The Human Comedy (17 page)

“And finally—I am in love, passionately so. My love is my life! If, without disclosing my reasons, I should propose marriage to a young woman who is accustomed to luxury, to elegance, to a life rich in enjoyment of the arts, a girl who loves listening idly to Rossini’s music from a box at the Bouffons opera house—well, if I propose that she should deprive herself of one hundred fifty thousand francs for the sake of some doddering old folks or some hypothetical invalids, she’ll laugh and turn her back on me, or her companion will tell her I’m a cruel prankster. If in an ecstasy of love I should urge the delights of a modest existence in a little house on the banks of the Loire, if I ask her to sacrifice her Parisian life in the name of our love, first of all that would be a virtuous lie, and second I might have a sorry experience and lose the heart of a girl who loves dancing, is mad about fine clothes, and for the time being is mad about me. She’ll be carried off by some slim dandy of an officer with a pretty curled mustache who plays the piano, makes much of Lord Byron, and cuts a fine figure on horseback. What to do? Messieurs, I beg you—tell me!”

The upright fellow, the Puritan gentleman who looked like
Jeanie Deans’s father
in the Waverley novel, whom I had briefly mentioned before and who till now had said not a word, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Idiot! Why on earth did you ever ask him if he came from Beauvais!”

Paris, May 1831
Translated by Linda Asher

SARRASINE

To Monsieur Charles de Bernard du Grail

I
WAS LOST
in one of those deep meditations that can overtake anyone, even the most frivolous man, in the midst of uproarious revelries. Midnight had just sounded from the clock of the Élysée-Bourbon. Sitting in the recess of a window, concealed behind the undulating drape of a moiré curtain, I had full leisure to contemplate the garden of the house where I was a guest for the evening. Unevenly daubed with snow, the trees stood out dimly against the gray of an overcast sky, brightened only a little by moonlight. In that unearthly ambiance they looked vaguely like specters half wrapped in their shrouds, a monumental image of the famed dance of the dead. And then, turning in the other direction, I could admire the dance of the living!—a splendid salon, its walls ornamented with silver and gold, candles aglow in the gleaming chandeliers. There swarmed, darted, and fluttered the most beautiful women of Paris, sumptuous, resplendent, ablaze with diamonds! Flowers on their heads, at their bosoms, in their hair, strewn over their gowns, in garlands at their feet. It was all delicate shivers of delight, the lace, silk, and taffeta shimmering about their elegant flanks with every step. Here and there flashed an overheated glance, eclipsing the glint of the diamonds, further arousing already overwrought hearts. There were tilts of the head full of meaning for lovers, and demeanors discouraging for husbands. The gamblers’ cries with each unexpected play of the cards, the clinking of the gold, all this mingled with the music, the hum of the conversation, and to complete the rapture of that crowd, drunk on all the enchantments this world has to offer, wafting perfumes and an atmosphere of euphoria excited the imagination to a fever pitch. Thus, to my right, the somber, silent image of death; to my left, the mannered bacchanalia of life; here a cold, drear, mourning-draped nature; there a jubilant humankind. For my part, at the junction of these two so disparate scenes, which, a thousand times re-created in all manner of forms, make of Paris the world’s most amusing city and its most philosophical, mine was a motley half-festive, half-morbid mood. My left foot kept time with the music; the other might have been in a coffin, for my leg was chilled by one of those drafts that freeze half your body while the other half feels the damp warmth of the salons, not an uncommon happenstance at the ball.

“I don’t believe Monsieur de Lanty has owned this house long?”

“He has. It was ten years ago that he bought it from Marshal de Carigliano.”

“Ah!”

“These people must have an enormous fortune?”

“Most assuredly.”

“What a party! There’s a kind of shamelessness to its opulence.”

“Do you suppose they’re as rich as Monsieur de Nucingen or Monsieur de Gondreville?”

“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.