Béatrix quotes

Modern industry, toiling for the masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, for its outcome was as personal to the purchaser as to the maker.

We have products nowadays; we no longer have works.

Buildings play a large part in the phenomena of retrospection; but to industry, buildings are stone-quarries or saltpetre mines, or storehouses for cotton. A few years more and these primitive towns will be transformed, known no more excepting in this literary iconography.

Thus flung down on the edge of a continent,

Guérande leads no whither, and no one ever comes there.

Happy in being unknown, the town cares only for itself.

… Croisic, a peninsular town communicating with Guérande across a tract of shifting sands, where the road traced each day is washed out each night, and by boats indispensable for crossing the inlet which forms the port of le Croisic, and which encroaches on the sand.

Thus this charming little town is a Herculaneum of feudalism, minus the winding sheet of lava.

It stands, but is not alive; its only reason for surviving is that it has not been pulled down.

Thus this charming little town is a Herculaneum of feudalism, minus the winding sheet of lava.

It stands, but is not alive; its only reason for surviving is that it has not been pulled down.

If you arrive at Guérande from le Croisic, after crossing the tract of salt marshes, you are startled and excited at the sight of this immense fortification, apparently quite new.

Nobody knows whether the next generation will keep up the ancestral home, where each one abides as in an inn; whereas formerly men labored, or at least believed that they labored, for an eternal posterity. Hence the beauty of their houses.

Faith in themselves worked wonders, as much as faith in God.

With regard to the arrangement and furniture of the upper stories, they can only be imagined from this description of the ground floor, and from the appearance and habits of the family.

The firm modeling of the features, the high brow, the sternness of outline, the severe nose, the form of the bones which wounds alone can alter, expressed disinterested courage, boundless faith, implicit obedience, incorruptible fidelity, unchanging affection.

In him the granite of Brittany was made man.

The Baron had no teeth.

… street—the Baron looked round on the circle of his anxious friends gathered round the little table lighted up by the antique lamp, and merely said, in a quavering voice, while Gasselin hung up the muskets and swords in their place, these words of feudal simplicity:

“Not all the Barons did their duty.”

Then he kissed his wife and sister, sat down in his old armchair, and ordered supper for his son, himself, and Gasselin. Gasselin, having screened Calyste with his body, had received a sabre cut on his shoulder;

The cards were dealt with automatic slowness. They talked in chest-tones. And these respectable and highborn personages were so delightfully mean as to suspect each other’s play. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël almost always accused the Curé of cheating when he won a pool.

“But what is so odd,” the Curé would say, “is that I never cheat when I am fined.”

No one laid down a card without profound meditation, without keen scrutiny, and more or less astute hints, ingenious and searching remarks. The deals were interrupted, you may be sure, by gossip as to what was going on in the town, or discussions on politics.

“Her bacon?” asked the Baron.

“Her bacon! She does not save it,” retorted the old maid.

“Everyone played, and everyone is looed; I have the king, queen, and knave of trumps, mistigris, and a king,” said the Baroness. “The pool is ours, sister.”

Calyste suddenly stood up; he looked at his mother and said:

“Mother, Camille is my friend. I cannot hear her spoken of in this way, for I would give my life for her.”

“Your life?” said the Baroness, gazing at her son in terror. “Your life is our life—the life of us all!”

How could she, the Baroness, have reason to bless Mademoiselle des Touches? These two questions were as all-important to her simple soul as the maddest revolution can be to a diplomatist.

Camille Maupin was a revolution in the quiet and simple home.

“I am very much afraid that this woman will spoil him for us,” said she, taking up the newspaper again.

But for this disaster she might never have become famous. Napoleon said that Misfortune was midwife to Genius. This event gave Mademoiselle des Touches at once and forever the scorn of mankind which is her great strength.

Félicité was dead and Camille was born.

She returned to Paris in the company of Conti, the great musician, for whom she wrote the libretti of two operas;

She was appallingly clear to herself. She could suffer and analyze her suffering, as Cuvier and Dupuytren could explain to their friends the fatal progress of their diseases and the steady advance of death.

