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_ The marriage took place at the beginning of the year 1795. Husband and
wife came to Douai that the first days of their union might be spent
in the patriarchal house of the Claes,--the treasures of which were
increased by those of Mademoiselle de Temninck, who brought with her
several fine pictures of Murillo and Velasquez, the diamonds of her
mother, and the magnificent wedding-gifts, made to her by her brother,
the Duke of Casa-Real.
Few women were ever happier than Madame Claes. Her happiness lasted
for fifteen years without a cloud, diffusing itself like a vivid light
into every nook and detail of her life. Most men have inequalities of
character which produce discord, and deprive their households of the
harmony which is the ideal of a home; the majority are blemished with
some littleness or meanness, and meanness of any kind begets
bickering. One man is honorable and diligent, but hard and crabbed;
another kindly, but obstinate; this one loves his wife, yet his will
is arbitrary and uncertain; that other, preoccupied by ambition, pays
off his affections as he would a debt, bestows the luxuries of wealth
but deprives the daily life of happiness,--in short, the average man
of social life is essentially incomplete, without being signally to
blame. Men of talent are as variable as barometers; genius alone is
intrinsically good.
For this reason unalloyed happiness is found at the two extremes of
the moral scale. The good-natured fool and the man of genius alone are
capable--the one through weakness, the other by strength--of that
equanimity of temper, that unvarying gentleness, which soften the
asperities of daily life. In the one, it is indifference or stolidity;
in the other, indulgence and a portion of the divine thought of which
he is the interpreter, and which needs to be consistent alike in
principle and application. Both natures are equally simple; but in one
there is vacancy, in the other depth. This is why clever women are
disposed to take dull men as the small change for great ones.
Balthazar Claes carried his greatness into the lesser things of life.
He delighted in considering conjugal love as a magnificent work; and
like all men of lofty aims who can bear nothing imperfect, he wished
to develop all its beauties. His powers of mind enlivened the calm of
happiness, his noble nature marked his attentions with the charm of
grace. Though he shared the philosophical tenets of the eighteenth
century, he installed a chaplain in his home until 1801 (in spite of
the risk he ran from the revolutionary decrees), so that he might not
thwart the Spanish fanaticism which his wife had sucked in with her
mother's milk: later, when public worship was restored in France, he
accompanied her to mass every Sunday. His passion never ceased to be
that of a lover. The protecting power, which women like so much, was
never exercised by this husband, lest to that wife it might seem pity.
He treated her with exquisite flattery as an equal, and sometimes
mutinied against her, as men will, as though to brave the supremacy of
a pretty woman. His lips wore a smile of happiness, his speech was
ever tender; he loved his Josephine for herself and for himself, with
an ardor that crowned with perpetual praise the qualities and the
loveliness of a wife.
Fidelity, often the result of social principle, religious duty, or
self-interest on the part of a husband, was in this case involuntary,
and not without the sweet flatteries of the spring-time of love. Duty
was the only marriage obligation unknown to these lovers, whose love
was equal; for Balthazar Claes found the complete and lasting
realization of his hopes in Mademoiselle de Temninck; his heart was
satisfied but not wearied, the man within him was ever happy.
Not only did the daughter of Casa-Real derive from her Spanish blood
the intuition of that science which varies pleasure and makes it
infinite, but she possessed the spirit of unbounded self-devotion,
which is the genius of her sex as grace is that of beauty. Her love
was a blind fanaticism which, at a nod, would have sent her joyously
to her death. Balthazar's own delicacy had exalted the generous
emotions of his wife, and inspired her with an imperious need of
giving more than she received. This mutual exchange of happiness which
each lavished upon the other, put the mainspring of her life visibly
outside of her personality, and filled her words, her looks, her
actions, with an ever-growing love. Gratitude fertilized and varied
the life of each heart; and the certainty of being all in all to one
another excluded the paltry things of existence, while it magnified
the smallest accessories.
