The Muse of the Department. Honore de Balzac

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СКАЧАТЬ if she flushes a little, that is intelligible and interesting. A little neglect is thought charming, and her face is so carefully studied, so well known, that slight changes are scarcely noticed, and regarded at last as “beauty spots.” When Dinah ceased to have a new dress with a new season, she seemed to have made a concession to the philosophy of the place.

      It is the same with matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as it is with matters of feeling. The mind can rust as well as the body if it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose the briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive. The provincial is used to walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there is nothing to be avoided; so in Paris she walks on as raw recruits do, never remembering that there may be hindrances, for there are none in her way in her native place, where she is known, where she is always in her place, and every one makes way for her. Thus she loses all the charm of the unforeseen.

      And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend to copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the gestures, the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very countenance of others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the society she lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny’s ideas she assumed his tone of voice; she unconsciously fell into masculine manners from seeing none but men; she fancied that by laughing at what was ridiculous in them she was safe from catching it; but, as often happens, some hue of what she laughed at remained in the grain.

      A Parisian woman sees so many examples of good taste that a contrary result ensues. In Paris women learn to seize the hour and moment when they may appear to advantage; while Madame de la Baudraye, accustomed to take the stage, acquired an indefinable theatrical and domineering manner, the air of a prima donna coming forward on the boards, of which ironical smiles would soon have cured her in the capital.

      But after she had acquired this stock of absurdities, and, deceived by her worshipers, imagined them to be added graces, a moment of terrible awakening came upon her like the fall of an avalanche from a mountain. In one day she was crushed by a frightful comparison.

      In 1829, after the departure of Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, she was excited by the anticipation of a little pleasure; she was expecting the Baronne de Fontaine. Anna’s husband, who was now Director-General under the Minister of Finance, took advantage of leave of absence on the occasion of his father’s death to take his wife to Italy. Anna wished to spend the day at Sancerre with her school-friend. This meeting was strangely disastrous. Anna, who at school had been far less handsome than Dinah, now, as Baronne de Fontaine, was a thousand times handsomer than the Baronne de la Baudraye, in spite of her fatigue and her traveling dress. Anna stepped out of an elegant traveling chaise loaded with Paris milliners’ boxes, and she had with her a lady’s maid, whose airs quite frightened Dinah. All the difference between a woman of Paris and a provincial was at once evident to Dinah’s intelligent eye; she saw herself as her friend saw her – and Anna found her altered beyond recognition. Anna spent six thousand francs a year on herself alone, as much as kept the whole household at La Baudraye.

      In twenty-four hours the friends had exchanged many confidences; and the Parisian, seeing herself so far superior to the phoenix of Mademoiselle Chamarolles’ school, showed her provincial friend such kindness, such attentions, while giving her certain explanations, as were so many stabs to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that Anna’s advantages all lay on the surface, while her own were for ever buried.

      When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time two-and-twenty, fell into the depths of despair.

      “What is it that ails you?” asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so dejected.

      “Anna,” said she, “has learned to live, while I have been learning to endure.”

      A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye’s house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her successive transformations – a drama to which no one but Monsieur de Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her anonymous fame.

      Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an analysis of a poem which was the outcome of her deep despair.

      Her patience and her resignation alike broken by the departure of the Vicomte de Chargeboeuf, Dinah took the worthy Abbe’s advice to exhale her evil thoughts in verse – a proceeding which perhaps accounts for some poets.

      “You will find such relief as those who write epitaphs or elegies over those whom they have lost. Pain is soothed in the heart as lines surge up in the brain.”

      This strange production caused a great ferment in the departments of the Allier, the Nievre, and the Cher, proud to possess a poet capable of rivalry with the glories of Paris. Paquita la Sevillane, by Jan Diaz, was published in the Echo du Morvan, a review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and Romanesque mannerisms.

      The poem began with this ballad:

      Ah! if you knew the fragrant plain,

      The air, the sky, of golden Spain,

      Its fervid noons, its balmy spring,

      Sad daughters of the northern gloom,

      Of love, of heav’n, of native home,

      You never would presume to sing!

      For men are there of other mould

      Than those who live in this dull cold.

      And there to music low and sweet

      Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,

      Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn

      In satin shoes, on dainty feet.

      Ah, you would be the first to blush

      Over your dancers’ romp and rush,

      And your too hideous carnival,

      That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,

      And skips the mud in hob-nail’d shoe —

      A truly dismal festival.

      To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,

      Paquita sang; the murky town beneath

      Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise

      To chew the storm with teeth.

      Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage —

      And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen – where Dinah had never been – written with the affected brutality which, a little later, inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery, in short, between poetry and sordid money-making.

      Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita’s horror of Normandy by saying:

      Seville, you see, had been her native home,

      Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet.

      She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,

      Had lovers at her feet.

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