THE LILY OF THE VALLEY

by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

  To Monsieur J. B. Nacquart,
  Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine.

  Dear Doctor--Here is one of the most carefully hewn stones in the
  second course of the foundation of a literary edifice which I have
  slowly and laboriously constructed. I wish to inscribe your name
  upon it, as much to thank the man whose science once saved me as
  to honor the friend of my daily life.

De Balzac.

THE LILY OF THE VALLEY

ENVOI

  Felix de Vandenesse to Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville:

  I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we
  love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore
  the ordinary rules of common-sense. To smooth the frown upon their
  brow, to soften the pout upon their lips, what obstacles we
  miraculously overcome! We shed our blood, we risk our future!

  You exact the history of my past life; here it is. But remember
  this, Natalie; in obeying you I crush under foot a reluctance
  hitherto unconquerable. Why are you jealous of the sudden reveries
  which overtake me in the midst of our happiness? Why show the
  pretty anger of a petted woman when silence grasps me? Could you
  not play upon the contradictions of my character without inquiring
  into the causes of them? Are there secrets in your heart which
  seek absolution through a knowledge of mine? Ah! Natalie, you have
  guessed mine; and it is better you should know the whole truth.
  Yes, my life is shadowed by a phantom; a word evokes it; it hovers
  vaguely above me and about me; within my soul are solemn memories,
  buried in its depths like those marine productions seen in calmest
  weather and which the storms of ocean cast in fragments on the
  shore.

  The mental labor which the expression of ideas necessitates has
  revived the old, old feelings which give me so much pain when they
  come suddenly; and if in this confession of my past they break 
  forth in a way that wounds you, remember that you threatened to
  punish me if I did not obey your wishes, and do not, therefore,
  punish my obedience. I would that this, my confidence, might
  increase your love.

Until we meet,

Felix.

CHAPTER I

TWO CHILDHOODS

To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching
of all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose
tender roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest
buds are torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by
frost at the moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the
sorrows of the child whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose
smiles are checked by the cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that
tells of such poor hearts, oppressed by beings placed about them to
promote the development of their natures, would contain the true
history of my childhood.

What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral or
physical infirmity caused by mother's coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was a
reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first
neglect; as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not
discovered it. Far from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters
found amusement in making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which
children hide each other's peccadilloes, and which early teaches them
the principles of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that,
I was often punished for my brother's faults, without being allowed to
prove the injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in
children taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to
which I was subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother
whom they feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a
childish love of imitation; was it from a need of testing their
powers; or was it simply through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes
united to deprive me of the sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had
made me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling
hearts rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed
feelings turn to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth
from which, in after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many
characters the habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear,
and fear ends in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a
man, and makes him more or less a slave. But in my case these
perpetual tortures led to the development of a certain strength, which
increased through exercise and predisposed my spirit to the habit of
moral resistance. Always in expectation of some new grief--as the
martyrs expected some fresh blow--my whole being expressed, I doubt
not, a sullen resignation which smothered the grace and gaiety of
childhood, and gave me an appearance of idiocy which seemed to justify
my mother's threatening prophecies. The certainty of injustice
prematurely roused my pride--that fruit of reason--and thus, no doubt,
checked the evil tendencies which an education like mine encouraged.

Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her
solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous
of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such times
when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would
inflict upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced
that I could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and
watch the insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. Though my
loneliness naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation
was first aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my
early troubles. So little notice was taken of me that the governess
occasionally forgot to send me to bed. One evening I was peacefully
crouching under a fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of
curiosity which takes possession of a child's mind, and to which my
precocious melancholy gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters
were playing about and laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an
accompaniment to my thoughts. After a while the noise ceased and
darkness fell. My mother happened to notice my absence. To escape
blame, our governess, a terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, worked upon my
mother's fears,--told her I had a horror of my home and would long ago
have run away if she had not watched me; that I was not stupid but
sullen; and that in all her experience of children she had never known
one of so bad a disposition as mine. She pretended to search for me. I
answered as soon as I was called, and she came to the fig-tree, where
she very well knew I was. "What are you doing there?" she asked.
"Watching a star." "You were not watching a star," said my mother, who
was listening on her balcony; "children of your age know nothing of
astronomy." "Ah, madame," cried Mademoiselle Caroline, "he has opened
the faucet of the reservoir; the garden is inundated!" Then there was
a general excitement. The fact was that my sisters had amused
themselves by turning the cock to see the water flow, but a sudden
spurt wet them all over and frightened them so much that they ran away
without closing it. Accused and convicted of this piece of mischief
and told that I lied when I denied it, I was severely punished. Worse
than all, I was jeered at for my pretended love of the stars and
forbidden to stay in the garden after dark.

Such tyrannical restrains intensify a passion in the hearts of
children even more than in those of men; children think of nothing but
the forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly attractive to
them. I was often whipped for my star. Unable to confide in my kind, I
told it all my troubles in that delicious inward prattle with which we
stammer our first ideas, just as once we stammered our first words. At
twelve years of age, long after I was at school, I still watched that
star with indescribable delight,--so deep and lasting are the
impressions we receive in the dawn of life.

My brother Charles, five years older than I and as handsome a boy as
he now is a man, was the favorite of my father, the idol of my mother,
and consequently the sovereign of the house. He was robust and well-
made, and had a tutor. I, puny and even sickly, was sent at five years
of age as day pupil to a school in the town; taken in the morning and
brought back at night by my father's valet. I was sent with a scanty
lunch, while my school-fellows brought plenty of good food. This
trifling contrast between my privations and their prosperity made me
suffer deeply. The famous potted pork prepared at Tours and called
"rillettes" and "rillons" was the chief feature of their mid-day meal,
between the early breakfast and the parent's dinner, which was ready
when we returned from school. This preparation of meat, much prized by
certain gourmands, is seldom seen at Tours on aristocratic tables; if
I had ever heard of it before I went to school, I certainly had never
had the happiness of seeing that brown mess spread on slices of bread
and butter. Nevertheless, my desire for those "rillons" was so great
that it grew to be a fixed idea, like the longing of an elegant
Parisian duchess for the stews cooked by a porter's wife,--longings
which, being a woman, she found means to satisfy. Children guess each
other's covetousness, just as you are able to read a man's love, by
the look in the eyes; consequently I became an admirable butt for
ridicule. My comrades, nearly all belonging to the lower bourgeoisie,
would show me their "rillons" and ask if I knew how they were made and
where they were sold, and why it was that I never had any. They licked
their lips as they talked of them--scraps of pork pressed in their own
fat and looking like cooked truffles; they inspected my lunch-basket,
and finding nothing better than Olivet cheese or dried fruits, they
plagued me with questions: "Is that all you have? have you really
nothing else?"--speeches which made me realize the difference between
my brother and myself.

This contrast between my own abandonment and the happiness of others
nipped the roses of my childhood and blighted my budding youth. The
first time that I, mistaking my comrades' actions for generosity, put
forth my hand to take the dainty I had so long coveted and which was
now hypocritically held out to me, my tormentor pulled back his slice
to the great delight of his comrades who were expecting that result.
If noble and distinguished minds are, as we often find them, capable
of vanity, can we blame the child who weeps when despised and jeered