_ Two years after the winter when Monsieur Claes returned to chemistry,
the aspect of his house was changed. Whether it were that society was
affronted by his perpetual absent-mindedness and chose to think itself
in the way, or that Madame Claes's secret anxieties made her less
agreeable than before, certain it is that she no longer saw any but
her intimate friends. Balthazar went nowhere, shut himself up in his
laboratory all day, sometimes stayed there all night, and only
appeared in the bosom of his family at dinner-time.
After the second year he no longer passed the summer at his country-
house, and his wife was unwilling to live there alone. Sometimes he
went to walk and did not return till the following day, leaving Madame
Claes a prey to mortal anxiety during the night. After causing a
fruitless search for him through the town, whose gates, like those of
other fortified places, were closed at night, it was impossible to
send into the country, and the unhappy woman could only wait and
suffer till morning. Balthazar, who had forgotten the hour at which
the gates closed, would come tranquilly home next day, quite unmindful
of the tortures his absence had inflicted on his family; and the
happiness of getting him back proved as dangerous an excitement of
feeling to his wife as her fears of the preceding night. She kept
silence and dared not question him, for when she did so on the
occasion of his first absence, he answered with an air of surprise:--
"Well, what of it? Can I not take a walk?"
Passions never deceive. Madame Claes's anxieties corroborated the
rumors she had taken so much pains to deny. The experience of her
youth had taught her to understand the polite pity of the world.
Resolved not to undergo it a second time, she withdrew more and more
into the privacy of her own house, now deserted by society and even by
her nearest friends.
Among these many causes of distress, the negligence and disorder of
Balthazar's dress, so degrading to a man of his station, was not the
least bitter to a woman accustomed to the exquisite nicety of Flemish
life. At first Josephine endeavored, in concert with Balthazar's
valet, Lemulquinier, to repair the daily devastation of his clothing,
but even that she was soon forced to give up. The very day when
Balthazar, unaware of the substitution, put on new clothes in place of
those that were stained, torn, or full of holes, he made rags of them.
The poor wife, whose perfect happiness had lasted fifteen years,
during which time her jealousy had never once been roused, was
apparently and suddenly nothing in the heart where she had lately
reigned. Spanish by race, the feelings of a Spanish woman rose within
her when she discovered her rival in a Science that allured her
husband from her: torments of jealousy preyed upon her heart and
renewed her love. What could she do against Science? Should she combat
that tyrannous, unyielding, growing power? Could she kill an invisible
rival? Could a woman, limited by nature, contend with an Idea whose
delights are infinite, whose attractions are ever new? How make head
against the fascination of ideas that spring the fresher and the
lovelier out of difficulty, and entice a man so far from this world
that he forgets even his dearest loves?
At last one day, in spite of Balthazar's strict orders, Madame Claes
resolved to follow him, to shut herself up in the garret where his
life was spent, and struggle hand to hand against her rival by sharing
her husband's labors during the long hours he gave to that terrible
mistress. She determined to slip secretly into the mysterious
laboratory of seduction, and obtain the right to be there always.
Lemulquinier alone had that right, and she meant to share it with him;
but to prevent his witnessing the contention with her husband which
she feared at the outset, she waited for an opportunity when the valet
should be out of the way. For a while she studied the goings and
comings of the man with angry impatience; did he not know that which
was denied to her--all that her husband hid from her, all that she
dared not inquire into? Even a servant was preferred to a wife!
The day came; she approached the place, trembling, yet almost happy.
For the first time in her life she encountered Balthazar's anger. She
had hardly opened the door before he sprang upon her, seized her,
threw her roughly on the staircase, so that she narrowly escaped
rolling to the bottom.
"God be praised! you are still alive!" he cried, raising her.
A glass vessel had broken into fragments over Madame Claes, who saw
her husband standing by her, pale, terrified, and almost livid.
"My dear, I forbade you to come here," he said, sitting down on the
stairs, as though prostrated. "The saints have saved your life! By
what chance was it that my eyes were on the door when you opened it?
We have just escaped death."
"Then I might have been happy!" she exclaimed.
"My experiment has failed," continued Balthazar. "You alone could I
forgive for that terrible disappointment. I was about to decompose
nitrogen. Go back to your own affairs."
Balthazar re-entered the laboratory and closed the door.
"Decompose nitrogen!" said the poor woman as she re-entered her
chamber, and burst into tears.
The phrase was unintelligible to her. Men, trained by education to
have a general conception of everything, have no idea how distressing
it is for a woman to be unable to comprehend the thought of the man
she loves. More forbearing than we, these divine creatures do not let
us know when the language of their souls is not understood by us; they
shrink from letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and
hide their pain as gladly as they silence their wishes: but, having
higher ambitions in love than men, they desire to wed not only the
heart of a husband, but his mind.
