



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





JUANA


BY HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

                  To Madame la Comtesse Merlin.




JUANA

(THE MARANAS)




CHAPTER I. EXPOSITION

Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced into
his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of trouble and
disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain fair-minded
military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking resemblance
to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it. Order being
re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective lines, and
the commandant of the city appointed, military administration began. The
place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all things were organized on a
French system, the Spaniards were left free to follow "in petto" their
national tastes.

This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it lasted)
had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so difficult
to discover. In the marechal's army was a regiment, composed almost
entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene, a man
of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the military
service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor a Kingdom
of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he had ample
opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that he met with
several. His regiment was composed of the scattered fragments of the
Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the colonial battalions
are to France. Its permanent cantonments, established on the island of
Elba, served as an honorable place of exile for the troublesome sons of
good families and for those great men who have just missed greatness,
whom society brands with a hot iron and designates by the term "mauvais
sujets"; men who are for the most part misunderstood; whose existence
may become either noble through the smile of a woman lifting them out
of their rut, or shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of
some damnable reflection dropped by a drunken comrade.

Napoleon had incorporated these vigorous beings in the sixth of the
line, hoping to metamorphose them finally into generals,--barring those
whom the bullets might take off. But the emperor's calculation was
scarcely fulfilled, except in the matter of the bullets. This regiment,
often decimated but always the same in character, acquired a great
reputation for valor in the field and for wickedness in private life.
At the siege of Tarragona it lost its celebrated hero, Bianchi, the man
who, during the campaign, had wagered that he would eat the heart of a
Spanish sentinel, and did eat it. Though Bianchi was the prince of the
devils incarnate to whom the regiment owed its dual reputation, he had,
nevertheless, that sort of chivalrous honor which excuses, in the army,
the worst excesses. In a word, he would have been, at an earlier period,
an admirable pirate. A few days before his death he distinguished
himself by a daring action which the marechal wished to reward. Bianchi
refused rank, pension, and additional decoration, asking, for sole
recompense, the favor of being the first to mount the breach at the
assault on Tarragona. The marechal granted the request and then forgot
his promise; but Bianchi forced him to remember Bianchi. The enraged
hero was the first to plant our flag on the wall, where he was shot by a
monk.

This historical digression was necessary, in order to explain how it was
that the 6th of the line was the regiment to enter Tarragona, and why
the disorder and confusion, natural enough in a city taken by storm,
degenerated for a time into a slight pillage.

This regiment possessed two officers, not at all remarkable among these
men of iron, who played, nevertheless, in the history we shall now
relate, a somewhat important part.

The first, a captain in the quartermaster's department, an officer half
civil, half military, was considered, in soldier phrase, to be fighting
his own battle. He pretended bravery, boasted loudly of belonging to
the 6th of the line, twirled his moustache with the air of a man who was
ready to demolish everything; but his brother officers did not esteem
him. The fortune he possessed made him cautious. He was nicknamed, for
two reasons, "captain of crows." In the first place, he could smell
powder a league off, and took wing at the sound of a musket; secondly,
the nickname was based on an innocent military pun, which his position
in the regiment warranted. Captain Montefiore, of the illustrious
Montefiore family of Milan (though the laws of the Kingdom of Italy
forbade him to bear his title in the French service) was one of the
handsomest men in the army. This beauty may have been among the secret
causes of his prudence on fighting days. A wound which might have
injured his nose, cleft his forehead, or scarred his cheek, would have
destroyed one of the most beautiful Italian faces which a woman ever
dreamed of in all its delicate proportions. This face, not unlike the
type which Girodet has given to the dying young Turk, in the "Revolt at
Cairo," was instinct with that melancholy by which all women are more or
less duped.

The Marquis de Montefiore possessed an entailed property, but his income
was mortgaged for a number of years to pay off the costs of certain
Italian escapades which are inconceivable in Paris. He had ruined
himself in supporting a theatre at Milan in order to force upon a public
a very inferior prima donna, whom he was said to love madly. A fine
future was therefore before him, and he did not care to risk it for the
paltry distinction of a bit of red ribbon. He was not a brave man, but
he was certainly a philosopher; and he had precedents, if we may use so
parliamentary an expression. Did not Philip the Second register a vow
after the battle of Saint Quentin that never again would he put himself
under fire? And did not the Duke of Alba encourage him in thinking that
the worst trade in the world was the involuntary exchange of a crown
for a bullet? Hence, Montefiore was Philippiste in his capacity of rich
marquis and handsome man; and in other respects also he was quite as
profound a politician as Philip the Second himself. He consoled himself
for his nickname, and for the disesteem of the regiment by thinking
that his comrades were blackguards, whose opinion would never be of any
consequence to him if by chance they survived the present war, which
seemed to be one of extermination. He relied on his face to win him
promotion; he saw himself made colonel by feminine influence and a
carefully managed transition from captain of equipment to orderly
officer, and from orderly officer to aide-de-camp on the staff of some
easy-going marshal. By that time, he reflected, he should come into his
property of a hundred thousand scudi a year, some journal would speak of
him as "the brave Montefiore," he would marry a girl of rank, and no one
would dare to dispute his courage or verify his wounds.

