Honore de Balzac (6 page)

"Mount behind me," he said, "and pray that God be with us. Sit firm,
the beast may die of it." So saying he kicked the horse with both heels,
pressing him with his powerful knees, and the animal sprang forward with
the rapidity of a hunter, seeming to understand what his master wanted
of him, and crossed the forest in fifteen minutes. Then Michu, who had
not swerved from the shortest way, pulled up, found a spot at the
edge of the woods from which he could see the roofs of the chateau of
Cinq-Cygne lighted by the moon, tied his horse to a tree, and followed
by his wife, gained a little eminence which overlooked the valley.

The chateau, which Marthe and Michu looked at together for a moment,
makes a charming effect in the landscape. Though it has little extent
and is of no importance whatever as architecture, yet archaeologically
it is not without a certain interest. This old edifice of the fifteenth
century, placed on an eminence, surrounded on all sides by a moat,
or rather by deep, wide ditches always full of water, is built in
cobble-stones buried in cement, the walls being seven feet thick.
Its simplicity recalls the rough and warlike life of feudal days. The
chateau, plain and unadorned, has two large reddish towers at either
end, connected by a long main building with casement windows, the
stone mullions of which, being roughly carved, bear some resemblance to
vine-shoots. The stairway is outside the house, at the middle, in a sort
of pentagonal tower entered through a small arched door. The interior
of the ground-floor together with the rooms on the first storey
were modernized in the time of Louis XIV., and the whole building is
surmounted by an immense roof broken by casement windows with carved
triangular pediments. Before the castle lies a vast green sward the
trees of which had recently been cut down. On either side of the
entrance bridge are two small dwellings where the gardeners live,
connected across the road by a paltry iron railing without character,
evidently modern. To right and left of the lawn, which is divided in
two by a paved road-way, are the stables, cow-sheds, barns, wood-house,
bakery, poultry-yard, and the offices, placed in what were doubtless
the remains of two wings of the old building similar to those that were
still standing. The two large towers, with their pepper-pot roofs which
had not been rased, and the belfry of the middle tower, gave an air of
distinction to the village. The church, also very old, showed near by
its pointed steeple, which harmonized well with the solid masses of the
castle. The moon brought out in full relief the various roofs and towers
on which it played and sparkled.

Michu gazed at this baronial structure in a manner that upset all his
wife's ideas about him; his face, now calm, wore a look of hope and also
a sort of pride. His eyes scanned the horizon with a glance of defiance;
he listened for sounds in the air. It was now nine o'clock; the moon
was beginning to cast its light upon the margin of the forest and to
illumine the little bluff on which they stood. The position struck him
as dangerous and he left it, fearful of being seen. But no suspicious
noise troubled the peace of the beautiful valley encircled on this side
by the forest of Nodesme. Marthe, exhausted and trembling, was awaiting
some explanation of their hurried ride. What was she engaged in? Was she
to aid in a good deed or an evil one? At that instant Michu bent to his
wife's ear and whispered:—

"Go the house and ask to speak to the Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne; when you
see her beg her to speak to you alone. If no one can overhear you, say
to her: 'Mademoiselle, the lives of your two cousins are in danger, and
he who can explain the how and why is waiting to speak to you.' If
she seems afraid, if she distrusts you, add these words: 'They are
conspiring against the First Consul and the conspiracy is discovered.'
Don't give your name; they distrust us too much."

Marthe raised her face towards her husband and said:—

"Can it be that you serve them?"

"What if I do?" he said, frowning, taking her words as a reproach.

"You don't understand me," cried Marthe, seizing his large hand and
falling on her knees beside him as she kissed it and covered it with her
tears.

"Go, go, you shall cry later," he said, kissing her vehemently.

