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Tumi Moutlana noesis87media — ** spoiler alert ** This is Part 2 of the Ferragus trilogy about 'The Thirteen' which showcases the power and reach of the Devorants, a secret society of companions who look out for each other's interets without morals or scruples. I read the translation by by Ellen Marriage. This is not a review, it's a summary so that I can keep track of these stories from Scenes of Parisian Life, in La Comedie Humaine. SO BEWARE: IT'S ALL SPOILERS This story takes place on an island in the Mediterranean after the French had taken Cadiz and restored Ferdinand VII to the throne. There is a convent of the Barefoot Carmelites there which had escaped the effects of the Revolution, where the nuns live in total seclusion. It was a place of refuge for many women who had reasons to withdraw from the world, but the tale begins with the determination of a French general to breach the fortress... Despite the risks to his career, he is searching for someone special to him. As the new government is established a mass is held, but he sees nothing of the nuns except that he hears one of the Sisters play the organ. She plays Moses in Egypt, a piece of sacred music by Rossini, to whom Balzac dedicates some effusive praise as the composer who brings most human passion into his art. The general can tell that the Sister is a Frenchwoman by the passion with which she plays the fugue in the Te Deum and her inclusion of the air of Fleuve du Tage as an interlude reveals her to be his exiled lady-love expressing her pent-up emotion. What to do? Well, when his division marches out of town, he stays behind and he goes to church. The town is farewelling the army; there is no one there at the service but him. He clanks his spurs and he talks to himself to let the nuns know there is one Frenchman left behind, and the organist plays the Magnificat with enthusiastic passion so he knows his message has been understood. Indeed she plays with such passion as to subvert the holy role of the organ in communicating religious devotion but eventually she succumbs to that once more, ending her recital with an Amen which tells the general that their souls can only meet again in Heaven. Back to the church next day and it's a different organist but his disappointment is only momentary, for the soprano is his lover. He has to behave himself because his host is with him; it is he who explains the strictness of the order and that an exception can only be made for visits for very serious reasons such as illness. Permission may only be granted by the Mother Superior, and among the other foreigners is a Frenchwoman, Sister Theresa, who directs the music. However, in the context of the fall of the Bourbons, since the general brings news from France, he is granted an interview! The Mother Superior is there as a witness, but she speaks only Latin and Spanish so the General is emboldened to address Sister Theresa aka the Duchesse as Antoinette. However when the Mother Superior realises that they know each other she curtails the interview. Antoinette thinks quickly and identifies the General as her 'brother' and the interview is allowed to resume, passion restrained by the need to maintain the fiction and by Antoinette's insistence that she can now be only Sister Theresa to him. He, now named as Armand unburdens himself, revealing that he and his powerful friends (i.e. the Thirteen have been helping him) have searched high and low for her. He begs her to join him, he can have her vows renounced by the Pope and they can live in seclusion but she refuses, and in anger he accuses her of no longer loving him. She says she does, and that he is with her all the time in her thoughts, but unable to bear his remonstrances any longer she cries out to the Mother Superior that this man is her lover and the interview is terminated. The general takes leave from his duties and goes back to France. So, next comes the flashback. Balzac starts by describing the Faubourg Saint-Germain as the locus of society in Paris at that time. Aristocrats, he says, have always liked to live away from the hoi-polloi, and as fast as a city grows up around them to serve their needs, the sooner they take themselves off to build a new mansion somewhere else. Balzac declares that there is nothing incongruous in this and goes on to have a little rant about there being a natural order of things where an aristocracy will always rise to the top and it would be a good thing for France if they knew it: An aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different functions, all of them, however, existing for one common end. (Kindle Location 2074) This distinction between the upper and lower spheres of social activity, emphasized by differences in their manner of living, necessarily implies that in the highest aristocracy there is real worth and some distinguishing merit. In any state, no matter what form of "government" is affected, so soon as the patrician class fails to maintain that complete superiority which is the condition of its existence, it ceases to be a force, and is pulled down at once by the populace. The people always wish to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders, hands, hearts, and