The Village Rector

by Honoré de Balzac

“Yes,” some of them would reply; “but would you give your daughter to a man like Graslin? No woman could marry him with impunity.”

Now that Graslin was married, all the mothers who had courted him for ten years past pursued him with sarcasms.

Veronique grew visibly thinner and really ugly; her eyes looked weary, her features coarsened, her manner was shy and awkward; she acquired that air of cold and melancholy rigidity for which the ultra-pious are so often blamed. Her skin took on a grayish tone; she dragged herself languidly about during this first year of married life, ordinarily so brilliant for a young wife. She tried to divert her mind by reading, profiting by the liberty of married women to read what they please. She read the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Lord Byron, the works of Schiller and of Goethe, and much else of modern and also ancient literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to draw. She painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning ardently to all those resources which women employ to bear the weariness of their solitude. She gave herself that second education which most women derive from a man, but which she derived from herself only.

The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her, and she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could she see the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like seeds in the earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep melancholy, caused by constant meditation on herself, brought her back by hidden by-ways to the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a time she must have lived again that old romantic poem, making herself both the actor and the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed in light, flowery, fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid eyes wandered around a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all like Graslin. She studied them, and then she seemed to question their wives; but nothing on the faces of those women revealed an inward anguish like to hers, and she returned home sad and gloomy and distressed about herself. The authors she had read in the morning answered to the feelings in her soul; their thoughts pleased her; but at night she heard only empty words, not even presented in a lively way,—dull, empty, foolish conversations in petty local matters, or personalities of no interest to her. She was often surprised at the heat displayed in discussions which concerned no feeling or sentiment—to her the essence of existence, the soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no doubt of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full of harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which were unknown to her, for she had no intimate friend to enlighten or advise her. Injustice, which angers little minds, brings loftier souls to question themselves, and communicates a species of humility to them. Veronique condemned herself, endeavoring to see her own faults. She tried to be affable; they called her false. She grew more gentle still; they said she was a hypocrite, and her pious devotion helped on the calumny. She spent money, gave dinners and balls, and they taxed her with pride.

Unsuccessful in all these attempts, unjustly judged, rebuffed by the petty and tormenting pride which characterizes provincial society, where each individual is armed with pretensions and their attendant uneasiness, Madame Graslin fell back into utter solitude. She returned with eagerness to the arms of the Church. Her great soul, clothed with so weak a flesh, showed her the multiplied commandments of Catholicism as so many stones placed for protection along the precipices of life, so many props brought by charitable hands to sustain human weakness on its weary way; and she followed, with greater rigor than ever, even the smallest religious practices.

On this the liberals of the town classed Madame Graslin among the devotes, the ultras. To the different animosities Veronique had innocently acquired, the virulence of party feeling now added its periodical exasperation. But as this ostracism took nothing really from her, she quietly left society and lived in books which offered her such infinite resources. She meditated on what she read, she compared systems, she widened immeasurably the horizons of her intellect and the extent of her education; in this way she opened the gates of her soul to curiosity.

During this period of resolute study, in which religion supported and maintained her mind, she obtained the friendship of Monsieur Grossetete, one of those old men whose mental superiority grows rusty in provincial life, but who, when they come in contact with an eager mind, recover something of their former brilliancy. The good man took an earnest interest in Veronique, who, to reward him for the flattering warmth of heart which old men show to those they like, displayed before him, and for the first time in her life, the treasures of her soul and the acquirements of her mind, cultivated so secretly, and now full of blossom. An extract from a letter written by her about this time to Monsieur Grossetete will show the condition of the mind of a woman who was later to give signal proofs of a firm and lofty nature:—

“The flowers you sent me for the ball were charming, but they
suggested harsh reflections. Those pretty creatures gathered by
you, and doomed to wilt upon my bosom to adorn a fete, made me
think of others that live and die unseen in the depths of your
woods, their fragrance never inhaled by any one. I asked myself
why I was dancing there, why I was decked with flowers, just as I
ask God why he has placed me to live in this world.
“You see, my friend, all is a snare to the unhappy; the smallest
matter brings the sick mind back to its woes; but the greatest
evil of certain woes is the persistency which makes them a fixed
idea pervading our lives. A constant sorrow ought rather to be a
divine inspiration. You love flowers for themselves, whereas I
love them as I love to listen to fine music. So, as I was saying,
the secret of a mass of things escapes me. You, my old friend, you
have a passion,—that of the horticulturist. When you return to
town inspire me with that taste, so that I may rush to my
greenhouse with eager feet, as you go to yours to watch the
development of your plants, to bud and bloom with them, to admire
what you create,—the new colors, the unexpected varieties, which
expand and grow beneath your eyes by the virtue of your care.
“My greenhouse, the one I watch, is filled with suffering souls.
The miseries I try to lessen sadden my heart; and when I take them
upon myself, when, after finding some young woman without clothing
for her babe, some old man wanting bread, I have supplied their
needs, the emotions their distress and its relief have caused me
do not suffice my soul. Ah, friend, I feel within me untold powers
—for evil, possibly,—which nothing can lower, which the sternest
commands of our religion are unable to abase! Sometimes, when I go
to see my mother, walking alone among the fields, I want to cry
aloud, and I do so. It seems to me that my body is a prison in
which some evil genius is holding a shuddering creature while
awaiting the mysterious words which are to burst its obstructive
form.
“But that comparison is not a just one. In me it seems to be the
body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul,
books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some
anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace of my existence?
“Oh, if some sentiment, some mania that I could cultivate, does
not come into my life, I feel I shall sink at last into the gulf
where all ideas are dulled, where character deteriorates, motives
slacken, virtues lose their backbone, and all the forces of the
soul are scattered,—a gulf in which I shall no longer be the
being Nature meant me to be!
“This is what my bitter complainings mean. But do not let them
hinder you from sending me those flowers. Your friendship is so
soothing and so full of loving kindness that it has for the last
few months almost reconciled me to myself. Yes, it makes me happy
to have you cast a glance upon my soul, at once so barren and so
full of bloom; and I am thankful for every gentle word you say to
one who rides the phantom steed of dreams, and returns worn-out.”

At the end of the third year of his married life, Graslin, observing that his wife no longer used her horses, and finding a good market for them, sold them. He also sold the carriages, sent away the coachman, let the bishop have his man-cook, and contented himself with a woman. He no longer gave the monthly sum to his wife, telling her that he would pay all bills. He thought himself the most fortunate of husbands in meeting no opposition whatever to these proceedings from the woman who had brought him a million of francs as a dowry. Madame Graslin, brought up from childhood without ever seeing money, or being made to feel that it was an indispensable element in life, deserved no praise whatever for this apparent generosity. Graslin even noticed in a corner of the secretary all the sums he had ever given her, less the money she had bestowed in charity or spent upon her dress, the cost of which was much lessened by the profusion of her wedding trousseau.