The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honoré de Balzac

  “But don’t you know?”

  Looking more closely, I recognized the speakers as members of that curious race that, in Paris, occupies itself exclusively with questions of “Why?”, with “How?” “Where does he come from?” “Who are they?” “What might be the matter?” “What did she do?” They lowered their voices and wandered off in search of an isolated divan on which to continue their conversation more comfortably. Never had a more fruitful mine been opened for excavators of mysteries. No one knew in what land the Lanty family originated, nor what trade, what swindle, what piracy or inheritance had brought them a fortune estimated at several million. Everyone in the family spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English, and German with a flawlessness that suggested a long sojourn among those varied peoples. Were they Gypsies? Were they grifters?

  “Suppose they were the devil incarnate,” said several young politicians. “They throw a wonderful party.”

  “What does it matter to me if the Comte de Lanty pillaged some Casbah? I’d gladly marry his daughter!” cried a guest with a philosophical streak.

  And indeed, who would not have married Marianina, a girl of sixteen, her beauty a living image of the Oriental poets’ most fabulous dreams? Like the sultan’s daughter in the tale of The Magic Lamp, she should have gone about veiled. Her singing put to shame the incomplete talents of any Madame Malibran, Madame Sontag, or Madame Fodor, for in them one single dominant quality hindered the perfection of the whole, while Marianina combined and united in equal measure purity of tone, musical sensitivity, precision in meter and phrasing, soul and science, accuracy and emotion. This girl was the very model of the secret poetry that holds all the arts in one common bond, and which always flees those who strive after it. Sweet and modest, educated and witty, nothing could outshine Marianina, save perhaps her mother.

  Have you ever come across one of those women whose dazzling beauty defies all the onslaughts of age, who at thirty-six seem more desirable than they must have been fifteen years earlier? Their faces bespeak the passion of their soul; they scintillate; each feature glows with intelligence, every pore is endowed with a particular radiance, especially by lamplight. Their seductive eyes attract, refuse, speak, or stay silent; their walk is innocently knowing; their voices exploit the melodious riches of sweetness and tenderness at their most enticing. Founded in experienced comparisons, their words of praise are a caress for the prickliest amour propre. One arch of their eyebrows, the faintest flick of an eye, a pursing of their lips, and a sort of terror assails all who depend on them for their life and their happiness. A girl inexperienced in love and easily swayed by fine words can always be seduced, but with such women as these, a man needs the discipline, like Monsieur de Jaucourt, not to cry out when an unknowing chambermaid breaks two of his fingers against the doorjamb as he hides in a closet. Is loving one of these redoubtable sirens not gambling with one’s very life? And is that perhaps why we love them with such passion? The Comtesse de Lanty was just such a woman.

  Filippo, Marianina’s brother, inherited from the countess the same superhuman beauty as his sister. To say it all in a word, this young man was a living image of Antinous, if of slenderer build. But how becoming to youth are those slight and delicate proportions, when an olive tint, luxuriant eyebrows, and the fire in a velvet-soft eye promise a future of manly passions and gallant thoughts! If, in every young girl’s heart, Filippo was lodged as an ideal, he was also lodged in the memory of every mother as the finest catch to be had in all of France.

  The beauty, the fortune, the wit, the grace and intelligence of these two children came to them solely from their mother. The Comte de Lanty was short, ugly, and pockmarked, somber as a Spaniard, dull as a banker. On the other hand, he passed for a man of great shrewdness and acumen, perhaps because he rarely laughed and was forever citing the words of Metternich or Wellington.

  This mysterious family possessed all the allure of a poem by Lord Byron, whose obscurities were translated differently by every denizen of the beau monde: a dark, sublime song, verse upon verse. Monsieur and Madame de Lanty’s silence on their origins, on their past, on their links with the four corners of the world would not long have been a subject of surprise in Paris. There is perhaps no land where Vespasian’s axiom is better understood. There, even stained with blood or filth, golden ecus betray nothing and mean everything. So long as high society can put a figure on your fortune, your class is that of the sums equivalent to yours, and no one asks to see your documents of title, for everyone knows how little they cost. In a city where social problems are resolved by algebraic equations, fortune hunters have every chance on their side. Were this family of Gypsy extraction, they were wealthy and glamorous enough that high society gladly allowed them their little mysteries. Unfortunately, however, the enigmatic history of the House of Lanty offered one subject of undying curiosity, something that would not have been out of place in a novel by Ann Radcliffe.

