhaustible source of sadness or of
placid content.

Thus, it is almost impossible not to feel a certain tender sensibility
over a picture of Flemish life, if the accessories are clearly given.
Why so? Perhaps, among other forms of existence, it offers the best
conclusion to man’s uncertainties. It has its social festivities, its
family ties, and the easy affluence which proves the stability of its
comfortable well-being; it does not lack repose amounting almost to
beatitude; but, above all, it expresses the calm monotony of a frankly
sensuous happiness, where enjoyment stifles desire by anticipating it.
Whatever value a passionate soul may attach to the tumultuous life
of feeling, it never sees without emotion the symbols of this Flemish
nature, where the throbbings of the heart are so well regulated that
superficial minds deny the heart’s existence. The crowd prefers
the abnormal force which overflows to that which moves with steady
persistence. The world has neither time nor patience to realize the
immense power concealed beneath an appearance of uniformity. Therefore,
to impress this multitude carried away on the current of existence,
passion, like a great artist, is compelled to go beyond the mark, to
exaggerate, as did Michael Angelo, Bianca Capello, Mademoiselle de la
Valliere, Beethoven, and Paganini. Far-seeing minds alone disapprove
such excess, and respect only the energy represented by a finished
execution whose perfect quiet charms superior men. The life of this
essentially thrifty people amply fulfils the conditions of happiness
which the masses desire as the lot of the average citizen.

A refined materialism is stamped on all the habits of Flemish life.
English comfort is harsh in tone and arid in color; whereas the
old-fashioned Flemish interiors rejoice the eye with their mellow tints,
and the feelings with their genuine heartiness. There, work implies
no weariness, and the pipe is a happy adaptation of Neapolitan
“far-niente.” Thence comes the peaceful sentiment in Art (its most
essential condition), patience, and the element which renders its
creations durable, namely, conscience. Indeed, the Flemish character
lies in the two words, patience and conscience; words which seem at
first to exclude the richness of poetic light and shade, and to make the
manners and customs of the country as flat as its vast plains, as cold
as its foggy skies. And yet it is not so. Civilization has brought her
power to bear, and has modified all things, even the effects of climate.
If we observe attentively the productions of various parts of the globe,
we are surprised to find that the prevailing tints from the temperate
zones are gray or fawn, while the more brilliant colors belong to the
products of the hotter climates. The manners and customs of a country
must naturally conform to this law of nature.

Flanders, which in former times was essentially dun-colored and
monotonous in tint, learned the means of irradiating its smoky
atmosphere through its political vicissitudes, which brought it under
the successive dominion of Burgundy, Spain, and France, and threw
it into fraternal relations with Germany and Holland. From Spain it
acquired the luxury of scarlet dyes and shimmering satins, tapestries of
vigorous design, plumes, mandolins, and courtly bearing. In exchange for
its linen and its laces, it brought from Venice that fairy glass-ware in
which wine sparkles and seems the mellower. From Austria it learned the
ponderous diplomacy which, to use a popular saying, takes three steps
backward to one forward; while its trade with India poured into it the
grotesque designs of China and the marvels of Japan.

And yet, in spite of its patience in gathering such treasures, its
tenacity in parting with no possession once gained, its endurance of all
things, Flanders was considered nothing more than the general storehouse
of Europe, until the day when the discovery of tobacco brought into
one smoky outline the scattered features of its national physiognomy.
Thenceforth, and notwithstanding the parcelling out of their territory,
the Flemings became a people homogeneous through their pipes and
beer.[*]

    [*] Flanders was parcelled into three divisions; of which Eastern
    Flanders, capital Ghent, and Western Flanders, capital Bruges, are
    two provinces of Belgium. French Flanders, capital Lille, is the
    Departement du Nord of France. Douai, about twenty miles from
    Lille, is the chief town of the arrondissement du Nord.

After assimilating, by constant sober regulation of conduct, the
products and the ideas of its masters and its neighbors, this country of
Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for itself
an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which
bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its ideality and
produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of
comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and
epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and
trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight
oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment. There men look
exclusively to the thing that is: their thoughts are so scrupulously
bent on supplying the wants of this life that they have never risen, in
any direction, above the level of this present earth. The sole idea
they have ever conceived of the future is that of a thrifty, prosaic
statecraft: their revolutionary vigor came from a domestic desire to
live as they liked, with their elbows on the table, and to take their
ease under the projecting roofs of their own porches.

The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence which
comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere, that
craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus the
compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted
on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in
the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is half-done,--neither
houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a
monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and that
of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient industry,
are hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked to show in
human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no better
than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was
proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way, and without the
incitements of glory, for the welfare of his Free-town.

Yet we shall find a tender and poetic side to this patriarchal life,
which will come naturally to the surface in the description of an
ancient house which, at the period when this history begins, was one of
the last in Douai to preserve the old-time characteristics of Flemish
life.

Of all the towns in the Departement du Nord, Douai is, alas, the most
modernized: there the innovating spirit has made the greatest strides,
and the love of social progress is the most diffused. There the old
buildings are daily disappearing, and the manners and customs of
a venerable past are being rapidly obliterated. Parisian ideas and
fashions and modes of life now rule the day, and soon nothing will be
left of that ancient Flemish life but the warmth of its hospitality, its
traditional Spanish courtesy, and the wealth and cleanliness of Holland.
Mansions of white stone are replacing the old brick buildings, and
the cosy comfort of Batavian interiors is fast yielding before the
capricious elegance of Parisian novelties.

The house in which the events of this history occurred stands at about
the middle of the rue de Paris, and has been known at Douai for more
than two centuries as the House of Claes. The Van Claes were formerly
one of the great families of craftsmen to whom, in various lines of
production, the Netherlands owed a commercial supremacy which it has
never lost. For a long period of time the Claes lived at Ghent, and
were, from generation to generation, the syndics of the powerful Guild
of Weavers. When the great city revolted under Charles V., who tried
to suppress its privileges, the head of the Claes family was so deeply
compromised in the rebellion that, foreseeing a catastrophe and bound to
share the fate of his associates, he secretly sent wife, children, and
property to France before the Emperor invested the town. The syndic’s
forebodings were justified. Together with other burghers who were
excluded from the capitulation, he was hanged as a rebel, though he was,
in reality, the defender of the liberties of Ghent.

The death of Claes and his associates bore fruit. Their needless
execution cost the King of Spain the greater part of his possessions in
the Netherlands. Of all the seed sown in the earth, the blood of martyrs
gives the quickest harvest. When Philip the Second, who punished revolt
through two generations, stretched his iron sceptre over Douai, the
Claes preserved their great wealth by allying themselves in marriage
with the very noble family of Molina, whose elder branch, then poor,
thus became rich enough to buy the county of Nourho which they had long
held titularly in the kingdom of Leon.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after vicissitudes which
are of no interest to our present purpose, the family of Claes was
represented at Douai in the person of Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina,
Comte de Nourho, who preferred to be called simply Balthazar Claes. Of
the immense fortune amassed by his ancestors, who had kept in motion
over a thousand looms, there remained to him some fifteen thousand
francs a year from landed property in the arrondissement of Douai, and
the house in the rue de Paris, whose furniture in itself was a fortune.
As to the family possessions in Leon, they had been in litigation
between the Molinas of Douai and the branch of the family which remained
in Spain. The Molinas of Leon won the domain and assumed the title of
Comtes de Nourho, though the Claes alone had a legal right to it. But
the pride of a Belgian burgher was superior to the haughty arrogance of
Castile: after the civil rights were instituted, Balthazar Claes cast
aside the ragged robes of his Spanish nobility for his more illustrious
descent from the Ghent martyr.

The patriotic sentiment was so strongly developed in the families exiled
under Charles V. that, to the very close of the eighteenth century, the
Claes remained faithful to the manners and customs and traditions of
their ancestors. They married into none but the purest burgher families,
and required a certain number of aldermen and burgomasters in the
pedigree of every bride-elect before admitting her to the family. They
sought their wives in Bruges or Ghent, in Liege or in Holland; so that
the time-honored domestic customs might be perpetuated around their
hearthstones. This social group became more and more restricted, until,
at the close of the last century, it mustered only some seven or eight
families of the parliamentary nobility, whose manners and flowing robes
of office and magisterial gravity (partly Spanish) harmonized well with
the habits of their life.

The inhabitants of Douai held the family in a religious esteem that was
well-nigh superstition. The sturdy honesty, the untainted loyalty of
the Claes, their unfailing decorum of manners and conduct, made them the
objects of a reverence which found expression in the name,--the House
of Claes. The whole spirit of ancient Flanders breathed in that mansion,
which afforded to the lovers of burgher antiquities a type of the modest
houses which the wealthy craftsmen of the Middle Ages constructed for
their homes.

The chief ornament of the facade was an oaken door, in two sections,
studded with nails driven in the pattern of a quineunx, in the centre of
which the Claes pride had carved a pair of shuttles. The recess of the
doorway, which was built of freestone, was topped by a pointed arch
bearing a little shrine surmounted by a cross, in which was a statuette
of Sainte-Genevieve plying her distaff. Though time had left its mark
upon the delicate workmanship of portal and shrine, the extreme care
taken of it by the servants of the house allowed the passers-by to note
all its details.

The casing of the door, formed by fluted pilasters, was dark gray in
color, and so highly polished that it shone as if varnished. On either
side of the doorway, on the ground-floor, were two windows, which
resembled all the other windows of the house. The casing of white stone
ended below the sill in a richly carved shell, and rose above the window
in an arch, supported at its apex by the head-piece of a cross, which
divided the glass sashes in four unequal parts; for the transversal bar,
placed at the height of that in a Latin cross, made the lower sashes of
the window nearly double the height of the upper, the latter rounding
at the sides into the arch. The coping of the arch was ornamented with
three rows of brick, placed one above the other, the bricks alternately
projecting or retreating to the depth of an inch, giving the effect of
a Greek moulding. The glass panes, which were small and diamond-shaped,
were set in very slender leading, painted red. The walls of the house,
of brick jointed with white mortar, were braced at regular distances,
and at the angles of the house, by stone courses.

The first floor was pierced by five windows, the second by three,
while the attic had only one large circular opening in five divisions,
surrounded by a freestone moulding and placed in the centre of the
triangular pediment defined by the gable-roof, like the rose-window of
a cathedral. At the peak was a vane in the shape of a weaver’s shuttle
threaded with flax. Both sides of the large triangular pediment which
formed the wall of the gable were dentelled squarely into something like
steps, as low down as the string-course of the upper floor, where the
rain from the roof fell to right and left of the house through the jaws
of a fantastic gargoyle. A freestone foundation projected like a step at
the base of the house; and on either side of the entrance, between the
two windows, was a trap-door, clamped by heavy iron bands, through which
the cellars were entered,--a last vestige of ancient usages.

From the time the house was built, this facade had been carefully
cleaned twice a year. If a little mortar fell from between the bricks,
the crack was instantly filled up. The sashes, the sills, the copings,
were dusted oftener than the most precious sculptures in the Louvre. The
front of the house bore no signs of decay; notwithstanding the deepened
color which age had given to the bricks, it was as well preserved as
a choice old picture, or some rare book cherished by an amateur, which
would be ever new were it not for the blistering of our climate and the
effect of gases, whose pernicious breath threatens our own health.

The cloudy skies and humid atmosphere of Flanders, and the shadows
produced by the narrowness of the street, sometimes diminished the
brilliancy which the old house derived from its cleanliness; moreover,
the very care bestowed upon it made it rather sad and chilling to the
eye. A poet might have wished some leafage about the shrine, a little
moss in the crevices of the freestone, a break in the even courses of
the brick; he would have longed for a swallow to build her nest in
the red coping that roofed the arches of the windows. The precise and
immaculate air of this facade, a little worn by perpetual rubbing, gave
the house a tone of severe propriety and estimable decency which would
have driven a romanticist out of the neighborhood, had he happened to
take lodgings over the way.

When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which hung
from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the servant-woman,
coming from within, had admitted him through the side of the double-door
in which was a small grated loop-hole, that half of the door escaped
from her hand and swung back by its own weight with a solemn, ponderous
sound that echoed along the roof of a wide paved archway and through the
depths of the house, as though the door had been of iron. This archway,
painted to resemble marble, always clean and daily sprinkled with fresh
sand, led into a large court-yard paved with smooth square stones of
a greenish color. On the left were the linen-rooms, kitchens, and
servants’ hall; to the right, the wood-house, coal-house, and offices,
whose doors, walls, and windows were decorated with designs kept
exquisitely clean. The daylight, threading its way between four red
walls chequered with white lines, caught rosy tints and reflections
which gave a mysterious grace and fantastic appearance to faces, and
even to trifling details.

A second house, exactly like the building on the street, and called in
Flanders the “back-quarter,” stood at the farther end of the court-yard,
and was used exclusively as the family dwelling. The first room on the
ground-floor was a parlor, lighted by two windows on the court-yard,
and two more looking out upon a garden which was of the same size as the
house. Two glass doors, placed exactly opposite to each other, led at
one end of the room to the garden, at the other to the court-yard, and
were in line with the archway and the street door; so that a visitor
entering the latter could see through to the greenery which draped the
lower end of the garden. The front building, which was reserved for
receptions and the lodging-rooms of guests, held many objects of art and
accumulated wealth, but none of them equalled in the eyes of a Claes,
nor indeed in the judgment of a connoisseur, the treasures contained in
the parlor, where for over two centuries the family life had glided on.

The Claes who died for the liberties of Ghent, and who might in these
days be thought a mere ordinary craftsman if the historian omitted to
say that he possessed over forty thousand silver marks, obtained by
the manufacture of sail-cloth for the all-powerful Venetian navy,--this
Claes had a friend in the famous sculptor in wood, Van Huysum of Bruges.
The artist had dipped many a time into the purse of the rich craftsman.
Some time before the rebellion of the men of Ghent, Van Huysum, grown
rich himself, had secretly carved for his friend a wall-decoration in
ebony, representing the chief scenes in the life of Van Artevelde,--that
brewer of Ghent who, for a brief hour, was King of Flanders. This
wall-covering, of which there were no less than sixty panels, contained
about fourteen hundred principal figures, and was held to be Van
Huysum’s masterpiece. The officer appointed to guard the burghers
whom Charles V. determined to hang when he re-entered his native town,
proposed, it is said, to Van Claes to let him escape if he would give
him Van Huysum’s great work; but the weaver had already despatched it to
Douai.

The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving, which
Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr’s memory, came to Douai to
frame in wood painted in lapis-lazuli with threads of gold, is therefore
the most complete work of this master, whose least carvings now sell for
nearly their weight in gold. Hanging over the fire-place, Van Claes
the martyr, painted by Titian in his robes as president of the Court
of Parchons, still seemed the head of the family, who venerated him as
their greatest man. The chimney-piece, originally in stone with a very
high mantle-shelf, had been made over in marble during the last century;
on it now stood an old clock and two candlesticks with five twisted
branches, in bad taste, but of solid silver. The four windows were
draped by wide curtains of red damask with a flowered black design,
lined with white silk; the furniture, covered with the same material,
had been renovated in the time of Louis XIV. The floor, evidently
modern, was laid in large squares of white wood bordered with strips
of oak. The ceiling, formed of many oval panels, in each of which Van
Huysum had carved a grotesque mask, had been respected and allowed to
keep the brown tones of the native Dutch oak.

In the four corners of this parlor were truncated columns, supporting
candelabra exactly like those on the mantle-shelf; and a round table
stood in the middle of the room. Along the walls card-tables were
symmetrically placed. On two gilded consoles with marble slabs there
stood, at the period when this history begins, two glass globes filled
with water, in which, above a bed of sand and shells, red and gold and
silver fish were swimming about. The room was both brilliant and sombre.
The ceiling necessarily absorbed the light and reflected none. Although
on the garden side all was bright and glowing, and the sunshine danced
upon the ebony carvings, the windows on the court-yard admitted
so little light that the gold threads in the lapis-lazuli scarcely
glittered on the opposite wall. This parlor, which could be gorgeous
on a fine day, was usually, under the Flemish skies, filled with soft
shadows and melancholy russet tones, like those shed by the sun on the
tree-tops of the forests in autumn.

It is unnecessary to continue this description of the House of Claes, in
other parts of which many scenes of this history will occur: at present,
it is enough to make known its general arrangement.




CHAPTER II

Towards the end of August, 1812, on a Sunday evening after vespers, a
woman was sitting in a deep armchair placed before one of the windows
looking out upon the garden. The sun’s rays fell obliquely upon the
house and athwart the parlor, breaking into fantastic lights on the
carved panellings of the wall, and wrapping the woman in a crimson halo
projected through the damask curtains which draped the window. Even an
ordinary painter, had he sketched this woman at this particular moment,
would assuredly have produced a striking picture of a head that was full
of pain and melancholy. The attitude of the body, and that of the
feet stretched out before her, showed the prostration of one who loses
consciousness of physical being in the concentration of powers absorbed
in a fixed idea: she was following its gleams in the far future, just as
sometimes on the shores of the sea, we gaze at a ray of sunlight which
pierces the clouds and draws a luminous line to the horizon.

The hands of this woman hung nerveless outside the arms of her chair,
and her head, as if too heavy to hold up, lay back upon its cushions. A
dress of white cambric, very full and flowing, hindered any judgment
as to the proportions of her figure, and the bust was concealed by the
folds of a scarf crossed on the bosom and negligently knotted. If the
light had not thrown into relief her face, which she seemed to show
in preference to the rest of her person, it would still have been
impossible to escape riveting the attention exclusively upon it. Its
expression of stupefaction, which was cold and rigid despite hot tears
that were rolling from her eyes, would have struck the most thoughtless
mind. Nothing is more terrible to behold than excessive grief that is
rarely allowed to break forth, of which traces were left on this woman’s
face like lava congealed about a crater. She might have been a
dying mother compelled to leave her children in abysmal depths of
wretchedness, unable to bequeath them to any human protector.

The countenance of this lady, then about forty years of age and not
nearly so far from handsome as she had been in her youth, bore none of
the characteristics of a Flemish woman. Her thick black hair fell in
heavy curls upon her shoulders and about her cheeks. The forehead, very
prominent, and narrow at the temples, was yellow in tint, but beneath it
sparkled two black eyes that were capable of emitting flames. Her face,
altogether Spanish, dark skinned, with little color and pitted by the
small-pox, attracted the eye by the beauty of its oval, whose outline,
though slightly impaired by time, preserved a finished elegance and
dignity, and regained at times its full perfection when some effort of
the soul restored its pristine purity. The most noticeable feature in
this strong face was the nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, and
so sharply curved at the middle as to give the idea of an interior
malformation; yet there was an air of indescribable delicacy about it,
and the partition between the nostrils was so thin that a rosy light
shone through it. Though the lips, which were large and curved, betrayed
the pride of noble birth, their expression was one of kindliness and
natural courtesy.

The beauty of this vigorous yet feminine face might indeed be
questioned, but the face itself commanded attention. Short, deformed,
and lame, this woman remained all the longer unmarried because the world
obstinately refused to credit her with gifts of mind. Yet there were
men who were deeply stirred by the passionate ardor of that face and its
tokens of ineffable tenderness, and who remained under a charm that was
seemingly irreconcilable with such personal defects.

She was very like her grandfather, the Duke of Casa-Real, a grandee of
Spain. At this moment, when we first see her, the charm which in earlier
days despotically grasped the soul of poets and lovers of poesy now
emanated from that head with greater vigor than at any former period of
her life, spending itself, as it were, upon the void, and expressing a
nature of all-powerful fascination over men, though it was at the same
time powerless over destiny.

