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JUANA
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame la Comtesse Merlin.
JUANA
(THE MARANAS)
CHAPTER I
EXPOSITION
Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced
into his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of
trouble and disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain
fair-minded military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking
resemblance to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it.
Order being re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective
lines, and the commandant of the city appointed, military
administration began. The place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all
things were organized on a French system, the Spaniards were left free
to follow "in petto" their national tastes.
This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it
lasted) had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so
difficult to discover. In the marechal's army was a regiment, composed
almost entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene,
a man of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the
military service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor
a Kingdom of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he
had ample opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that
he met with several. His regiment was composed of the scattered
fragments of the Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the
colonial battalions are to France. Its permanent cantonments,
established on the island of Elba, served as an honorable place of
exile for the troublesome sons of good families and for those great
men who have just missed greatness, whom society brands with a hot
iron and designates by the term "mauvais sujets"; men who are for the
most part misunderstood; whose existence may become either noble
through the smile of a woman lifting them out of their rut, or
shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of some damnable
reflection dropped by a drunken comrade.
Napoleon had incorporated these vigorous beings in the sixth of the
line, hoping to metamorphose them finally into generals,--barring
those whom the bullets might take off. But the emperor's calculation
was scarcely fulfilled, except in the matter of the bullets. This
regiment, often decimated but always the same in character, acquired a
great reputation for valor in the field and for wickedness in private
life. At the siege of Tarragona it lost its celebrated hero, Bianchi,
the man who, during the campaign, had wagered that he would eat the
heart of a Spanish sentinel, and did eat it. Though Bianchi was the
prince of the devils incarnate to whom the regiment owed its dual
reputation, he had, nevertheless, that sort of chivalrous honor which
excuses, in the army, the worst excesses. In a word, he would have
been, at an earlier period, an admirable pirate. A few days before his
death he distinguished himself by a daring action which the marechal
wished to reward. Bianchi refused rank, pension, and additional
decoration, asking, for sole recompense, the favor of being the first
to mount the breach at the assault on Tarragona. The marechal granted
the request and then forgot his promise; but Bianchi forced him to
remember Bianchi. The enraged hero was the first to plant our flag on
the wall, where he was shot by a monk.
This historical digression was necessary, in order to explain how it
was that the 6th of the line was the regiment to enter Tarragona, and
why the disorder and confusion, natural enough in a city taken by
storm, degenerated for a time into a slight pillage.
This regiment possessed two officers, not at all remarkable among
these men of iron, who played, nevertheless, in the history we shall
now relate, a somewhat important part.
The first, a captain in the quartermaster's department, an officer
half civil, half military, was considered, in soldier phrase, to be
fighting his own battle. He pretended bravery, boasted loudly of
belonging to the 6th of the line, twirled his moustache with the air
of a man who was ready to demolish everything; but his brother
officers did not esteem him. The fortune he possessed made him
cautious. He was nicknamed, for two reasons, "captain of crows." In
the first place, he could smell powder a league off, and took wing at
the sound of a musket; secondly, the nickname was based on an innocent
military pun, which his position in the regiment warranted. Captain
Montefiore, of the illustrious Montefiore family of Milan (though the
laws of the Kingdom of Italy forbade him to bear his title in the
French service) was one of the handsomest men in the army. This beauty
may have been among the secret causes of his prudence on fighting
days. A wound which might have injured his nose, cleft his forehead,
or scarred his cheek, would have destroyed one of the most beautiful
Italian faces which a woman ever dreamed of in all its delicate
proportions. This face, not unlike the type which Girodet has given to
the dying young Turk, in the "Revolt at Cairo," was instinct with that
melancholy by which all women are more or less duped.
The Marquis de Montefiore possessed an entailed property, but his
income was mortgaged for a number of years to pay off the costs of
certain Italian escapades which are inconceivable in Paris. He had
ruined himself in supporting a theatre at Milan in order to force upon
a public a very inferior prima donna, whom he was said to love madly.
A fine future was therefore before him, and he did not care to risk it
for the paltry distinction of a bit of red ribbon. He was not a brave
man, but he was certainly a philosopher; and he had precedents, if we
may use so parliamentary an expression. Did not Philip the Second
register a vow after the battle of Saint Quentin that never again
would he put himself under fire? And did not the Duke of Alba
encourage him in thinking that the worst trade in the world was the
involuntary exchange of a crown for a bullet? Hence, Montefiore was
Philippiste in his capacity of rich marquis and handsome man; and in
other respects also he was quite as profound a politician as Philip
the Second himself. He consoled himself for his nickname, and for the
disesteem of the regiment by thinking that his comrades were
blackguards, whose opinion would never be of any consequence to him if
by chance they survived the present war, which seemed to be one of
extermination. He relied on his face to win him promotion; he saw
himself made colonel by feminine influence and a carefully managed
transition from captain of equipment to orderly officer, and from
orderly officer to aide-de-camp on the staff of some easy-going
marshal. By that time, he reflected, he should come into his property
of a hundred thousand scudi a year, some journal would speak of him as
"the brave Montefiore," he would marry a girl of rank, and no one
would dare to dispute his courage or verify his wounds.