The deformed woman whom her husband thinks straight, the lame woman
whom he would not have otherwise, the old woman who seems ever young--
are they not the happiest creatures of the feminine world? Can human
passion go beyond it? The glory of a woman is to be adored for a
defect. To forget that a lame woman does not walk straight may be the
glamour of a moment, but to love her because she is lame is the
deification of her defects. In the gospel of womanhood it is written:
"Blessed are the imperfect, for theirs is the kingdom of Love." If
this be so, surely beauty is a misfortune; that fugitive flower counts
for too much in the feeling that a woman inspires; often she is loved
for her beauty as another is married for her money. But the love
inspired or bestowed by a woman disinherited of the frail advantages
pursued by the sons of Adam, is true love, the mysterious passion, the
ardent embrace of souls, a sentiment for which the day of
disenchantment never comes. That woman has charms unknown to the
world, from whose jurisdiction she withdraws herself: she is beautiful
with a meaning; her glory lies in making her imperfections forgotten,
and thus she constantly succeeds in doing so.
The celebrated attachments of history were nearly all inspired by
women in whom the vulgar mind would have found defects,--Cleopatra,
Jeanne de Naples, Diane de Poitiers, Mademoiselle de la Valliere,
Madame de Pompadour; in fact, the majority of the women whom love has
rendered famous were not without infirmities and imperfections, while
the greater number of those whose beauty is cited as perfect came to
some tragic end of love.
This apparent singularity must have a cause. It may be that man lives
more by sentiment than by sense; perhaps the physical charm of beauty
is limited, while the moral charm of a woman without beauty is
infinite. Is not this the moral of the fable on which the Arabian
Nights are based? An ugly wife of Henry VIII. might have defied the
axe, and subdued to herself the inconstancy of her master.
By a strange chance, not inexplicable, however, in a girl of Spanish
origin, Madame Claes was uneducated. She knew how to read and write,
but up to the age of twenty, at which time her parents withdrew her
from a convent, she had read none but ascetic books. On her first
entrance into the world, she was eager for pleasure and learned only
the flimsy art of dress; she was, moreover, so deeply conscious of her
ignorance that she dared not join in conversation; for which reason
she was supposed to have little mind. Yet, the mystical education of a
convent had one good result; it left her feelings in full force and
her natural powers of mind uninjured. Stupid and plain as an heiress
in the eyes of the world, she became intellectual and beautiful to her
husband. During the first years of their married life, Balthazar
endeavored to give her at least the knowledge that she needed to
appear to advantage in good society: but he was doubtless too late,
she had no memory but that of the heart. Josephine never forgot
anything that Claes told her relating to themselves; she remembered
the most trifling circumstances of their happy life; but of her
evening studies nothing remained to her on the morrow.
This ignorance might have caused much discord between husband and
wife, but Madame Claes's understanding of the passion of love was so
simple and ingenuous, she loved her husband so religiously, so
sacredly, and the thought of preserving her happiness made her so
adroit, that she managed always to seem to understand him, and it was
seldom indeed that her ignorance was evident. Moreover, when two
persons love one another so well that each day seems for them the
beginning of their passion, phenomena arise out of this teeming
happiness which change all the conditions of life. It resembles
childhood, careless of all that is not laughter, joy, and merriment.
Then, when life is in full activity, when its hearths glow, man lets
the fire burn without thought or discussion, without considering
either the means or the end.
No daughter of Eve ever more truly understood the calling of a wife
than Madame Claes. She had all the submission of a Flemish woman, but
her Spanish pride gave it a higher flavor. Her bearing was imposing;
she knew how to command respect by a look which expressed her sense of
birth and dignity: but she trembled before Claes; she held him so
high, so near to God, carrying to him every act of her life, every
thought of her heart, that her love was not without a certain
respectful fear which made it keener. She proudly assumed all the
habits of a Flemish bourgeoisie, and put her self-love into making the
home life liberally happy,--preserving every detail of the house in
scrupulous cleanliness, possessing nothing that did not serve the
purposes of true comfort, supplying her table with the choicest food,
and putting everything within those walls into harmony with the life
of her heart.