When her eyes turned from the glass globes, where they were gazing at
the fish they saw not, she raised them with a despairing action, as if
to invoke the skies. Her sufferings seemed of a kind that are told to
God alone. The silence was unbroken save for the chirp of crickets and
the shrill whirr of a few locusts, coming from the little garden then
hotter than an oven, and the dull sound of silver and plates, and the
moving of chairs in the adjoining room, where a servant was preparing to
serve the dinner.

At this moment, the distressed woman roused herself from her abstraction
and listened attentively; she took her handkerchief, wiped away her
tears, attempted to smile, and so resolutely effaced the expression of
pain that was stamped on every feature that she presently seemed in the
state of happy indifference which comes with a life exempt from
care. Whether it were that the habit of living in this house to which
infirmities confined her enabled her to perceive certain natural effects
that are imperceptible to the senses of others, but which persons under
the influence of excessive feeling are keen to discover, or whether
Nature, in compensation for her physical defects, had given her more
delicate sensations than better organized beings,--it is certain that
this woman had heard the steps of a man in a gallery built above the
kitchens and the servants’ hall, by which the front house communicated
with the “back-quarter.” The steps grew more distinct. Soon, without
possessing the power of this ardent creature to abolish space and meet
her other self, even a stranger would have heard the foot-fall of a man
upon the staircase which led down from the gallery to the parlor.

The sound of that step would have startled the most heedless being into
thought; it was impossible to hear it coolly. A precipitate, headlong
step produces fear. When a man springs forward and cries, “Fire!” his
feet speak as loudly as his voice. If this be so, then a contrary
gait ought not to cause less powerful emotion. The slow approach, the
dragging step of the coming man might have irritated an unreflecting
spectator; but an observer, or a nervous person, would undoubtedly have
felt something akin to terror at the measured tread of feet that seemed
devoid of life, and under which the stairs creaked loudly, as though two
iron weights were striking them alternately. The mind recognized at once
either the heavy, undecided step of an old man or the majestic tread of
a great thinker bearing the worlds with him.

When the man had reached the lowest stair, and had planted both feet
upon the tiled floor with a hesitating, uncertain movement, he stood
still for a moment on the wide landing which led on one side to the
servants’ hall, and on the other to the parlor through a door concealed
in the panelling of that room,--as was another door, leading from the
parlor to the dining-room. At this moment a slight shudder, like the
sensation caused by an electric spark, shook the woman seated in the
armchair; then a soft smile brightened her lips, and her face, moved by
the expectation of a pleasure, shone like that of an Italian Madonna.
She suddenly gained strength to drive her terrors back into the depths
of her heart. Then she turned her face to the panel of the wall which
she knew was about to open, and which in fact was now pushed in with
such brusque violence that the poor woman herself seemed jarred by the
shock.

Balthazar Claes suddenly appeared, made a few steps forward, did not
look at the woman, or if he looked at her did not see her, and stood
erect in the middle of the parlor, leaning his half-bowed head on his
right hand. A sharp pang to which the woman could not accustom herself,
although it was daily renewed, wrung her heart, dispelled her smile,
contracted the sallow forehead between the eyebrows, indenting that line
which the frequent expression of excessive feeling scores so deeply;
her eyes filled with tears, but she wiped them quickly as she looked at
Balthazar.

It was impossible not to be deeply impressed by this head of the family
of Claes. When young, he must have resembled the noble family martyr who
had threatened to be another Artevelde to Charles V.; but as he stood
there at this moment, he seemed over sixty years of age, though he
was only fifty; and this premature old age had destroyed the honorable
likeness. His tall figure was slightly bent,--either because his labors,
whatever they were, obliged him to stoop, or that the spinal column
was curved by the weight of his head. He had a broad chest and square
shoulders, but the lower parts of his body were lank and wasted, though
nervous; and this discrepancy in a physical organization evidently once
perfect puzzled the mind which endeavored to explain this anomalous
figure by some possible singularities of the man’s life.

His thick blond hair, ill cared-for, fell over his shoulders in the
Dutch fashion, and its very disorder was in keeping with the general
eccentricity of his person. His broad brow showed certain protuberances
which Gall identifies with poetic genius. His clear and full blue eyes
had the brusque vivacity which may be noticed in searchers for occult
causes. The nose, probably perfect in early life, was now elongated, and
the nostrils seemed to have gradually opened wider from an involuntary
tension of the olfactory muscles. The cheek-bones were very prominent,
which made the cheeks themselves, already withered, seem more sunken;
his mouth, full of sweetness, was squeezed in between the nose and a
short chin, which projected sharply. The shape of the face, however, was
long rather than oval, and the scientific doctrine which sees in every
human face a likeness to an animal would have found its confirmation in
that of Balthazar Claes, which bore a strong resemblance to a horse’s
head. The skin clung closely to the bones, as though some inward fire
were incessantly drying its juices. Sometimes, when he gazed into space,
as if to see the realization of his hopes, it almost seemed as though
the flames that devoured his soul were issuing from his nostrils.

The inspired feelings that animate great men shone forth on the pale
face furrowed with wrinkles, on the brow haggard with care like that of
an old monarch, but above all they gleamed in the sparkling eye, whose
fires were fed by chastity imposed by the tyranny of ideas and by the
inward consecration of a great intellect. The cavernous eyes seemed
to have sunk in their orbits through midnight vigils and the terrible
reaction of hopes destroyed, yet ceaselessly reborn. The zealous
fanaticism inspired by an art or a science was evident in this man;
it betrayed itself in the strange, persistent abstraction of his mind
expressed by his dress and bearing, which were in keeping with the
anomalous peculiarities of his person.

His large, hairy hands were dirty, and the nails, which were very long,
had deep black lines at their extremities. His shoes were not cleaned
and the shoe-strings were missing. Of all that Flemish household, the
master alone took the strange liberty of being slovenly. His black cloth
trousers were covered with stains, his waistcoat was unbuttoned, his
cravat awry, his greenish coat ripped at the seams,--completing an array
of signs, great and small, which in any other man would have betokened
a poverty begotten of vice, but which in Balthazar Claes was the
negligence of genius.

Vice and Genius too often produce the same effects; and this misleads
the common mind. What is genius but a long excess which squanders time
and wealth and physical powers, and leads more rapidly to a hospital
than the worst of passions? Men even seem to have more respect for vices
than for genius, since to the latter they refuse credit. The profits
accruing from the hidden labors of the brain are so remote that the
social world fears to square accounts with the man of learning in his
lifetime, preferring to get rid of its obligations by not forgiving his
misfortunes or his poverty.

If, in spite of this inveterate forgetfulness of the present, Balthazar
Claes had abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some sweet and
companionable meaning had revisited that thoughtful countenance, if the
fixed eyes had lost their rigid strain and shone with feeling, if he had
ever looked humanly about him and returned to the real life of common
things, it would indeed have been difficult not to do involuntary homage
to the winning beauty of his face and the gracious soul that would then
have shone from it. As it was, all who looked at him regretted that the
man belonged no more to the world at large, and said to one another: “He
must have been very handsome in his youth.” A vulgar error! Never was
Balthazar Claes’s appearance more poetic than at this moment. Lavater,
had he seen him, would fain have studied that head so full of patience,
of Flemish loyalty, and pure morality,--where all was broad and noble,
and passion seemed calm because it was strong.

The conduct of this man could not be otherwise than pure; his word
was sacred, his friendships seemed undeviating, his self-devotedness
complete: and yet the will to employ those qualities in patriotic
service, for the world or for the family, was directed, fatally,
elsewhere. This citizen, bound to guard the welfare of a household,
to manage property, to guide his children towards a noble future, was
living outside the line of his duty and his affections, in communion
with an attendant spirit. A priest might have thought him inspired by
the word of God; an artist would have hailed him as a great master; an
enthusiast would have taken him for a seer of the Swedenborgian faith.

At the present moment, the dilapidated, uncouth, and ruined clothes that
he wore contrasted strangely with the graceful elegance of the woman who
was sadly admiring him. Deformed persons who have intellect, or nobility
of soul, show an exquisite taste in their apparel. Either they dress
simply, convinced that their charm is wholly moral, or they make others
forget their imperfections by an elegance of detail which diverts the
eye and occupies the mind. Not only did this woman possess a noble soul,
but she loved Balthazar Claes with that instinct of the woman which
gives a foretaste of the communion of angels. Brought up in one of the
most illustrious families of Belgium, she would have learned good taste
had she not possessed it; and now, taught by the desire of constantly
pleasing the man she loved, she knew how to clothe herself admirably,
and without producing incongruity between her elegance and the defects
of her conformation. The bust, however, was defective in the shoulders
only, one of which was noticeably much larger than the other.

She looked out of the window into the court-yard, then towards the
garden, as if to make sure she was alone with Balthazar, and presently
said, in a gentle voice and with a look full of a Flemish woman’s
submissiveness,--for between these two love had long since driven out
the pride of her Spanish nature:--

“Balthazar, are you so very busy? this is the thirty-third Sunday since
you have been to mass or vespers.”

Claes did not answer; his wife bowed her head, clasped her hands,
and waited: she knew that his silence meant neither contempt nor
indifference, only a tyrannous preoccupation. Balthazar was one of those
beings who preserve deep in their souls and after long years all their
youthful delicacy of feeling; he would have thought it criminal to
wound by so much as a word a woman weighed down by the sense of physical
disfigurement. No man knew better than he that a look, a word, suffices
to blot out years of happiness, and is the more cruel because it
contrasts with the unfailing tenderness of the past: our nature leads us
to suffer more from one discord in our happiness than pleasure coming in
the midst of trouble can bring us joy.

Presently Balthazar appeared to waken; he looked quickly about him, and
said,--

“Vespers? Ah, yes! the children are at vespers.”

He made a few steps forward, and looked into the garden, where
magnificent tulips were growing on all sides; then he suddenly stopped
short as if brought up against a wall, and cried out,--

“Why should they not combine within a given time?”

“Is he going mad?” thought the wife, much terrified.

To give greater interest to the present scene, which was called forth
by the situation of their affairs, it is absolutely necessary to glance
back at the past lives of Balthazar Claes and the granddaughter of the
Duke of Casa-Real.

Towards the year 1783, Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina de Nourho, then
twenty-two years of age, was what is called in France a fine man. He
came to finish his education in Paris, where he acquired excellent
manners in the society of Madame d’Egmont, Count Horn, the Prince
of Aremberg, the Spanish ambassador, Helvetius, and other Frenchmen
originally from Belgium, or coming lately thence, whose birth or wealth
won them admittance among the great seigneurs who at that time gave the
tone to social life. Young Claes found several relations and friends
ready to launch him into the great world at the very moment when that
world was about to fall. Like other young men, he was at first more
attracted by glory and science than by the vanities of life. He
frequented the society of scientific men, particularly Lavoisier, who
at that time was better known to the world for his enormous fortune as
a “fermier-general” than for his discoveries in chemistry,--though later
the great chemist was to eclipse the man of wealth.

Balthazar grew enamored of the science which Lavoisier cultivated,
and became his devoted disciple; but he was young, and handsome as
Helvetius, and before long the Parisian women taught him to distil wit
and love exclusively. Though he had studied chemistry with such ardor
that Lavoisier commended him, he deserted science and his master for
those mistresses of fashion and good taste from whom young men take
finishing lessons in knowledge of life, and learn the usages of good
society, which in Europe forms, as it were, one family.

The intoxicating dream of social success lasted but a short time.
Balthazar left Paris, weary of a hollow existence which suited neither
his ardent soul nor his loving heart. Domestic life, so calm, so tender,
which the very name of Flanders recalled to him, seemed far more fitted
to his character and to the aspirations of his heart. No gilded Parisian
salon had effaced from his mind the harmonies of the panelled parlor and
the little garden where his happy childhood had slipped away. A man
must needs be without a home to remain in Paris,--Paris, the city of
cosmopolitans, of men who wed the world, and clasp her with the arms of
Science, Art, or Power.

The son of Flanders came back to Douai, like La Fontaine’s pigeon to
its nest; he wept with joy as he re-entered the town on the day of the
Gayant procession,--Gayant, the superstitious luck of Douai, the glory
of Flemish traditions, introduced there at the time the Claes family
had emigrated from Ghent. The death of Balthazar’s father and mother had
left the old mansion deserted, and the young man was occupied for a time
in settling its affairs. His first grief over, he wished to marry; he
needed the domestic happiness whose every religious aspect had fastened
upon his mind. He even followed the family custom of seeking a wife in
Ghent, or at Bruges, or Antwerp; but it happened that no woman whom he
met there suited him. Undoubtedly, he had certain peculiar ideas as
to marriage; from his youth he had been accused of never following the
beaten track.

One day, at the house of a relation in Ghent, he heard a young lady,
then living in Brussels, spoken of in a manner which gave rise to a long
discussion. Some said that the beauty of Mademoiselle de Temninck was
destroyed by the imperfections of her figure; others declared that she
was perfect in spite of her defects. Balthazar’s old cousin, at whose
house the discussion took place, assured his guests that, handsome or
not, she had a soul that would make him marry her were he a marrying
man; and he told how she had lately renounced her share of her parents’
property to enable her brother to make a marriage worthy of his name;
thus preferring his happiness to her own, and sacrificing her future
to his interests,--for it was not to be supposed that Mademoiselle de
Temninck would marry late in life and without property when, young and
wealthy, she had met with no aspirant.

A few days later, Balthazar Claes made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle
de Temninck; with whom he fell deeply in love. At first, Josephine de
Temninck thought herself the object of a mere caprice, and refused to
listen to Monsieur Claes; but passion is contagious; and to a poor girl
who was lame and ill-made, the sense of inspiring love in a young and
handsome man carries with it such strong seduction that she finally
consented to allow him to woo her.

It would need a volume to paint the love of a young girl humbly
submissive to the verdict of a world that calls her plain, while she
feels within herself the irresistible charm which comes of sensibility
and true feeling. It involves fierce jealousy of happiness, freaks of
cruel vengeance against some fancied rival who wins a glance,--emotions,
terrors, unknown to the majority of women, and which ought, therefore,
to be more than indicated. The doubt, the dramatic doubt of love, is the
keynote of this analysis, where certain souls will find once more the
lost, but unforgotten, poetry of their early struggles; the passionate
exaltations of the heart which the face must not betray; the fear
that we may not be understood, and the boundless joy of being so; the
hesitations of the soul which recoils upon itself, and the magnetic
propulsions which give to the eyes an infinitude of shades; the
promptings to suicide caused by a word, dispelled by an intonation;
trembling glances which veil an inward daring; sudden desires to speak
and act that are paralyzed by their own violence; the secret eloquence
of common phrases spoken in a quivering voice; the mysterious workings
of that pristine modesty of soul and that divine discernment which
lead to hidden generosities, and give so exquisite a flavor to silent
devotion; in short, all the loveliness of young love, and the weaknesses
of its power.

Mademoiselle Josephine de Temninck was coquettish from nobility of soul.
The sense of her obvious imperfections made her as difficult to win as
the handsomest of women. The fear of some day displeasing the eye roused
her pride, destroyed her trustfulness, and gave her the courage to hide
in the depths of her heart that dawning happiness which other women
delight in making known by their manners,--wearing it proudly, like a
coronet. The more love urged her towards Balthazar, the less she dared
to express her feelings. The glance, the gesture, the question and
answer as it were of a pretty woman, so flattering to the man she loves,
would they not be in her case mere humiliating speculation? A beautiful
woman can be her natural self,--the world overlooks her little follies
or her clumsiness; whereas a single criticising glance checks the
noblest expression on the lips of an ugly woman, adds to the ill-grace
of her gesture, gives timidity to her eyes and awkwardness to her whole
bearing. She knows too well that to her alone the world condones no
faults; she is denied the right to repair them; indeed, the chance to do
so is never given. This necessity of being perfect and on her guard at
every moment, must surely chill her faculties and numb their exercise?
Such a woman can exist only in an atmosphere of angelic forbearance.
Where are the hearts from which forbearance comes with no alloy of
bitter and stinging pity.

These thoughts, to which the codes of social life had accustomed her,
and the sort of consideration more wounding than insult shown to her by
the world,--a consideration which increases a misfortune by making it
apparent,--oppressed Mademoiselle de Temninck with a constant sense of
embarrassment, which drove back into her soul its happiest expression,
and chilled and stiffened her attitudes, her speech, her looks. Loving
and beloved, she dared to be eloquent or beautiful only when alone.
Unhappy and oppressed in the broad daylight of life, she might have been
enchanting could she have expanded in the shadow. Often, to test the
love thus offered to her, and at the risk of losing it, she refused to
wear the draperies that concealed some portion of her defects, and her
Spanish eyes grew entrancing when they saw that Balthazar thought her
beautiful as before.

Nevertheless, even so, distrust soiled the rare moments when she yielded
herself to happiness. She asked herself if Claes were not seeking a
domestic slave,--one who would necessarily keep the house? whether he
had himself no secret imperfection which obliged him to be satisfied
with a poor, deformed girl? Such perpetual misgivings gave a priceless
value to the few short hours during which she trusted the sincerity and
the permanence of a love which was to avenge her on the world. Sometimes
she provoked hazardous discussions, and probed the inner consciousness
of her lover by exaggerating her defects. At such times she often wrung
from Balthazar truths that were far from flattering; but she loved the
embarrassment into which he fell when she had led him to say that what
he loved in a woman was a noble soul and the devotion which made each
day of life a constant happiness; and that after a few years of married
life the handsomest of women was no more to a husband than the ugliest.
After gathering up what there was of truth in all such paradoxes tending
to reduce the value of beauty, Balthazar would suddenly perceive the
ungraciousness of his remarks, and show the goodness of his heart by the
delicate transitions of thought with which he proved to Mademoiselle de
Temninck that she was perfect in his eyes.

The spirit of devotion which, it may be, is the crown of love in a
woman, was not lacking in this young girl, who had always despaired of
being loved; at first, the prospect of a struggle in which feeling
and sentiment would triumph over actual beauty tempted her; then, she
fancied a grandeur in giving herself to a man in whose love she did not
believe; finally, she was forced to admit that happiness, however short
its duration might be, was too precious to resign.

Such hesitations, such struggles, giving the charm and the
unexpectedness of passion to this noble creature, inspired Balthazar
with a love that was well-nigh chivalric.




CHAPTER III

The marriage took place at the beginning of the year 1795. Husband and
wife came to Douai that the first days of their union might be spent
in the patriarchal house of the Claes,--the treasures of which were
increased by those of Mademoiselle de Temninck, who brought with her
several fine pictures of Murillo and Velasquez, the diamonds of her
mother, and the magnificent wedding-gifts, made to her by her brother,
the Duke of Casa-Real.

Few women were ever happier than Madame Claes. Her happiness lasted for
fifteen years without a cloud, diffusing itself like a vivid light
into every nook and detail of her life. Most men have inequalities of
character which produce discord, and deprive their households of the
harmony which is the ideal of a home; the majority are blemished with
some littleness or meanness, and meanness of any kind begets bickering.
One man is honorable and diligent, but hard and crabbed; another kindly,
but obstinate; this one loves his wife, yet his will is arbitrary and
uncertain; that other, preoccupied by ambition, pays off his affections
as he would a debt, bestows the luxuries of wealth but deprives the
daily life of happiness,--in short, the average man of social life is
essentially incomplete, without being signally to blame. Men of talent
are as variable as barometers; genius alone is intrinsically good.

For this reason unalloyed happiness is found at the two extremes of
the moral scale. The good-natured fool and the man of genius alone
are capable--the one through weakness, the other by strength--of that
equanimity of temper, that unvarying gentleness, which soften the
asperities of daily life. In the one, it is indifference or stolidity;
in the other, indulgence and a portion of the divine thought of which he
is the interpreter, and which needs to be consistent alike in principle
and application. Both natures are equally simple; but in one there is
vacancy, in the other depth. This is why clever women are disposed to
take dull men as the small change for great ones.