To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which
absorbed her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty
of a rival might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman
gives to her who loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a
mortification like this only proved Madame Claes's powerlessness and
humiliated the feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she
had reached a point where her ignorance parted her from her husband.
Worse than all, last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he
was often in danger--near her, yet far away, and she might not share,
nor even know, his peril. Her position became, like hell, a moral
prison from which there was no issue, in which there was no hope.
Madame Claes resolved to know at least the outward attractions of this
fatal science, and she began secretly to study chemistry in the books.
From this time the family became, as it were, cloistered.
Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon
the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which
we find it at the moment when this history begins.
The situation grew daily more complicated. Like all passionate women,
Madame Claes was disinterested. Those who truly love know that
considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are
reluctantly associated with them. Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear
without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand
francs upon his property. The apparent authenticity of the
transaction, the rumors and conjectures spread through the town,
forced Madame Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband's
notary and, disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret
anxieties or let him guess them, and even ask her the humiliating
question,--
"How is it that Monsieur Claes has not told you of this?"
Happily, the notary was almost a relation,--in this wise: The
grandfather of Monsieur Claes had married a Pierquin of Antwerp, of
the same family as the Pierquins of Douai. Since the marriage the
latter, though strangers to the Claes, claimed them as cousins.
Monsieur Pierquin, a young man twenty-six years of age, who had just
succeeded to his father's practice, was the only person who now had
access to the House of Claes.
Madame Balthazar had lived for several months in such complete
solitude that the notary was obliged not only to confirm the rumor of
the disasters, but to give her further particulars, which were now
well known throughout the town. He told her that it was probably that
her husband owed considerable sums of money to the house which
furnished him with chemicals. That house, after making inquiries as to
the fortune and credit of Monsieur Claes, accepted all his orders and
sent the supplies without hesitation, notwithstanding the heavy sums
of money which became due. Madame Claes requested Pierquin to obtain
the bill for all the chemicals that had been furnished to her husband.
Two months later, Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, manufacturers of
chemical products, sent in a schedule of accounts rendered, which
amounted to over one hundred thousand francs. Madame Claes and
Pierquin studied the document with an ever-increasing surprise. Though
some articles, entered in commercial and scientific terms, were
unintelligible to them, they were frightened to see entries of
precious metals and diamonds of all kinds, though in small quantities.
The large sum total of the debt was explained by the multiplicity of
the articles, by the precautions needed in transporting some of them,
more especially valuable machinery, by the exorbitant price of certain
rare chemicals, and finally by the cost of instruments made to order
after the designs of Monsieur Claes himself.
The notary had made inquiries, in his client's interest, as to
Messieurs Protez and Chiffreville, and found that their known
integrity was sufficient guarantee as to the honesty of their
operations with Monsieur Claes, to whom, moreover, they frequently
sent information of results obtained by chemists in Paris, for the
purpose of sparing him expense. Madame Claes begged the notary to keep
the nature of these purchases from the knowledge of the people of
Douai, lest they should declare the whole thing a mania; but Pierquin
replied that he had already delayed to the very last moment the
notarial deeds which the importance of the sum borrowed necessitated,
in order not to lessen the respect in which Monsieur Claes was held.
He then revealed the full extent of the evil, telling her plainly that
if she could not find means to prevent her husband from thus madly
making way with his property, in six months the patrimonial fortune of
the Claes would be mortgaged to its full value. As for himself, he
said, the remonstrances he had already made to his cousin, with all
the consideration due to a man so justly respected, had been wholly
unavailing. Balthazar had replied, once for all, that he was working
for the fame and the fortune of his family.
Thus, to the tortures of the heart which Madame Claes had borne for
two years--one following the other with cumulative suffering--was now
added a dreadful and ceaseless fear which made the future terrifying.
Women have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous. Why do
they fear so much more than they hope in matters that concern the
interests of this life? Why is their faith given only to religious
ideas of a future existence? Why do they so ably foresee the
catastrophes of fortune and the crises of fate? Perhaps the sentiment
which unites them to the men they love gives them a sense by which
they weigh force, measure faculties, understand tastes, passions,
vices, virtues. The perpetual study of these causes in the midst of
which they live gives them, no doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing
effects in all possible relations of earthly life. What they see of
the present enables them to judge of the future with an intuitive
ability explained by the perfection of their nervous system, which
allows them to seize the lightest indications of thought and feeling.
Their whole being vibrates in communion with great moral convulsions.
Either they feel, or they see.