Camille Maupin knew passion as these two learned men knew anatomy.

“I came here on purpose to form an opinion about him; he is already bored. He misses Paris, as I told him; he is homesick for something to criticise.

but, being beset with hesitancy as soon as creation is needed, he sees obstacles without being carried away by beauties, and by dint of discussing means, he sits, his hands hanging idle, producing no results. Intellectually he is a Turk in whom meditation induces sleep.

Criticism is his opium, and his harem of books has disgusted him with any work he might do.

He is equally indifferent to the smallest and to the greatest things, and is compelled by the mere weight of his brain to throw himself into debauchery to abdicate for a little while the irresistible power of his omnipotent analysis.

“Claude is jesting,” Camille went on, addressing Calyste, “and he is wrong—with you who know nothing of Paris and its ‘chaff.’ ”

“I had no idea that I was funny,” said Vignon, very gravely.

“By what road did you come? For two hours I have never ceased looking out towards le Croisic.”

He knew nothing himself, as Félicité had told him, of the sort of deceptive witticisms in which the satirists of the press excel.

To him love was a human form of religion.

On seeing him cross the courtyard, his mother could not restrain a joyful exclamation, and old Mademoiselle du Guénic whistled for Mariotte.

Can I know nothing of woman but wifely surrender, or of love but its equable lamplight? Is all my curiosity to be satiated before it is excited? Am I to live without ever feeling that fury of the heart which adds to a man’s power?

Am I to be a married monk?

—No! I have set my teeth in the Paris apple of civilization.

“I was singing your praise,” said Vignon, “an easier matter than singeing your beard.”

“I have a sword to cut the beards of those who wear them too long,” retorted Calyste.

“And I have a tongue that cuts sharply, too,” replied Vignon, smiling. “We are Frenchmen—the affair can be arranged.”

“Beauty has no place but in women. And besides, Claude Vignon is fine. Men of genius have a brow that beams, eyes where lightnings play—and I, unhappy wretch, I only know how to love.”

“They say that is all-sufficient, my darling,” said she, kissing his forehead.

“I have been told so. I have had no experience.”

“You came back from Paris madly in love with Calyste,” he was saying to Félicité. “But you were appalled at the consequences of such a passion at your age; it would lead you into a gulf, a hell—to suicide perhaps.

Love can exist only in the belief that it is eternal

, and you could foresee, a few paces before you in life, a terrible parting—weariness and old age putting a dreadful end to a beautiful poem.

in a flowered muslin dress, one little, slender foot put forward in a green gaitered shoe, leaning on her slight parasol-stick, and waving her well-gloved hand.

Nothing is more strikingly effective than a woman on a rock, like a statue on its pedestal.

Conti could see Calyste go up to Camille.

“That girl is not dangerous!” said Béatrix, smiling.

Young men in love are like starving people, the cook’s preparations do not satisfy them; they think too much of the end to understand the means.

As he turned from les Touches to Guérande, Calyste’s mind was full of Béatrix; he did not know what deep feminine skill Félicité was employing to promote his interests—to use a cant phrase.

“Some traveler, I forget who, tells us that horses in a state of freedom take the handsomest of them to be their leader.

Beauty, my dear, is the genius of matter; it is the hallmark set by Nature on her most perfect creations; it is the truest symbol, as it is the greatest chance.

Did anyone ever imagine a deformed angel? Do not they combine grace and strength? What has kept us standing for hours together before certain pictures in Italy, in which genius has striven for years to realize one of these caprices of nature?

The thing which above all others appalled the Baroness was to see that, by sheer force of instinct, feeling could acquire the insight of consummate experience. Calyste had written to Béatrix as he might have done under the guidance of Monsieur du Halga.

One of the greatest joys, perhaps, that a small mind can know is that of duping a great soul and catching it in a snare.