Captain Montefiore had one friend in the person of the quartermaster,
--a Provencal, born in the neighborhood of Nice, whose name was Diard.
A friend, whether at the galleys or in the garret of an artist, consoles
for many troubles. Now Montefiore and Diard were two philosophers, who
consoled each other for their present lives by the study of vice,
as artists soothe the immediate disappointment of their hopes by the
expectation of future fame. Both regarded the war in its results, not
its action; they simply considered those who died for glory fools.
Chance had made soldiers of them; whereas their natural proclivities
would have seated them at the green table of a congress. Nature had
poured Montefiore into the mould of a Rizzio, and Diard into that of
a diplomatist. Both were endowed with that nervous, feverish,
half-feminine organization, which is equally strong for good or evil,
and from which may emanate, according to the impulse of these singular
temperaments, a crime or a generous action, a noble deed or a base one.
The fate of such natures depends at any moment on the pressure, more
or less powerful, produced on their nervous systems by violent and
transitory passions.

Diard was considered a good accountant, but no soldier would have
trusted him with his purse or his will, possibly because of the
antipathy felt by all real soldiers against the bureaucrats. The
quartermaster was not without courage and a certain juvenile generosity,
sentiments which many men give up as they grow older, by dint of
reasoning or calculating. Variable as the beauty of a fair woman, Diard
was a great boaster and a great talker, talking of everything. He said
he was artistic, and he made prizes (like two celebrated generals) of
works of art, solely, he declared, to preserve them for posterity.
His military comrades would have been puzzled indeed to form a correct
judgment of him. Many of them, accustomed to draw upon his funds when
occasion obliged them, thought him rich; but in truth, he was a gambler,
and gamblers may be said to have nothing of their own. Montefiore was
also a gambler, and all the officers of the regiment played with the
pair; for, to the shame of men be it said, it is not a rare thing to
see persons gambling together around a green table who, when the game is
finished, will not bow to their companions, feeling no respect for them.
Montefiore was the man with whom Bianchi made his bet about the heart of
the Spanish sentinel.

Montefiore and Diard were among the last to mount the breach at
Tarragona, but the first in the heart of the town as soon as it was
taken. Accidents of this sort happen in all attacks, but with this pair
of friends they were customary. Supporting each other, they made their
way bravely through a labyrinth of narrow and gloomy little streets in
quest of their personal objects; one seeking for painted madonnas, the
other for madonnas of flesh and blood.

In what part of Tarragona it happened I cannot say, but Diard presently
recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the gate of
which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to put a
stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to prevent two
Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of the moustache
with which in their military fanaticism they had decorated her face, he
bought the picture. Montefiore, left alone during this episode, noticed,
nearly opposite the convent, the house and shop of a draper, from which
a shot was fired at him at the moment when his eyes caught a flaming
glance from those of an inquisitive young girl, whose head was advanced
under the shelter of a blind. Tarragona taken by assault, Tarragona
furious, firing from every window, Tarragona violated, with dishevelled
hair, and half-naked, was indeed an object of curiosity,--the curiosity
of a daring Spanish woman. It was a magnified bull-fight.

Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the
cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The profile
of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing which he,
an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an
impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen.
He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a thousand
follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man--the most
abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his head,
suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,--to set
fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means of
action; the fighting was centred in the market-place, where a few
obstinate beings were still defending the town. A better idea then
occurred to him. Diard came out of the convent, but Montefiore said not
a word of his discovery; on the contrary, he accompanied him on a series
of rambles about the streets. But the next day, the Italian had obtained
his military billet in the house of the draper,--an appropriate lodging
for an equipment captain!

The house of the worthy Spaniard consisted, on the ground-floor, of a
vast and gloomy shop, externally fortified with stout iron bars, such
as we see in the old storehouses of the rue des Lombards. This shop
communicated with a parlor lighted from an interior courtyard, a large
room breathing the very spirit of the middle-ages, with smoky old
pictures, old tapestries, antique "brazero," a plumed hat hanging to
a nail, the musket of the guerrillas, and the cloak of Bartholo. The
kitchen adjoined this unique living-room, where the inmates took their
meals and warmed themselves over the dull glow of the brazier, smoking
cigars and discoursing bitterly to animate all hearts with hatred
against the French. Silver pitchers and precious dishes of plate and
porcelain adorned a buttery shelf of the old fashion. But the light,
sparsely admitted, allowed these dazzling objects to show but slightly;
all things, as in pictures of the Dutch school, looked brown, even the
faces. Between the shop and this living-room, so fine in color and
in its tone of patriarchal life, was a dark staircase leading to
a ware-room where the light, carefully distributed, permitted the
examination of goods. Above this were the apartments of the merchant and
his wife. Rooms for an apprentice and a servant-woman