The pair had two sons and two daughters. The eldest, Marguerite, was
born in 1796. The last child was a boy, now three years old, named
Jean-Balthazar. The maternal sentiment in Madame Claes was almost
equal to her love for her husband; and there rose in her soul,
especially during the last days of her life, a terrible struggle
between those nearly balanced feelings, of which the one became, as it
were, an enemy of the other. The tears and the terror that marked her
face at the moment when this tale of a domestic drama then lowering
over the quiet house begins, were caused by the fear of having
sacrificed her children to her husband.
In 1805, Madame Claes's brother died without children. The Spanish law
does not allow a sister to succeed to territorial possessions, which
follow the title; but the duke had left her in his will about sixty
thousand ducats, and this sum the heirs of the collateral branch did
not seek to retain. Though the feeling which united her to Balthazar
Claes was such that no thought of personal interest could ever sully
it, Josephine felt a certain pleasure in possessing a fortune equal to
that of her husband, and was happy in giving something to one who had
so nobly given everything to her. Thus, a mere chance turned a
marriage which worldly minds had declared foolish, into an excellent
alliance, seen from the standpoint of material interests. The use to
which this sum of money should be put became, however, somewhat
difficult to determine.
The House of Claes was so richly supplied with furniture, pictures,
and objects of art of priceless value, that it was difficult to add
anything worthy of what was already there. The tastes of the family
through long periods of time had accumulated these treasures. One
generation followed the quest of noble pictures, leaving behind it the
necessity of completing a collection still unfinished; and thus the
taste became hereditary in the family. The hundred pictures which
adorned the gallery leading from the family building to the reception-
rooms on the first floor of the front house, as well as some fifty
others placed about the salons, were the product of the patient
researches of three centuries. Among them were choice specimens of
Rubens, Ruysdael, Vandyke, Terburg, Gerard Dow, Teniers, Mieris, Paul
Potter, Wouvermans, Rembrandt, Hobbema, Cranach, and Holbein. French
and Italian pictures were in a minority, but all were authentic and
masterly.
Another generation had fancied Chinese and Japanese porcelains: this
Claes was eager after rare furniture, that one for silver-ware; in
fact, each and all had their mania, their passion,--a trait which
belongs in a striking degree to the Flemish character. The father of
Balthazar, a last relic of the once famous Dutch society, left behind
him the finest known collection of tulips.
Besides these hereditary riches, which represented an enormous
capital, and were the choice ornament of the venerable house,--a house
that was simple as a shell outside but, like a shell, adorned within
by pearls of price and glowing with rich color,--Balthazar Claes
possessed a country-house on the plain of Orchies, not far from Douai.
Instead of basing his expenses, as Frenchmen do, upon his revenues, he
followed the old Dutch custom of spending only a fourth of his income.
Twelve hundred ducats a year put his costs of living at a level with
those of the richest men of the place. The promulgation of the Civil
Code proved the wisdom of this course. Compelling, as it did, the
equal division of property, the Title of Succession would some day
leave each child with limited means, and disperse the treasures of the
Claes collection. Balthazar, therefore, in concert with Madame Claes,
invested his wife's property so as to secure to each child a fortune
eventually equal to his own. The house of Claes still maintained its
moderate scale of living, and bought woodlands somewhat the worse for
wars that had laid waste the country, but which in ten years' time, if
well-preserved, would return an enormous value.
The upper ranks of society in Douai, which Monsieur Claes frequented,
appreciated so justly the noble character and qualities of his wife
that, by tacit consent she was released from those social duties to
which the provinces cling so tenaciously. During the winter season,
when she lived in town, she seldom went into society; society came to
her. She received every Wednesday, and gave three grand dinners every
month. Her friends felt that she was more at ease in her own house;
where, indeed, her passion for her husband and the care she bestowed
on the education of her children tended to keep her.