  Observant and inquiring folk, those who insist on knowing in what shop you buy your candelabras or who ask you your rent when your apartment strikes them as fine, had noted the sporadic presence of a curious personage in the midst of the countess’s parties, concerts, balls, and routs. This personage was a man. He first appeared on the occasion of a concert at the Lantys’, drifting into the drawing room as if lured by Marianina’s bewitching voice.

  “I feel a chill all of a sudden,” said one lady to another, standing not far from the doorway.

  The stranger, then close beside her, went on his way.

  “Isn’t that odd! Now I’m hot,” said the woman, once he was gone. “Call me mad if you like, but I can’t help thinking that gentleman in black was the cause of it.”

  Soon the exaggeration native to high society spawned the birth and multiplication of the quaintest ideas, the strangest remarks, the most ridiculous tales concerning this enigmatic figure. Though not exactly a vampire, a ghoul, an artificial man, a sort of Faust or Robin Hood, he nonetheless, to hear those of a fantastical bent, had in him some part of all these anthropomorphic essences. Here and there one could find Germans who took these ingenious sallies of Parisian tittle-tattle for realities. The stranger was simply a little old man. Several of those young men accustomed to deciding the future of Europe each morning with a few well-turned sentences sought to see in that creature some nefarious criminal, some possessor of untold fortunes. Novelists recounted the old man’s life and told you in truly picturesque detail of the atrocities he’d committed in the service of the Prince of Mysore. Bankers, a more down-to-earth folk, invented their own specious story. “Bah,” they said, pityingly shrugging their broad shoulders, “that little old man is a Genoese head!”

  “Monsieur, if the question is not indiscreet, would you be so kind as to explain what you mean by Genoese head?”

  “Monsieur, it is a man on whose life hangs an enormous sum of money; no doubt the income of this family depends on that old man’s good health.”

  I recall hearing a mesmerist at Madame d’Espard’s, who on the most dubious historical evidence proved that the old man was none other than the great Balsamo, alias Cagliostro, preserved under glass. According to this latter-day alchemist, the Sicilian adventurer had eluded death and whiled away his days making gold for his grandchildren. The bailiff of Ferrette, for his part, claimed to have recognized that singular personage as the Count de Saint-Germain. Spoken in fanciful tones, with the jeering air that is the mark of our modern society without beliefs, these absurdities kept alive a whole host of vague suspicions concerning the House of Lanty. And by the curious workings of circumstance, that family lent credence to these conjectures through their rather mysterious behavior with the old man, whose existence they shielded, in a sense, from all inquiry.

  He had only to cross the threshold of the rooms he was meant to occupy chez Lanty to set off a tremendous to-do among the family. One might have thought it an event of great moment. Only Filippo, Marianina, Madame de Lanty, and an aged servant had the privilege of
helping the stranger to walk, to stand up, to sit down. They watched over his slightest gesture. He seemed some magical creature, on whom everyone’s happiness, life, or fortune depended. Was it fear or affection? Try as they might, the society crowd could find no key to that conundrum. Concealed for months at a time in the depths of an unknown sanctuary, this household spirit emerged all at once, as if furtively, unbidden, and appeared in the drawing room like those fairies of days gone by, descending from their flying dragons to disrupt the grand occasions to which they had not been invited. Only the most practiced observer could then discern the anxiety of the houses’ masters, singularly adept as they were at concealing their sentiments. Now and again, however, even as she danced a quadrille, the artless Marianina cast a panicked glance toward the old man she was charged with watching over amid the mingling crowds. Or else Filippo hastily slipped through the throng to his side, where he stayed, tender and attentive, as if that strange creature might be broken by any contact with men, by even the slightest puff of breath. The countess tried to come near, never signaling her intention to join him; then, adopting a manner and an expression no less servile than affectionate, no less submissive than tyrannical, she spoke two or three words to which the old man nearly always deferred, and he disappeared, led—or, more precisely, tugged along—by her hand. If Madame de Lanty was not nearby, the count would employ a thousand stratagems to approach him, but he seemed to have difficulty making himself heard by the old man and treated him like a spoiled child whose mother indulges his whims or fears his mutiny. Foolishly, certain indiscreet souls ventured to question Comte de Lanty, but that cold, reserved man never seemed to understand the meddlers’ inquiries. And so, after many attempts, rendered vain by the entire family’s vigilant reticence, the quest to discover the secret they guarded so closely was abandoned. The well-bred spies, the gossipmongers, the politicians all threw up their hands and troubled themselves with that mystery no more.

