



Produced by Dagny





THE PURSE


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Clara Bell



  To Sofka


  "Have you observed, mademoiselle, that the painters and
  sculptors of the Middle Ages, when they placed two figures in
  adoration, one on each side of a fair Saint, never failed to
  give them a family likeness? When you here see your name among
  those that are dear to me, and under whose auspices I place my
  works, remember that touching harmony, and you will see in
  this not so much an act of homage as an expression of the
  brotherly affection of your devoted servant,

                                                "DE BALZAC."




THE PURSE


For souls to whom effusiveness is easy there is a delicious hour that
falls when it is not yet night, but is no longer day; the twilight
gleam throws softened lights or tricksy reflections on every object, and
favors a dreamy mood which vaguely weds itself to the play of light
and shade. The silence which generally prevails at that time makes it
particularly dear to artists, who grow contemplative, stand a few
paces back from the pictures on which they can no longer work, and pass
judgement on them, rapt by the subject whose most recondite meaning then
flashes on the inner eye of genius. He who has never stood pensive by a
friend's side in such an hour of poetic dreaming can hardly understand
its inexpressible soothingness. Favored by the clear-obscure, the
material skill employed by art to produce illusion entirely disappears.
If the work is a picture, the figures represented seem to speak and
walk; the shade is shadow, the light is day; the flesh lives, eyes
move, blood flows in their veins, and stuffs have a changing sheen.
Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the
beauties of the work. At that hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps
it wakes at nightfall! Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind,
which we people with dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears
the soul aloft to the world of fancies, a world full of voluptuous
imaginings, where the artist forgets the real world, yesterday and the
morrow, the future--everything down to its miseries, the good and the
evil alike.

At this magic hour a young painter, a man of talent, who saw in art
nothing but Art itself, was perched on a step-ladder which helped him to
work at a large high painting, now nearly finished. Criticising himself,
honestly admiring himself, floating on the current of his thoughts,
he then lost himself in one of those meditative moods which ravish and
elevate the soul, soothe it, and comfort it. His reverie had no doubt
lasted a long time. Night fell. Whether he meant to come down from his
perch, or whether he made some ill-judged movement, believing himself to
be on the floor--the event did not allow of his remembering exactly the
cause of his accident--he fell, his head struck a footstool, he lost
consciousness and lay motionless during a space of time of which he knew
not the length.

A sweet voice roused him from the stunned condition into which he had
sunk. When he opened his eyes the flash of a bright light made him close
them again immediately; but through the mist that veiled his senses he
heard the whispering of two women, and felt two young, two timid hands
on which his head was resting. He soon recovered consciousness, and by
the light of an old-fashioned Argand lamp he could make out the most
charming girl's face he had ever seen, one of those heads which are
often supposed to be a freak of the brush, but which to him suddenly
realized the theories of the ideal beauty which every artist creates
for himself and whence his art proceeds. The features of the unknown
belonged, so to say, to the refined and delicate type of Prudhon's
school, but had also the poetic sentiment which Girodet gave to the
inventions of his phantasy. The freshness of the temples, the regular
arch of the eyebrows, the purity of outline, the virginal innocence so
plainly stamped on every feature of her countenance, made the girl a
perfect creature. Her figure was slight and graceful, and frail in form.
Her dress, though simple and neat, revealed neither wealth nor penury.

As he recovered his senses, the painter gave expression to his
admiration by a look of surprise, and stammered some confused thanks.
He found a handkerchief pressed to his forehead, and above the smell
peculiar to a studio, he recognized the strong odor of ether, applied no
doubt to revive him from his fainting fit. Finally he saw an old woman,
looking like a marquise of the old school, who held the lamp and was
advising the young girl.

"Monsieur," said the younger woman in reply to one of the questions
put by the painter during the few minutes when he was still under the
influence of the vagueness that the shock had produced in his ideas, "my
mother and I heard the noise of your fall on the floor, and we fancied
we heard a groan. The silence following on the crash alarmed us, and we
hurried up. Finding the key in the latch, we happily took the liberty
of entering, and we found you lying motionless on the ground. My mother
went to fetch what was needed to bathe your head and revive you. You
have cut your forehead--there. Do you feel it?"

"Yes, I do now," he replied.

"Oh, it will be nothing," said the old mother. "Happily your head rested
against this lay-figure."

"I feel infinitely better," replied the painter. "I need nothing further
but a hackney cab to take me home. The porter's wife will go for one."

He tried to repeat his thanks to the two strangers; but at each sentence
the elder lady interrupted him, saying, "Tomorrow, monsieur, pray
be careful to put on leeches, or to be bled, and drink a few cups of
something healing. A fall may be dangerous."