When he no longer heard her step his eyes filled with tears. He had
distrusted Marthe on account of her father's opinions; he had hidden the
secrets of his life from her; but the beauty of her simple nature had
suddenly appeared to him, just as the grandeur of his had, as suddenly,
revealed itself to her. Marthe had passed in a moment from the deep
humiliation caused by the degradation of the man whose name she bore,
to the exaltation given by a sense of his nobleness. The change was
instantaneous, without transition; it was enough to make her tremble.
She told him later that she went, as it were, through blood from the
pavilion to the edge of the forest, and there was lifted to heaven, in
a moment, among the angels. Michu, who had known he was not appreciated,
and who mistook his wife's grieved and melancholy manner for lack of
affection, and had left her to herself, living chiefly out of doors
and reserving all his tenderness for his boy, instantly understood the
meaning of her tears. She had cursed the part which her beauty and her
father's will had forced her to take; but now happiness, in the midst of
this great storm, played, with a beautiful flame like a vivid lightning
about them. And it was lightning! Each thought of the last ten years of
misconception, and they blamed themselves only. Michu stood motionless,
his elbow on his gun, his chin on his hand, lost in deep reverie. Such
a moment in a man's life makes him willing to accept the saddest moments
of a painful past.

Marthe, agitated by the same thoughts as those of her husband, was also
troubled in heart by the danger of the Simeuse brothers; for she now
understood all, even the faces of the two Parisians, though she still
could not explain to herself her husband's gun. She darted forward like
a doe, and soon reached the road to the chateau. There she was surprised
by the steps of a man following behind her; she turned, with a cry, and
her husband's large hand closed her mouth.

"From the hill up there I saw the silver lace of the gendarmes' hats.
Go in by the breach in the moat between Mademoiselle's tower and the
stables. The dogs won't bark at you. Go through the garden and call the
countess by the window; order them to saddle her horse, and ask her to
come out through the breach. I'll be there, after discovering what the
Parisians are planning, and how to escape them."

Danger, which seemed to be rolling like an avalanche upon them, gave
wings to Marthe's feet.

The old Frank name of the Cinq-Cygnes and the Chargeboeufs was Duineff.
Cinq-Cygne became that of the younger branch of the Chargeboeufs after
the defence of a castle made, during their father's absence, by five
daughters of that race, all remarkably fair, and of whom no one expected
such heroism. One of the first Comtes de Champagne wished, by bestowing
this pretty name, to perpetuate the memory of their deed as long as the
family existed. Laurence, the last of her race, was, contrary to Salic
law, heiress of the name, the arms, and the manor. She was therefore
Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne in her own right; her husband would have to take
both her name and her blazon, which bore for device the glorious answer
made by the elder of the five sisters when summoned to surrender the
castle, "We die singing." Worthy descendant of these noble heroines,
Laurence was fair and lily-white as though nature had made her for a
wager. The lines of her blue veins could be seen through the delicate
close texture of her skin. Her beautiful golden hair harmonized
delightfully with eyes of the deepest blue. Everything about her
belonged to the type of delicacy. Within that fragile though active
body, and in defiance as it were of its pearly whiteness, lived a
soul like that of a man of noble nature; but no one, not even a close
observer, would have suspected it from the gentle countenance and
rounded features which, when seen in profile, bore some slight
resemblance to those of a lamb. This extreme gentleness, though noble,
had something of the stupidity of the little animal. "I look like a
dreamy sheep," she would say, smiling. Laurence, who talked little,
seemed not so much dreamy as dormant. But, did any important
circumstance arise, the hidden Judith was revealed, sublime; and
circumstances had, unfortunately, not been wanting.

At thirteen years of age, Laurence, after the events already related,
was an orphan living in a house opposite to the empty space where
so recently had stood one of the most curious specimens in France
of sixteenth-century architecture, the hotel Cinq-Cygne. Monsieur
d'Hauteserre, her relation, now her guardian, took the young heiress to
live in the country at her chateau of Cinq-Cygne. That brave provincial
gentleman, alarmed at the death of his brother, the Abbe d'Hauteserre,
who was shot in the open square as he was about to escape in the dress
of a peasant, was not in a position to defend the interests of his
ward. He had two sons in the army of the princes, and every day, at the
slightest unusual sound, he believed that the municipals of Arcis were
coming to arrest him. Laurence, proud of having sustained a siege and of
possessing the historic whiteness of her swan-like ancestors, despised
the prudent cowardice of the old man who bent to the storm, and dreamed
only of distinguishing herself. So, she boldly hung the portrait of
Charlotte Corday on the walls of her poor salon at Cinq-Cygne, and
crowned it with oak-leaves. She corresponded by messenger with her
twin cousins, in defiance of the law, which punished the act, when
discovered, with death. The messenger, who risked his life, brought back
the answers. Laurence lived only, after the catastrophes at Troyes,
for the triumph of the royal cause. After soberly judging Monsieur and
Madame d'Hauteserre (who lived with her at the chateau de Cinq-Cygne),
and recognizing their honest, but stolid natures, she put them outside
the lines of her own life. She had, moreover, too good a mind and too
sound a judgment to complain of their natures; always kind, amiable,
and affectionate towards them, she nevertheless told them none of her
secrets. Nothing forms a character so much as the practice of constant
concealment in the bosom of a family.