Captain Montefiore had one friend in the person of the quartermaster,
--a Provencal, born in the neighborhood of Nice, whose name was Diard.
A friend, whether at the galleys or in the garret of an artist,
consoles for many troubles. Now Montefiore and Diard were two
philosophers, who consoled each other for their present lives by the
study of vice, as artists soothe the immediate disappointment of their
hopes by the expectation of future fame. Both regarded the war in its
results, not its action; they simply considered those who died for
glory fools. Chance had made soldiers of them; whereas their natural
proclivities would have seated them at the green table of a congress.
Nature had poured Montefiore into the mould of a Rizzio, and Diard
into that of a diplomatist. Both were endowed with that nervous,
feverish, half-feminine organization, which is equally strong for good
or evil, and from which may emanate, according to the impulse of these
singular temperaments, a crime or a generous action, a noble deed or a
base one. The fate of such natures depends at any moment on the
pressure, more or less powerful, produced on their nervous systems by
violent and transitory passions.
Diard was considered a good accountant, but no soldier would have
trusted him with his purse or his will, possibly because of the
antipathy felt by all real soldiers against the bureaucrats. The
quartermaster was not without courage and a certain juvenile
generosity, sentiments which many men give up as they grow older, by
dint of reasoning or calculating. Variable as the beauty of a fair
woman, Diard was a great boaster and a great talker, talking of
everything. He said he was artistic, and he made prizes (like two
celebrated generals) of works of art, solely, he declared, to preserve
them for posterity. His military comrades would have been puzzled
indeed to form a correct judgment of him. Many of them, accustomed to
draw upon his funds when occasion obliged them, thought him rich; but
in truth, he was a gambler, and gamblers may be said to have nothing
of their own. Montefiore was also a gambler, and all the officers of
the regiment played with the pair; for, to the shame of men be it
said, it is not a rare thing to see persons gambling together around a
green table who, when the game is finished, will not bow to their
companions, feeling no respect for them. Montefiore was the man with
whom Bianchi made his bet about the heart of the Spanish sentinel.
Montefiore and Diard were among the last to mount the breach at
Tarragona, but the first in the heart of the town as soon as it was
taken. Accidents of this sort happen in all attacks, but with this
pair of friends they were customary. Supporting each other, they made
their way bravely through a labyrinth of narrow and gloomy little
streets in quest of their personal objects; one seeking for painted
madonnas, the other for madonnas of flesh and blood.
In what part of Tarragona it happened I cannot say, but Diard
presently recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the
gate of which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to
put a stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to
prevent two Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of
the moustache with which in their military fanaticism they had
decorated her face, he bought the picture. Montefiore, left alone
during this episode, noticed, nearly opposite the convent, the house
and shop of a draper, from which a shot was fired at him at the moment
when his eyes caught a flaming glance from those of an inquisitive
young girl, whose head was advanced under the shelter of a blind.
Tarragona taken by assault, Tarragona furious, firing from every
window, Tarragona violated, with dishevelled hair, and half-naked, was
indeed an object of curiosity,--the curiosity of a daring Spanish
woman. It was a magnified bull-fight.
Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the
cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The
profile of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing
which he, an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming
of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever
seen. He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a
thousand follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man--the
most abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his
head, suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,--to
set fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means of
action; the fighting was centred in the market-place, where a few
obstinate beings were still defending the town. A better idea then
occurred to him. Diard came out of the convent, but Montefiore said
not a word of his discovery; on the contrary, he accompanied him on a
series of rambles about the streets. But the next day, the Italian had
obtained his military billet in the house of the draper,--an
appropriate lodging for an equipment captain!
