In other parts of Transylvania the country-seats of the Hungarian nobility offer a pleasant diversion; but here there is nothing of the sort, all the land about the place being in the hands of Saxon village communities. Social life at Hermanstadt was therefore reduced to a few military families, who either might or might not happen to suit one another; and whoever has experience with this class will know that the cases of non-suitability are, alas! by far the most frequent.
“Small towns are so much nicer—don’t you think so?” I heard a gushing creature remark to a gentleman she was endeavoring to captivate. “One gets to know people so much better than in large towns. Isn’t it true?” “Very true,” he replied, dryly; “one gets to know and to dislike people so much more thoroughly than in a large town.”
Of course there were exceptions; but even if you do succeed in finding one or two friends whose society you care to cultivate, the case is not really much better—for whose feelings, what affection could stand the test of meeting their best friend six times a day in every possible combination of weather, locality, and costume?—in church, on the promenade, at the confectioner’s, and in every second shop, till you have long exhausted your whole répertoire of smiles, nods, and ejaculatory salutations. What galvanized attempts were made at gayety only served to bring out the social barrenness into stronger relief; for how was it possible to get up interest in a ball when you knew exactly beforehand what every woman would wear, what each man would say, and which of them would dance together?
None of the military families then stationed at Hermanstadt happening to have grown-up daughters, the absence of girls from most social reunions gave them much of the effect of a third-class provincial theatre, where the part of soubrette is performed by a respectable matron of fifty, and where Juliets and Ophelias are apt to be passée and wrinkled. We hear so much about the corruption of large towns; but for a good, steady, infallible underminer of morals, commend me to the life of a dull little country town. People here began to flirt out of very ennui and desolation of spirit; beardless boys at a loss to dispose of their soft green hearts, desperately offered them to women twice their age; couples who had lived happily together in the whirl of a dissipated capital now drifted asunder under the deadening influence of this idyllic tête-à-tête, each seeking distraction in another direction—the result of all this being an amount of middle-aged flirtation exceedingly nauseous to behold. Each evening-party was thus broken up into duets of these elderly lovers, while by daytime every man walked with his neighbor’s wife beneath the bare elm-trees which shaded the only dry walk near the town.
This is, perhaps, what Balzac means by saying that life in the provinces is far more intense than in a capital—so intense, indeed, as frequently to be entirely made up of unnatural dislikes and equally unnatural likings; while that serene indifference which, after all, is the only really comfortable feeling in life, has here no place.
Cranford-like, we all walked to and from the social meetings, which took place at alternate houses. The distances were so short as not to make it worth while getting in and out of a carriage, and people who loved their horses did not care to drive them on a cold, dark night over the slippery and uneven pavement of the town. Every party, therefore, terminated by a Cinderella-like transformation scene—thick wadded hoods, heavy fur cloaks, and monstrous clogs reducing us one and all to shapeless bundles, as we walked home in the starlight over the crisp, crunching snow.
As the winter advances the social gloom deepens, and the liveliest spirits fall a prey to a sense of mild desperation. I began to realize the possibility of paying endless visits to the seal or the fat lady, and only wondered why no one had as yet hit upon the bright expedient of buying the one or marrying the other, merely by way of bringing some variety into his existence. Some women changed their cooks, and others their lovers, merely for change’s sake; and as there was far greater choice of the latter than of the former article—there being many men, but of cooks very few—any woman known to be capable of roasting a hen or making a plain rice-pudding became the centre of a dozen intrigues woven round her greasy person. A single roe-deer appearing in the market infallibly gave birth to three or four evening-parties within the week. You were invited to sup on its saddle at the general’s, to partake of the right haunch at the colonel’s house, and the left at the major’s, and might deem yourself exceptionally lucky indeed if not further compelled to study its anatomy at some other house or houses—everywhere accompanied by the identical brown sauce, the same slices of lemon, the self-same dresses, cards, and conversation!
Oh, roebuck, roebuck! why did you not remain in your own native forest? Much better would it have been for yourself—and for us!