Now, although separated from her husband for over two years, Madame
Claes foresaw the loss of their property. She fully understood the
deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of
Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he
was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute
indifference. But what was he really seeking? Up to this time maternal
feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this
woman that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had
never come between them. Suddenly she found herself at times more
mother than wife, though hitherto she had been more wife than mother.
However ready she had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her
children to the man who had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to
whom she was still the only woman in the world, the remorse she felt
for the weakness of her maternal love threw her into terrible
alternations of feeling. As a wife, she suffered in heart; as a
mother, through her children; as a Christian, for all.
She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul. Her husband,
sole arbiter of the family fate, was the master by whose will it must
be guided; he was responsible to God only. Besides, could she reproach
him for the use he now made of his fortune, after the
disinterestedness he had shown to her for many happy years? Was she to
judge his purposes? And yet her conscience, in keeping with the spirit
of the law, told her that parents were the depositaries and guardians
of property, and possessed no right to alienate the material welfare
of the children. To escape replying to such stern questions she
preferred to shut her eyes, like one who refuses to see the abyss into
whose depths he knows he is about to fall.
For more than six months her husband had given her no money for the
household expenses. She sold secretly, in Paris, the handsome diamond
ornaments her brother had given her on her marriage, and placed the
family on a footing of the strictest economy. She sent away the
governess of her children, and even the nurse of little Jean. Formerly
the luxury of carriages and horses was unknown among the burgher
families, so simple were they in their habits, so proud in their
feelings; no provision for that modern innovation had therefore been
made at the House of Claes, and Balthazar was obliged to have his
stable and coach-house in a building opposite to his own house: his
present occupations allowed him no time to superintend that portion of
his establishment, which belongs exclusively to men. Madame Claes
suppressed the whole expense of equipages and servants, which her
present isolation from the world rendered unnecessary, and she did so
without pretending to conceal the retrenchment under any pretext. So
far, facts had contradicted her assertions, and silence for the future
was more becoming: indeed the change in the family mode of living
called for no explanation in a country where, as in Flanders, any one
who lives up to his income is considered a madman.
And yet, as her eldest daughter, Marguerite, approached her sixteenth
birthday, Madame Claes longed to procure for her a good marriage, and
to place her in society in a manner suitable to a daughter of the
Molinas, the Van Ostron-Temnincks, and the Casa-Reals. A few days
before the one on which this story opens, the money derived from the
sale of the diamonds had been exhausted. On the very day, at three
o'clock in the afternoon, as Madame Claes was taking her children to
vespers, she met Pierquin, who was on his way to see her, and who
turned and accompanied her to the church, talking in a low voice of
her situation.
"My dear cousin," he said, "unless I fail in the friendship which
binds me to your family, I cannot conceal from you the peril of your
position, nor refrain from begging you to speak to your husband. Who
but you can hold him back from the gulf into which he is plunging? The
rents from the mortgaged estates are not enough to pay the interest on
the sums he has borrowed. If he cuts the wood on them he destroys your
last chance of safety in the future. My cousin Balthazar owes at this
moment thirty thousand francs to the house of Protez and Chiffreville.
How can you pay them? What will you live on? If Claes persists in
sending for reagents, retorts, voltaic batteries, and other such
playthings, what will become of you? Your whole property, except the
house and furniture, has been dissipated in gas and carbon; yesterday
he talked of mortgaging the house, and in answer to a remark of mine,
he cried out, 'The devil!' It was the first sign of reason I have
known him show for three years."
Madame Claes pressed the notary's arm, and said in a tone of
suffering, "Keep it secret."
Overwhelmed by these plain words of startling clearness, the poor
woman, pious as she was, could not pray; she sat still on her chair
between her children, with her prayer-book open, but not turning its
leaves; her mind was sunk in meditations as absorbing as those of her
husband. The Spanish sense of honor, the Flemish integrity, resounded
in her soul with a peal louder than any organ. The ruin of her
children was accomplished! Between them and their father's honor she
must no longer hesitate. The necessity of a coming struggle with her
husband terrified her; in her eyes he was so great, so majestic, that
the mere prospect of his anger made her tremble as at a vision of the
divine wrath. She must now depart from the submission she had sacredly
practised as a wife. The interests of her children compelled her to
oppose, in his most cherished tastes, the man she idolized. Must she
not daily force him back to common matters from the higher realms of
Science; drag him forcibly from a smiling future and plunge him into a
materialism hideous to artists and great men? To her, Balthazar Claes
was a Titan of science, a man big with glory; he could only have
forgotten her for the riches of a mighty hope. Then too, was he not
profoundly wise? she had heard him talk with such good sense on every
subject that he must be sincere when he declared he worked for the
glory and prosperity of his family. His love for his wife and family
was not only vast, it was infinite. That feeling could not be extinct;
it was magnified, and reproduced in another form.