Such had been, up to the year 1809, the general course of this
household, which had nothing in common with the ordinary run of
conventional ideas, though the outward life of these two persons,
secretly full of love and joy, was like that of other people.
Balthazar Claes's passion for his wife, which she had known how to
perpetuate, seemed, to use his own expression, to spend its inborn
vigor and fidelity on the cultivation of happiness, which was far
better than the cultivation of tulips (though to that he had always
had a leaning), and dispensed him from the duty of following a mania
like his ancestors.
At the close of this year, the mind and the manners of Balthazar Claes
underwent a fatal change,--a change which began so gradually that at
first Madame Claes did not think it necessary to inquire the cause.
One night her husband went to bed with a mind so preoccupied that she
felt it incumbent on her to respect his mood. Her womanly delicacy and
her submissive habits always led her to wait for Balthazar's
confidence; which, indeed, was assured to her by so constant an
affection that she had never had the slightest opening for jealousy.
Though certain of obtaining an answer whenever she should make the
inquiry, she still retained enough of the earlier impressions of her
life to dread a refusal. Besides, the moral malady of her husband had
its phases, and only came by slow degrees to the intolerable point at
which it destroyed the happiness of the family.
However occupied Balthazar Claes might be, he continued for several
months cheerful, affectionate, and ready to talk; the change in his
character showed itself only by frequent periods of absent-mindedness.
Madame Claes long hoped to hear from her husband himself the nature of
the secret employment in which he was engaged; perhaps, she thought,
he would reveal it when it developed some useful result; many men are
led by pride to conceal the nature of their efforts, and only make
them known at the moment of success. When the day of triumph came,
surely domestic happiness would return, more vivid than ever when
Balthazar became aware of this chasm in the life of love, which his
heart would surely disavow. Josephine knew her husband well enough to
be certain that he would never forgive himself for having made his
Pepita less than happy during several months.
She kept silence therefore, and felt a sort of joy in thus suffering
by him for him: her passion had a tinge of that Spanish piety which
allows no separation between religion and love, and believes in no
sentiment without suffering. She waited for the return of her
husband's affection, saying daily to herself, "To-morrow it may come,"
--treating her happiness as though it were an absent friend.
During this stage of her secret distress, she conceived her last
child. Horrible crisis, which revealed a future of anguish! In the
midst of her husband's abstractions love showed itself on this
occasion an abstraction even greater than the rest. Her woman's pride,
hurt for the first time, made her sound the depths of the unknown
abyss which separated her from the Claes of earlier days. From that
time Balthazar's condition grew rapidly worse. The man formerly so
wrapped up in his domestic happiness, who played for hours with his
children on the parlor carpet or round the garden paths, who seemed
able to exist only in the light of his Pepita's dark eyes, did not
even perceive her pregnancy, seldom shared the family life, and even
forgot his own.
The longer Madame Claes postponed inquiring into the cause of his
preoccupation the less she dared to do so. At the very idea, her blood
ran cold and her voice grew faint. At last the thought occurred to her
that she had ceased to please her husband, and then indeed she was
seriously alarmed. That fear now filled her mind, drove her to
despair, then to feverish excitement, and became the text of many an
hour of melancholy reverie. She defended Balthazar at her own expense,
calling herself old and ugly; then she imagined a generous though
humiliating consideration for her in this secret occupation by which
he secured to her a negative fidelity; and she resolved to give him
back his independence by allowing one of those unspoken divorces which
make the happiness of many a marriage.
Before bidding farewell to conjugal life, Madame Claes made some
attempt to read her husband's heart, and found it closed. Little by
little, she saw him become indifferent to all that he had formerly
loved; he neglected his tulips, he cared no longer for his children.