Balthazar Claes carried his greatness into the lesser things of life. He
delighted in considering conjugal love as a magnificent work; and like
all men of lofty aims who can bear nothing imperfect, he wished to
develop all its beauties. His powers of mind enlivened the calm of
happiness, his noble nature marked his attentions with the charm of
grace. Though he shared the philosophical tenets of the eighteenth
century, he installed a chaplain in his home until 1801 (in spite of the
risk he ran from the revolutionary decrees), so that he might not thwart
the Spanish fanaticism which his wife had sucked in with her mother’s
milk: later, when public worship was restored in France, he accompanied
her to mass every Sunday. His passion never ceased to be that of
a lover. The protecting power, which women like so much, was never
exercised by this husband, lest to that wife it might seem pity. He
treated her with exquisite flattery as an equal, and sometimes mutinied
against her, as men will, as though to brave the supremacy of a pretty
woman. His lips wore a smile of happiness, his speech was ever tender;
he loved his Josephine for herself and for himself, with an ardor that
crowned with perpetual praise the qualities and the loveliness of a
wife.

Fidelity, often the result of social principle, religious duty, or
self-interest on the part of a husband, was in this case involuntary,
and not without the sweet flatteries of the spring-time of love. Duty
was the only marriage obligation unknown to these lovers, whose love was
equal; for Balthazar Claes found the complete and lasting realization of
his hopes in Mademoiselle de Temninck; his heart was satisfied but not
wearied, the man within him was ever happy.

Not only did the daughter of Casa-Real derive from her Spanish blood the
intuition of that science which varies pleasure and makes it infinite,
but she possessed the spirit of unbounded self-devotion, which is the
genius of her sex as grace is that of beauty. Her love was a blind
fanaticism which, at a nod, would have sent her joyously to her death.
Balthazar’s own delicacy had exalted the generous emotions of his
wife, and inspired her with an imperious need of giving more than she
received. This mutual exchange of happiness which each lavished upon
the other, put the mainspring of her life visibly outside of her
personality, and filled her words, her looks, her actions, with an
ever-growing love. Gratitude fertilized and varied the life of each
heart; and the certainty of being all in all to one another excluded the
paltry things of existence, while it magnified the smallest accessories.

The deformed woman whom her husband thinks straight, the lame woman whom
he would not have otherwise, the old woman who seems ever young--are
they not the happiest creatures of the feminine world? Can human passion
go beyond it? The glory of a woman is to be adored for a defect. To
forget that a lame woman does not walk straight may be the glamour of
a moment, but to love her because she is lame is the deification of
her defects. In the gospel of womanhood it is written: “Blessed are the
imperfect, for theirs is the kingdom of Love.” If this be so, surely
beauty is a misfortune; that fugitive flower counts for too much in
the feeling that a woman inspires; often she is loved for her beauty as
another is married for her money. But the love inspired or bestowed by a
woman disinherited of the frail advantages pursued by the sons of Adam,
is true love, the mysterious passion, the ardent embrace of souls, a
sentiment for which the day of disenchantment never comes. That woman
has charms unknown to the world, from whose jurisdiction she withdraws
herself: she is beautiful with a meaning; her glory lies in making her
imperfections forgotten, and thus she constantly succeeds in doing so.

The celebrated attachments of history were nearly all inspired by women
in whom the vulgar mind would have found defects,--Cleopatra, Jeanne
de Naples, Diane de Poitiers, Mademoiselle de la Valliere, Madame de
Pompadour; in fact, the majority of the women whom love has rendered
famous were not without infirmities and imperfections, while the greater
number of those whose beauty is cited as perfect came to some tragic end
of love.

This apparent singularity must have a cause. It may be that man lives
more by sentiment than by sense; perhaps the physical charm of beauty is
limited, while the moral charm of a woman without beauty is infinite. Is
not this the moral of the fable on which the Arabian Nights are based?
An ugly wife of Henry VIII. might have defied the axe, and subdued to
herself the inconstancy of her master.

By a strange chance, not inexplicable, however, in a girl of Spanish
origin, Madame Claes was uneducated. She knew how to read and write, but
up to the age of twenty, at which time her parents withdrew her from a
convent, she had read none but ascetic books. On her first entrance into
the world, she was eager for pleasure and learned only the flimsy art of
dress; she was, moreover, so deeply conscious of her ignorance that she
dared not join in conversation; for which reason she was supposed to
have little mind. Yet, the mystical education of a convent had one good
result; it left her feelings in full force and her natural powers of
mind uninjured. Stupid and plain as an heiress in the eyes of the world,
she became intellectual and beautiful to her husband. During the first
years of their married life, Balthazar endeavored to give her at least
the knowledge that she needed to appear to advantage in good society:
but he was doubtless too late, she had no memory but that of the
heart. Josephine never forgot anything that Claes told her relating
to themselves; she remembered the most trifling circumstances of their
happy life; but of her evening studies nothing remained to her on the
morrow.

This ignorance might have caused much discord between husband and wife,
but Madame Claes’s understanding of the passion of love was so simple
and ingenuous, she loved her husband so religiously, so sacredly, and
the thought of preserving her happiness made her so adroit, that she
managed always to seem to understand him, and it was seldom indeed that
her ignorance was evident. Moreover, when two persons love one another
so well that each day seems for them the beginning of their passion,
phenomena arise out of this teeming happiness which change all the
conditions of life. It resembles childhood, careless of all that is not
laughter, joy, and merriment. Then, when life is in full activity, when
its hearths glow, man lets the fire burn without thought or discussion,
without considering either the means or the end.

No daughter of Eve ever more truly understood the calling of a wife than
Madame Claes. She had all the submission of a Flemish woman, but her
Spanish pride gave it a higher flavor. Her bearing was imposing; she
knew how to command respect by a look which expressed her sense of birth
and dignity: but she trembled before Claes; she held him so high, so
near to God, carrying to him every act of her life, every thought of
her heart, that her love was not without a certain respectful fear
which made it keener. She proudly assumed all the habits of a Flemish
bourgeoisie, and put her self-love into making the home life liberally
happy,--preserving every detail of the house in scrupulous cleanliness,
possessing nothing that did not serve the purposes of true comfort,
supplying her table with the choicest food, and putting everything
within those walls into harmony with the life of her heart.

The pair had two sons and two daughters. The eldest, Marguerite, was
born in 1796. The last child was a boy, now three years old, named
Jean-Balthazar. The maternal sentiment in Madame Claes was almost equal
to her love for her husband; and there rose in her soul, especially
during the last days of her life, a terrible struggle between those
nearly balanced feelings, of which the one became, as it were, an enemy
of the other. The tears and the terror that marked her face at the
moment when this tale of a domestic drama then lowering over the quiet
house begins, were caused by the fear of having sacrificed her children
to her husband.

In 1805, Madame Claes’s brother died without children. The Spanish law
does not allow a sister to succeed to territorial possessions, which
follow the title; but the duke had left her in his will about sixty
thousand ducats, and this sum the heirs of the collateral branch did not
seek to retain. Though the feeling which united her to Balthazar Claes
was such that no thought of personal interest could ever sully it,
Josephine felt a certain pleasure in possessing a fortune equal to that
of her husband, and was happy in giving something to one who had so
nobly given everything to her. Thus, a mere chance turned a marriage
which worldly minds had declared foolish, into an excellent alliance,
seen from the standpoint of material interests. The use to which this
sum of money should be put became, however, somewhat difficult to
determine.

The House of Claes was so richly supplied with furniture, pictures, and
objects of art of priceless value, that it was difficult to add anything
worthy of what was already there. The tastes of the family through long
periods of time had accumulated these treasures. One generation
followed the quest of noble pictures, leaving behind it the necessity
of completing a collection still unfinished; and thus the taste became
hereditary in the family. The hundred pictures which adorned the gallery
leading from the family building to the reception-rooms on the first
floor of the front house, as well as some fifty others placed about the
salons, were the product of the patient researches of three centuries.
Among them were choice specimens of Rubens, Ruysdael, Vandyke, Terburg,
Gerard Dow, Teniers, Mieris, Paul Potter, Wouvermans, Rembrandt,
Hobbema, Cranach, and Holbein. French and Italian pictures were in a
minority, but all were authentic and masterly.

Another generation had fancied Chinese and Japanese porcelains: this
Claes was eager after rare furniture, that one for silver-ware; in fact,
each and all had their mania, their passion,--a trait which belongs in
a striking degree to the Flemish character. The father of Balthazar, a
last relic of the once famous Dutch society, left behind him the finest
known collection of tulips.

Besides these hereditary riches, which represented an enormous capital,
and were the choice ornament of the venerable house,--a house that was
simple as a shell outside but, like a shell, adorned within by pearls
of price and glowing with rich color,--Balthazar Claes possessed a
country-house on the plain of Orchies, not far from Douai. Instead of
basing his expenses, as Frenchmen do, upon his revenues, he followed the
old Dutch custom of spending only a fourth of his income. Twelve hundred
ducats a year put his costs of living at a level with those of the
richest men of the place. The promulgation of the Civil Code proved
the wisdom of this course. Compelling, as it did, the equal division of
property, the Title of Succession would some day leave each child with
limited means, and disperse the treasures of the Claes collection.
Balthazar, therefore, in concert with Madame Claes, invested his wife’s
property so as to secure to each child a fortune eventually equal to his
own. The house of Claes still maintained its moderate scale of living,
and bought woodlands somewhat the worse for wars that had laid waste the
country, but which in ten years’ time, if well-preserved, would return
an enormous value.

The upper ranks of society in Douai, which Monsieur Claes frequented,
appreciated so justly the noble character and qualities of his wife
that, by tacit consent she was released from those social duties to
which the provinces cling so tenaciously. During the winter season, when
she lived in town, she seldom went into society; society came to her.
She received every Wednesday, and gave three grand dinners every month.
Her friends felt that she was more at ease in her own house; where,
indeed, her passion for her husband and the care she bestowed on the
education of her children tended to keep her.

Such had been, up to the year 1809, the general course of this
household, which had nothing in common with the ordinary run of
conventional ideas, though the outward life of these two persons,
secretly full of love and joy, was like that of other people. Balthazar
Claes’s passion for his wife, which she had known how to perpetuate,
seemed, to use his own expression, to spend its inborn vigor and
fidelity on the cultivation of happiness, which was far better than the
cultivation of tulips (though to that he had always had a leaning), and
dispensed him from the duty of following a mania like his ancestors.

At the close of this year, the mind and the manners of Balthazar Claes
underwent a fatal change,--a change which began so gradually that at
first Madame Claes did not think it necessary to inquire the cause. One
night her husband went to bed with a mind so preoccupied that she felt
it incumbent on her to respect his mood. Her womanly delicacy and her
submissive habits always led her to wait for Balthazar’s confidence;
which, indeed, was assured to her by so constant an affection that she
had never had the slightest opening for jealousy. Though certain of
obtaining an answer whenever she should make the inquiry, she still
retained enough of the earlier impressions of her life to dread a
refusal. Besides, the moral malady of her husband had its phases, and
only came by slow degrees to the intolerable point at which it destroyed
the happiness of the family.

However occupied Balthazar Claes might be, he continued for several
months cheerful, affectionate, and ready to talk; the change in his
character showed itself only by frequent periods of absent-mindedness.
Madame Claes long hoped to hear from her husband himself the nature of
the secret employment in which he was engaged; perhaps, she thought, he
would reveal it when it developed some useful result; many men are led
by pride to conceal the nature of their efforts, and only make them
known at the moment of success. When the day of triumph came, surely
domestic happiness would return, more vivid than ever when Balthazar
became aware of this chasm in the life of love, which his heart would
surely disavow. Josephine knew her husband well enough to be certain
that he would never forgive himself for having made his Pepita less than
happy during several months.

She kept silence therefore, and felt a sort of joy in thus suffering by
him for him: her passion had a tinge of that Spanish piety which allows
no separation between religion and love, and believes in no sentiment
without suffering. She waited for the return of her husband’s affection,
saying daily to herself, “To-morrow it may come,”--treating her
happiness as though it were an absent friend.

During this stage of her secret distress, she conceived her last child.
Horrible crisis, which revealed a future of anguish! In the midst of
her husband’s abstractions love showed itself on this occasion an
abstraction even greater than the rest. Her woman’s pride, hurt for
the first time, made her sound the depths of the unknown abyss which
separated her from the Claes of earlier days. From that time Balthazar’s
condition grew rapidly worse. The man formerly so wrapped up in his
domestic happiness, who played for hours with his children on the parlor
carpet or round the garden paths, who seemed able to exist only in the
light of his Pepita’s dark eyes, did not even perceive her pregnancy,
seldom shared the family life, and even forgot his own.

The longer Madame Claes postponed inquiring into the cause of his
preoccupation the less she dared to do so. At the very idea, her blood
ran cold and her voice grew faint. At last the thought occurred to
her that she had ceased to please her husband, and then indeed she was
seriously alarmed. That fear now filled her mind, drove her to despair,
then to feverish excitement, and became the text of many an hour of
melancholy reverie. She defended Balthazar at her own expense, calling
herself old and ugly; then she imagined a generous though humiliating
consideration for her in this secret occupation by which he secured
to her a negative fidelity; and she resolved to give him back his
independence by allowing one of those unspoken divorces which make the
happiness of many a marriage.

Before bidding farewell to conjugal life, Madame Claes made some attempt
to read her husband’s heart, and found it closed. Little by little,
she saw him become indifferent to all that he had formerly loved; he
neglected his tulips, he cared no longer for his children. There could
be no doubt that he was given over to some passion that was not of the
heart, but which, to a woman’s mind, is not less withering. His love
was dormant, not lost: this might be a consolation, but the misfortune
remained the same.

The continuance of such a state of things is explained by one
word,--hope, the secret of all conjugal situations. It so happened
that whenever the poor woman reached a depth of despair which gave her
courage to question her husband, she met with a few brief moments of
happiness when she was able to feel that if Balthazar was indeed in the
clutch of some devilish power, he was permitted, sometimes at least, to
return to himself. At such moments, when her heaven brightened, she
was too eager to enjoy its happiness to trouble him with importunate
questions: later, when she endeavored to speak to him, he would suddenly
escape, leave her abruptly, or drop into the gulf of meditation from
which no word of hers could drag him.

Before long the reaction of the moral upon the physical condition began
its ravages,--at first imperceptibly, except to the eyes of a loving
woman following the secret thought of a husband through all its
manifestations. Often she could scarcely restrain her tears when she saw
him, after dinner, sink into an armchair by the corner of the fireplace,
and remain there, gloomy and abstracted. She noted with terror the slow
changes which deteriorated that face, once, to her eyes, sublime
through love: the life of the soul was retreating from it; the structure
remained, but the spirit was gone. Sometimes the eyes were glassy, and
seemed as if they had turned their gaze and were looking inward. When
the children had gone to bed, and the silence and solitude oppressed
her, Pepita would say, “My friend, are you ill?” and Balthazar would
make no answer; or if he answered, he would come to himself with a
quiver, like a man snatched suddenly from sleep, and utter a “No” so
harsh and grating that it fell like a stone on the palpitating heart of
his wife.

Though she tried to hide this strange state of things from her friends,
Madame Claes was obliged sometimes to allude to it. The social world
of Douai, in accordance with the custom of provincial towns, had made
Balthazar’s aberrations a topic of conversation, and many persons
were aware of certain details that were still unknown to Madame Claes.
Disregarding the reticence which politeness demanded, a few friends
expressed to her so much anxiety on the subject that she found herself
compelled to defend her husband’s peculiarities.

“Monsieur Claes,” she said, “has undertaken a work which wholly absorbs
him; its success will eventually redound not only to the honor of the
family but to that of his country.”

This mysterious explanation was too flattering to the ambition of a
town whose local patriotism and desire for glory exceed those of other
places, not to be readily accepted, and it produced on all minds a
reaction in favor of Balthazar.

The supposition of his wife was, to a certain extent, well-founded.
Several artificers of various trades had long been at work in the garret
of the front house, where Balthazar went early every morning. After
remaining, at first, for several hours, an absence to which his wife and
household grew gradually accustomed, he ended by being there all day.
But--unexpected shock!--Madame Claes learned through the humiliating
medium of some women friends, who showed surprise at her ignorance,
that her husband constantly imported instruments of physical science,
valuable materials, books, machinery, etc., from Paris, and was on the
highroad to ruin in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. She ought, so her
kind friends added, to think of her children, and her own future; it was
criminal not to use her influence to draw Monsieur Claes from the fatal
path on which he had entered.

Though Madame Claes, with the tone and manner of a great lady, silenced
these absurd speeches, she was inwardly terrified in spite of her
apparent confidence, and she resolved to break through her present
system of silence and resignation. She brought about one of those little
scenes in which husband and wife are on an equal footing; less timid at
such a moment, she dared to ask Balthazar the reason for his change,
the motive of his constant seclusion. The Flemish husband frowned, and
replied:--

“My dear, you could not understand it.”

Soon after, however, Josephine insisted on being told the secret, gently
complaining that she was not allowed to share all the thoughts of one
whose life she shared.

“Very well, since it interests you so much,” said Balthazar, taking his
wife upon his knee and caressing her black hair, “I will tell you that
I have returned to the study of chemistry, and I am the happiest man on
earth.”




CHAPTER IV

Two years after the winter when Monsieur Claes returned to chemistry,
the aspect of his house was changed. Whether it were that society was
affronted by his perpetual absent-mindedness and chose to think itself
in the way, or that Madame Claes’s secret anxieties made her less
agreeable than before, certain it is that she no longer saw any but
her intimate friends. Balthazar went nowhere, shut himself up in his
laboratory all day, sometimes stayed there all night, and only appeared
in the bosom of his family at dinner-time.

After the second year he no longer passed the summer at his
country-house, and his wife was unwilling to live there alone. Sometimes
he went to walk and did not return till the following day, leaving
Madame Claes a prey to mortal anxiety during the night. After causing
a fruitless search for him through the town, whose gates, like those of
other fortified places, were closed at night, it was impossible to send
into the country, and the unhappy woman could only wait and suffer
till morning. Balthazar, who had forgotten the hour at which the gates
closed, would come tranquilly home next day, quite unmindful of the
tortures his absence had inflicted on his family; and the happiness of
getting him back proved as dangerous an excitement of feeling to his
wife as her fears of the preceding night. She kept silence and dared not
question him, for when she did so on the occasion of his first absence,
he answered with an air of surprise:--

“Well, what of it? Can I not take a walk?”

Passions never deceive. Madame Claes’s anxieties corroborated the rumors
she had taken so much pains to deny. The experience of her youth had
taught her to understand the polite pity of the world. Resolved not to
undergo it a second time, she withdrew more and more into the privacy of
her own house, now deserted by society and even by her nearest friends.

Among these many causes of distress, the negligence and disorder of
Balthazar’s dress, so degrading to a man of his station, was not the
least bitter to a woman accustomed to the exquisite nicety of Flemish
life. At first Josephine endeavored, in concert with Balthazar’s valet,
Lemulquinier, to repair the daily devastation of his clothing, but
even that she was soon forced to give up. The very day when Balthazar,
unaware of the substitution, put on new clothes in place of those that
were stained, torn, or full of holes, he made rags of them.

