The Lily of the Valley

By Honoré de Balzac.

Translated by James Waring.

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To Monsieur J. B. Nacquart

Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine

Dear Doctor—Here is one of the most highly wrought stones of the second story of a literary edifice that is being slowly and laboriously constructed; I wish to set your name here, as much to thank the physician who once saved my life as to do honor to the friend of every day.

De Balzac.

The Lily of the Valley

To Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville

“I yield to your wish. It is the privilege of the woman whom we love more than she loves us that she can at any moment make us forget the laws of good sense. To spare ourselves the sight of a wrinkle on your brow, to dissipate a pout on your lips—which so small a contradiction saddens—we work miracles to annihilate distance, we give our blood, we mortgage the future.

“You, today, want my past: here it is. But understand this, Natalie; to obey you I have had to trample under foot a repugnance I never before have conquered. Why must you be suspicious of the long and sudden reveries which come over me when I am happiest? Why show the pretty tempers of a woman beloved because I fall silent? Could you not play with the contrasts of my nature without knowing their causes? Have you in your heart secrets which must have mine to gain absolution?

“Well, you have guessed rightly, Natalie, and it is better perhaps that you should know everything: yes, my life is overshadowed by a phantom; it asserts itself vaguely at the least word that evokes it; it often hovers over me unbidden. I have, buried within my soul, astounding memories, like those marine growths which may be seen in calm waters, and which the surges of the storm fling in fragments on the shore.

“Though the travail needed for the utterance of ideas has controlled the old emotions which hurt me so much when they are suddenly aroused, if there should be in this confession any outbreaks that offend you, remember that you threatened me in case of disobedience, and do not punish me for having obliged you.

“I only wish my confidence might increase your tenderness twofold.

“Till this evening.

“Félix.”

To what genius fed on tears may we some day owe the most touching elegy—the picture of the tortures suffered in silence by souls whose roots, while still tender, find nothing but hard pebbles in the soil of home, whose earliest blossoms are rent by the hands of hate, whose flowers are frostbitten as soon as they open? What poet will tell of the sorrows of the child whose lips suck the milk of bitterness, whose smiles are checked by the scorching fire of a stern eye? The fiction that should depict these poor crushed hearts, downtrodden by those who are placed about them to encourage the development of their feelings, would be the true story of my childhood.

What vanities could I, a newborn babe, have fretted? What moral or physical deformity earned me my mother’s coldness? Was I the offspring of duty, a child whose birth is fortuitous, or one whose existence is a standing reproach?

Sent to be nursed in the country and forgotten by my parents for three years, when I returned to my father’s house I counted for so little that I had to endure the pity of the servants. I know not to what feeling nor to what happy chance I owed it that I was able to rally after this first disaster; as a child I did not understand, and as a man I do not know. My brother and my two sisters, far from mitigating my fate, amused themselves by tormenting me. The mutual compact, in virtue of which children hide each other’s peccadilloes and learn an infant code of honor, was null and void as regarded me; nay, more, I often found myself in disgrace for my brother’s misdeeds, with no power of appeal against the injustice; was it that insidious self-interest, of which a germ exists even in children, prompted them to add to the persecution that weighed on me, so as to win the good graces of the mother whom they feared no less? Was it the result of their imitative instinct? Was it a desire to try their power, or a lack of fellow-feeling? All these causes combined perhaps to deprive me of the comfort of brotherly kindness. Cut off already from all affection, I could love nothing, and Nature had made me loving! Is there an angel who collects the sighs of such ever-repressed feeling? If misprized sentiments turn to hatred in some souls, in mine they became concentrated, and wore a channel from whence at a later date they gushed into my life. In some characters the habit of shrinking relaxes every fibre, and gives rise to fear; and fear reduces us to perpetual subjection. Hence proceeds a weakness which debases a man and gives him an indescribable taint of servility.

But this constant torment gave me the habit of exerting a force which increased with exercise, and predisposed my soul to moral fortitude. Always on the lookout for some new misery, as martyrs expect a fresh blow, my whole being must have expressed a gloomy dejection which stifled all the graces and impulses of childhood, a condition which was regarded as a symptom of idiocy, justifying my mother’s ominous prognostics. A sense of this injustice gave rise in my spirit to a premature feeling of pride, the outcome of reason, which, no doubt, was a check on the evil disposition fostered by such a manner of education.

Though completely neglected by my mother, I was occasionally the cause of some scruples in her mind; she sometimes talked of my learning something, and expressed a purpose of teaching me; then I shuddered miserably at the thought of the anguish of daily contact with her. I blessed my deserted loneliness, and was happy in being left in the garden to play with pebbles, watch the insects, and gaze at the blue sky.

Though isolation made me dreamy, my love of meditation had its rise in an incident which will give you an idea of my first woes. I was so entirely overlooked that the governess often forgot to put me to bed. One evening, peacefully sitting under a fig-tree, I was looking at a star with the passionate curiosity known to children, to which, in me, precocious melancholy gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters were playing and shouting; I head the remote clatter like an accompaniment of my thoughts. The noise presently ceased; night fell. By chance my mother noticed my absence. To avert a scolding, our governess, a certain terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, justified my mother’s affected fears by declaring that I had a horror of home; that if she had not watched me narrowly, I should have run away before then; that I was not weak of intellect, but sly; that of all the children she had ever had care of, she had never known one whose disposition was so vile as mine.

She then pretended to search for me, and called me; I replied; she came to the fig-tree where she knew that I was.

“What have you been doing here?” she asked.

“I was looking at a star.”

“You were not looking at a star,” cried my mother, who was listening from her balcony, “as if a child of your age could know anything of astronomy!”

“Oh, madame,” cried Mademoiselle Caroline, “He turned on the tap of the cistern, the garden is flooded!”

There was a great commotion. My sisters had amused themselves with turning the tap to see the water flow; but, startled by a spurt sideways that had wetted them all over, they lost their head, and fled without turning the water off again. Accused and convicted of having devised this piece of mischief, and of lying when I asserted my innocence, I was severely punished. But, worst of all, I was mocked at for my love of stargazing, and my mother forbade my staying in the garden in the evening.

Tyrannical prohibitions give zest to a passion, even more in children than in men; children have the advantage of thinking of nothing else but the forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly fascinating. So I was often caned for my star. Unable to confide my woes to any human being, I told my griefs to the star in that exquisite internal warbling by which a child lisps its first ideas as he has already lisped his first words. At the age of twelve, a boy at school, I still contemplated it with a sense of unspeakable rapture, so deep are the marks set on the heart by the impressions received in the dawn of life.