heads; they must be the spokesmen, they must represent the intelligence and the glory of the nation. Nations, like women, love strength in those who rule them; they cannot give love without respect; they refuse utterly to obey those of whom they do not stand in awe. An aristocracy fallen into contempt is a roi faineant, a husband in petticoats; first it ceases to be itself, and then it ceases to be. (Location 2099) The mistake that aristocrats made, he says, was to hand over power to the bourgeois, leaving themselves only with the trappings of it, which brought them into contempt. There were a few intelligent ones around, but not enough, and most aristocrats were so conscious of having lost real power that they comforted themselves by acting as if they had not. They were undisciplined, they were weak, and they were selfish. Sidetracked by petty issues like etiquette, they wasted opportunities in 1814 and 1820 and emigrated into the countryside out of their own self-interest. Frenchwomen who might have done much to create salons for the emergence of intelligent leadership did little too. The Duchesse de Langeais had been married for four years when the Restoration took place. Women in her family always married above their station and she was no exception. Their families had quietly supported the King during the Empire and they happily resumed the trappings of their rank when he returned. However the marriage of Antoinette and the Duke was a marriage only of convenience, and they lived apart without breaching convention, the Duchesse never forgiving her husband for some grave unspecified offence (homosexuality? Some barbarity in the bedroom?) She was a star in society but she recognised that she would never achieve her ambition to have a grand reputation unless she were loved – and she discovers that it is possible to invoke love without giving it. She meets her match one day with the Marquis de Montriveau, Armand of the clanking spurs. His social credentials had been poor because he was in the wrong corps to impress either Napoleon or the Bourbons. He was shy, he was modest, he had no swagger. He was diffident because he has learned young that life is cheap in the army. He was respected but not popular. But all that changed when he came back from Africa. He was an adventurous soul but his exotic expeditions in Egypt and Africa were ruinous. His sojourn in the desert and miraculous escape from the savage tribes might well have made a most interesting novel in itself had Balzac written it - but his discoveries and research were all lost and he came back to Paris in 1818 with nothing but a reputation for courage and daring, qualities much admired in the salons of Paris. The King's government was looking for loyal men and his friends saw to it that he was given favours including promotion. (He would, of course, was too noble to seek any favours himself.) Despite his shyness masquerading as hauteur he then became a success in society and Antoinette is interested in him at once. Hearing the amazing tale of his trek across the desert, she decides on a whim that she wants him as her lover, never intending to fall for him herself, but rather to have him as a conquest before any else can claim him. (He is of course, also handsome). Alas for Armand, Antoinette is his first love, and smitten, he little realises what's in store. He visits, and she plays the coquette with him. This goes on too long for her however, and her friends tease that she will be stuck with him so she engineers a quarrel and almost breaks his heart by telling him that she wants only to be his friend. She claims that this is because she is not free, and he (man-of-action) suggests that the obstacle could easily be overcome. She, mindful of what she would lose if that happened and confident that she can 'tire him out', agrees to see him ostensibly as one of many, and warns him that if 'an accident' were to befall the duke they could never be together. But inevitably she falls for him herself, and has to use religion as a shield to prevent all but the occasional chaste kiss. Confused herself, because this was her first love too, she did not know how to control her emotions and was cruel because she feared the loss of her position as the Duke's wife. Her refusal stings Armand: "I am in despair that God should have invented no way for a woman to confirm the gift of her heart save by adding the gift of her person. The high value which you yourself put upon the gift teaches me that I cannot attach less importance to it. If you have given me your inmost self and your whole heart, as you tell me, what can the rest matter? And besides, if my happiness means so painful a sacrifice, let us say no more about it. But you must pardon a man of spirit if he feels humiliated at being taken for a spaniel." To which she replies "M. le Marquis, I am in despair that God should not have invented some nobler way for a man to confirm the gift of his heart than by the manifestation of prodigiously vulgar desires. We become bond-slaves when we give ourselves body and soul, but a man is bound to nothing by accepting the gift. Who will assure me that love will last? The very love that I might show for you at every moment, the better to