The poor wife, whose perfect happiness had lasted fifteen years, during
which time her jealousy had never once been roused, was apparently and
suddenly nothing in the heart where she had lately reigned. Spanish
by race, the feelings of a Spanish woman rose within her when she
discovered her rival in a Science that allured her husband from her:
torments of jealousy preyed upon her heart and renewed her love.
What could she do against Science? Should she combat that tyrannous,
unyielding, growing power? Could she kill an invisible rival? Could
a woman, limited by nature, contend with an Idea whose delights are
infinite, whose attractions are ever new? How make head against the
fascination of ideas that spring the fresher and the lovelier out of
difficulty, and entice a man so far from this world that he forgets even
his dearest loves?

At last one day, in spite of Balthazar’s strict orders, Madame Claes
resolved to follow him, to shut herself up in the garret where his life
was spent, and struggle hand to hand against her rival by sharing
her husband’s labors during the long hours he gave to that terrible
mistress. She determined to slip secretly into the mysterious laboratory
of seduction, and obtain the right to be there always. Lemulquinier
alone had that right, and she meant to share it with him; but to prevent
his witnessing the contention with her husband which she feared at the
outset, she waited for an opportunity when the valet should be out of
the way. For a while she studied the goings and comings of the man with
angry impatience; did he not know that which was denied to her--all that
her husband hid from her, all that she dared not inquire into? Even a
servant was preferred to a wife!

The day came; she approached the place, trembling, yet almost happy. For
the first time in her life she encountered Balthazar’s anger. She had
hardly opened the door before he sprang upon her, seized her, threw her
roughly on the staircase, so that she narrowly escaped rolling to the
bottom.

“God be praised! you are still alive!” he cried, raising her.

A glass vessel had broken into fragments over Madame Claes, who saw her
husband standing by her, pale, terrified, and almost livid.

“My dear, I forbade you to come here,” he said, sitting down on the
stairs, as though prostrated. “The saints have saved your life! By what
chance was it that my eyes were on the door when you opened it? We have
just escaped death.”

“Then I might have been happy!” she exclaimed.

“My experiment has failed,” continued Balthazar. “You alone could I
forgive for that terrible disappointment. I was about to decompose
nitrogen. Go back to your own affairs.”

Balthazar re-entered the laboratory and closed the door.

“Decompose nitrogen!” said the poor woman as she re-entered her chamber,
and burst into tears.

The phrase was unintelligible to her. Men, trained by education to have
a general conception of everything, have no idea how distressing it is
for a woman to be unable to comprehend the thought of the man she loves.
More forbearing than we, these divine creatures do not let us know when
the language of their souls is not understood by us; they shrink from
letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and hide their pain
as gladly as they silence their wishes: but, having higher ambitions in
love than men, they desire to wed not only the heart of a husband, but
his mind.

To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which absorbed
her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty of a rival
might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman gives to her who
loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a mortification
like this only proved Madame Claes’s powerlessness and humiliated the
feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she had reached a
point where her ignorance parted her from her husband. Worse than all,
last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he was often in
danger--near her, yet far away, and she might not share, nor even know,
his peril. Her position became, like hell, a moral prison from which
there was no issue, in which there was no hope. Madame Claes resolved
to know at least the outward attractions of this fatal science, and
she began secretly to study chemistry in the books. From this time the
family became, as it were, cloistered.

Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon
the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which
we find it at the moment when this history begins.

The situation grew daily more complicated. Like all passionate
women, Madame Claes was disinterested. Those who truly love know that
considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are
reluctantly associated with them. Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear
without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand
francs upon his property. The apparent authenticity of the transaction,
the rumors and conjectures spread through the town, forced Madame
Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband’s notary and,
disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret anxieties or let him
guess them, and even ask her the humiliating question,--

“How is it that Monsieur Claes has not told you of this?”

Happily, the notary was almost a relation,--in this wise: The
grandfather of Monsieur Claes had married a Pierquin of Antwerp, of the
same family as the Pierquins of Douai. Since the marriage the latter,
though strangers to the Claes, claimed them as cousins. Monsieur
Pierquin, a young man twenty-six years of age, who had just succeeded
to his father’s practice, was the only person who now had access to the
House of Claes.

Madame Balthazar had lived for several months in such complete solitude
that the notary was obliged not only to confirm the rumor of the
disasters, but to give her further particulars, which were now well
known throughout the town. He told her that it was probably that her
husband owed considerable sums of money to the house which furnished him
with chemicals. That house, after making inquiries as to the fortune and
credit of Monsieur Claes, accepted all his orders and sent the supplies
without hesitation, notwithstanding the heavy sums of money which became
due. Madame Claes requested Pierquin to obtain the bill for all the
chemicals that had been furnished to her husband.

Two months later, Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, manufacturers
of chemical products, sent in a schedule of accounts rendered, which
amounted to over one hundred thousand francs. Madame Claes and Pierquin
studied the document with an ever-increasing surprise. Though
some articles, entered in commercial and scientific terms, were
unintelligible to them, they were frightened to see entries of precious
metals and diamonds of all kinds, though in small quantities. The large
sum total of the debt was explained by the multiplicity of the articles,
by the precautions needed in transporting some of them, more especially
valuable machinery, by the exorbitant price of certain rare chemicals,
and finally by the cost of instruments made to order after the designs
of Monsieur Claes himself.

The notary had made inquiries, in his client’s interest, as to Messieurs
Protez and Chiffreville, and found that their known integrity was
sufficient guarantee as to the honesty of their operations with Monsieur
Claes, to whom, moreover, they frequently sent information of results
obtained by chemists in Paris, for the purpose of sparing him expense.
Madame Claes begged the notary to keep the nature of these purchases
from the knowledge of the people of Douai, lest they should declare the
whole thing a mania; but Pierquin replied that he had already delayed to
the very last moment the notarial deeds which the importance of the
sum borrowed necessitated, in order not to lessen the respect in which
Monsieur Claes was held. He then revealed the full extent of the evil,
telling her plainly that if she could not find means to prevent her
husband from thus madly making way with his property, in six months the
patrimonial fortune of the Claes would be mortgaged to its full value.
As for himself, he said, the remonstrances he had already made to his
cousin, with all the consideration due to a man so justly respected, had
been wholly unavailing. Balthazar had replied, once for all, that he was
working for the fame and the fortune of his family.

Thus, to the tortures of the heart which Madame Claes had borne for two
years--one following the other with cumulative suffering--was now added
a dreadful and ceaseless fear which made the future terrifying. Women
have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous. Why do they fear
so much more than they hope in matters that concern the interests of
this life? Why is their faith given only to religious ideas of a future
existence? Why do they so ably foresee the catastrophes of fortune and
the crises of fate? Perhaps the sentiment which unites them to the
men they love gives them a sense by which they weigh force, measure
faculties, understand tastes, passions, vices, virtues. The perpetual
study of these causes in the midst of which they live gives them, no
doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing effects in all possible relations
of earthly life. What they see of the present enables them to judge
of the future with an intuitive ability explained by the perfection
of their nervous system, which allows them to seize the lightest
indications of thought and feeling. Their whole being vibrates in
communion with great moral convulsions. Either they feel, or they see.

Now, although separated from her husband for over two years, Madame
Claes foresaw the loss of their property. She fully understood the
deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of
Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he
was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute
indifference. But what was he really seeking? Up to this time maternal
feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this woman
that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had never come
between them. Suddenly she found herself at times more mother than wife,
though hitherto she had been more wife than mother. However ready she
had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her children to the man who
had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to whom she was still the
only woman in the world, the remorse she felt for the weakness of her
maternal love threw her into terrible alternations of feeling. As a
wife, she suffered in heart; as a mother, through her children; as a
Christian, for all.

She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul. Her husband,
sole arbiter of the family fate, was the master by whose will it must be
guided; he was responsible to God only. Besides, could she reproach him
for the use he now made of his fortune, after the disinterestedness he
had shown to her for many happy years? Was she to judge his purposes?
And yet her conscience, in keeping with the spirit of the law, told
her that parents were the depositaries and guardians of property, and
possessed no right to alienate the material welfare of the children. To
escape replying to such stern questions she preferred to shut her eyes,
like one who refuses to see the abyss into whose depths he knows he is
about to fall.

For more than six months her husband had given her no money for the
household expenses. She sold secretly, in Paris, the handsome diamond
ornaments her brother had given her on her marriage, and placed
the family on a footing of the strictest economy. She sent away the
governess of her children, and even the nurse of little Jean. Formerly
the luxury of carriages and horses was unknown among the burgher
families, so simple were they in their habits, so proud in their
feelings; no provision for that modern innovation had therefore been
made at the House of Claes, and Balthazar was obliged to have his stable
and coach-house in a building opposite to his own house: his present
occupations allowed him no time to superintend that portion of his
establishment, which belongs exclusively to men. Madame Claes suppressed
the whole expense of equipages and servants, which her present isolation
from the world rendered unnecessary, and she did so without pretending
to conceal the retrenchment under any pretext. So far, facts had
contradicted her assertions, and silence for the future was more
becoming: indeed the change in the family mode of living called for no
explanation in a country where, as in Flanders, any one who lives up to
his income is considered a madman.

And yet, as her eldest daughter, Marguerite, approached her sixteenth
birthday, Madame Claes longed to procure for her a good marriage, and to
place her in society in a manner suitable to a daughter of the Molinas,
the Van Ostron-Temnincks, and the Casa-Reals. A few days before the
one on which this story opens, the money derived from the sale of the
diamonds had been exhausted. On the very day, at three o’clock in the
afternoon, as Madame Claes was taking her children to vespers, she met
Pierquin, who was on his way to see her, and who turned and accompanied
her to the church, talking in a low voice of her situation.

“My dear cousin,” he said, “unless I fail in the friendship which binds
me to your family, I cannot conceal from you the peril of your position,
nor refrain from begging you to speak to your husband. Who but you can
hold him back from the gulf into which he is plunging? The rents from
the mortgaged estates are not enough to pay the interest on the sums he
has borrowed. If he cuts the wood on them he destroys your last chance
of safety in the future. My cousin Balthazar owes at this moment thirty
thousand francs to the house of Protez and Chiffreville. How can you pay
them? What will you live on? If Claes persists in sending for reagents,
retorts, voltaic batteries, and other such playthings, what will become
of you? Your whole property, except the house and furniture, has been
dissipated in gas and carbon; yesterday he talked of mortgaging the
house, and in answer to a remark of mine, he cried out, ‘The devil!’ It
was the first sign of reason I have known him show for three years.”

Madame Claes pressed the notary’s arm, and said in a tone of suffering,
“Keep it secret.”

Overwhelmed by these plain words of startling clearness, the poor woman,
pious as she was, could not pray; she sat still on her chair between
her children, with her prayer-book open, but not turning its leaves; her
mind was sunk in meditations as absorbing as those of her husband. The
Spanish sense of honor, the Flemish integrity, resounded in her
soul with a peal louder than any organ. The ruin of her children was
accomplished! Between them and their father’s honor she must no longer
hesitate. The necessity of a coming struggle with her husband terrified
her; in her eyes he was so great, so majestic, that the mere prospect of
his anger made her tremble as at a vision of the divine wrath. She must
now depart from the submission she had sacredly practised as a wife. The
interests of her children compelled her to oppose, in his most cherished
tastes, the man she idolized. Must she not daily force him back to
common matters from the higher realms of Science; drag him forcibly from
a smiling future and plunge him into a materialism hideous to artists
and great men? To her, Balthazar Claes was a Titan of science, a man big
with glory; he could only have forgotten her for the riches of a mighty
hope. Then too, was he not profoundly wise? she had heard him talk
with such good sense on every subject that he must be sincere when he
declared he worked for the glory and prosperity of his family. His love
for his wife and family was not only vast, it was infinite. That feeling
could not be extinct; it was magnified, and reproduced in another form.

Noble, generous, timid as she was, she prepared herself to ring into the
ears of this noble man the word and the sound of money, to show him the
sores of poverty, and force him to hear cries of distress when he was
listening only for the melodious voice of Fame. Perhaps his love for her
would lessen! If she had had no children, she would bravely and joyously
have welcomed the new destiny her husband was making for her. Women who
are brought up in opulence are quick to feel the emptiness of material
enjoyments; and when their hearts, more wearied than withered, have once
learned the happiness of a constant interchange of real feelings, they
feel no shrinking from reduced outward circumstances, provided they
are still acceptable to the man who has loved them. Their wishes, their
pleasures, are subordinated to the caprices of that other life outside
of their own; to them the only dreadful future is to lose him.

At this moment, therefore, her children came between Pepita and her true
life, just as Science had come between herself and Balthazar. And thus,
when she reached home after vespers, and threw herself into the deep
armchair before the window of the parlor, she sent away her children,
directing them to keep perfectly quiet, and despatched a message to her
husband, through Lemulquinier, saying that she wished to see him.
But although the old valet did his best to make his master leave the
laboratory, Balthazar scarcely heeded him. Madame Claes thus gained time
for reflection. She sat thinking, paying no attention to the hour nor
the light. The thought of owing thirty thousand francs that could not be
paid renewed her past anguish and joined it to that of the present
and the future. This influx of painful interests, ideas, and feelings
overcame her, and she wept.

As Balthazar entered at last through the panelled door, the expression
of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more distracted
than she had yet seen it. When he made her no answer she was magnetized
for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied of all expression,
by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled from that bald brow.
Under the shock of this impression she wished to die. But when she heard
the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish at the moment when her
heart was breaking, her courage came back to her; she resolved to
struggle with that awful power which had torn a lover from her arms, a
father from her children, a fortune from their home, happiness from all.
And yet she could not repress a trepidation which made her quiver; in
all her life no such solemn scene as this had taken place. This dreadful
moment--did it not virtually contain her future, and gather within it
all the past?

Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies
the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily before
the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the rush of
thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the feelings
under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her husband slowly
crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women know that agony of
inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was writhing. Even one whose
heart has been tried by nothing worse than the declaration to a husband
of some extravagance, or a debt to a dress-maker, will understand how
its pulses swell and quicken when the matter is one of life itself.

A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her husband’s
feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief; but to Madame
Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her fears. When she
saw Balthazar about to leave the room, her impulse was to spring towards
him; then a cruel thought restrained her--she should stand before him!
would she not seem ridiculous in the eyes of a man no longer under the
glamour of love--who might see true? She resolved to avoid all dangerous
chances at so solemn a moment, and remained seated, saying in a clear
voice,

“Balthazar.”

He turned mechanically and coughed; then, paying no attention to his
wife, he walked to one of the little square boxes that are placed at
intervals along the wainscoting of every room in Holland and Belgium,
and spat in it. This man, who took no thought of other persons, never
forgot the inveterate habit of using those boxes. To poor Josephine,
unable to find a reason for this singularity, the constant care which
her husband took of the furniture caused her at all times an unspeakable
pang, but at this moment the pain was so violent that it put her beside
herself and made her exclaim in a tone of impatience, which expressed
her wounded feelings,--

“Monsieur, I am speaking to you!”

“What does that mean?” answered Balthazar, turning quickly, and casting
a look of reviving intelligence upon his wife, which fell upon her like
a thunderbolt.

“Forgive me, my friend,” she said, turning pale. She tried to rise and
put out her hand to him, but her strength gave way and she fell back. “I
am dying!” she cried in a voice choked by sobs.

At the sight Balthazar had, like all abstracted persons, a vivid
reaction of mind; and he divined, so to speak, the secret cause of this
attack. Taking Madame Claes at once in his arms, he opened the door
upon the little antechamber, and ran so rapidly up the ancient wooden
staircase that his wife’s dress having caught on the jaws of one of the
griffins that supported the balustrade, a whole breadth was torn off
with a loud noise. He kicked in the door of the vestibule between their
chambers, but the door of Josephine’s bedroom was locked.

He gently placed her on a chair, saying to himself, “My God! the key,
where is the key?”

“Thank you, dear friend,” said Madame Claes, opening her eyes. “This
is the first time for a long, long while that I have been so near your
heart.”

“Good God!” cried Claes, “the key!--here come the servants.”

Josephine signed to him to take a key that hung from a ribbon at her
waist. After opening the door, Balthazar laid his wife on a sofa, and
left the room to stop the frightened servants from coming up by giving
them orders to serve the dinner; then he went back to Madame Claes.

“What is it, my dear life?” he said, sitting down beside her, and taking
her hand and kissing it.

“Nothing--now,” she answered. “I suffer no longer. Only, I would I had
the power of God to pour all the gold of the world at thy feet.”

“Why gold?” he asked. He took her in his arms, pressed her to him and
kissed her once more upon the forehead. “Do you not give me the greatest
of all riches in loving me as you do love me, my dear and precious
wife?”

“Oh! my Balthazar, will you not drive away the anguish of our lives as
your voice now drives out the misery of my heart? At last, at last, I
see that you are still the same.”

“What anguish do you speak of, dear?”

“My friend, we are ruined.”

“Ruined!” he repeated. Then, with a smile, he stroked her hand, holding
it within his own, and said in his tender voice, so long unheard:
“To-morrow, dear love, our wealth may perhaps be limitless. Yesterday,
in searching for a far more important secret, I think I found the means
of crystallizing carbon, the substance of the diamond. Oh, my dear
wife! in a few days’ time you will forgive me all my forgetfulness--I
am forgetful sometimes, am I not? Was I not harsh to you just now? Be
indulgent for a man who never ceases to think of you, whose toils are
full of you--of us.”

“Enough, enough!” she said, “let us talk of it all to-night, dear
friend. I suffered from too much grief, and now I suffer from too much
joy.”

“To-night,” he resumed; “yes, willingly: we will talk of it. If I fall
into meditation, remind me of this promise. To-night I desire to leave
my work, my researches, and return to family joys, to the delights of
the heart--Pepita, I need them, I thirst for them!”

“You will tell me what it is you seek, Balthazar?”

“Poor child, you cannot understand it.”

“You think so? Ah! my friend, listen; for nearly four months I have
studied chemistry that I might talk of it with you. I have read
Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Chaptal, Nollet, Rouelle, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac,
Spallanzani, Leuwenhoek, Galvani, Volta,--in fact, all the books
about the science you worship. You can tell me your secrets, I shall
understand you.”

“Oh! you are indeed an angel,” cried Balthazar, falling at her feet,
and shedding tears of tender feeling that made her quiver. “Yes, we will
understand each other in all things.”

“Ah!” she cried, “I would throw myself into those hellish fires which
heat your furnaces to hear these words from your lips and to see you
thus.” Then, hearing her daughter’s step in the anteroom, she sprang
quickly forward. “What is it, Marguerite?” she said to her eldest
daughter.

“My dear mother, Monsieur Pierquin has just come. If he stays to dinner
we need some table-linen; you forgot to give it out this morning.”

Madame Claes drew from her pocket a bunch of small keys and gave them
to the young girl, pointing to the mahogany closets which lined the
ante-chamber as she said:

“My daughter, take a set of the Graindorge linen; it is on your right.”

“Since my dear Balthazar comes back to me, let the return be complete,”
 she said, re-entering her chamber with a soft and arch expression on her
face. “My friend, go into your own room; do me the kindness to dress for
dinner, Pierquin will be with us. Come, take off this ragged clothing;
see those stains! Is it muratic or sulphuric acid which left these
yellow edges to the holes? Make yourself young again,--I will send you
Mulquinier as soon as I have changed my dress.”

Balthazar attempted to pass through the door of communication,
forgetting that it was locked on his side. He went out through the
anteroom.

“Marguerite, put the linen on a chair, and come and help me dress; I
don’t want Martha,” said Madame Claes, calling her daughter.

Balthazar had caught Marguerite and turned her towards him with a joyous
action, exclaiming: “Good-evening, my child; how pretty you are in your
muslin gown and that pink sash!” Then he kissed her forehead and pressed
her hand.

