Poor Relations. Honore de Balzac

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СКАЧАТЬ She herself called herself the Family Confessional.

      The Baroness only, remembering her ill-usage in childhood by the cousin who, though younger, was stronger than herself, never wholly trusted her. Besides, out of sheer modesty, she would never have told her domestic sorrows to any one but God.

      It may here be well to add that the Baron's house preserved all its magnificence in the eyes of Lisbeth Fischer, who was not struck, as the parvenu perfumer had been, with the penury stamped on the shabby chairs, the dirty hangings, and the ripped silk. The furniture we live with is in some sort like our own person; seeing ourselves every day, we end, like the Baron, by thinking ourselves but little altered, and still youthful, when others see that our head is covered with chinchilla, our forehead scarred with circumflex accents, our stomach assuming the rotundity of a pumpkin. So these rooms, always blazing in Betty's eyes with the Bengal fire of Imperial victory, were to her perennially splendid.

      As time went on, Lisbeth had contracted some rather strange old-maidish habits. For instance, instead of following the fashions, she expected the fashion to accept her ways and yield to her always out-of-date notions. When the Baroness gave her a pretty new bonnet, or a gown in the fashion of the day, Betty remade it completely at home, and spoilt it by producing a dress of the style of the Empire or of her old Lorraine costume. A thirty-franc bonnet came out a rag, and the gown a disgrace. On this point, Lisbeth was as obstinate as a mule; she would please no one but herself and believed herself charming; whereas this assimilative process – harmonious, no doubt, in so far as that it stamped her for an old maid from head to foot – made her so ridiculous, that, with the best will in the world, no one could admit her on any smart occasion.

      This refractory, capricious, and independent spirit, and the inexplicable wild shyness of the woman for whom the Baron had four times found a match – an employe in his office, a retired major, an army contractor, and a half-pay captain – while she had refused an army lacemaker, who had since made his fortune, had won her the name of the Nanny Goat, which the Baron gave her in jest. But this nickname only met the peculiarities that lay on the surface, the eccentricities which each of us displays to his neighbors in social life. This woman, who, if closely studied, would have shown the most savage traits of the peasant class, was still the girl who had clawed her cousin's nose, and who, if she had not been trained to reason, would perhaps have killed her in a fit of jealousy.

      It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled her to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild men, reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the difference between natural and civilized man. The savage has only impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time. This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who is still one with nature, this contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a savage of Lorraine, somewhat treacherous too, was of this class of natures, which are commoner among the lower orders than is supposed, accounting for the conduct of the populace during revolutions.

      At the time when this Drama opens, if Cousin Betty would have allowed herself to be dressed like other people; if, like the women of Paris, she had been accustomed to wear each fashion in its turn, she would have been presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the stiffness of a stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris simply does not exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features, the Calabrian fixity of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by Giotto, and of which a true Parisian would have taken advantage, above all, her strange way of dressing, gave her such an extraordinary appearance that she sometimes looked like one of those monkeys in petticoats taken about by little Savoyards. As she was well known in the houses connected by family which she frequented, and restricted her social efforts to that little circle, as she liked her own home, her singularities no longer astonished anybody; and out of doors they were lost in the immense stir of Paris street-life, where only pretty women are ever looked at.

      Hortense's laughter was at this moment caused by a victory won over her Cousin Lisbeth's perversity; she had just wrung from her an avowal she had been hoping for these three years past. However secretive an old maid may be, there is one sentiment which will always avail to make her break her fast from words, and that is her vanity. For the last three years, Hortense, having become very inquisitive on such matters, had pestered her cousin with questions, which, however, bore the stamp of perfect innocence. She wanted to know why her cousin had never married. Hortense, who knew of the five offers that she had refused, had constructed her little romance; she supposed that Lisbeth had had a passionate attachment, and a war of banter was the result. Hortense would talk of "We young girls!" when speaking of herself and her cousin.

      Cousin Betty had on several occasions answered in the same tone – "And who says I have not a lover?" So Cousin Betty's lover, real or fictitious, became a subject of mild jesting. At last, after two years of this petty warfare, the last time Lisbeth had come to the house Hortense's first question had been:

      "And how is your lover?"

      "Pretty well, thank you," was the answer. "He is rather ailing, poor young man."

      "He has delicate health?" asked the Baroness, laughing.

      "I should think so! He is fair. A sooty thing like me can love none but a fair man with a color like the moon."

      "But who is he? What does he do?" asked Hortense. "Is he a prince?"

      "A prince of artisans, as I am queen of the bobbin. Is a poor woman like me likely to find a lover in a man with a fine house and money in the funds, or in a duke of the realm, or some Prince Charming out of a fairy tale?"

      "Oh, I should so much like to see him!" cried Hortense, smiling.

      "To see what a man can be like who can love the Nanny Goat?" retorted Lisbeth.

      "He must be some monster of an old clerk, with a goat's beard!" Hortense said to her mother.

      "Well, then, you are quite mistaken, mademoiselle."

      "Then you mean that you really have a lover?" Hortense exclaimed in triumph.

      "As sure as you have not!" retorted Lisbeth, nettled.

      "But if you have a lover, why don't you marry him, Lisbeth?" said the Baroness, shaking her head at her daughter. "We have been hearing rumors about him these three years. You have had time to study him; and if he has been faithful so long, you should not persist in a delay which must be hard upon him. After all, it is a matter of conscience; and if he is young, it is time to take a brevet of dignity."

      Cousin Betty had fixed her gaze on Adeline, and seeing that she was jesting, she replied:

      "It would be marrying hunger and thirst; he is a workman, I am a workwoman. If we had children, they would be workmen. – No, no; we love each other spiritually; it is less expensive."

      "Why do you keep him in hiding?" Hortense asked.

      "He wears a round jacket," replied the old maid, laughing.

      "You truly love him?" the Baroness inquired.

      "I believe you! I love him for his own sake, the dear cherub. For four years his home has been in my heart."

      "Well, then, if you love him for himself," said the Baroness gravely, "and if he really exists, you are treating him criminally. You do not know how to love truly."

      "We all know that from our birth," said Lisbeth.

      "No, СКАЧАТЬ