  But at the time of these events those glittering salons may still have held a handful of philosophers who, taking an ice or a sorbet, or setting their empty punch glass on a sideboard, quietly remarked to each other, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that these people are felons. That old man, always hidden away, appearing only at equinoxes or solstices, seems to me the very image of a murderer . . .”

  “Or a swindler . . .”

  “It’s much the same thing. Sometimes it’s far worse to kill a man’s fortune than to kill the man himself.”

  “Monsieur, I placed a bet of twenty louis, I have forty coming to me.”

  “But, monsieur, there are only thirty left on the table.”

  “Very uneven crowd in this place. You daren’t gamble here.”

  “It’s true. Say, soon six months since we last saw the Spirit. Do you believe it’s a living being?”

  “Heh heh, at the very most . . .”

  These last words were spoken in my vicinity by strangers who wandered off just as I was summing up my reflections in one final thought, black mingled with white, life with death. No less than my eyes, my fevered imagination contemplated by turns the party, its splendor now at a peak, and the dark tableau of the gardens. I know not how long I meditated on those two sides of the human coin; in any case, I was abruptly awoken by a young woman’s stifled laughter. The image that then offered itself to my gaze left me dumbstruck. By an extraordinary caprice of nature, the semi-funereal fantasy that was twisting and turning in my mind had suddenly broken free: It was standing before me, personified, alive, burst like Minerva from Jupiter’s brow, full-grown and strong, it was at once one hundred years old and twenty-two, it was living and dead. Escaped from his room like a madman from his cell, the old man must have discreetly taken cover behind a row of guests raptly listening as Marianina sang the last notes of the cavatina from Tancredi. He might almost have appeared from below the floor, hoisted by some theatrical mechanism. Motionless and somber, he stood for a moment watching the festivities, whose murmur had no doubt faintly reached his ears. He stared all around him, almost like a sleepwalker, his attention so fixed on the scene that he stood in the heart of the crowd without seeing the crowd. He had materialized unannounced beside one of Paris’s most breathtaking creatures, an elegant young dancer, a woman of delicate physique, with one of those faces as fresh as a child’s, white and pink, and so slight, so transparent, that a man’s gaze might almost run straight through it, as the rays of the sun penetrate a pristine pane of glass. There they stood before me, the two of them, together, united, so close each to the other that the stranger brushed against both her gauzy dress and her garlands of flowers, both her slightly crimped hair and her loose, floating sash.

  I had brought this young woman to Madame de Lanty’s ball. As this was her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh, but I silenced her with a curt and imperious sign, ordering her to show some respect for her neighbor. She sat down nearby me. The old man would not be parted from that delectable creature, to whom he had capriciously attached himself with the mute, seemingly gratuitous obstinacy to which the aged are prone, in which they are very like children. He was forced to pull up a folding chair to sit near the young lady. He moved with the mechanical awkwardness of a paralytic, sluggish and tentative. He sat down slowly, cautiously, mumbling a few unintelligible words. His broken voice was like the sound of a stone falling into a well. The young lady gave my hand a powerful squeeze, as if she were standing terrified atop a high precipice, and she shivered when the old man noted her stare and turned toward her two eyes without warmth, two murky eyes comparable only to dulled nacre.