“Mamma, papa has kissed me!” cried Marguerite, running into her mother’s
room. “He seems so joyous, so happy!”

“My child, your father is a great man; for three years he has toiled for
the fame and fortune of his family: he thinks he has attained the object
of his search. This day is a festival for us all.”

“My dear mamma,” replied Marguerite, “we shall not be alone in our joy,
for the servants have been so grieved to see him unlike himself. Oh! put
on another sash, this is faded.”

“So be it; but make haste, I want to speak to Pierquin. Where is he?”

“In the parlor, playing with Jean.”

“Where are Gabriel and Felicie?”

“I hear them in the garden.”

“Run down quickly and see that they do not pick the tulips; your father
has not seen them in flower this year, and he may take a fancy to look
at them after dinner. Tell Mulquinier to go up and assist your father in
dressing.”




CHAPTER V

As Marguerite left the room, Madame Claes glanced at the children
through the windows of her chamber, which looked on the garden, and saw
that they were watching one of those insects with shining wings spotted
with gold, commonly called “darning-needles.”

“Be good, my darlings,” she said, raising the lower sash of the window
and leaving it up to air the room. Then she knocked gently on the door
of communication, to assure herself that Balthazar had not fallen into
abstraction. He opened it, and seeing him half-dressed, she said in
joyous tones:--

“You won’t leave me long with Pierquin, will you? Come as soon as you
can.”

Her step was so light as she descended that a listener would never have
supposed her lame.

“When monsieur carried madame upstairs,” said the old valet, whom she
met on the staircase, “he tore this bit out of her dress, and he broke
the jaw of that griffin; I’m sure I don’t know who can put it on again.
There’s our staircase ruined--and it used to be so handsome!”

“Never mind, my poor Mulquinier; don’t have it mended at all--it is not
a misfortune,” said his mistress.

“What can have happened?” thought Lemulquinier; “why isn’t it a
misfortune, I should like to know? has the master found the Absolute?”

“Good-evening, Monsieur Pierquin,” said Madame Claes, opening the parlor
door.

The notary rushed forward to give her his arm; as she never took any but
that of her husband she thanked him with a smile and said,--

“Have you come for the thirty thousand francs?”

“Yes, madame; when I reached home I found a letter of advice from
Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, who have drawn six letters of
exchange upon Monsieur Claes for five thousand francs each.”

“Well, say nothing to Balthazar to-day,” she replied. “Stay and dine
with us. If he happens to ask why you came, find some plausible pretext,
I entreat you. Give me the letter. I will speak to him myself about
it. All is well,” she added, noticing the lawyer’s surprise. “In a few
months my husband will probably pay off all the sums he has borrowed.”

Hearing these words, which were said in a low voice, the notary looked
at Mademoiselle Claes, who was entering the room from the garden
followed by Gabriel and Felicie, and remarked,--

“I have never seen Mademoiselle Marguerite as pretty as she is at this
moment.”

Madame Claes, who was sitting in her armchair with little Jean upon her
lap, raised her head and looked at her daughter, and then at the notary,
with a pretended air of indifference.

Pierquin was a man of middle height, neither stout nor thin, with vulgar
good looks, a face that expressed vexation rather than melancholy, and a
pensive habit in which there was more of indecision than thought. People
called him a misanthrope, but he was too eager after his own interests,
and too extortionate towards others to have set up a genuine divorce
from the world. His indifferent demeanor, his affected silence, his
habitual custom of looking, as it were, into the void, seemed to
indicate depth of character, while in fact they merely concealed the
shallow insignificance of a notary busied exclusively with earthly
interests; though he was still young enough to feel envy. To marry into
the family of Claes would have been to him an object of extreme desire,
if an instinct of avarice had not underlain it. He could seem generous,
but for all that he was a keen reckoner. And thus, without explaining
to himself the motive for his change of manner, his behavior was harsh,
peremptory, and surly, like that of an ordinary business man, when he
thought the Claes were ruined; accommodating, affectionate, and almost
servile, when he saw reason to believe in a happy issue to his cousin’s
labors. Sometimes he beheld an infanta in Margeurite Claes, to whom no
provincial notary might aspire; then he regarded her as any poor girl
too happy if he deigned to make her his wife. He was a true provincial,
and a Fleming; without malevolence, not devoid of devotion and
kindheartedness, but led by a naive selfishness which rendered all his
better qualities incomplete, while certain absurdities of manner spoiled
his personal appearance.

Madame Claes recollected the curt tone in which the notary had spoken to
her that afternoon in the porch of the church, and she took note of the
change which her present reply had wrought in his demeanor; she guessed
its meaning and tried to read her daughter’s mind by a penetrating
glance, seeking to discover if she thought of her cousin; but the young
girl’s manner showed complete indifference.

After a few moments spent in general conversation on the current topics
of the day, the master of the house came down from his bedroom, where
his wife had heard with inexpressible delight the creaking sound of his
boots as he trod the floor. The step was that of a young and active man,
and foretold so complete a transformation, that the mere expectation
of his appearance made Madame Claes quiver as he descended the stairs.
Balthazar entered, dressed in the fashion of the period. He wore highly
polished top-boots, which allowed the upper part of the white silk
stockings to appear, blue kerseymere small-clothes with gold buttons,
a flowered white waistcoat, and a blue frock-coat. He had trimmed his
beard, combed and perfumed his hair, pared his nails, and washed his
hands, all with such care that he was scarcely recognizable to those
who had seen him lately. Instead of an old man almost decrepit, his
children, his wife, and the notary saw a Balthazar Claes who was forty
years old, and whose courteous and affable presence was full of its
former attractions. The weariness and suffering betrayed by the thin
face and the clinging of the skin to the bones, had in themselves a sort
of charm.

“Good-evening, Pierquin,” said Monsieur Claes.

Once more a husband and a father, he took his youngest child from his
wife’s lap and tossed him in the air.

“See that little fellow!” he exclaimed to the notary. “Doesn’t such a
pretty creature make you long to marry? Take my word for it, my dear
Pierquin, family happiness consoles a man for everything. Up, up!” he
cried, tossing Jean into the air; “down, down! up! down!”

The child laughed with all his heart as he went alternately to the
ceiling and down to the carpet. The mother turned away her eyes that she
might not betray the emotion which the simple play caused her,--simple
apparently, but to her a domestic revolution.

“Let me see how you can walk,” said Balthazar, putting his son on the
floor and throwing himself on a sofa near his wife.

The child ran to its father, attracted by the glitter of the gold
buttons which fastened the breeches just above the slashed tops of his
boots.

“You are a darling!” cried Balthazar, kissing him; “you are a Claes,
you walk straight. Well, Gabriel, how is Pere Morillon?” he said to his
eldest son, taking him by the ear and twisting it. “Are you struggling
valiantly with your themes and your construing? have you taken sharp
hold of mathematics?”

Then he rose, and went up to the notary with the affectionate courtesy
that characterized him.

“My dear Pierquin,” he said, “perhaps you have something to say to me.”
 He took his arm to lead him to the garden, adding, “Come and see my
tulips.”

Madame Claes looked at her husband as he left the room, unable to
repress the joy she felt in seeing him once more so young, so affable,
so truly himself. She rose, took her daughter round the waist and kissed
her, exclaiming:--

“My dear Marguerite, my darling child! I love you better than ever
to-day.”

“It is long since I have seen my father so kind,” answered the young
girl.

Lemulquinier announced dinner. To prevent Pierquin from offering her his
arm, Madame Claes took that of her husband and led the way into the next
room, the whole family following.

The dining-room, whose ceiling was supported by beams and decorated with
paintings cleaned and restored every year, was furnished with tall oaken
side-boards and buffets, on whose shelves stood many a curious piece of
family china. The walls were hung with violet leather, on which designs
of game and other hunting objects were stamped in gold. Carefully
arranged here and there above the shelves, shone the brilliant plumage
of strange birds, and the lustre of rare shells. The chairs, which
evidently had not been changed since the beginning of the sixteenth
century, showed the square shape with twisted columns and the low back
covered with a fringed stuff, common to that period, and glorified by
Raphael in his picture of the Madonna della Sedia. The wood of these
chairs was now black, but the gilt nails shone as if new, and the stuff,
carefully renewed from time to time, was of an admirable shade of red.

The whole life of Flanders with its Spanish innovations was in this
room. The decanters and flasks on the dinner-table, with their graceful
antique lines and swelling curves, had an air of respectability. The
glasses were those old goblets with stems and feet which may be seen
in the pictures of the Dutch or Flemish school. The dinner-service of
faience, decorated with raised colored figures, in the manner of Bernard
Palissy, came from the English manufactory of Wedgwood. The silver-ware
was massive, with square sides and designs in high relief,--genuine
family plate, whose pieces, in every variety of form, fashion, and
chasing, showed the beginnings of prosperity and the progress towards
fortune of the Claes family. The napkins were fringed, a fashion
altogether Spanish; and as for the linen, it will readily be supposed
that the Claes’s household made it a point of honor to possess the best.

All this service of the table, silver, linen, and glass, were for
the daily use of the family. The front house, where the social
entertainments were given, had its own especial luxury, whose marvels,
being reserved for great occasions, wore an air of dignity often lost
to things which are, as it were, made common by daily use. Here, in
the home quarter, everything bore the impress of patriarchal use and
simplicity. And--for a final and delightful detail--a vine grew outside
the house between the windows, whose tendrilled branches twined about
the casements.

“You are faithful to the old traditions, madame,” said Pierquin, as he
received a plate of that celebrated thyme soup in which the Dutch and
Flemish cooks put little force-meat balls and dice of fried bread. “This
is the Sunday soup of our forefathers. Your house and that of my uncle
des Racquets are the only ones where we still find this historic soup
of the Netherlands. Ah! pardon me, old Monsieur Savaron de Savarus of
Tournai makes it a matter of pride to keep up the custom; but everywhere
else old Flanders is disappearing. Now-a-days everything is changing;
furniture is made from Greek models; wherever you go you see helmets,
lances, shields, and bows and arrows! Everybody is rebuilding his house,
selling his old furniture, melting up his silver dishes, or exchanging
them for Sevres porcelain,--which does not compare with either old
Dresden or with Chinese ware. Oh! as for me, I’m Flemish to the core;
my heart actually bleeds to see the coppersmiths buying up our beautiful
inlaid furniture for the mere value of the wood and the metal. The fact
is, society wants to change its skin. Everything is being sacrificed,
even the old methods of art. When people insist on going so fast,
nothing is conscientiously done. During my last visit to Paris I was
taken to see the pictures in the Louvre. On my word of honor, they
are mere screen-painting,--no depth, no atmosphere; the painters were
actually afraid to put colors on their canvas. And it is they who talk
of overturning our ancient school of art! Ah, bah!--”

“Our old masters,” replied Balthazar, “studied the combination of colors
and their endurance by submitting them to the action of sun and rain.
You are right enough, however; the material resources of art are less
cultivated in these days than formerly.”

Madame Claes was not listening to the conversation. The notary’s remark
that porcelain dinner-services were now the fashion, gave her the
brilliant idea of selling a quantity of heavy silver-ware which she
had inherited from her brother,--hoping to be able thus to pay off the
thirty thousand francs which her husband owed.

“Ha! ha!” Balthazar was saying to Pierquin when Madame Claes’s mind
returned to the conversation, “so they are discussing my work in Douai,
are they?”

“Yes,” replied the notary, “every one is asking what it is you spend so
much money on. Only yesterday I heard the chief-justice deploring that a
man like you should be searching for the Philosopher’s stone. I ventured
to reply that you were too wise not to know that such a scheme was
attempting the impossible, too much of a Christian to take God’s work
out of his hands; and, like every other Claes, too good a business man
to spend your money for such befooling quackeries. Still, I admit that I
share the regret people feel at your absence from society. You might as
well not live here at all. Really, madame, you would have been delighted
had you heard the praises showered on Monsieur Claes and on you.”

“You acted like a faithful friend in repelling imputations whose least
evil is to make me ridiculous,” said Balthazar. “Ha! so they think me
ruined? Well, my dear Pierquin, two months hence I shall give a fete in
honor of my wedding-day whose magnificence will get me back the respect
my dear townsmen bestow on wealth.”

Madame Claes colored deeply. For two years the anniversary had been
forgotten. Like madmen whose faculties shine at times with unwonted
brilliancy, Balthazar was never more gracious and delightful in
his tenderness than at this moment. He was full of attention to his
children, and his conversation had the charms of grace, and wit,
and pertinence. This return of fatherly feeling, so long absent, was
certainly the truest fete he could give his wife, for whom his looks
and words expressed once more that unbroken sympathy of heart for heart
which reveals to each a delicious oneness of sentiment.

Old Lemulquinier seemed to renew his youth; he came and went about
the table with unusual liveliness, caused by the accomplishment of
his secret hopes. The sudden change in his master’s ways was even more
significant to him than to Madame Claes. Where the family saw happiness
he saw fortune. While helping Balthazar in his experiments he had come
to share his beliefs. Whether he really understood the drift of his
master’s researches from certain exclamations which escaped the chemist
when expected results disappointed him, or whether the innate tendency
of mankind towards imitation made him adopt the ideas of the man in
whose atmosphere he lived, certain it is that Lemulquinier had conceived
for his master a superstitious feeling that was a mixture of terror,
admiration, and selfishness. The laboratory was to him what a
lottery-office is to the masses,--organized hope. Every night he went
to bed saying to himself, “To-morrow we may float in gold”; and every
morning he woke with a faith as firm as that of the night before.

His name proved that his origin was wholly Flemish. In former days the
lower classes were known by some name or nickname derived from their
trades, their surroundings, their physical conformation, or their moral
qualities. This name became the patronymic of the burgher family which
each established as soon as he obtained his freedom. Sellers of linen
thread were called in Flanders, “mulquiniers”; and that no doubt was
the trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from
a state of serfdom to one of burgher dignity, until some unknown
misfortune had again reduced his present descendant to the condition of
a serf, with the addition of wages. The whole history of Flanders and
its linen-trade was epitomized in this old man, often called, by way of
euphony, Mulquinier. He was not without originality, either of character
or appearance. His face was triangular in shape, broad and long, and
seamed by small-pox which had left innumerable white and shining patches
that gave him a fantastic appearance. He was tall and thin; his whole
demeanor solemn and mysterious; and his small eyes, yellow as the wig
which was smoothly plastered on his head, cast none but oblique glances.

The old valet’s outward man was in keeping with the feeling of curiosity
which he everywhere inspired. His position as assistant to his master,
the depositary of a secret jealously guarded and about which he
maintained a rigid silence, invested him with a species of charm. The
denizens of the rue de Paris watched him pass with an interest mingled
with awe; to all their questions he returned sibylline answers big with
mysterious treasures. Proud of being necessary to his master, he assumed
an annoying authority over his companions, employing it to further his
own interests and compel a submission which made him virtually the ruler
of the house. Contrary to the custom of Flemish servants, who are deeply
attached to the families whom they serve, Mulquinier cared only for
Balthazar. If any trouble befell Madame Claes, or any joyful event
happened to the family, he ate his bread and butter and drank his beer
as phlegmatically as ever.

Dinner over, Madame Claes proposed that coffee should be served in
the garden, by the bed of tulips which adorned the centre of it. The
earthenware pots in which the bulbs were grown (the name of each flower
being engraved on slate labels) were sunk in the ground and so
arranged as to form a pyramid, at the summit of which rose a certain
dragon’s-head tulip which Balthazar alone possessed. This flower, named
“tulipa Claesiana,” combined the seven colors; and the curved edges of
each petal looked as though they were gilt. Balthazar’s father, who had
frequently refused ten thousand florins for this treasure, took such
precautions against the theft of a single seed that he kept the plant
always in the parlor and often spent whole days in contemplating it. The
stem was enormous, erect, firm, and admirably green; the proportions
of the plant were in harmony with the proportions of the flower, whose
seven colors were distinguishable from each other with the clearly
defined brilliancy which formerly gave such fabulous value to these
dazzling plants.

“Here you have at least thirty or forty thousand francs’ worth of
tulips,” said the notary, looking alternately at Madame Claes and at the
many-colored pyramid. The former was too enthusiastic over the beauty
of the flowers, which the setting sun was just then transforming into
jewels, to observe the meaning of the notary’s words.

“What good do they do you?” continued Pierquin, addressing Balthazar;
“you ought to sell them.”

“Bah! am I in want of money?” replied Claes, in the tone of a man to
whom forty thousand francs was a matter of no consequence.

There was a moment’s silence, during which the children made many
exclamations.

“See this one, mamma!”

“Oh! here’s a beauty!”

“Tell me the name of that one!”

“What a gulf for human reason to sound!” cried Balthazar, raising
his hands and clasping them with a gesture of despair. “A compound of
hydrogen and oxygen gives off, according to their relative proportions,
under the same conditions and by the same principle, these manifold
colors, each of which constitutes a distinct result.”

His wife heard the words of his proposition, but it was uttered so
rapidly that she did not seize its exact meaning; and Balthazar, as
if remembering that she had studied his favorite science, made her a
mysterious sign, saying,--

“You do not yet understand me, but you will.”

Then he apparently fell back into the absorbed meditation now habitual
to him.

“No, I am sure you do not understand him,” said Pierquin, taking his
coffee from Marguerite’s hand. “The Ethiopian can’t change his skin, nor
the leopard his spots,” he whispered to Madame Claes. “Have the goodness
to remonstrate with him later; the devil himself couldn’t draw him out
of his cogitation now; he is in it for to-day, at any rate.”

So saying, he bade good-bye to Claes, who pretended not to hear him,
kissed little Jean in his mother’s arms, and retired with a low bow.

When the street-door clanged behind him, Balthazar caught his wife round
the waist, and put an end to the uneasiness his feigned reverie was
causing her by whispering in her ear,--

“I knew how to get rid of him.”

Madame Claes turned her face to her husband, not ashamed to let him
see the tears of happiness that filled her eyes: then she rested her
forehead against his shoulder and let little Jean slide to the floor.

“Let us go back into the parlor,” she said, after a pause.

Balthazar was exuberantly gay throughout the evening. He invented games
for the children, and played with such zest himself that he did not
notice two or three short absences made by his wife. About half-past
nine, when Jean had gone to bed, Marguerite returned to the parlor after
helping her sister Felicie to undress, and found her mother seated in
the deep armchair, and her father holding his wife’s hand as he talked
to her. The young girl feared to disturb them, and was about to retire
without speaking, when Madame Claes caught sight of her, and said:--

“Come in, Marguerite; come here, dear child.” She drew her down, kissed
her tenderly on the forehead, and said, “Carry your book into your own
room; but do not sit up too late.”

“Good-night, my darling daughter,” said Balthazar.

Marguerite kissed her father and mother and went away. Husband and wife
remained alone for some minutes without speaking, watching the last
glimmer of the twilight as it faded from the trees in the garden, whose
outlines were scarcely discernible through the gathering darkness.
When night had almost fallen, Balthazar said to his wife in a voice of
emotion,--

“Let us go upstairs.”

Long before English manners and customs had consecrated the wife’s
chamber as a sacred spot, that of a Flemish woman was impenetrable. The
good housewives of the Low Countries did not make it a symbol of
virtue. It was to them a habit contracted from childhood, a domestic
superstition, rendering the bedroom a delightful sanctuary of tender
feelings, where simplicity blended with all that was most sweet and
sacred in social life. Any woman in Madame Claes’s position would have
wished to gather about her the elegances of life, but Josephine had done
so with exquisite taste, knowing well how great an influence the aspect
of our surroundings exerts upon the feelings of others. To a pretty
creature it would have been mere luxury, to her it was a necessity.
No one better understood the meaning of the saying, “A pretty woman is
self-created,”--a maxim which guided every action of Napoleon’s first
wife, and often made her false; whereas Madame Claes was ever natural
and true.