The house of the worthy Spaniard consisted, on the ground-floor, of a
vast and gloomy shop, externally fortified with stout iron bars, such
as we see in the old storehouses of the rue des Lombards. This shop
communicated with a parlor lighted from an interior courtyard, a large
room breathing the very spirit of the middle-ages, with smoky old
pictures, old tapestries, antique "brazero," a plumed hat hanging to a
nail, the musket of the guerrillas, and the cloak of Bartholo. The
kitchen adjoined this unique living-room, where the inmates took their
meals and warmed themselves over the dull glow of the brazier, smoking
cigars and discoursing bitterly to animate all hearts with hatred
against the French. Silver pitchers and precious dishes of plate and
porcelain adorned a buttery shelf of the old fashion. But the light,
sparsely admitted, allowed these dazzling objects to show but
slightly; all things, as in pictures of the Dutch school, looked
brown, even the faces. Between the shop and this living-room, so fine
in color and in its tone of patriarchal life, was a dark staircase
leading to a ware-room where the light, carefully distributed,
permitted the examination of goods. Above this were the apartments of
the merchant and his wife. Rooms for an apprentice and a servant-woman
were in a garret under the roof, which projected over the street and
was supported by buttresses, giving a somewhat fantastic appearance to
the exterior of the building. These chambers were now taken by the
merchant and his wife who gave up their own rooms to the officer who
was billeted upon them,--probably because they wished to avoid all
quarrelling.
Montefiore gave himself out as a former Spanish subject, persecuted by
Napoleon, whom he was serving against his will; and these semi-lies
had the success he expected. He was invited to share the meals of the
family, and was treated with the respect due to his name, his birth,
and his title. He had his reasons for capturing the good-will of the
merchant and his wife; he scented his madonna as the ogre scented the
youthful flesh of Tom Thumb and his brothers. But in spite of the
confidence he managed to inspire in the worthy pair the latter
maintained the most profound silence as to the said madonna; and not
only did the captain see no trace of the young girl during the first
day he spent under the roof of the honest Spaniard, but he heard no
sound and came upon no indication which revealed her presence in that
ancient building. Supposing that she was the only daughter of the old
couple, Montefiore concluded they had consigned her to the garret,
where, for the time being, they made their home.
But no revelation came to betray the hiding-place of that precious
treasure. The marquis glued his face to the lozenge-shaped leaded
panes which looked upon the black-walled enclosure of the inner
courtyard; but in vain; he saw no gleam of light except from the
windows of the old couple, whom he could see and hear as they went and
came and talked and coughed. Of the young girl, not a shadow!
Montefiore was far too wary to risk the future of his passion by
exploring the house nocturnally, or by tapping softly on the doors.
Discovery by that hot patriot, the mercer, suspicious as a Spaniard
must be, meant ruin infallibly. The captain therefore resolved to wait
patiently, resting his faith on time and the imperfection of men,
which always results--even with scoundrels, and how much more with
honest men!--in the neglect of precautions.
The next day he discovered a hammock in the kitchen, showing plainly
where the servant-woman slept. As for the apprentice, his bed was
evidently made on the shop counter. During supper on the second day
Montefiore succeeded, by cursing Napoleon, in smoothing the anxious
forehead of the merchant, a grave, black-visaged Spaniard, much like
the faces formerly carved on the handles of Moorish lutes; even the
wife let a gay smile of hatred appear in the folds of her elderly
face. The lamp and the reflections of the brazier illumined
fantastically the shadows of the noble room. The mistress of the house
offered a "cigarrito" to their semi-compatriot. At this moment the
rustle of a dress and the fall of a chair behind the tapestry were
plainly heard.
"Ah!" cried the wife, turning pale, "may the saints assist us! God
grant no harm has happened!"
"You have some one in the next room, have you not?" said Montefiore,
giving no sign of emotion.
The draper dropped a word of imprecation against the girls. Evidently
alarmed, the wife opened a secret door, and led in, half fainting, the
Italian's madonna, to whom he was careful to pay no attention; only,
to avoid a too-studied indifference, he glanced at the girl before he
turned to his host and said in his own language:--
"Is that your daughter, signore?"
Perez de Lagounia (such was the merchant's name) had large commercial
relations with Genoa, Florence, and Livorno; he knew Italian, and
replied in the same language:--
"No; if she were my daughter I should take less precautions. The child
is confided to our care, and I would rather die than see any evil
happen to her. But how is it possible to put sense into a girl of
eighteen?"
"She is very handsome," said Montefiore, coldly, not looking at her
face again.
"Her mother's beauty is celebrated," replied the merchant, briefly.
They continued to smoke, watching each other. Though Montefiore
compelled himself not to give the slightest look which might
contradict his apparent coldness, he could not refrain, at a moment
when Perez turned his head to expectorate, from casting a rapid glance
at the young girl, whose sparkling eyes met his. Then, with that
science of vision which gives to a libertine, as it does to a
sculptor, the fatal power of disrobing, if we may so express it, a
woman, and divining her shape by inductions both rapid and sagacious,
he beheld one of those masterpieces of Nature whose creation appears
to demand as its right all the happiness of love. Here was a fair
young face, on which the sun of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre
which added to its expression of seraphic calmness a passionate pride,
like a flash of light infused beneath that diaphanous complexion,--
due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which vivified and colored it. Her
hair, raised to the top of her head, fell thence with black
reflections round the delicate transparent ears and defined the
outlines of a blue-veined throat. These luxuriant locks brought into
strong relief the dazzling eyes and the scarlet lips of a well-arched
mouth. The bodice of the country set off the lines of a figure that
swayed as easily as a branch of willow. She was not the Virgin of
Italy, but the Virgin of Spain, of Murillo, the only artist daring
enough to have painted the Mother of God intoxicated with the joy of
conceiving the Christ,--the glowing imagination of the boldest and
also the warmest of painters.
