



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





BEATRIX

By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




NOTE

  It is somewhat remarkable that Balzac, dealing as he did with
  traits of character and the minute and daily circumstances of
  life, has never been accused of representing actual persons in the
  two or three thousand portraits which he painted of human nature.

  In "The Great Man of the Provinces in Paris" some likenesses were
  imagined: Jules Janin in Etienne Lousteau, Armand Carrel in Michel
  Chrestien, and, possibly, Berryer in Daniel d'Arthez. But in the
  present volume, "Beatrix," he used the characteristics of certain
  persons, which were recognized and admitted at the time of
  publication. Mademoiselle des Touches (Camille Maupin) is George
  Sand in character, and the personal description of her, though
  applied by some to the famous Mademoiselle Georges, is easily
  recognized from Couture's drawing. Beatrix, Conti, and Claude
  Vignon are sketches of the Comtesse d'Agoult, Liszt, and the
  well-known critic Gustave Planche.

  The opening scene of this volume, representing the manners and
  customs of the old Breton family, a social state existing no
  longer except in history, and the transition period of the
  _vieille roche_ as it passed into the customs and ideas of the
  present century, is one of Balzac's remarkable and most famous
  pictures in the "Comedy of Human Life."

  K.P.W.





BEATRIX





I. A BRETON TOWN AND MANSION

France, especially in Brittany, still possesses certain towns completely
outside of the movement which gives to the nineteenth century its
peculiar characteristics. For lack of quick and regular communication
with Paris, scarcely connected by wretched roads with the
sub-prefecture, or the chief city of their own province, these towns
regard the new civilization as a spectacle to be gazed at; it amazes
them, but they never applaud it; and, whether they fear or scoff at it,
they continue faithful to the old manners and customs which have come
down to them. Whoso would travel as a moral archaeologist, observing men
instead of stones, would find images of the time of Louis XV. in many a
village of Provence, of the time of Louis XIV. in the depths of Pitou,
and of still more ancient times in the towns of Brittany. Most of these
towns have fallen from states of splendor never mentioned by historians,
who are always more concerned with facts and dates than with the truer
history of manners and customs. The tradition of this splendor still
lives in the memory of the people,--as in Brittany, where the native
character allows no forgetfulness of things which concern its own land.
Many of these towns were once the capitals of a little feudal State,--a
county or duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, if
the male line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads became
arms; and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate.

For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient times
are beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for the
masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of
which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan. Nowadays
we have _products_, we no longer have _works_. Public buildings,
monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of retrospection;
but the monuments of modern industry are freestone quarries, saltpetre
mines, cotton factories. A few more years and even these old cities will
be transformed and seen no more except in the pages of this iconography.

One of the towns in which