Though Balthazar knew his wife’s chamber well, his forgetfulness of
material things had lately been so complete that he felt a thrill of
soft emotion when he entered it, as though he saw it for the first time.
The proud gaiety of a triumphant woman glowed in the splendid colors of
the tulips which rose from the long throats of Chinese vases judiciously
placed about the room, and sparkled in the profusion of lights whose
effect can only be compared to a joyous burst of martial music. The
gleam of the wax candles cast a mellow sheen on the coverings of
pearl-gray silk, whose monotony was relieved by touches of gold, soberly
distributed here and there on a few ornaments, and by the varied colors
of the tulips, which were like sheaves of precious stones. The secret
of this choice arrangement--it was he, ever he! Josephine could not tell
him in words more eloquent that he was now and ever the mainspring of
her joys and woes.

The aspect of that chamber put the soul deliciously at ease, cast out
sad thoughts, and left a sense of pure and equable happiness. The
silken coverings, brought from China, gave forth a soothing perfume
that penetrated the system without fatiguing it. The curtains, carefully
drawn, betrayed a desire for solitude, a jealous intention of guarding
the sound of every word, of hiding every look of the reconquered
husband. Madame Claes, wearing a dressing-robe of muslin, which was
trimmed by a long pelerine with falls of lace that came about her
throat, and adorned with her beautiful black hair, which was exquisitely
glossy and fell on either side of her forehead like a raven’s wing, went
to draw the tapestry portiere that hung before the door and allowed no
sound to penetrate the chamber from without.




CHAPTER VI

At the doorway Josephine turned, and threw to her husband, who was
sitting near the chimney, one of those gay smiles with which a sensitive
woman whose soul comes at moments into her face, rendering it beautiful,
gives expression to irresistible hopes. Woman’s greatest charm lies
in her constant appeal to the generosity of man by the admission of a
weakness which stirs his pride and wakens him to the nobler sentiments.
Is not such an avowal of weakness full of magical seduction? When the
rings of the portiere had slipped with a muffled sound along the wooden
rod, she turned towards Claes, and made as though she would hide her
physical defects by resting her hand upon a chair and drawing herself
gracefully forward. It was calling him to help her. Balthazar, sunk for
a moment in contemplation of the olive-tinted head, which attracted
and satisfied the eye as it stood out in relief against the soft gray
background, rose to take his wife in his arms and carry her to her sofa.
This was what she wanted.

“You promised me,” she said, taking his hand which she held between her
own magnetic palms, “to tell me the secret of your researches. Admit,
dear friend, that I am worthy to know it, since I have had the courage
to study a science condemned by the Church that I might be able to
understand you. I am curious; hide nothing from me. Tell me first how
it happened, that you rose one morning anxious and oppressed, when over
night I had left you happy.”

“Is it to hear me talk of chemistry that you have made yourself so
coquettishly delightful?”

“Dear friend, a confidence which puts me in your inner heart is the
greatest of all pleasures for me; is it not a communion of souls which
gives birth to the highest happiness of earth? Your love comes back to
me not lessened, pure; I long to know what dream has had the power to
keep it from me so long. Yes, I am more jealous of a thought than of
all the women in the world. Love is vast, but it is not infinite, while
Science has depths unfathomed, to which I will not let you go alone.
I hate all that comes between us. If you win the glory for which
you strive, I must be unhappy; it will bring you joy, while I--I
alone--should be the giver of your happiness.”

“No, my angel, it was not an idea, not a thought; it was a man that
first led me into this glorious path.”

“A man!” she cried in terror.

“Do you remember, Pepita, the Polish officer who stayed with us in
1809?”

“Do I remember him!” she exclaimed; “I am often annoyed because my
memory still recalls those eyes, like tongues of fire darting from coals
of hell, those hollows above the eyebrows, that broad skull stripped
of hair, the upturned moustache, the angular, worn face!--What awful
impassiveness in his bearing! Ah! surely if there had been a room in any
inn I would never have allowed him to sleep here.”

“That Polish gentleman,” resumed Balthazar, “was named Adam de
Wierzchownia. When you left us alone that evening in the parlor, we
happened by chance to speak of chemistry. Compelled by poverty to give
up the study of that science, he had become a soldier. It was, I think,
by means of a glass of sugared water that we recognized each other as
adepts. When I ordered Mulquinier to bring the sugar in pieces, the
captain gave a start of surprise. ‘Have you studied chemistry?’ he
asked. ‘With Lavoisier,’ I answered. ‘You are happy in being rich and
free,’ he cried; then from the depths of his bosom came the sigh of a
man,--one of those sighs which reveal a hell of anguish hidden in the
brain or in the heart, a something ardent, concentrated, not to be
expressed in words. He ended his sentence with a look that startled
me. After a pause, he told me that Poland being at her last gasp he
had taken refuge in Sweden. There he had sought consolation for his
country’s fate in the study of chemistry, for which he had always felt
an irresistible vocation. ‘And I see you recognize as I do,’ he added,
‘that gum arabic, sugar, and starch, reduced to powder, each yield a
substance absolutely similar, with, when analyzed, the same qualitative
result.’

“He paused again; and then, after examining me with a searching eye, he
said confidentially, in a low voice, certain grave words whose general
meaning alone remains fixed on my memory; but he spoke with a force of
tone, with fervid inflections, with an energy of gesture, which stirred
my very vitals, and struck my imagination as the hammer strikes the
anvil. I will tell you briefly the arguments he used, which were to me
like the live coal laid by the Almighty upon Isaiah’s tongue; for my
studies with Lavoisier enabled me to understand their full bearing.

“‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘the parity of these three substances, in
appearance so distinct, led me to think that all the productions of
nature ought to have a single principle. The researches of modern
chemistry prove the truth of this law in the larger part of natural
effects. Chemistry divides creation into two distinct parts,--organic
nature, and inorganic nature. Organic nature, comprising as it does all
animal and vegetable creations which show an organization more or less
perfect,--or, to be more exact, a greater or lesser motive power, which
gives more or less sensibility,--is, undoubtedly, the more important
part of our earth. Now, analysis has reduced all the products of
this nature to four simple substances, namely: three gases, nitrogen,
hydrogen, and oxygen, and another simple substance, non-metallic and
solid, carbon. Inorganic nature, on the contrary, so simple, devoid of
movement and sensation, denied the power of growth (too hastily
accorded to it by Linnaeus), possesses fifty-three simple substances, or
elements, whose different combinations make its products. Is it probable
that means should be more numerous where a lesser number of results are
produced?

“‘My master’s opinion was that these fifty-three primary bodies have
one originating principle, acted upon in the past by some force the
knowledge of which has perished to-day, but which human genius ought to
rediscover. Well, then, suppose that this force does live and act again;
we have chemical unity. Organic and inorganic nature would apparently
then rest on four essential principles,--in fact, if we could decompose
nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but
three. This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the
ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to
scorn. Modern chemistry is nothing more than that. It is much, and yet
little,--much, because the science has never recoiled before difficulty;
little, in comparison with what remains to be done. Chance has served
her well, my noble Science! Is not that tear of crystallized pure
carbon, the diamond, seemingly the last substance possible to create?
The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore
creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond. Yet we have
discovered the nature and the law of its composition.

“‘As for me,’ he continued, ‘I have gone farther still. An experiment
proved to me that the mysterious Ternary, which has occupied the human
mind from time immemorial, will not be found by physical analyses, which
lack direction to a fixed point. I will relate, in the first place, the
experiment itself.

“‘Sow cress-seed (to take one among the many substances of organic
nature) in flour of brimstone (to take another simple substance).
Sprinkle the seed with distilled water, that no unknown element may
reach the product of the germination. The seed germinates, and sprouts
from a known environment, and feeds only on elements known by analysis.
Cut off the stalks from time to time, till you get a sufficient quantity
to produce after burning them enough ashes for the experiment. Well,
by analyzing those ashes, you will obtain silicic acid, aluminium,
phosphate and carbonate of lime, carbonate of magnesia, the sulphate and
carbonate of potassium, and oxide of iron, precisely as if the cress
had grown in ordinary earth, beside a brook. Now, those elements did not
exist in the brimstone, a simple substance which served for soil to the
cress, nor in the distilled water with which the plant was nourished,
whose composition was known. But since they are no more to be found
in the seed itself, we can explain their presence in the plant only by
assuming the existence of a primary element common to all the substances
contained in the cress, and also to all those by which we environed
it. Thus the air, the distilled water, the brimstone, and the various
elements which analysis finds in the cress, namely, potash, lime,
magnesia, aluminium, etc., should have one common principle floating in
the atmosphere like light of the sun.

“‘From this unimpeachable experiment,’ he cried, ‘I deduce the existence
of the Alkahest, the Absolute,--a substance common to all created
things, differentiated by one primary force. Such is the net meaning
and position of the problem of the Absolute, which appears to me to
be solvable. In it we find the mysterious Ternary, before whose shrine
humanity has knelt from the dawn of ages,--the primary matter, the
medium, the product. We find that terrible number THREE in all things
human. It governs religions, sciences, and laws.

“‘It was at this point,’ he went on, ‘that poverty put an end to my
researches. You were the pupil of Lavoisier, you are rich, and master of
your own time, I will therefore tell you my conjectures. Listen to the
conclusions my personal experiments have led me to foresee. The PRIME
MATTER must be the common principle in the three gases and in carbon.
The MEDIUM must be the principle common to negative and positive
electricity. Proceed to the discovery of the proofs that will establish
those two truths; you will then find the explanation of all phenomenal
existence.

“‘Oh, monsieur!’ he cried, striking his brow, ‘when I know that I
carry here the last word of Creation, when intuitively I perceive the
Unconditioned, is it LIVING to be dragged hither and thither in the ruck
of men who fly at each other’s throats at the word of command without
knowing what they are doing? My actual life is an inverted dream. My
body comes and goes and acts; it moves amid bullets, and cannon, and
men; it crosses Europe at the will of a power I obey and yet despise. My
soul has no consciousness of these acts; it is fixed, immovable, plunged
in one idea, rapt in that idea, the Search for the Alkahest,--for that
principle by which seeds that are absolutely alike, growing in the same
environments, produce, some a white, others a yellow flower. The same
phenomenon is seen in silkworms fed from the same leaves, and apparently
constituted exactly alike,--one produces yellow silk, another white; and
if we come to man himself, we find that children often resemble neither
father nor mother. The logical deduction from this fact surely involves
the explanation of all the phenomena of nature.

“‘Ah, what can be more in harmony with our ideas of God than to believe
that he created all things by the simplest method? The Pythagorean
worship of ONE, from which come all other numbers, and which represented
Primal Matter; that of the number TWO, the first aggregation and the
type of all the rest; that of the number THREE, which throughout
all time has symbolized God,--that is to say, Matter, Force, and
Product,--are they not an echo, lingering along the ages, of some
confused knowledge of the Absolute? Stahl, Becker, Paracelsus, Agrippa,
all the great Searchers into occult causes took the Great Triad for
their watchword,--in other words, the Ternary. Ignorant men who despise
alchemy, that transcendent chemistry, are not aware that our work is
only carrying onward the passionate researches of those great men. Had
I found the Absolute, the Unconditioned, I meant to have grappled with
Motion. Ah! while I am swallowing gunpowder and leading men uselessly to
their death, my former master is piling discovery upon discovery! he
is soaring towards the Absolute, while I--I shall die like a dog in the
trenches!’

“When this poor grand man recovered his composure, he said, in a
touching tone of brotherhood, ‘If I see cause for a great experiment
I will bequeath it to you before I die.’--My Pepita,” cried Balthazar,
taking his wife’s hands, “tears of anguish rolled down his hollow
cheeks, as he cast into my soul the fiery arguments that Lavoisier had
timidly recognized without daring to follow them out--”

“Oh!” cried Madame Claes, unable to refrain from interrupting her
husband, “that man, passing one night under our roof, was able to
deprive us of your love, to destroy with a phrase, a word, the happiness
of a family! Oh, my dear Balthazar, did he make the sign of the cross?
did you examine him? The Tempter alone could have had that flaming eye
which sent forth the fire of Prometheus. Yes, none but the devil could
have torn you from me. From that day you have been neither husband, nor
father, nor master of your family.”

“What!” exclaimed Balthazar, springing to his feet and casting a
piercing glance at his wife, “do you blame your husband for rising above
the level of other men that he may lay at your feet the divine purple
of his glory, as a paltry offering in exchange for the treasures of your
heart! Ah, my Pepita,” he cried, “you do not know what I have done. In
these three years I have made giant strides--”

His face seemed to his wife at this moment more transfigured under the
fires of genius than she had ever seen it under the fires of love; and
she wept as she listened to him.

“I have combined chlorine and nitrogen; I have decomposed many
substances hitherto considered simple; I have discovered new metals.
Why!” he continued, noticing that his wife wept, “I have even decomposed
tears. Tears contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium,
mucin, and water.”

He went on speaking, without observing the spasm of pain that contracted
Josephine’s features; he was again astride of Science, which bore him
with outspread wings far away from material existence.

“This analysis, my dear,” he went on, “is one of the most convincing
proofs of the theory of the Absolute. All life involves combustion.
According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its
hearth is life more or less enduring. In like manner, the destruction
of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case
combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible. In like manner, again,
vegetables, which are constantly revived by combinations producing
dampness, live indefinitely; in fact, we still possess certain
vegetables which existed before the period of the last cataclysm. But
each time that nature has perfected an organism and then, for some
unknown reason, has introduced into it sensation, instinct, or
intelligence (three marked stages of the organic system), these three
agencies necessitate a combustion whose activity is in direct proportion
to the result obtained. Man, who represents the highest point of
intelligence, and who offers us the only organism by which we arrive at
a power that is semi-creative--namely, THOUGHT--is, among all zoological
creations, the one in which combustion is found in its most intense
degree; whose powerful effects may in fact be seen to some extent in the
phosphates, sulphates, and carbonates which a man’s body reveals to
our analysis. May not these substances be traces left within him of
the passage of the electric fluid which is the principle of all
fertilization? Would not electricity manifest itself by a greater
variety of compounds in him than in any other animal? Should not he have
faculties above those of all other created beings for the purpose of
absorbing fuller portions of the Absolute principle? and may he not
assimilate that principle so as to produce, in some more perfect
mechanism, his force and his ideas? I think so. Man is a retort. In my
judgment, the brain of an idiot contains too little phosphorous or other
product of electro-magnetism, that of a madman too much; the brain of an
ordinary man has but little, while that of a man of genius is saturated
to its due degree. The man constantly in love, the street-porter, the
dancer, the large eater, are the ones who disperse the force resulting
from their electrical apparatus. Consequently, our feelings--”

“Enough, Balthazar! you terrify me; you commit sacrilege. What, is my
love--”

“An ethereal matter disengaged, an emanation, the key of the Absolute.
Conceive if I--I, the first, should find it, find it, find it!”

As he uttered the words in three rising tones, the expression of his
face rose by degrees to inspiration. “I shall make metals,” he cried; “I
shall make diamonds, I shall be a co-worker with Nature!”

“Will you be the happier?” she asked in despair. “Accursed science!
accursed demon! You forget, Claes, that you commit the sin of pride, the
sin of which Satan was guilty; you assume the attributes of God.”

“Oh! oh! God!”

“He denies Him!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Claes, God wields a
power that you can never gain.”

At this argument, which seemed to discredit his beloved Science, he
looked at his wife and trembled.

“What power?” he asked.

“Primal force--motion,” she replied. “This is what I learn from the
books your mania has constrained me to read. Analyze fruits, flowers,
Malaga wine; you will discover, undoubtedly, that their substances come,
like those of your water-cress, from a medium that seems foreign to
them. You can, if need be, find them in nature; but when you have them,
can you combine them? can you make the flowers, the fruits, the Malaga
wine? Will you have grasped the inscrutable effects of the sun, of the
atmosphere of Spain? Ah! decomposing is not creating.”

“If I discover the magistral force, I shall be able to create.”

“Will nothing stop him?” cried Pepita. “Oh! my love, my love! it is
killed! I have lost him!”

She wept bitterly, and her eyes, illumined by grief and by the sanctity
of the feelings that flooded her soul, shone with greater beauty than
ever through her tears.

“Yes,” she resumed in a broken voice, “you are dead to all. I see it
but too well. Science is more powerful within you than your own self;
it bears you to heights from which you will return no more to be the
companion of a poor woman. What joys can I still offer you? Ah! I would
fain believe, as a wretched consolation, that God has indeed created you
to make manifest his works, to chant his praises; that he has put within
your breast the irresistible power that has mastered you--But no; God is
good; he would keep in your heart some thoughts of the woman who adores
you, of the children you are bound to protect. It is the Evil One alone
who is helping you to walk amid these fathomless abysses, these clouds
of outer darkness, where the light of faith does not guide you,--nothing
guides you but a terrible belief in your own faculties! Were it
otherwise, would you not have seen that you have wasted nine hundred
thousand francs in three years? Oh! do me justice, you, my God on earth!
I reproach you not; were we alone I would bring you, on my knees, all
I possess and say, ‘Take it, fling it into your furnace, turn it into
smoke’; and I should laugh to see it float away in vapor. Were you poor,
I would beg without shame for the coal to light your furnace. Oh! could
my body yield your hateful Alkahest, I would fling myself upon those
fires with joy, since your glory, your delight is in that unfound
secret. But our children, Claes, our children! what will become of them
if you do not soon discover this hellish thing? Do you know why Pierquin
came to-day? He came for thirty thousand francs, which you owe and
cannot pay. I told him that you had the money, so that I might spare you
the mortification of his questions; but to get it I must sell our family
silver.”

She saw her husband’s eyes grow moist, and she flung herself
despairingly at his feet, raising up to him her supplicating hands.

“My friend,” she cried, “refrain awhile from these researches; let us
economize, let us save the money that may enable you to take them up
hereafter,--if, indeed, you cannot renounce this work. Oh! I do not
condemn it; I will heat your furnaces if you ask it; but I implore you,
do not reduce our children to beggary. Perhaps you cannot love them,
Science may have consumed your heart; but oh! do not bequeath them a
wretched life in place of the happiness you owe them. Motherhood has
sometimes been too weak a power in my heart; yes, I have sometimes
wished I were not a mother, that I might be closer to your soul, your
life! And now, to stifle my remorse, must I plead the cause of my
children before you, and not my own?”

Her hair fell loose and floated over her shoulders, her eyes shot forth
her feelings as though they had been arrows. She triumphed over her
rival. Balthazar lifted her, carried her to the sofa, and knelt at her
feet.

“Have I caused you such grief?” he said, in the tone of a man waking
from a painful dream.

“My poor Claes! yes, and you will cause me more, in spite of yourself,”
 she said, passing her hand over his hair. “Sit here beside me,” she
continued, pointing to the sofa. “Ah! I can forget it all now, now that
you come back to us; all can be repaired--but you will not abandon
me again? say that you will not! My noble husband, grant me a woman’s
influence on your heart, that influence which is so needful to the
happiness of suffering artists, to the troubled minds of great men. You
may be harsh to me, angry with me if you will, but let me check you a
little for your good. I will never abuse the power if you will grant it.
Be famous, but be happy too. Do not love Chemistry better than you love
us. Hear me, we will be generous; we will let Science share your heart;
but oh! my Claes, be just; let us have our half. Tell me, is not my
disinterestedness sublime?”