  “I’m afraid,” she murmured into my ear.

  “No need to whisper,” I answered. “He’s very hard of hearing.”

  “You know him, then?”

  “Yes.”

  With this she found the courage to make a brief study of that creature with no name in our human tongues, form without substance, being without life, or life without will. She had fallen under the spell of the tremulous curiosity that compels women to seek out dangerous sensations, to gaze on chained tigers, to peer at boas, protected by only the most tinglingly tenuous barrier. The old man was stooped like a day laborer, but it was nonetheless plain that he had once been of average height. His excessive thinness and delicate limbs proved that his build had always been slight. His black silk breeches fluttered around his fleshless thighs, draping like a slack sail. An anatomist would immediately have recognized the symptoms of a dreadful consumption on seeing the withered legs that supported that strange body. They looked in every way like two crossed bones on a gravestone. An overpowering horror at the fate that awaits us all gripped the heart on discovering the ravages decrepitude had wrought on that fragile machine. The stranger wore a white waistcoat, embroidered in gold, as was once the fashion, and his linens were dazzlingly white. A rather dingy jabot of English lace, whose opulence a queen would have envied, made yellow ruffles on his breast, but on him that lace was more rag than ornament. At the center of the jabot, a diamond of incalculable price blazed like the sun. That outmoded flourish, that flagrant, tasteless treasure set off the bizarre creature’s face all the more. The frame harmonized with the portrait. His dark face was angular and rutted every which way. His chin was hollow; his temples were hollow; his eyes were deep-set in yellowed orbits. His jawbones, sharply defined by an emaciation beyond words, created cavities in the middle of each cheek. Unevenly illuminated, these depressions produced curious patterns of shadow and light that stripped his countenance of its last sameness with the human face. On top of all this, the passing years had so strongly glued that face’s fine yellow skin to its bones that it was covered by a multitude of wrinkles, some circular, like the ripples of water disturbed by a child’s pebble, some in the form of an asterisk, like a crack in a window, but all of them as deep and dense as the pages of a closed book. There are aged men who bring us face-to-face with more hideous portraits, but above all else, it was his glistening rouge and
white powder that made the specter before us seem an artificial creation. Under the lamplight, the eyebrows of his mask had a sheen that revealed a careful application of paint. Happily for the eye, saddened at the sight of such ruination, his cadaverous skull was concealed beneath a blond wig whose countless curls bore witness to an exceptional vanity. Indeed, the feminine coquetry of this phantasmagorical creature was rather overtly declared by the gold hoops that hung from his ears, by the rings whose fine stones gleamed on his ossified fingers, and by a watch chain that glimmered like the gems of a necklace on a woman’s throat. Finally, the blue-tinged lips of this sort of Japanese idol were fixed in an unwavering smile, an implacable, mocking smile not unlike a skull’s. Silent, still as a statue, he exuded the musky odor of old gowns exhumed from a duchess’s wardrobe by her heirs in the course of an inventory. If he turned his eyes toward the assembled guests, the movement of those lifeless orbs seemed the work of some hidden artifice, and when those eyes fell still, he who examined them soon doubted they had ever moved. To see, beside these human ruins, a young woman whose neck, arms, and throat were naked and white; whose rounded forms, blooming with beauty, whose hair, lush and vital above an alabaster forehead, inspired love; whose eyes did not receive the light but disseminated it; who was silken and fresh; whose airy curls and perfumed breath seemed too heavy, too hard, too powerful for that shadow, for that man of dust—ah! it truly was life and death, my thought incarnate, an imaginary arabesque, a chimera, half hideous but divinely feminine about the bust.

  “And yet there is no lack of such marriages in society,” I said to myself.

  “He smells of the graveyard,” cried the young woman in horror, nestling against me as if seeking assurance of my protection, her violent tremors conveying the depth of her fear. “He’s horrible! I can’t stay here a moment longer. If I look at him again, I’ll be sure death itself has come for me. But is he alive?”