keep your love, might serve you as a reason for deserting me. I have no wish to be a second edition of Mme de Beauseant. Who can ever know what it is that keeps you beside us? Our persistent coldness of heart is the cause of an unfailing passion in some of you; other men ask for an untiring devotion, to be idolized at every moment; some for gentleness, others for tyranny. No woman in this world as yet has really read the riddle of man's heart." Her sole wish is for his obedience and her liberty, but she understands (too late) that Armand is capable of killing her if he realises that she is only playing with him. It is the Marquis de Ronquerolles, (no friend of Armand's at that time) who enlightens him. He mocks his boyish folly, and advises him, if he must persist with a woman not worth his passion, to be firm and refuse to take no for an answer. So Armand surprises Antoinette in her boudoir, and makes his demands to her lofty refusals. He realises that Ronquerolles is right and resolves to make her pay, 'steel against steel'. He ignores her for a week and then at the ball of the Comtesse de Serizy (Ronquerolles' sister) he makes his move. He tells an old anecdote from his travels to London, about the axe which was used to chop off the head of Charles the First, and the edict that no one should touch the axe. When Antoinette teases him about this old story, he warns her quietly that she has 'touched the axe', and is in peril of some misfortune, perhaps to the hair on her pretty head. She scorns the prophecy but lo! he kidnaps her at home time with the old switch-the-carriage trick and she wakes from her shock to find herself bound hand and foot in his rooms. To her astonishment he unbinds her, declaring that he will not take by force what she refuses to give. He merely wants her to listen as she will not listen when she is in her own rooms. He tells her that it's any man's lookout if he cannot make a woman love him, and she would be within her rights to refuse him if she does not care for him. But he knows she does, and she has robbed him of a sublime happiness and poisoned his future with her caprice. God may forgive her but she needs to expiate her sin here on Earth. (It is quite a long speech). These words unfreeze her heart but it is too late; he says he no longer feels anything for her. He means to brand her with a cross on the forehead and his friends enter to do it. He weakens, however, and sends them away, and she, victorious, sees his tears in the mirror. She tries again to reconcile but he refuses, and he leads her back to Madame Serizy's where she pretends that nothing has happened except that Armand's prophecy has unnerved her. She now tries to retrieve his love but to no avail. He is obdurate; he is silent; he has withdrawn. She saw him once, at a review, two months later, and then threw caution to the winds and went, publicly to his home. Scandal erupts. At court the aging Princess with her encyclopaedic knowledge of aristocrat ancestry tells her gossip, and she reveals to the Duke that Armand de Montriveau indeed has good prospects not widely known if the the Dulmen branch of the Arschoot Rivaudoults should conveniently die out in Galicia, for then the Montriveaus would succeed to the title and estates. Oh dear, Antoinette could have had it all, eh? The Princess seeks to smooth over the scandal, her uncle the Vidame reminds Antoinette about all she might lose, and the Princess urges her not to give up the right to bear a future Duc de Langeais but when Antoinette finally agrees to discretion Ronquerolles interferes again and the on-again-off-again romance falters because Armand is angered by Antoinette's duplicity all over again. Antoinette then seeks the help of the Vidame to get Armand to read her letters, and he, old cynic, agrees to indulge her. In despair she writes to Armand, telling him that if he refuses her she will take herself off to a convent, and then – believing he is at home – in disguise as a maid she goes to his house to wait for an answer. But he is not there, and she – believing she is rejected - takes herself off to the nunnery, which leads to the frantic, and then international search for her. All to no avail. Until 1823. Then the Duke de Langeais dies, and Armand and his trusty friends mount an audacious rescue mission involving disguise as American sailors, an ingenious ascent of an impregnable cliff, chocolate and some house-breaking tools. All this enterprise and daring however is too late: worn out by years of fasting and fruitless passion, the Duchesse has died. That very day, of course. All that remains for the Thirteen is to remove her body, (and mystify the nuns) but ignominy awaits her. As they stand on deck together Ronquerolles cynically says "That was a woman once, now it is nothing. Let us tie a cannon ball to both feet and throw the body overboard; and if ever you think of her again, think of her as of some book that you read as a boy." "Yes," assented Montriveau, "it is nothing now but a dream." "That is sensible of you. Now, after this, have passions; but as for love, a man ought to know how to place it wisely; it is only a woman's last love that can satisfy a man's first love." No wonder they made a Hollywood movie out of it!