A Marriage Settlement

By Honoré de Balzac.

Translated by Clara Bell.

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To G. Rossini

A Marriage Settlement

Monsieur de Manerville the elder was a worthy gentleman of Normandy, well known to the Maréchal de Richelieu, who arranged his marriage with one of the richest heiresses of Bordeaux at the time when the old Duke held court in that city as Governor of Guienne. The Norman gentleman sold the lands he owned in Bessin, and established himself as a Gascon, tempted to this step by the beauty of the estate of Lanstrac, a delightful residence belonging to his wife. Towards the end of Louis XV’s reign, he purchased the post of Major of the King’s bodyguard, and lived till 1813, having happily survived the Revolution.

This was how. In the winter of 1790 he made a voyage to Martinique, where his wife had property, leaving the management of his estates in Gascony to a worthy notary’s clerk named Mathias, who had some taint of the new ideas. On his return, the Comte de Manerville found his possessions safe and profitably managed. This shrewdness was the fruit of a graft of the Gascon on the Norman.

Madame de Manerville died in 1810. Her husband, having learned by the dissipations of his youth the importance of money, and, like many old men, ascribing to it a greater power in life than it possesses, Monsieur de Manerville became progressively thrifty, avaricious, and mean. Forgetting that stingy fathers make spendthrift sons, he allowed scarcely anything to his son, though he was an only child.

Paul de Manerville came home from college at Vendôme towards the end of 1810, and for three years lived under his father’s rule. The tyranny exercised by the old man of sixty-nine over his sole heir could not fail to affect a heart and character as yet unformed. Though he did not lack the physical courage which would seem to be in the air of Gascony, Paul dared not contend with his father, and lost the elasticity of resistance that gives rise to moral courage. His suppressed feelings were pent at the bottom of his heart, where he kept them long in reserve without daring to express them; thus, at a later time, when he felt that they were not in accordance with the maxims of the world, though he could think rightly, he could act wrongly. He would have fought at a word, while he quaked at the thought of sending away a servant; for his shyness found a field in any struggle which demanded persistent determination. Though capable of much to escape persecution, he would never have taken steps to hinder it by systematic antagonism, nor have met it by a steady display of strength. A coward in mind, though bold in action, he preserved till late that unconfessed innocence which makes a man the victim, the voluntary dupe, of things against which such natures hesitate to rebel, preferring to suffer rather than complain.

He was a prisoner in his father’s old house, for he had not money enough to disport himself with the young men of the town; he envied them their amusements, but could not share them. The old gentleman took him out every evening in an antique vehicle, drawn by a pair of shabbily-harnessed horses, attended to by two antique and shabbily-dressed menservants, into the society of a royalist clique, consisting of the waifs of the nobility of the old Parlement and of the sword. These two bodies of magnates, uniting after the Revolution to resist Imperial influence, had by degrees become an aristocracy of landowners. Overpowered by the wealth and the shifting fortunes of a great seaport, this Faubourg Saint-Germain of Bordeaux responded with scorn to the magnificence of commerce and of the civil and military authorities.

Too young to understand social distinctions and the poverty hidden under the conspicuous vanity to which they give rise, Paul was bored to death among these antiques, not knowing that these associations of his youth would secure to him the aristocratic preeminence for which France will always have a weakness.

He found some little compensation for the dreariness of these evenings in certain exercises such as young men love, for his father insisted on them. In the old aristocrat’s eyes, to be a master of all weapons, to ride well, to play tennis, and have fine manners⁠—in short, the superficial training of the gentleman of the past⁠—constituted the accomplished man. So, every morning Paul fenced, rode, and practised with pistols. The rest of his time he spent in novel-reading, for his father would not hear of the transcendental studies which put a finishing touch to education in these days.