She made him smile. With the marvellous art such women possess, she
carried the momentous question into the regions of pleasantry where
women reign. But though she seemed to laugh, her heart was violently
contracted and could not easily recover the quiet even action that was
habitual to it. And yet, as she saw in the eyes of Balthazar the rebirth
of a love which was once her glory, the full return of a power she
thought she had lost, she said to him with a smile:--

“Believe me, Balthazar, nature made us to feel; and though you may wish
us to be mere electrical machines, yet your gases and your ethereal
disengaged matters will never explain the gift we possess of looking
into futurity.”

“Yes,” he exclaimed, “by affinity. The power of vision which makes the
poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based
on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds
class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet
sees and deduces. Unfortunately, such affinities are too rare and too
obscure to be subjected to analysis or observation.”

“Is this,” she said, giving him a kiss to drive away the Chemistry she
had so unfortunately reawakened, “what you call an affinity?”

“No; it is a compound; two substances that are equivalents are neutral,
they produce no reaction--”

“Oh! hush, hush,” she cried, “you will make me die of grief. I can never
bear to see my rival in the transports of your love.”

“But, my dear life, I think only of you. My work is for the glory of my
family. You are the basis of all my hopes.”

“Ah, look me in the eyes!”

The scene had made her as beautiful as a young woman; of her whole
person Balthazar saw only her head, rising from a cloud of lace and
muslin.

“Yes, I have done wrong to abandon you for Science,” he said. “If I fall
back into thought and preoccupation, then, my Pepita, you must drag me
from them; I desire it.”

She lowered her eyes and let him take her hand, her greatest beauty,--a
hand that was both strong and delicate.

“But I ask more,” she said.

“You are so lovely, so delightful, you can obtain all,” he answered.

“I wish to destroy that laboratory, and chain up Science,” she said,
with fire in her eyes.

“So be it--let Chemistry go to the devil!”

“This moment effaces all!” she cried. “Make me suffer now, if you will.”

Tears came to Balthazar’s eyes, as he heard these words.

“You were right, love,” he said. “I have seen you through a veil; I have
not understood you.”

“If it concerned only me,” she said, “willingly would I have suffered
in silence, never would I have raised my voice against my sovereign. But
your sons must be thought of, Claes. If you continue to dissipate your
property, no matter how glorious the object you have in view the world
will take little account of it, it will only blame you and yours. But
surely, it is enough for a man of your noble nature that his wife has
shown him a danger he did not perceive. We will talk of this no more,”
 she cried, with a smile and a glance of coquetry. “To-night, my Claes,
let us not be less than happy.”




CHAPTER VII

On the morrow of this evening so eventful for the Claes family,
Balthazar, from whom Josephine had doubtless obtained some promise as
to the cessation of his researches, remained in the parlor, and did not
enter his laboratory. The succeeding day the household prepared to
move into the country, where they stayed for more than two months, only
returning to town in time to prepare for the fete which Claes determined
to give, as in former years, to commemorate his wedding-day. He now
began by degrees to obtain proof of the disorder which his experiments
and his indifference had brought into his business affairs.

Madame Claes, far from irritating the wound by remarking on it,
continually found remedies for the evil that was done. Of the seven
servants who customarily served the family, there now remained only
Lemulquinier, Josette the cook, and an old waiting-woman, named Martha,
who had never left her mistress since the latter left her convent. It
was of course impossible to give a fete to the whole society of Douai
with so few servants, but Madame Claes overcame all difficulties by
proposing to send to Paris for a cook, to train the gardener’s son as
a waiter, and to borrow Pierquin’s manservant. Thus the pinched
circumstances of the family passed unnoticed by the community.

During the twenty days of preparation for the fete, Madame Claes was
cleverly able to outwit her husband’s listlessness. She commissioned him
to select the rarest plants and flowers to decorate the grand staircase,
the gallery, and the salons; then she sent him to Dunkerque to order one
of those monstrous fish which are the glory of the burgher tables in the
northern departments. A fete like that the Claes were about to give is a
serious affair, involving thought and care and active correspondence, in
a land where traditions of hospitality put the family honor so much
at stake that to servants as well as masters a grand dinner is like a
victory won over the guests. Oysters arrived from Ostend, grouse were
imported from Scotland, fruits came from Paris; in short, not the
smallest accessory was lacking to the hereditary luxury.

A ball at the House of Claes had an importance of its own. The
government of the department was then at Douai, and the anniversary fete
of the Claes usually opened the winter season and set the fashion to the
neighborhood. For fifteen years, Balthazar had endeavored to make it
a distinguished occasion, and had succeeded so well that the fete was
talked of throughout a circumference of sixty miles, and the toilettes,
the guests, the smallest details, the novelties exhibited, and the
events that took place, were discussed far and wide. These preparations
now prevented Claes from thinking, for the time being, of the Alkahest.
Since his return to social life and domestic bliss, the servant of
science had recovered his self-love as a man, as a Fleming, as the
master of a household, and he now took pleasure in the thought of
surprising the whole country. He resolved to give a special character
to this ball by some exquisite novelty; and he chose, among all
other caprices of luxury, the loveliest, the richest, and the most
fleeting,--he turned the old mansion into a fairy bower of rare plants
and flowers, and prepared choice bouquets for all the ladies.

The other details of the fete were in keeping with this unheard-of
luxury, and nothing seemed likely to mar the effect. But the
Twenty-ninth Bulletin and the news of the terrible disasters of the
grand army in Russia, and at the passage of the Beresina, were made
known on the afternoon of the appointed day. A sincere and profound
grief was felt in Douai, and those who were present at the fete, moved
by a natural feeling of patriotism, unanimously declined to dance.

Among the letters which arrived that day in Douai, was one for Balthazar
from Monsieur de Wierzchownia, then in Dresden and dying, he wrote,
from wounds received in one of the late engagements. He remembered his
promise, and desired to bequeath to his former host several ideas on the
subject of the Absolute, which had come to him since the period of their
meeting. The letter plunged Claes into a reverie which apparently did
honor to his patriotism; but his wife was not misled by it. To her, this
festal day brought a double mourning: and the ball, during which the
House of Claes shone with departing lustre, was sombre and sad in spite
of its magnificence, and the many choice treasures gathered by the hands
of six generations, which the people of Douai now beheld for the last
time.

Marguerite Claes, just sixteen, was the queen of the day, and on this
occasion her parents presented her to society. She attracted all eyes by
the extreme simplicity and candor of her air and manner, and especially
by the harmony of her form and countenance with the characteristics of
her home. She was the embodiment of the Flemish girl whom the painters
of that country loved to represent,--the head perfectly rounded and
full, chestnut hair parted in the middle and laid smoothly on the brow,
gray eyes with a mixture of green, handsome arms, natural stoutness
which did not detract from her beauty, a timid air, and yet, on the
high square brow an expression of firmness, hidden at present under an
apparent calmness and docility. Without being sad or melancholy, she
seemed to have little natural enjoyment. Reflectiveness, order, a
sense of duty, the three chief expressions of Flemish nature, were the
characteristics of a face that seemed cold at first sight, but to which
the eye was recalled by a certain grace of outline and a placid pride
which seemed the pledges of domestic happiness. By one of those freaks
which physiologists have not yet explained, she bore no likeness to
either father or mother, but was the living image of her maternal
great-grandmother, a Conyncks of Bruges, whose portrait, religiously
preserved, bore witness to the resemblance.

The supper gave some life to the ball. If the military disasters forbade
the delights of dancing, every one felt that they need not exclude the
pleasures of the table. The true patriots, however, retired early; only
the more indifferent remained, together with a few card players and the
intimate friends of the family. Little by little the brilliantly lighted
house, to which all the notabilities of Douai had flocked, sank into
silence, and by one o’clock in the morning the great gallery was
deserted, the lights were extinguished in one salon after another,
and the court-yard, lately so bustling and brilliant, grew dark and
gloomy,--prophetic image of the future that lay before the family. When
the Claes returned to their own appartement, Balthazar gave his wife the
letter he had received from the Polish officer: Josephine returned it
with a mournful gesture; she foresaw the coming doom.

From that day forth, Balthazar made no attempt to disguise the weariness
and the depression that assailed him. In the mornings, after the family
breakfast, he played for awhile in the parlor with little Jean, and
talked to his daughters, who were busy with their sewing, or embroidery
or lace-work; but he soon wearied of the play and of the talk, and
seemed at last to get through with them as a duty. When his wife came
down again after dressing, she always found him sitting in an easy-chair
looking blankly at Marguerite and Felicie, quite undisturbed by the
rattle of their bobbins. When the newspaper was brought in, he read it
slowly like a retired merchant at a loss how to kill the time. Then he
would get up, look at the sky through the window panes, go back to his
chair and mend the fire drearily, as though he were deprived of all
consciousness of his own movements by the tyranny of ideas.

Madame Claes keenly regretted her defects of education and memory. It
was difficult for her to sustain an interesting conversation for any
length of time; perhaps this is always difficult between two persons who
have said everything to each other, and are forced to seek for subjects
of interest outside the life of the heart, or the life of material
existence. The life of the heart has its own moments of expansion which
need some stimulus to bring them forth; discussions of material life
cannot long occupy superior minds accustomed to decide promptly; and the
mere gossip of society is intolerable to loving natures. Consequently,
two isolated beings who know each other thoroughly ought to seek their
enjoyments in the higher regions of thought; for it is impossible to
satisfy with paltry things the immensity of the relation between them.
Moreover, when a man has accustomed himself to deal with great subjects,
he becomes unamusable, unless he preserves in the depths of his heart
a certain guileless simplicity and unconstraint which often make great
geniuses such charming children; but the childhood of the heart is a
rare human phenomenon among those whose mission it is to see all, know
all, and comprehend all.

During these first months, Madame Claes worked her way through this
critical situation, by unwearying efforts, which love or necessity
suggested to her. She tried to learn backgammon, which she had never
been able to play, but now, from an impetus easy to understand, she
ended by mastering it. Then she interested Balthazar in the education of
his daughters, and asked him to direct their studies. All such resources
were, however, soon exhausted. There came a time when Josephine’s
relation to Balthazar was like that of Madame de Maintenon to Louis
XIV.; she had to amuse the unamusable, but without the pomps of power or
the wiles of a court which could play comedies like the sham embassies
from the King of Siam and the Shah of Persia. After wasting the revenues
of France, Louis XIV., no longer young or successful, was reduced to the
expedients of a family heir to raise the money he needed; in the midst
of his grandeur he felt his impotence, and the royal nurse who had
rocked the cradles of his children was often at her wit’s end to rock
his, or soothe the monarch now suffering from his misuse of men and
things, of life and God. Claes, on the contrary, suffered from too much
power. Stifling in the clutch of a single thought, he dreamed of the
pomps of Science, of treasures for the human race, of glory for himself.
He suffered as artists suffer in the grip of poverty, as Samson suffered
beneath the pillars of the temple. The result was the same for the two
sovereigns; though the intellectual monarch was crushed by his inward
force, the other by his weakness.

What could Pepita do, singly, against this species of scientific
nostalgia? After employing every means that family life afforded her,
she called society to the rescue, and gave two “cafes” every week. Cafes
at Douai took the place of teas. A cafe was an assemblage which, during
a whole evening, the guests sipped the delicious wines and liqueurs
which overflow the cellars of that ever-blessed land, ate the Flemish
dainties and took their “cafe noir” or their “cafe au lait frappe,”
 while the women sang ballads, discussed each other’s toilettes, and
related the gossip of the day. It was a living picture by Mieris or
Terburg, without the pointed gray hats, the scarlet plumes, or the
beautiful costumes of the sixteenth century. And yet, Balthazar’s
efforts to play the part of host, his constrained courtesy, his forced
animation, left him the next day in a state of languor which showed but
too plainly the depths of the inward ill.

These continual fetes, weak remedies for the real evil, only increased
it. Like branches which caught him as he rolled down the precipice, they
retarded Claes’s fall, but in the end he fell the heavier. Though he
never spoke of his former occupations, never showed the least regret for
the promise he had given not to renew his researches, he grew to have
the melancholy motions, the feeble voice, the depression of a sick
person. The ennui that possessed him showed at times in the very manner
with which he picked up the tongs and built fantastic pyramids in the
fire with bits of coal, utterly unconscious of what he was doing. When
night came he was evidently relieved; sleep no doubt released him from
the importunities of thought: the next day he rose wearily to encounter
another day,--seeming to measure time as the tired traveller measures
the desert he is forced to cross.

If Madame Claes knew the cause of this languor she endeavored not to see
the extent of its ravages. Full of courage against the sufferings of the
mind, she was helpless against the generous impulses of the heart. She
dared not question Balthazar when she saw him listening to the laughter
of little Jean or the chatter of his girls, with the air of a man
absorbed in secret thoughts; but she shuddered when she saw him shake
off his melancholy and try, with generous intent, to seem cheerful, that
he might not distress others. The little coquetries of the father with
his daughters, or his games with little Jean, moistened the eyes of
the poor wife, who often left the room to hide the feelings that heroic
effort caused her,--a heroism the cost of which is well understood by
women, a generosity that well-nigh breaks their heart. At such times
Madame Claes longed to say, “Kill me, and do what you will!”

Little by little Balthazar’s eyes lost their fire and took the glaucous
opaque tint which overspreads the eyes of old men. His attentions to his
wife, his manner of speaking, his whole bearing, grew heavy and inert.
These symptoms became more marked towards the end of April, terrifying
Madame Claes, to whom the sight was now intolerable, and who had all
along reproached herself a thousand times while she admired the Flemish
loyalty which kept her husband faithful to his promise.

At last, one day when Balthazar seemed more depressed than ever, she
hesitated no longer; she resolved to sacrifice everything and bring him
back to life.

“Dear friend,” she said, “I release you from your promise.”

Balthazar looked at her in amazement.

“You are thinking of your researches, are you not?” she continued.

He answered by a gesture of startling eagerness. Far from remonstrating,
Madame Claes, who had had leisure to sound the abyss into which they
were about to fall together, took his hand and pressed it, smiling.

“Thank you,” she said; “now I am sure of my power. You sacrificed more
than your life to me. In future, be the sacrifices mine. Though I have
sold some of my diamonds, enough are left, with those my brother gave
me, to get the necessary money for your experiments. I intended those
jewels for my daughters, but your glory shall sparkle in their stead;
and, besides, you will some day replace them with other and finer
diamonds.”

The joy that suddenly lighted her husband’s face was like a death-knell
to the wife: she saw, with anguish, that the man’s passion was stronger
than himself. Claes had faith in his work which enabled him to walk
without faltering on a path which, to his wife, was the edge of a
precipice. For him faith, for her doubt,--for her the heavier burden:
does not the woman ever suffer for the two? At this moment she chose to
believe in his success, that she might justify to herself her connivance
in the probable wreck of their fortunes.

“The love of all my life can be no recompense for your devotion,
Pepita,” said Claes, deeply moved.

He had scarcely uttered the words when Marguerite and Felicie entered
the room and wished him good-morning. Madame Claes lowered her eyes
and remained for a moment speechless in presence of her children,
whose future she had just sacrificed to a delusion; her husband, on the
contrary, took them on his knees, and talked to them gaily, delighted to
give vent to the joy that choked him.

From this day Madame Claes shared the impassioned life of her husband.
The future of her children, their father’s credit, were two motives as
powerful to her as glory and science were to Claes. After the diamonds
were sold in Paris, and the purchase of chemicals was again begun, the
unhappy woman never knew another hour’s peace of mind. The demon of
Science and the frenzy of research which consumed her husband now
agitated her own mind; she lived in a state of continual expectation,
and sat half-lifeless for days together in the deep armchair, paralyzed
by the very violence of her wishes, which, finding no food, like those
of Balthazar, in the daily hopes of the laboratory, tormented her spirit
and aggravated her doubts and fears. Sometimes, blaming herself for
compliance with a passion whose object was futile and condemned by the
Church, she would rise, go to the window on the courtyard and gaze with
terror at the chimney of the laboratory. If the smoke were rising, an
expression of despair came into her face, a conflict of thoughts and
feelings raged in her heart and mind. She beheld her children’s future
fleeing in that smoke, but--was she not saving their father’s life? was
it not her first duty to make him happy? This last thought calmed her
for a moment.

She obtained the right to enter the laboratory and remain there; but
even this melancholy satisfaction was soon renounced. Her sufferings
were too keen when she saw that Balthazar took no notice of her, or
seemed at times annoyed by her presence; in that fatal place she went
through paroxysms of jealous impatience, angry desires to destroy the
building,--a living death of untold miseries. Lemulquinier became to
her a species of barometer: if she heard him whistle as he laid the
breakfast-table or the dinner-table, she guessed that Balthazar’s
experiments were satisfactory, and there were prospects of a coming
success; if, on the other hand, the man were morose and gloomy, she
looked at him and trembled,--Balthazar must surely be dissatisfied.
Mistress and valet ended by understanding each other, notwithstanding
the proud reserve of the one and the reluctant submission of the other.

Feeble and defenceless against the terrible prostrations of thought, the
poor woman at last gave way under the alternations of hope and despair
which increased the distress of the loving wife, and the anxieties of
the mother trembling for her children. She now practised the doleful
silence which formerly chilled her heart, not observing the gloom that
pervaded the house, where whole days went by in that melancholy parlor
without a smile, often without a word. Led by sad maternal foresight,
she trained her daughters to household work, and tried to make them
skilful in womanly employments, that they might have the means of
living if destitution came. The outward calm of this quiet home covered
terrible agitations. Towards the end of the summer Balthazar had used
the money derived from the diamonds, and was twenty thousand francs in
debt to Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville.

In August, 1813, about a year after the scene with which this history
begins, although Claes had made a few valuable experiments, for which,
unfortunately, he cared but little, his efforts had been without result
as to the real object of his researches. There came a day when he ended
the whole series of experiments, and the sense of his impotence crushed
him; the certainty of having fruitlessly wasted enormous sums of money
drove him to despair. It was a frightful catastrophe. He left the
garret, descended slowly to the parlor, and threw himself into a chair
in the midst of his children, remaining motionless for some minutes as
though dead, making no answer to the questions his wife pressed upon
him. Tears came at last to his relief, and he rushed to his own chamber
that no one might witness his despair.

Josephine followed him and drew him into her own room, where, alone with
her, Balthazar gave vent to his anguish. These tears of a man, these
broken words of the hopeless toiler, these bitter regrets of the husband
and father, did Madame Claes more harm than all her past sufferings. The
victim consoled the executioner. When Balthazar said to her in a tone of
dreadful conviction: “I am a wretch; I have gambled away the lives of
my children, and your life; you can have no happiness unless I kill
myself,”--the words struck home to her heart; she knew her husband’s
nature enough to fear he might at once act out the despairing wish: an
inward convulsion, disturbing the very sources of life itself, seized
her, and was all the more dangerous because she controlled its violent
effects beneath a deceptive calm of manner.

“My friend,” she said, “I have consulted, not Pierquin, whose friendship
does not hinder him from feeling some secret satisfaction at our ruin,
but an old man who has been as good to me as a father. The Abbe de
Solis, my confessor, has shown me how we can still save ourselves from
ruin. He came to see the pictures. The value of those in the gallery is
enough to pay the sums you have borrowed on your property, and also all
that you owe to Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, who have no doubt an
account against you.”

Claes made an affirmative sign and bowed his head, the hair of which was
now white.

“Monsieur de Solis knows the Happe and Duncker families of Amsterdam;
they have a mania for pictures, and are anxious, like all parvenus,
to display a luxury which ought to belong only to the old families:
he thinks they will pay the full value of ours. By this means we can
recover our independence, and out of the purchase money, which will
amount to over one hundred thousand ducats, you will have enough to
continue the experiments. Your daughters and I will be content with very
little; we can fill up the empty frames with other pictures in course of
time and by economy; meantime you will be happy.”

