“You beseech me to love you out of Christian charity. I could, I own, do much out of charity—everything but love.
“You are sometimes dull and tiresome; you dignify your gloom by the name of melancholy: well and good; but it is intolerable, and fills the woman who loves you with cruel anxieties. I have come across that saint’s tomb too often standing between us; I have reflected, and I have concluded that I have no wish to die like her. If you exasperated Lady Dudley, a woman of the first distinction, I, who have not her furious passions, fear I should even sooner grow cold.
“Put love out of the question as between you and me, since you no longer find happiness but with the dead, and let us be friends; I am willing.
“Why, my dear Count, you began by loving an adorable woman, a perfect mistress, who undertook to make your fortune, who procured you a peerage, who loved you to distraction—and you made her die of grief! Why, nothing can be more monstrous. Among the most ardent and the most luckless youths who drag their ambitions over the pavements of Paris, is there one who would not have behaved himself for ten years to obtain half the favors which you failed to recognize? When a man is so beloved, what more does he want?
“Poor woman! she suffered much; and you, when you have made a few sentimental speeches, think you have paid your debt over her bier. This, no doubt, is the prize that awaits my affection for you. Thank you, dear Count, but I desire no rival on either side of the grave.
“When a man has such a crime on his conscience, the least he can do is not to tell!
“I asked you a foolish question; it was in my part as a woman, a daughter of Eve. It was your part to calculate the results of the answer. You ought to have deceived me; I should have thanked you for it later. Have you understood wherein lies the merit of men who are liked by women? Do you not perceive how magnanimous they are when they swear that they have never loved before, that this is their first love? Your programme is impossible. Lady Dudley and Madame de Mortsauf in one! Why, my dear friend, you might as well try to combine fire and water. Do you know nothing of women? They are as they are; they must have the defects of their qualities.
“You met Lady Dudley too soon to appreciate her, and the evil you say of her seems to me to be the revenge of your wounded vanity; you understood Madame de Mortsauf too late; you punished each for not being the other; what then would become of me, being neither one nor the other?
“I like you well enough to have reflected very seriously on your future prospects. Your look, as of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, has always interested me, and I believe in the constancy of melancholy men, but I did not know that you had begun your career in the world by killing the loveliest and most virtuous of women. Well, I have been considering what remains for you to do; I have thought it out. I think you had better marry some Mrs. Shandy, who will know nothing of love or passion, who will never trouble her head about Lady Dudley or Madame de Mortsauf, nor about those spells of dullness which you call melancholy—when you are as amusing as a rainy day—and who will be the worthy Sister of Charity you long for.
“As to love—thrilling at a word, knowing how to wait for happiness, how to give and take it, feeling the myriad storms of passion, making common cause with the little vanities of the woman you love—my dear Count, give it up. You have followed the advice of your good angel too exactly; you have avoided young women so effectually that you know nothing about them. Madame de Mortsauf was wise in getting you to a front place at once; every woman would have been against you, and you would never have got one. It is too late now to begin your training, and to learn to say the things we like to hear, to be noble at appropriate moments, to worship our triviality when we have a fancy to be trivial. We are not such simpletons as you think us. When we love, we set the man of our choice above all else. Anything that shakes our faith in our own supremacy shakes our love. By flattering us, you flatter yourselves.
“If you want to live in the world and mingle on equal terms with women, conceal with care all you have told me; they do not care to strew the flowers of their affections on stones, or lavish their caresses to heal a wounded heart. Every woman will at once discern the shallowness of your heart, and you will be constantly more unhappy. Very few will be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or good-natured enough to dismiss you without rancor and offer you their friendship, as she now does who still remains your sincere friend.
Colophon
The Lily of the Valley
was published in by
Honoré de Balzac.
It was translated from French in by
James Waring.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Vince Rice,
and is based on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Portrait of Harriott West (Later Mrs. William Woodgate),
a painting completed circa by
Thomas Lawrence.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in and by
The League of Moveable Type.
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