In this young girl three things were united, a single one of which
would have sufficed for the glory of a woman: the purity of the pearl
in the depths of ocean; the sublime exaltation of the Spanish Saint
Teresa; and a passion of love which was ignorant of itself. The
presence of such a woman has the virtue of a talisman. Montefiore no
longer felt worn and jaded. That young girl brought back his youthful
freshness.
But, though the apparition was delightful, it did not last. The girl
was taken back to the secret chamber, where the servant-woman carried
to her openly both light and food.
"You do right to hide her," said Montefiore in Italian. "I will keep
your secret. The devil! we have generals in our army who are capable
of abducting her."
Montefiore's infatuation went so far as to suggest to him the idea of
marrying her. He accordingly asked her history, and Perez very
willingly told him the circumstances under which she had become his
ward. The prudent Spaniard was led to make this confidence because he
had heard of Montefiore in Italy, and knowing his reputation was
desirous to let him see how strong were the barriers which protected
the young girl from the possibility of seduction. Though the good-man
was gifted with a certain patriarchal eloquence, in keeping with his
simple life and customs, his tale will be improved by abridgment.
At the period when the French Revolution changed the manners and
morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a
street prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of
its fall. The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic
adventures and strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other
woman of her class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great
lords struck with her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged
with gold and jewels and all the delights of excessive wealth,--
flowers, carriages, pages, maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like
those of Catherine II.); in short, the life of a queen, despotic in
her caprices and obeyed, often beyond her own imaginings. Then,
without herself, or any one, chemist, physician, or man of science,
being able to discover how her gold evaporated, she would find herself
back in the streets, poor, denuded of everything, preserving nothing
but her all-powerful beauty, yet living on without thought or care of
the past, the present, or the future. Cast, in her poverty, into the
hands of some poor gambling officer, she attached herself to him as a
dog to its master, sharing the discomforts of the military life, which
indeed she comforted, as content under the roof of a garret as beneath
the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and Spanish both, she
fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion, and more than once
she had said to love:--
"Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God."
But this slime permeated with gold and perfumes, this careless
indifference to all things, these unbridled passions, these religious
beliefs cast into that heart like diamonds into mire, this life begun,
and ended, in a hospital, these gambling chances transferred to the
soul, to the very existence,--in short, this great alchemy, for which
vice lit the fire beneath the crucible in which fortunes were melted
up and the gold of ancestors and the honor of great names evaporated,
proceeded from a CAUSE, a particular heredity, faithfully transmitted
from mother to daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman
was La Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the
idea, person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown
since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a
name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the
constant heredity of the same office devolving on the family.
Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which
united and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served
to express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of
that sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day
can give an idea. Ninon de l'Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone
played, in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas
who, in preceding centuries, gathered around them the cassock, gown,
and sword. An Imperia built I forget which church in Rome in a frenzy
of repentance, as Rhodope built, in earlier times, a pyramid in Egypt.
The name Marana, inflicted at first as a disgrace upon the singular
family with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its
veritable name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.
One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this
event was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it was in a
moment of repentance and melancholy, this Marana of the nineteenth
century stood with her feet in the slime and her head raised to
heaven. She cursed the blood in her veins, she cursed herself, she
trembled lest she should have a daughter, and she swore, as such women
swear, on the honor and with the will of the galleys--the firmest
will, the most scrupulous honor that there is on earth--she swore,
before an altar, and believing in that altar, to make her daughter a
virtuous creature, a saint, and thus to gain, after that long line of
lost women, criminals in love, an angel in heaven for them all.
The vow once made, the blood of the Maranas spoke; the courtesan
returned to her reckless life, a thought the more within her heart. At
last she loved, with the violent love of such women, as Henrietta
Wilson loved Lord Ponsonby, as Mademoiselle Dupuis loved Bolingbroke,
as the Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love,
she adored one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the
virtues which she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there
was of vice between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless
marriage unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to
justify, but which no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at
last, that she had a daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom
to desire a noble life and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy
or not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure,
untainted sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the
most disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La
Marana was a mother like none other; for, in her total, her eternal
shipwreck, motherhood might still redeem her. To accomplish sacredly
through life the task of sending a pure soul to heaven, was not that a
better thing than a tardy repentance? was it not, in truth, the only
spotless prayer which she could lift to God?