



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





SERAPHITA


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                            DEDICATION

  To Madame Eveline de Hanska, nee Comtesse Rzewuska.

  Madame,--Here is the work which you asked of me. I am happy, in
  thus dedicating it, to offer you a proof of the respectful
  affection you allow me to bear you. If I am reproached for
  impotence in this attempt to draw from the depths of mysticism a
  book which seeks to give, in the lucid transparency of our
  beautiful language, the luminous poesy of the Orient, to you the
  blame! Did you not command this struggle (resembling that of
  Jacob) by telling me that the most imperfect sketch of this
  Figure, dreamed of by you, as it has been by me since childhood,
  would still be something to you?

  Here, then, it is,--that something. Would that this book could
  belong exclusively to noble spirits, preserved like yours from
  worldly pettiness by solitude! THEY would know how to give to it
  the melodious rhythm that it lacks, which might have made it, in
  the hands of a poet, the glorious epic that France still awaits.
  But from me they must accept it as one of those sculptured
  balustrades, carved by a hand of faith, on which the pilgrims
  lean, in the choir of some glorious church, to think upon the end
  of man.

  I am, madame, with respect,
  Your devoted servant,
  De Balzac.




SERAPHITA




CHAPTER I. SERAPHITUS


As the eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the
imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated
edges, like a granite lace, against which the surges of the North Sea
roar incessantly? Who has not dreamed of the majestic sights to be seen
on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and
little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may
almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable
hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts
the conformation of a fish's spine, fishery being the staple commerce of
the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who
cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen
degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain
existence. Thanks to perils devoid of glory, to year-long snows which
clothe the Norway peaks and guard them from profaning foot of traveller,
these sublime beauties are virgin still; they will be seen to harmonize
with human phenomena, also virgin--at least to poetry--which here took
place, the history of which it is our purpose to relate.

If one of these inlets, mere fissures to the eyes of the eider-ducks, is
wide enough for the sea not to freeze between the prison-walls of
rock against which it surges, the country-people call the little bay
a "fiord,"--a word which geographers of every nation have adopted into
their respective languages. Though a certain resemblance exists
among all these fiords, each has its own characteristics. The sea has
everywhere forced its way as through a breach, yet the rocks about each
fissure are diversely rent, and their tumultuous precipices defy the
rules of geometric law. Here the scarp is dentelled like a saw; there
the narrow ledges barely allow the snow to lodge or the noble crests of
the Northern pines to spread themselves; farther on, some convulsion of
Nature may have rounded a coquettish curve into a lovely valley flanked
in rising terraces with black-plumed pines. Truly we are tempted to call
this land the Switzerland of Ocean.

Midway between Trondhjem and Christiansand lies an inlet called the
Strom-fiord. If the Strom-fiord is not the loveliest of these rocky
landscapes, it has the merit of displaying the terrestrial grandeurs
of Norway, and of enshrining the scenes of a history that is indeed
celestial.

The general outline of the Strom-fiord seems at first sight to be that
of a funnel washed out by the sea. The passage which the waves have
forced present to the eye an image of the eternal struggle between old
Ocean and the granite rock,--two creations of equal power, one through
inertia, the other by ceaseless motion. Reefs of fantastic shape run out
on either side, and bar the way of ships and forbid their entrance. The
intrepid sons of Norway cross these reefs on foot, springing from rock
to rock, undismayed at the abyss--a hundred fathoms deep and only six
feet wide--which yawns beneath them. Here a tottering block of gneiss
falling athwart two rocks gives an uncertain footway; there the
hunters or the fishermen, carrying their loads, have flung the stems of
fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the projecting reefs, around and
beneath which the surges roar incessantly. This dangerous entrance to
the little bay bears obliquely to the right with a serpentine movement,
and there encounters a mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet
above sea-level, the base of which is a vertical palisade of solid
rock more than a mile and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere
yielding to clefts or undulations until it reaches a height of two
hundred feet above