“Bravo!” he replied when I submitted my idea to him, “that is one of the books that one reads once, talks about always and entirely forgets. I saw this Balzac once in Paris, at the Castries. It is more than forty years ago. I was a youngster then. But I remember him well, fat, short and stubby, noisy, important, with beautiful bright eyes and a common air.”
The fact is that after the first pages, he fell asleep, while the marquise. Mlle. Largeyx and the religieuse knit, and Lucien, who had recently come into possession of a box of colors conscientiously illuminated the illustrations of a large volume.
While reading I observed Charlotte, and it was not difficult to see that this time my calculation had been correct, and that she vibrated under the phrases of the romance as a violin under a skillful bow. Everything was prepared to receive this impression, from her feelings already stirred to her nerves strained by an influence of a physical kind. One cannot live with impunity for weeks in such an atmosphere as that of the château, always warm, nearly stifling.
From that evening, this child hung on my lips as the ingenuous loves of Eugénie and her cousin Charles disclosed their touching episodes. The same instinct of comedy which had guided me in my false confidence made me throw into every phrase the intonation which I thought would please her most.
I certainly enjoyed this book, although I preferred ten other of Balzac’s works, such, for example, as the “Curé de Tours,” which are veritable literary compendiums, each phrase of which contains more philosophy than a scholium of Spinoza.
I forced myself to appear touched by the misfortunes of the miser’s daughter, in my most secret fibres; and my voice grew pitiful over the sweet recluse of Saumur.
Here, as before, I gave myself useless trouble. There was no need of an art so complicated. In the crisis of imaginative sensibility through which Charlotte was passing, any romance of love was a peril.
If the father and mother had possessed, even in a feeble degree, that spirit of observation which parents ought to exercise without ceasing, they would have divined this peril of their daughter, more and more captivated during the three evenings that this reading lasted. The marquise simply remarked that characters so black as father Grandet and the cousin did not exist. As for the marquis, he knew too much of the world to proffer any such opinion, he formulated the cause of his ennui during the reading.
“It is decidedly overdrawn. These unfinished descriptions, these analyses, these numerical calculations! They are all very good, I do not say they are not. But when I read a romance I wish to be amused.”
And he concluded that he must send to the Library of Clermont immediately for the comedies of Labiche. I was in despair at this new fancy. I would again be powerless to act upon the imagination of the young girl, just at the moment when I could feel success probable. This showed that I did not know the need which this soul, already touched, felt, unknown to herself, the need of drawing near to me, of comprehending me and making herself comprehended by me, of living in contact with my mind.