Béatrix knew herself to be very inferior to Camille Maupin. This inferiority was not merely in the sum-total of intellectual qualities known as talent, but also in those qualities of the heart that are called passion.

not to betray her secret she gave herself up to observing the secrets of nature; she cheated her pain by seeking a meaning in the motions of the spheres, and found God in the sublime solitude of the sky.

When once an infidel acknowledges God, he throws himself headlong into Catholicism, which, viewed as a system, is perfect.

That morning Camille had shown the Marquise a face still radiant with the light of her research, carried on during a night spent in lamentation. Calyste was always before her like a heavenly vision.

they see the slightest twitch of a foot under a petticoat, the most imperceptible start in the figure, and know the meaning of what to a man seems to have none.

Two women watching one another play one of the finest comedies to be seen.

“Calyste has committed some folly,” thought Camille, observing in both of them the indefinable look of persons who understand each other.

She dismissed him with a gesture which Calyste could not rebel against.

There are silent sorrows that are despotically eloquent.

As he went to le Croisic to find the boatmen, Calyste had some qualms of fear. Camille’s speech bore a stamp of doom that revealed the foresight of a mother.

“Nothing,” said he, looking at her with eyes whence the light of his soul and the flame of love had died out.

It is not hope, but despair, that gives the measure of our ambitions.

We give ourselves over in secret to the beautiful poems of hope, while grief shows itself unveiled.

… by Gasselin, who begged Calyste to put Camille’s red shawl round Béatrix under her arms, and to give him up the ends, climbed up to the little plateau, where Gasselin took her in his arms like a child, and carried her down to the shore.

“Death I would not say nay to⁠—but pain!” said she in a weak voice to Mademoiselle des Touches.

The faintness and shock from which Béatrix was suffering made it necessary that she should be carried as far as the farm whence Gasselin had borrowed the ladder.

“Come to breakfast with us tomorrow morning,” said old Zéphirine to Charlotte and Jacqueline; “my brother will talk to his son, and we will settle everything. One nail drives out another.”

“Not in a Breton,” said the Chevalier.

The next morning Calyste saw Charlotte arrive, dressed with unusual care, though it was still early, just as his father had ended giving him, in the dining-room, a discourse on matrimony, to which the lad could find nothing to say.

The Guérande doctor quietly explained to the Baroness that it would probably be necessary to take Calyste to Paris to consult the most eminent authorities, for that it would cost more than a hundred louis to bring them to Guérande.

“A man must die of something, but love is nothing,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“Alas, whatever the cause may be, Calyste is dying,” said his mother. “I recognize every symptom of consumption, the most horrible malady of my native land.”

Everyone knows what is meant by this je ne sais quoi. It is a compound of cleverness, taste, and temperament.

Béatrix was, in fact, a drama, a spectacle, all scenery, and transformations, and marvelous machinery.

The performance of these fairy pieces, which are no less brilliant in dialogue, turns the head of a man blessed with honesty; for, by the law of contrast, he feels a frenzied desire to play with the artificial thing.

The mind concludes, though not in words, “A woman who can make herself so attractive must have other resources of passion.” And it is true.

The women who are deserted are the women who love; the women who keep their lovers are those who know how to love.

Now, though this lesson in Italian had been a hard one for Béatrix’s vanity, her nature was too thoroughly artificial not to profit by it.

or, “I don’t bore you?” Gracious questionings, varying according to the wife’s wit or mood, and covering real or imaginary terrors.

A storm will stir up mud and bring it to the top of the noblest and purest hearts.

And so, next morning, Calyste, who was genuinely fond of his child, felt a thrill of joy at hearing that Sabine was anxious as to the cause of some symptoms, and, fearing croup, could not leave the infant Calyste.

The contrast of moral degradation and magnanimity fascinates their sight.

What is pure shines so vividly by the side of what is impure!

