A Woman of Thirty

by Honoré de Balzac

“He ought not to have answered them,” said the General, looking sternly at the child.

It seemed that the Marquise and the master of the house both perfectly understood why the children had come back so suddenly. Mme. d’Aiglemont looked at her daughter, and rose as if to go to her, but a terrible convulsion passed over her face, and all that could be read in it was relentless severity.

“That will do, Hélène,” she said. “Go into the other room, and leave off crying.”

“What can she have done, poor child!” asked the notary, thinking to appease the mother’s anger and to stop Hélène’s tears at one stroke. “So pretty as she is, she must be as good as can be; never anything but a joy to her mother, I will be bound. Isn’t that so, my little girl?”

Hélène cowered, looked at her mother, dried her eyes, struggled for composure, and took refuge in the next room.

“And you, madame, are too good a mother not to love all your children alike. You are too good a woman, besides, to have any of those lamentable preferences which have such fatal effects, as we lawyers have only too much reason to know. Society goes through our hands; we see its passions in that most revolting form, greed. Here it is the mother of a family trying to disinherit her husband’s children to enrich the others whom she loves better; or it is the husband who tries to leave all his property to the child who has done his best to earn his mother’s hatred. And then begin quarrels, and fears, and deeds, and defeasances, and sham sales, and trusts, and all the rest of it; a pretty mess, in fact, it is pitiable, upon my honor, pitiable! There are fathers that will spend their whole lives in cheating their children and robbing their wives. Yes, robbing is the only word for it. We were talking of tragedy; oh! I can assure you of this that if we were at liberty to tell the real reasons of some donations that I know of, our modern dramatists would have the material for some sensational bourgeois dramas. How the wife manages to get her way, as she invariably does, I cannot think; for in spite of appearances, and in spite of their weakness, it is always the women who carry the day. Ah! by the way, they don’t take me in. I always know the reason at the bottom of those predilections which the world politely styles ‘unaccountable.’ But in justice to the husbands, I must say that they never discover anything. You will tell me that this is a merciful dispens—”

Hélène had come back to the drawing-room with her father, and was listening attentively. So well did she understand all that was said, that she gave her mother a frightened glance, feeling, with a child’s quick instinct, that these remarks would aggravate the punishment hanging over her. The Marquise turned her white face to Vandenesse; and, with terror in her eyes, indicated her husband, who stood with his eyes fixed absently on the flower pattern of the carpet. The diplomatist, accomplished man of the world though he was, could no longer contain his wrath, he gave the man of law a withering glance.

“Step this way, sir,” he said, and he went hurriedly to the door of the ante-chamber; the notary left his sentence half finished, and followed, quaking, and the husband and wife were left together.

“Now, sir” said the Marquise de Vandenesse—he banged the drawing-room door, and spoke with concentrated rage—“ever since dinner you have done nothing but make blunders and talk folly. For heaven’s sake, go. You will make the most frightful mischief before you have done. If you are a clever man in your profession, keep to your profession; and if by any chance you should go into society, endeavor to be more circumspect.”

With that he went back to the drawing-room, and did not even wish the notary good-evening. For a moment that worthy stood dumfounded, bewildered, utterly at a loss. Then, when the buzzing in his ears subsided, he thought he heard someone moaning in the next room. Footsteps came and went, and bells were violently rung. He was by no means anxious to meet the Marquis again, and found the use of his legs to make good his escape, only to run against a hurrying crowd of servants at the door.