The young girl stole a look at the painter and at the pictures in the
studio. Her expression and her glances revealed perfect propriety; her
curiosity seemed rather absence of mind, and her eyes seemed to speak
the interest which women feel, with the most engaging spontaneity, in
everything which causes us suffering. The two strangers seemed to forget
the painter's works in the painter's mishap. When he had reassured them
as to his condition they left, looking at him with an anxiety that was
equally free from insistence and from familiarity, without asking any
indiscreet questions, or trying to incite him to any wish to visit them.
Their proceedings all bore the hall-mark of natural refinement and good
taste. Their noble and simple manners at first made no great impression
on the painter, but subsequently, as he recalled all the details of the
incident, he was greatly struck by them.

When they reached the floor beneath that occupied by the painter's
studio, the old lady gently observed, "Adelaide, you left the door
open."

"That was to come to my assistance," said the painter, with a grateful
smile.

"You came down just now, mother," replied the young girl, with a blush.

"Would you like us to accompany you all the way downstairs?" asked the
mother. "The stairs are dark."

"No, thank you, indeed, madame; I am much better."

"Hold tightly by the rail."

The two women remained on the landing to light the young man, listening
to the sound of his steps.



In order to set forth clearly all the exciting and unexpected interest
this scene might have for the young painter, it must be told that he
had only a few days since established his studio in the attics of this
house, situated in the darkest and, therefore, the most muddy part of
the Rue de Suresnes, almost opposite the Church of the Madeleine, and
quite close to his rooms in the Rue des Champs-Elysees. The fame his
talent had won him having made him one of the artists most dear to his
country, he was beginning to feel free from want, and to use his own
expression, was enjoying his last privations. Instead of going to his
work in one of the studios near the city gates, where the moderate rents
had hitherto been in proportion to his humble earnings, he had gratified
a wish that was new every morning, by sparing himself a long walk, and
the loss of much time, now more valuable than ever.

No man in the world would have inspired feelings of greater interest
than Hippolyte Schinner if he would ever have consented to make
acquaintance; but he did not lightly entrust to others the secrets of
his life. He was the idol of a necessitous mother, who had brought him
up at the cost of the severest privations. Mademoiselle Schinner, the
daughter of an Alsatian farmer, had never been married. Her tender soul
had been cruelly crushed, long ago, by a rich man, who did not pride
himself on any great delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as a
young girl, in all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her
life, she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions,
the disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so quickly--for
we try to postpone as long as possible our belief in evil, and it seems
to come too soon--that day was a whole age of reflection, and it was
also a day of religious thought and resignation. She refused the alms of
the man who had betrayed her, renounced the world, and made a glory of
her shame. She gave herself up entirely to her motherly love, seeking
in it all her joys in exchange for the social pleasures to which she bid
farewell. She lived by work, saving up a treasure for her son. And,
in after years, a day, an hour repaid her amply for the long and weary
sacrifices of her indigence.

At the last exhibition her son had received the Cross of the Legion of
Honor. The newspapers, unanimous in hailing an unknown genius, still
rang with sincere praises. Artists themselves acknowledged Schinner as
a master, and dealers covered his canvases with gold pieces. At
five-and-twenty Hippolyte Schinner, to whom his mother had transmitted
her woman's soul, understood more clearly than ever his position in the
world. Anxious to restore to his mother the pleasures of which society
had so long robbed her, he lived for her, hoping by the aid of fame and
fortune to see her one day happy, rich, respected, and surrounded by
men of mark. Schinner had therefore chosen his friends among the most
honorable and distinguished men. Fastidious in the selection of his
intimates, he desired to raise still further a position which his talent
had placed high. The work to which he had devoted himself from
boyhood, by compelling him to dwell in solitude--the mother of great
thoughts--had left him the beautiful beliefs which grace the early
days of life. His adolescent soul was not closed to any of the thousand
bashful emotions by which a young man is a being apart, whose heart
abounds in joys, in poetry, in virginal hopes, puerile in the eyes of
men of the world, but deep because they are single-hearted.

He was endowed with the gentle and polite manners which speak to the
soul, and fascinate even those who do not understand them. He was well
made. His voice, coming from his heart, stirred that of others to
noble sentiments, and bore witness to his true modesty by a certain
ingenuousness of tone. Those who saw him felt drawn to him by that
attraction of the moral nature which men of science are happily unable
to analyze; they would detect in it some phenomenon of galvanism, or
the current of I know not what fluid, and express our sentiments in a
formula of ratios of oxygen and electricity.