After she attained her majority Laurence allowed Monsieur d'Hauteserre
to manage her affairs as in the past. So long as her favorite mare was
well-groomed, her maid Catherine dressed to please her, and Gothard
the little page was suitably clothed, she cared for nothing else. Her
thoughts were aimed too high to come down to occupations and interests
which in other times than these would doubtless have pleased her. Dress
was a small matter to her mind; moreover her cousins were not there to
see her. She wore a dark-green habit when she rode, and a gown of some
common woollen stuff with a cape trimmed with braid when she walked;
in the house she was always seen in a silk wrapper. Gothard, the little
groom, a brave and clever lad of fifteen, attended her wherever she
went, and she was nearly always out of doors, riding or hunting over the
farms of Gondreville, without objection being made by either Michu or
the farmers. She rode admirably well, and her cleverness in hunting was
thought miraculous. In the country she was never called anything but
"Mademoiselle" even during the Revolution.

Whoever has read the fine romance of "Rob Roy" will remember that
rare woman for whose making Walter Scott's imagination abandoned its
customary coldness,—Diana Vernon. The recollection will serve to make
Laurence understood if, to the noble qualities of the Scottish huntress
you add the restrained exaltation of Charlotte Corday, surpassing,
however, the charming vivacity which rendered Diana so attractive. The
young countess had seen her mother die, the Abbe d'Hauteserre shot down,
the Marquis de Simeuse and his wife executed; her only brother had died
of his wounds; her two cousins serving in Conde's army might be killed
at any moment; and, finally, the fortunes of the Simeuse and the
Cinq-Cygne families had been seized and wasted by the Republic without
being of any benefit to the nation. Her grave demeanor, now lapsing into
apparent stolidity, can be readily understood.

Monsieur d'Hauteserre proved an upright and most careful guardian. Under
his administration Cinq-Cygne became a sort of farm. The good man, who
was far more of a close manager than a knight of the old nobility, had
turned the park and gardens to profit, and used their two hundred acres
of grass and woodland as pasturage for horses and fuel for the family.
Thanks to his severe economy the countess, on coming of age, had
recovered by his investments in the State funds a competent fortune.
In 1798 she possessed about twenty thousand francs a year from those
sources, on which, in fact, some dividends were still due, and twelve
thousand francs a year from the rentals at Cinq-Cygne, which had lately
been renewed at a notable increase. Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre
had provided for their old age by the purchase of an annuity of three
thousand francs in the Tontines Lafarge. That fragment of their former
means did not enable them to live elsewhere than at Cinq-Cygne, and
Laurence's first act on coming to her majority was to give them the use
for life of the wing of the chateau which they occupied.

The Hauteserres, as niggardly for their ward as they were for
themselves, laid up every year nearly the whole of their annuity for the
benefit of their sons, and kept the young heiress on miserable fare.
The whole cost of the Cinq-Cygne household never exceeded five thousand
francs a year. But Laurence, who condescended to no details, was
satisfied. Her guardian and his wife, unconsciously ruled by the
imperceptible influence of her strong character, which was felt even in
little things, had ended by admiring her whom they had known and treated
as a child,—a sufficiently rare feeling. But in her manner, her deep
voice, her commanding eye, Laurence held that inexplicable power which
rules all men,—even when its strength is mere appearance. To vulgar
minds real depth is incomprehensible; it is perhaps for that reason that
the populace is so prone to admire what it cannot understand. Monsieur
and Madame d'Hauteserre, impressed by the habitual silence and erratic
habits of the young girl, were constantly expecting some extraordinary
thing of her.