This comparison is pleasing. Calyste found nothing in Sabine to protect; she was irreproachable; all the wasted energies of his heart went forth to Béatrix.

she is just a great boy, and can walk alone. Poor Calyste! is this the wife to suit you? She has fine eyes, but such eyes are common in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Can a woman so lean be really tender?

Eve was fair; dark women are descended from Adam, fair women from God, whose hand left a last touch on Eve when all creation was complete.

” At about six o’clock Calyste in desperation took up his hat to go.

After sitting up till half-past twelve, Sabine had gone to bed tired out. She slept, though she had been cruelly startled by the brevity of her husband’s note; still, she accounted for it.

True love in a woman can always explain everything to the advantage of the man she loves.

“Calyste was in a hurry!” thought she.

She expected the fatal perfume, and she smelt it; and she no longer confided in Ursule, nor in her mother, who had so charitably deceived her. She wanted certainty, and she had not long to wait for it.

Certainty is never coy; it is like the sun, we soon need to pull down the blinds before it.

In love it is a repetition of the fable of the Woodman calling on Death. We wish that certainty would blind us.

She had refused to make the acquaintance of certain tiresome rich men, and others of flyblown reputations; she made no exceptions to this strict rule but in the case of certain great aristocratic names.

“They have a right to be stupid,” she would say, “because they are swells.”

Ostensibly she possessed the three hundred thousand francs that Rochefide had given her, and that a thorough good fellow, a stockbroker named Gobenheim—the only stockbroker she allowed in her house—managed for her;

but she also managed for herself a little private fortune of two hundred thousand francs, formed of her savings on her house allowance for three years, by constantly buying and selling with the three hundred thousand francs, which were all she would ever confess to.

“The more you make, the less you seem to have,” Gobenheim remarked one day.

“Water is so dear!” said she.

Modern notions of equality, which in our day have assumed such extravagant proportions, have inevitably developed in private life—in a parallel line with political life—pride, conceit, and vanity, the three grand divisions of the social I.

Fools wish to pass for clever men, clever men want to be men of talent, men of talent expect to be treated as geniuses: as to the geniuses, they are more reasonable; they consent to be regarded as no more than demigods.

This tendency of the spirit of the time, which in the Chamber of Deputies makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous of the poet, prompts fools to run down clever men, clever men to run down men of talent, men of …

According to the democrats, its aristocracy was a disease, but a definite and circumscribed disease; it has exchanged this for ten armed and contending aristocracies, the worst possible state of things.

To proclaim the equality of all is to declare the rights of the envious.

We are enjoying now the Saturnalia of the Revolution transferred to the apparently peaceful sphere of intelligence, industry, and politics; it seems as though the reputations earned by hard work, good service, and talent were a privilege granted at the expense of the masses.

Their icy-hearted creators never knew what was meant by an absorbing passion, Molière alone had a suspicion of it.—Love, Madame la Duchesse, is not an attachment to a noble woman, to a Clarissa; a great achievement that, on my word!—

Love is to say to one’s self: ‘The woman I worship is a wretch; she is deceiving me, she will deceive me again, she is an old hand, she smells of the burning pit!’⁠—and to fly to her, to find the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise.

That is how Molière loved, and how we love, we scamps and rips; for I can cry at the great scene in Arnolphe! That is how your son-in-law loves Béatrix!

“

We tire of everything, even of hell!

” said Maxime with a laugh.—“Till this evening.”

“Madame d’Espard cannot endure Béatrix; she will help me.—To the Hôtel Grandlieu,” he cried to the coachman, seeing Rastignac pass.

Find a great man without a weakness.

Maxime found the Duchess, Madame du Guénic, and Clotilde in tears.

“That is the way of it, in Paris,” said she. “

You go to bed on a wet night, next morning the pavement is dry, and everything so frozen that the dust flies; would you like a brush?

”

To this audacious falsehood Arthur could only bow his head; this was passing under the Caudine forks of submission.

True love has this magnanimous cowardice.

Arthur behaved to Madame Schontz as Sabine did to Calyste, as Calyste did to Béatrix.