Noble, generous, timid as she was, she prepared herself to ring into
the ears of this noble man the word and the sound of money, to show
him the sores of poverty, and force him to hear cries of distress when
he was listening only for the melodious voice of Fame. Perhaps his
love for her would lessen! If she had had no children, she would
bravely and joyously have welcomed the new destiny her husband was
making for her. Women who are brought up in opulence are quick to feel
the emptiness of material enjoyments; and when their hearts, more
wearied than withered, have once learned the happiness of a constant
interchange of real feelings, they feel no shrinking from reduced
outward circumstances, provided they are still acceptable to the man
who has loved them. Their wishes, their pleasures, are subordinated to
the caprices of that other life outside of their own; to them the only
dreadful future is to lose him.
At this moment, therefore, her children came between Pepita and her
true life, just as Science had come between herself and Balthazar. And
thus, when she reached home after vespers, and threw herself into the
deep armchair before the window of the parlor, she sent away her
children, directing them to keep perfectly quiet, and despatched a
message to her husband, through Lemulquinier, saying that she wished
to see him. But although the old valet did his best to make his master
leave the laboratory, Balthazar scarcely heeded him. Madame Claes thus
gained time for reflection. She sat thinking, paying no attention to
the hour nor the light. The thought of owing thirty thousand francs
that could not be paid renewed her past anguish and joined it to that
of the present and the future. This influx of painful interests,
ideas, and feelings overcame her, and she wept.
As Balthazar entered at last through the panelled door, the expression
of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more
distracted than she had yet seen it. When he made her no answer she
was magnetized for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied
of all expression, by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled
from that bald brow. Under the shock of this impression she wished to
die. But when she heard the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish
at the moment when her heart was breaking, her courage came back to
her; she resolved to struggle with that awful power which had torn a
lover from her arms, a father from her children, a fortune from their
home, happiness from all. And yet she could not repress a trepidation
which made her quiver; in all her life no such solemn scene as this
had taken place. This dreadful moment--did it not virtually contain
her future, and gather within it all the past?
Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies
the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily
before the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the
rush of thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the
feelings under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her
husband slowly crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women
know that agony of inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was
writhing. Even one whose heart has been tried by nothing worse than
the declaration to a husband of some extravagance, or a debt to a
dress-maker, will understand how its pulses swell and quicken when the
matter is one of life itself.
A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her
husband's feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief;
but to Madame Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her
fears. When she saw Balthazar about to leave the room, her impulse was
to spring towards him; then a cruel thought restrained her--she should
stand before him! would she not seem ridiculous in the eyes of a man
no longer under the glamour of love--who might see true? She resolved
to avoid all dangerous chances at so solemn a moment, and remained
seated, saying in a clear voice,
"Balthazar."
He turned mechanically and coughed; then, paying no attention to his
wife, he walked to one of the little square boxes that are placed at
intervals along the wainscoting of every room in Holland and Belgium,
and spat in it. This man, who took no thought of other persons, never
forgot the inveterate habit of using those boxes. To poor Josephine,
unable to find a reason for this singularity, the constant care which
her husband took of the furniture caused her at all times an
unspeakable pang, but at this moment the pain was so violent that it
put her beside herself and made her exclaim in a tone of impatience,
which expressed her wounded feelings,--
"Monsieur, I am speaking to you!"
"What does that mean?" answered Balthazar, turning quickly, and
casting a look of reviving intelligence upon his wife, which fell upon
her like a thunderbolt.
"Forgive me, my friend," she said, turning pale. She tried to rise and
put out her hand to him, but her strength gave way and she fell back.
"I am dying!" she cried in a voice choked by sobs.
At the sight Balthazar had, like all abstracted persons, a vivid
reaction of mind; and he divined, so to speak, the secret cause of
this attack. Taking Madame Claes at once in his arms, he opened the
door upon the little antechamber, and ran so rapidly up the ancient
wooden staircase that his wife's dress having caught on the jaws of
one of the griffins that supported the balustrade, a whole breadth was
torn off with a loud noise. He kicked in the door of the vestibule
between their chambers, but the door of Josephine's bedroom was
locked.
He gently placed her on a chair, saying to himself, "My God! the key,
where is the key?"
"Thank you, dear friend," said Madame Claes, opening her eyes. "This
is the first time for a long, long while that I have been so near your
heart."
"Good God!" cried Claes, "the key!--here come the servants."