Balthazar raised his head and looked at his wife with a joy that was
mingled with fear. Their roles were changed. The wife was the protector
of the husband. He, so tender, he, whose heart was so at one with his
Pepita’s, now held her in his arms without perceiving the horrible
convulsion that made her palpitate, and even shook her hair and her lips
with a nervous shudder.

“I dared not tell you,” he said, “that between me and the Unconditioned,
the Absolute, scarcely a hair’s breadth intervenes. To gasify metals, I
only need to find the means of submitting them to intense heat in some
centre where the pressure of the atmosphere is nil,--in short, in a
vacuum.”

Madame Claes could not endure the egotism of this reply. She expected a
passionate acknowledgment of her sacrifices--she received a problem in
chemistry! The poor woman left her husband abruptly and returned to the
parlor, where she fell into a chair between her frightened daughters,
and burst into tears. Marguerite and Felicie took her hands, kneeling
one on each side of her, not knowing the cause of her grief, and asking
at intervals, “Mother, what is it?”

“My poor children, I am dying; I feel it.”

The answer struck home to Marguerite’s heart; she saw, for the first
time on her mother’s face, the signs of that peculiar pallor which only
comes on olive-tinted skins.

“Martha, Martha!” cried Felicie, “come quickly; mamma wants you.”

The old duenna ran in from the kitchen, and as soon as she saw the livid
hue of the dusky skin usually high-colored, she cried out in Spanish,--

“Body of Christ! madame is dying!”

Then she rushed precipitately back, told Josette to heat water for a
footbath, and returned to the parlor.

“Don’t alarm Monsieur Claes; say nothing to him, Martha,” said her
mistress. “My poor dear girls,” she added, pressing Marguerite and
Felicie to her heart with a despairing action; “I wish I could live
long enough to see you married and happy. Martha,” she continued, “tell
Lemulquinier to go to Monsieur de Solis and ask him in my name to come
here.”

The shock of this attack extended to the kitchen. Josette and Martha,
both devoted to Madame Claes and her daughters, felt the blow in their
own affections. Martha’s dreadful announcement,--“Madame is dying;
monsieur must have killed her; get ready a mustard-bath,”--forced
certain exclamations from Josette, which she launched at Lemulquinier.
He, cold and impassive, went on eating at the corner of a table before
one of the windows of the kitchen, where all was kept as clean as the
boudoir of a fine lady.

“I knew how it would end,” said Josette, glancing at the valet and
mounting a stool to take down a copper kettle that shone like gold.
“There’s no mother could stand quietly by and see a father amusing
himself by chopping up a fortune like his into sausage-meat.”

Josette, whose head was covered by a round cap with crimped borders,
which made it look like a German nut-cracker, cast a sour look at
Lemulquinier, which the greenish tinge of her prominent little eyes
made almost venomous. The old valet shrugged his shoulders with a motion
worthy of Mirobeau when irritated; then he filled his large mouth with
bread and butter sprinkled with chopped onion.

“Instead of thwarting monsieur, madame ought to give him more money,” he
said; “and then we should soon be rich enough to swim in gold. There’s
not the thickness of a farthing between us and--”

“Well, you’ve got twenty thousand francs laid by; why don’t you give ‘em
to monsieur? he’s your master, and if you are so sure of his doings--”

“You don’t know anything about them, Josette. Mind your pots and pans,
and heat the water,” remarked the old Fleming, interrupting the cook.

“I know enough to know there used to be several thousand ounces of
silver-ware about this house which you and your master have melted up;
and if you are allowed to have your way, you’ll make ducks and drakes of
everything till there’s nothing left.”

“And monsieur,” added Martha, entering the kitchen, “will kill madame,
just to get rid of a woman who restrains him and won’t let him swallow
up everything he’s got. He’s possessed by the devil; anybody can see
that. You don’t risk your soul in helping him, Mulquinier, because you
haven’t got any; look at you! sitting there like a bit of ice when
we are all in such distress; the young ladies are crying like two
Magdalens. Go and fetch Monsieur l’Abbe de Solis.”

“I’ve got something to do for monsieur. He told me to put the laboratory
in order,” said the valet. “Besides, it’s too far--go yourself.”

“Just hear the brute!” cried Martha. “Pray who is to give madame her
foot-bath? do you want her to die? she has got a rush of blood to the
head.”

“Mulquinier,” said Marguerite, coming into the servants’ hall, which
adjoined the kitchen, “on your way back from Monsieur de Solis, call at
Dr. Pierquin’s house and ask him to come here at once.”

“Ha! you’ve got to go now,” said Josette.

“Mademoiselle, monsieur told me to put the laboratory in order,”
 said Lemulquinier, facing the two women and looking them down, with a
despotic air.

“Father,” said Marguerite, to Monsieur Claes who was just then
descending the stairs, “can you let Mulquinier do an errand for us in
town?”

“Now you’re forced to go, you old barbarian!” cried Martha, as she heard
Monsieur Claes put Mulquinier at his daughter’s bidding.

The lack of good-will and devotion shown by the old valet for the family
whom he served was a fruitful cause of quarrel between the two women and
Lemulquinier, whose cold-heartedness had the effect of increasing the
loyal attachment of Josette and the old duenna.

This dispute, apparently so paltry, was destined to influence the future
of the Claes family when, at a later period, they needed succor in
misfortune.




CHAPTER VIII

Balthazar was again so absorbed that he did not notice Josephine’s
condition. He took Jean upon his knee and trotted him mechanically,
pondering, no doubt, the problem he now had the means of solving. He saw
them bring the footbath to his wife, who was still in the parlor,
too weak to rise from the low chair in which she was lying; he gazed
abstractedly at his daughters now attending on their mother, without
inquiring the cause of their tender solicitude. When Marguerite or
Jean attempted to speak aloud, Madame Claes hushed them and pointed to
Balthazar. Such a scene was of a nature to make a young girl think; and
Marguerite, placed as she was between her father and mother, was old
enough and sensible enough to weigh their conduct.

There comes a moment in the private life of every family when the
children, voluntarily or involuntarily, judge their parents. Madame
Claes foresaw the dangers of that moment. Her love for Balthazar
impelled her to justify in Marguerite’s eyes conduct that might, to the
upright mind of a girl of sixteen, seem faulty in a father. The very
respect which she showed at this moment for her husband, making
herself and her condition of no account that nothing might disturb his
meditation, impressed her children with a sort of awe of the paternal
majesty. Such self-devotion, however infectious it might be, only
increased Marguerite’s admiration for her mother, to whom she was more
particularly bound by the close intimacy of their daily lives. This
feeling was based on the intuitive perception of sufferings whose causes
naturally occupied the young girl’s mind. No human power could have
hindered some chance word dropped by Martha, or by Josette, from
enlightening her as to the real reasons for the condition of her home
during the last four years. Notwithstanding Madame Claes’s reserve,
Marguerite discovered slowly, thread by thread, the clue to the domestic
drama. She was soon to be her mother’s active confidante, and later,
under other circumstances, a formidable judge.

Madame Claes’s watchful care now centred upon her eldest daughter,
to whom she endeavored to communicate her own self-devotion towards
Balthazar. The firmness and sound judgment which she recognized in
the young girl made her tremble at the thought of a possible struggle
between father and daughter whenever her own death should make the
latter mistress of the household. The poor woman had reached a point
where she dreaded the consequences of her death far more than death
itself. Her tender solicitude for Balthazar showed itself in the
resolution she had this day taken. By freeing his property from
encumbrance she secured his independence, and prevented all future
disputes by separating his interests from those of her children. She
hoped to see him happy until she closed her eyes on earth, and she
studied to transmit the tenderness of her own heart to Marguerite,
trusting that his daughter might continue to be to him an angel of
love, while exercising over the family a protecting and conservative
authority. Might she not thus shed the light of her love upon her dear
ones from beyond the grave? Nevertheless, she was not willing to lower
the father in the eyes of his daughter by initiating her into the secret
dangers of his scientific passion before it became necessary to do so.
She studied Marguerite’s soul and character, seeking to discover if the
girl’s own nature would lead her to be a mother to her brothers and her
sister, and a tender, gentle helpmeet to her father.

Madame Claes’s last days were thus embittered by fears and mental
disquietudes which she dared not confide to others. Conscious that the
recent scene had struck her death-blow, she turned her thoughts wholly
to the future. Balthazar, meanwhile, now permanently unfitted for the
care of property or the interests of domestic life, thought only of the
Absolute.

The heavy silence that reigned in the parlor was broken only by the
monotonous beating of Balthazar’s foot, which he continued to trot,
wholly unaware that Jean had slid from his knee. Marguerite, who was
sitting beside her mother and watching the changes on that pallid,
convulsed face, turned now and again to her father, wondering at his
indifference. Presently the street-door clanged, and the family saw the
Abbe de Solis leaning on the arm of his nephew and slowly crossing the
court-yard.

“Ah! there is Monsieur Emmanuel,” said Felicie.

“That good young man!” exclaimed Madame Claes; “I am glad to welcome
him.”

Marguerite blushed at the praise that escaped her mother’s lips. For
the last two days a remembrance of the young man had stirred mysterious
feelings in her heart, and wakened in her mind thoughts that had lain
dormant. During the visit made by the Abbe de Solis to Madame Claes on
the occasion of his examining the pictures, there happened certain of
those imperceptible events which wield so great an influence upon life;
and their results were sufficiently important to necessitate a brief
sketch of the two personages now first introduced into the history of
this family.

It was a matter of principle with Madame Claes to perform the duties
of her religion privately. Her confessor, who was almost unknown in the
family, now entered the house for the second time only; but there, as
elsewhere, every one was impressed with a sort of tender admiration at
the aspect of the uncle and his nephew.

The Abbe de Solis was an octogenarian, with silvery hair, and a withered
face from which the vitality seemed to have retreated to the eyes.
He walked with difficulty, for one of his shrunken legs ended in a
painfully deformed foot, which was cased in a species of velvet bag, and
obliged him to use a crutch when the arm of his nephew was not at hand.
His bent figure and decrepit body conveyed the impression of a delicate,
suffering nature, governed by a will of iron and the spirit of religious
purity. This Spanish priest, who was remarkable for his vast learning,
his sincere piety, and a wide knowledge of men and things, had been
successively a Dominican friar, the “grand penitencier” of Toledo,
and the vicar-general of the archbishopric of Malines. If the French
Revolution had not intervened, the influence of the Casa-Real family
would have made him one of the highest dignitaries of the Church;
but the grief he felt for the death of the young duke, Madame Claes’s
brother, who had been his pupil, turned him from active life, and he now
devoted himself to the education of his nephew, who was made an orphan
at an early age.

After the conquest of Belgium, the Abbe de Solis settled at Douai to be
near Madame Claes. From his youth up he had professed an enthusiasm for
Saint Theresa which, together with the natural bent of his mind, led
him to the mystical time of Christianity. Finding in Flanders, where
Mademoiselle Bourignon and the writings of the Quietists and Illuminati
made the greatest number of proselytes, a flock of Catholics devoted to
those ideas, he remained there,--all the more willingly because he
was looked up to as a patriarch by this particular communion, which
continued to follow the doctrines of the Mystics notwithstanding the
censures of the Church upon Fenelon and Madame Guyon. His morals were
rigid, his life exemplary, and he was believed to have visions. In spite
of his own detachment from the things of life, his affection for his
nephew made him careful of the young man’s interests. When a work of
charity was to be done, the old abbe put the faithful of his flock
under contribution before having recourse to his own means; and his
patriarchal authority was so well established, his motives so pure, his
discernment so rarely at fault, that every one was ready to answer
his appeal. To give an idea of the contrast between the uncle and the
nephew, we may compare the old man to a willow on the borders of a
stream, hollowed to a skeleton and barely alive, and the young man to a
sweet-brier clustering with roses, whose erect and graceful stems spring
up about the hoary trunk of the old tree as if they would support it.

Emmanuel de Solis, rigidly brought up by his uncle, who kept him at his
side as a mother keeps her daughter, was full of delicate sensibility,
of half-dreamy innocence,--those fleeting flowers of youth which bloom
perennially in souls that are nourished on religious principles. The old
priest had checked all sensuous emotions in his pupil, preparing him for
the trials of life by constant study and a discipline that was almost
cloisteral. Such an education, which would launch the youth unstained
upon the world and render him happy, provided he were fortunate in his
earliest affections, had endowed him with a purity of spirit which gave
to his person something of the charm that surrounds a maiden. His modest
eyes, veiling a strong and courageous soul, sent forth a light that
vibrated in the soul as the tones of a crystal bell sound their
undulations on the ear. His face, though regular, was expressive, and
charmed the eye with its clear-cut outline, the harmony of its
lines, and the perfect repose which came of a heart at peace. All was
harmonious. His black hair, his brown eyes and eyebrows, heightened
the effect of a white skin and a brilliant color. His voice was such as
might have been expected from his beautiful face; and something feminine
in his movements accorded well with the melody of its tones and with
the tender brightness of his eyes. He seemed unaware of the charm he
exercised by his modest silence, the half-melancholy reserve of his
manner, and the respectful attentions he paid to his uncle.

Those who saw the young man as he watched the uncertain steps of the
old abbe, and altered his own to suit their devious course, looking
for obstructions that might trip his uncle’s feet and guiding him to
a smoother way, could not fail to recognize in Emmanuel de Solis the
generous nature which makes the human being a divine creation. There
was something noble in the love that never criticised his uncle, in
the obedience that never cavilled at the old man’s orders; it seemed as
though there were prophecy in the gracious name his godmother had given
him. When the abbe gave proof of his Dominican despotism, in their own
home or in the presence of others, Emmanuel would sometimes lift his
head with so much dignity, as if to assert his metal should any other
man assail him, that men of honor were moved at the sight like artists
before a glorious picture; for noble sentiments ring as loudly in the
soul from living incarnations as from the imagery of art.

Emmanuel had accompanied his uncle when the latter came to examine the
pictures of the House of Claes. Hearing from Martha that the Abbe de
Solis was in the gallery, Marguerite, anxious to see so celebrated a
man, invented an excuse to join her mother and gratify her curiosity.
Entering hastily, with the heedless gaiety young girls assume at times
to hide their wishes, she encountered near the old abbe, clothed in
black and looking decrepit and cadaverous, the fresh, delightful face
of a young man. The naive glances of the youthful pair expressed their
mutual astonishment. Marguerite and Emmanuel had no doubt seen each
other in their dreams. Both lowered their eyes and raised them again
with one impulse; each, by the action, made the same avowal. Marguerite
took her mother’s arm, and spoke to her to cover her confusion and
find shelter under the maternal wing, turning her neck with a swan-like
motion to keep sight of Emmanuel, who still supported his uncle on his
arm. The light was cleverly arranged to give due value to the pictures,
and the half-obscurity of the gallery encouraged those furtive glances
which are the joy of timid natures. Neither went so far, even in
thought, as the first note of love; yet both felt the mysterious trouble
which stirs the heart, and is jealously kept secret in our youth from
fastidiousness or modesty.

The first impression which forces a sensibility hitherto suppressed
to overflow its borders, is followed in all young people by the same
half-stupefied amazement which the first sounds of music produce upon a
child. Some children laugh and think; others do not laugh till they have
thought; but those whose hearts are called to live by poetry or love,
listen stilly and hear the melody with a look where pleasure
flames already, and the search for the infinite begins. If, from an
irresistible feeling, we love the places where our childhood first
perceived the beauties of harmony, if we remember with delight the
musician, and even the instrument, that taught them to us, how much more
shall we love the being who reveals to us the music of life? The first
heart in which we draw the breath of love,--is it not our home, our
native land? Marguerite and Emmanuel were, each to each, that Voice of
music which wakes a sense, that hand which lifts the misty veil, and
reveals the distant shores bathed in the fires of noonday.

When Madame Claes paused before a picture by Guido representing an
angel, Marguerite bent forward to see the impression it made upon
Emmanuel, and Emmanuel looked at Marguerite to compare the mute thought
on the canvas with the living thought beside him. This involuntary and
delightful homage was understood and treasured. The old abbe gravely
praised the picture, and Madame Claes answered him, but the youth and
the maiden were silent.

Such was their first meeting: the mysterious light of the picture
gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders,
all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this
vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite’s
mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray
when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice,
whose fresh and mellow tone sent nameless delights into her heart,
completed the revelation that had come to her,--a revelation which
Emmanuel, were he able, should cherish to his own profit; for it often
happens that the man whom destiny employs to waken love in the heart
of a young girl is ignorant of his work and leaves it unfinished.
Marguerite bowed confusedly; her true farewell was in the glance which
seemed unwilling to lose so pure and lovely a vision. Like a child
she wanted her melody. Their parting took place at the foot of the old
staircase near the parlor; and when Marguerite re-entered the room she
watched the uncle and the nephew till the street-door closed upon them.

Madame Claes had been so occupied with the serious matters which caused
her conference with the abbe that she did not on this occasion observe
her daughter’s manner. When Monsieur de Solis came again to the house
on the occasion of her illness, she was too violently agitated to notice
the color that rushed into Marguerite’s face and betrayed the tumult of
a virgin heart conscious of its first joy. By the time the old abbe was
announced, Marguerite had taken up her sewing and appeared to give it
such attention that she bowed to the uncle and nephew without looking at
them. Monsieur Claes mechanically returned their salutation and left
the room with the air of a man called away by his occupations. The good
Dominican sat down beside Madame Claes and looked at her with one of
those searching glances by which he penetrated the minds of others; the
sight of Monsieur Claes and his wife was enough to make him aware of a
catastrophe.

“My children,” said the mother, “go into the garden; Marguerite, show
Emmanuel your father’s tulips.”

Marguerite, half abashed, took Felicie’s arm and looked at the young
man, who blushed and caught up little Jean to cover his confusion. When
all four were in the garden, Felicie and Jean ran to the other side,
leaving Marguerite, who, conscious that she was alone with young de
Solis, led him to the pyramid of tulips, arranged precisely in the same
manner year after year by Lemulquinier.

“Do you love tulips?” asked Marguerite, after standing for a moment in
deep silence,--a silence Emmanuel seemed little disposed to break.

“Mademoiselle, these flowers are beautiful, but to love them we must
perhaps have a taste of them, and know how to understand their beauties.
They dazzle me. Constant study in the gloomy little chamber in which I
live, close to my uncle, makes me prefer those flowers that are softer
to the eye.”

Saying these words he glanced at Marguerite; but the look, full as it
was of confused desires, contained no allusion to the lily whiteness,
the sweet serenity, the tender coloring which made her face a flower.

“Do you work very hard?” she asked, leading him to a wooden seat with
a back, painted green. “Here,” she continued, “the tulips are not so
close; they will not tire your eyes. Yes, you are right, those colors
are dazzling; they give pain.”

“Do I work hard?” replied the young man after a short silence, as he
smoothed the gravel with his foot. “Yes; I work at many things. My uncle
wished to make me a priest.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Marguerite, naively.

“I resisted; I felt no vocation for it. But it required great courage
to oppose my uncle’s wishes. He is so good, he loves me so much! Quite
recently he bought a substitute to save me from the conscription--me, a
poor orphan!”

“What do you mean to be?” asked Marguerite; then, immediately checking
herself as though she would unsay the words, she added with a pretty
gesture, “I beg your pardon; you must think me very inquisitive.”

“Oh, mademoiselle,” said Emmanuel, looking at her with tender
admiration, “except my uncle, no one ever asked me that question. I am
studying to be a teacher. I cannot do otherwise; I am not rich. If I
were principal of a college-school in Flanders I should earn enough to
live moderately, and I might ma

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