These details will perhaps explain to strong-minded persons and to men
of fashion why, in the absence of the porter whom he had sent to the end
of the Rue de la Madeleine to call him a coach, Hippolyte Schinner did
not ask the man's wife any questions concerning the two women whose
kindness of heart had shown itself in his behalf. But though he replied
Yes or No to the inquiries, natural under the circumstances, which the
good woman made as to his accident, and the friendly intervention of
the tenants occupying the fourth floor, he could not hinder her from
following the instinct of her kind; she mentioned the two strangers,
speaking of them as prompted by the interests of her policy and the
subterranean opinions of the porter's lodge.

"Ah," said she, "they were, no doubt, Mademoiselle Leseigneur and her
mother, who have lived here these four years. We do not know exactly
what these ladies do; in the morning, only till the hour of noon, an old
woman who is half deaf, and who never speaks any more than a wall, comes
in to help them; in the evening, two or three old gentlemen, with loops
of ribbon, like you, monsieur, come to see them, and often stay very
late. One of them comes in a carriage with servants, and is said to have
sixty thousand francs a year. However, they are very quiet tenants, as
you are, monsieur; and economical! they live on nothing, and as soon as
a letter is brought they pay for it. It is a queer thing, monsieur, the
mother's name is not the same as the daughter's. Ah, but when they go
for a walk in the Tuileries, mademoiselle is very smart, and she never
goes out but she is followed by a lot of young men; but she shuts the
door in their face, and she is quite right. The proprietor would never
allow----"

The coach having come, Hippolyte heard no more, and went home. His
mother, to whom he related his adventure, dressed his wound afresh, and
would not allow him to go to the studio next day. After taking advice,
various treatments were prescribed, and Hippolyte remained at home three
days. During this retirement his idle fancy recalled vividly, bit by
bit, the details of the scene that had ensued on his fainting fit. The
young girl's profile was clearly projected against the darkness of his
inward vision; he saw once more the mother's faded features, or he felt
the touch of Adelaide's hands. He remembered some gesture which at first
had not greatly struck him, but whose exquisite grace was thrown into
relief by memory; then an attitude, or the tones of a melodious voice,
enhanced by the distance of remembrance, suddenly rose before him, as
objects plunging to the bottom of deep waters come back to the surface.

So, on the day when he could resume work, he went early to his studio;
but the visit he undoubtedly had a right to pay to his neighbors was the
true cause of his haste; he had already forgotten the pictures he had
begun. At the moment when a passion throws off its swaddling clothes,
inexplicable pleasures are felt, known to those who have loved. So some
readers will understand why the painter mounted the stairs to the fourth
floor but slowly, and will be in the secret of the throbs that followed
each other so rapidly in his heart at the moment when he saw the humble
brown door of the rooms inhabited by Mademoiselle Leseigneur. This
girl, whose name was not the same as her mother's, had aroused the young
painter's deepest sympathies; he chose to fancy some similarity between
himself and her as to their position, and attributed to her misfortunes
of birth akin to his own. All the time he worked Hippolyte gave himself
very willingly to thoughts of love, and made a great deal of noise to
compel the two ladies to think of him, as he was thinking of them. He
stayed late at the studio and dined there; then, at about seven o'clock,
he went down to call on his neighbors.

No painter of manners has ventured to initiate us--perhaps out of
modesty--into the really curious privacy of certain Parisian existences,
into the secret of the dwellings whence emerge such fresh and elegant
toilets, such brilliant women, who rich on the surface, allow the signs
of very doubtful comfort to peep out in every part of their home. If,
here, the picture is too boldly drawn, if you find it tedious in places,
do not blame the description, which is, indeed, part and parcel of my
story; for the appearance of the rooms inhabited by his two neighbors
had a great influence on the feelings and hopes of Hippolyte Schinner.

The house belonged to one of those proprietors in whom there is a
foregone and profound horror of repairs and decoration, one of the men
who regard their position as Paris house-owners as a business. In the
vast chain of moral species, these people hold a middle place between
the miser and the usurer. Optimists in their own interests, they are all
faithful to the Austrian status quo. If you speak of moving a cupboard
or a door, of opening the most indispensable air-hole, their eyes flash,
their bile rises, they rear like a frightened horse. When the wind blows
down a few chimney-pots they are quite ill, and deprive themselves of an
evening at the Gymnase or the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, "on account
of repairs." Hippolyte, who had seen the performance gratis of a comical
scene with Monsieur Molineux as concerning certain decorative repairs
in his studio, was not surprised to see the dark greasy paint, the
oily stains, spots, and other disagreeable accessories that varied the
woodwork. And these stigmata of poverty are not altogether devoid of
poetry in an artist's eyes.

Mademoiselle Leseigneur herself opened the door. On recognizing the
young artist she bowed, and at the same time, with Parisian adroitness,
and with the presence of mind that pride can lend, she turned round to
shut the door in a glass partition through which Hippolyte might have
caught sight of some linen hung by lines over patent ironing stoves,