Josephine signed to him to take a key that hung from a ribbon at her
waist. After opening the door, Balthazar laid his wife on a sofa, and
left the room to stop the frightened servants from coming up by giving
them orders to serve the dinner; then he went back to Madame Claes.
"What is it, my dear life?" he said, sitting down beside her, and
taking her hand and kissing it.
"Nothing--now," she answered. "I suffer no longer. Only, I would I had
the power of God to pour all the gold of the world at thy feet."
"Why gold?" he asked. He took her in his arms, pressed her to him and
kissed her once more upon the forehead. "Do you not give me the
greatest of all riches in loving me as you do love me, my dear and
precious wife?"
"Oh! my Balthazar, will you not drive away the anguish of our lives as
your voice now drives out the misery of my heart? At last, at last, I
see that you are still the same."
"What anguish do you speak of, dear?"
"My friend, we are ruined."
"Ruined!" he repeated. Then, with a smile, he stroked her hand,
holding it within his own, and said in his tender voice, so long
unheard: "To-morrow, dear love, our wealth may perhaps be limitless.
Yesterday, in searching for a far more important secret, I think I
found the means of crystallizing carbon, the substance of the diamond.
Oh, my dear wife! in a few days' time you will forgive me all my
forgetfulness--I am forgetful sometimes, am I not? Was I not harsh to
you just now? Be indulgent for a man who never ceases to think of you,
whose toils are full of you--of us."
"Enough, enough!" she said, "let us talk of it all to-night, dear
friend. I suffered from too much grief, and now I suffer from too much
joy."
"To-night," he resumed; "yes, willingly: we will talk of it. If I fall
into meditation, remind me of this promise. To-night I desire to leave
my work, my researches, and return to family joys, to the delights of
the heart--Pepita, I need them, I thirst for them!"
"You will tell me what it is you seek, Balthazar?"
"Poor child, you cannot understand it."
"You think so? Ah! my friend, listen; for nearly four months I have
studied chemistry that I might talk of it with you. I have read
Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Chaptal, Nollet, Rouelle, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac,
Spallanzani, Leuwenhoek, Galvani, Volta,--in fact, all the books about
the science you worship. You can tell me your secrets, I shall
understand you."
"Oh! you are indeed an angel," cried Balthazar, falling at her feet,
and shedding tears of tender feeling that made her quiver. "Yes, we
will understand each other in all things."
"Ah!" she cried, "I would throw myself into those hellish fires which
heat your furnaces to hear these words from your lips and to see you
thus." Then, hearing her daughter's step in the anteroom, she sprang
quickly forward. "What is it, Marguerite?" she said to her eldest
daughter.
"My dear mother, Monsieur Pierquin has just come. If he stays to
dinner we need some table-linen; you forgot to give it out this
morning."
Madame Claes drew from her pocket a bunch of small keys and gave them
to the young girl, pointing to the mahogany closets which lined the
ante-chamber as she said:
"My daughter, take a set of the Graindorge linen; it is on your
right."
"Since my dear Balthazar comes back to me, let the return be
complete," she said, re-entering her chamber with a soft and arch
expression on her face. "My friend, go into your own room; do me the
kindness to dress for dinner, Pierquin will be with us. Come, take off
this ragged clothing; see those stains! Is it muratic or sulphuric
acid which left these yellow edges to the holes? Make yourself young
again,--I will send you Mulquinier as soon as I have changed my
dress."
Balthazar attempted to pass through the door of communication,
forgetting that it was locked on his side. He went out through the
anteroom.
"Marguerite, put the linen on a chair, and come and help me dress; I
don't want Martha," said Madame Claes, calling her daughter.
Balthazar had caught Marguerite and turned her towards him with a
joyous action, exclaiming: "Good-evening, my child; how pretty you are
in your muslin gown and that pink sash!" Then he kissed her forehead
and pressed her hand.
"Mamma, papa has kissed me!" cried Marguerite, running into her
mother's room. "He seems so joyous, so happy!"
"My child, your father is a great man; for three years he has toiled
for the fame and fortune of his family: he thinks he has attained the
object of his search. This day is a festival for us all."
"My dear mamma," replied Marguerite, "we shall not be alone in our
joy, for the servants have been so grieved to see him unlike himself.
Oh! put on another sash, this is faded."
"So be it; but make haste, I want to speak to Pierquin. Where is he?"
"In the parlor, playing with Jean."
"Where are Gabriel and Felicie?"
"I hear them in the garden."
"Run down quickly and see that they do not pick the tulips; your
father has not seen them in flower this year, and he may take a fancy
to look at them after dinner. Tell Mulquinier to go up and assist your
father in dressing." _