There could be no doubt that he was given over to some passion that
was not of the heart, but which, to a woman's mind, is not less
withering. His love was dormant, not lost: this might be a
consolation, but the misfortune remained the same.
The continuance of such a state of things is explained by one word,--
hope, the secret of all conjugal situations. It so happened that
whenever the poor woman reached a depth of despair which gave her
courage to question her husband, she met with a few brief moments of
happiness when she was able to feel that if Balthazar was indeed in
the clutch of some devilish power, he was permitted, sometimes at
least, to return to himself. At such moments, when her heaven
brightened, she was too eager to enjoy its happiness to trouble him
with importunate questions: later, when she endeavored to speak to
him, he would suddenly escape, leave her abruptly, or drop into the
gulf of meditation from which no word of hers could drag him.
Before long the reaction of the moral upon the physical condition
began its ravages,--at first imperceptibly, except to the eyes of a
loving woman following the secret thought of a husband through all its
manifestations. Often she could scarcely restrain her tears when she
saw him, after dinner, sink into an armchair by the corner of the
fireplace, and remain there, gloomy and abstracted. She noted with
terror the slow changes which deteriorated that face, once, to her
eyes, sublime through love: the life of the soul was retreating from
it; the structure remained, but the spirit was gone. Sometimes the
eyes were glassy, and seemed as if they had turned their gaze and were
looking inward. When the children had gone to bed, and the silence and
solitude oppressed her, Pepita would say, "My friend, are you ill?"
and Balthazar would make no answer; or if he answered, he would come
to himself with a quiver, like a man snatched suddenly from sleep, and
utter a "No" so harsh and grating that it fell like a stone on the
palpitating heart of his wife.
Though she tried to hide this strange state of things from her
friends, Madame Claes was obliged sometimes to allude to it. The
social world of Douai, in accordance with the custom of provincial
towns, had made Balthazar's aberrations a topic of conversation, and
many persons were aware of certain details that were still unknown to
Madame Claes. Disregarding the reticence which politeness demanded, a
few friends expressed to her so much anxiety on the subject that she
found herself compelled to defend her husband's peculiarities.
"Monsieur Claes," she said, "has undertaken a work which wholly
absorbs him; its success will eventually redound not only to the honor
of the family but to that of his country."
This mysterious explanation was too flattering to the ambition of a
town whose local patriotism and desire for glory exceed those of other
places, not to be readily accepted, and it produced on all minds a
reaction in favor of Balthazar.
The supposition of his wife was, to a certain extent, well-founded.
Several artificers of various trades had long been at work in the
garret of the front house, where Balthazar went early every morning.
After remaining, at first, for several hours, an absence to which his
wife and household grew gradually accustomed, he ended by being there
all day. But--unexpected shock!--Madame Claes learned through the
humiliating medium of some women friends, who showed surprise at her
ignorance, that her husband constantly imported instruments of
physical science, valuable materials, books, machinery, etc., from
Paris, and was on the highroad to ruin in search of the Philosopher's
Stone. She ought, so her kind friends added, to think of her children,
and her own future; it was criminal not to use her influence to draw
Monsieur Claes from the fatal path on which he had entered.
Though Madame Claes, with the tone and manner of a great lady,
silenced these absurd speeches, she was inwardly terrified in spite of
her apparent confidence, and she resolved to break through her present
system of silence and resignation. She brought about one of those
little scenes in which husband and wife are on an equal footing; less
timid at such a moment, she dared to ask Balthazar the reason for his
change, the motive of his constant seclusion. The Flemish husband
frowned, and replied:--
"My dear, you could not understand it."
Soon after, however, Josephine insisted on being told the secret,
gently complaining that she was not allowed to share all the thoughts
of one whose life she shared.
"Very well, since it interests you so much," said Balthazar, taking
his wife upon his knee and caressing her black hair, "I will tell you
that I have returned to the study of chemistry, and I am the happiest
man on earth." _
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