



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 the water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven
back with equal violence by the inert force of the mountain to the
opposite shore, gently curved by the spent force of the retreating
waves.

The fiord is closed at the upper end by a vast gneiss formation crowned
with forests, down which a river plunges in cascades, becomes a torrent
when the snows are melting, spreads into a sheet of waters, and then
falls with a roar into the bay,--vomiting as it does so the hoary pines
and the aged larches washed down from the forests and scarce seen amid
the foam. These trees plunge headlong into the fiord and reappear after
a time on the surface, clinging together and forming islets which float
ashore on the beaches, where the inhabitants of a village on the left
bank of the Strom-fiord gather them up, split, broken (though sometimes
whole), and always stripped of bark and branches. The mountain which
receives at its base the assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the
buffeting of the wild North wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest,
wrapped at all seasons in a mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak
of Norway; its proximity to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen
hundred feet, a degree of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of
the globe. The summit of this rocky mass, rising sheer from the fiord
on one side, <DW72>s gradually downward to the east, where it joins the
declivities of the Sieg and forms a series of terraced valleys, the
chilly temperature of which allows no growth but that of shrubs and
stunted trees.

The upper end of the fiord, where the waters enter it as they come down
from the forest, is called the Siegdahlen,--a word which may be held to
mean "the shedding of the Sieg,"--the river itself receiving that name.
The curving shore opposite to the face of the Falberg is the valley
of Jarvis,--a smiling scene overlooked by hills clothed with firs,
birch-trees, and larches, mingled with a few oaks and beeches, the
richest coloring of all the varied tapestries which Nature in these
northern regions spreads upon the surface of her rugged rocks. The eye
can readily mark the line where the soil, warmed by the rays of the sun,
bears cultivation and shows the native growth of the Norwegian flora.
Here the expanse of the fiord is broad enough to allow the sea, dashed
back by the Falberg, to spend its expiring force in gentle murmurs upon
the lower <DW72> of these hills,--a shore bordered with finest sand,
strewn with mica and sparkling pebbles, porphyry, and marbles of a
thousand tints, brought from Sweden by the river floods, together with
ocean waifs, shells, and flowers of the sea driven in by tempests,
whether of the Pole or Tropics.

At the foot of the hills of Jarvis lies a village of some two hundred
wooden houses, where an isolated population lives like a swarm of bees
in a forest, without increasing or diminishing; vegetating happily,
while wringing their means of living from the breast of a stern Nature.
The almost unknown existence of the little hamlet is readily accounted
for. Few of its inhabitants were bold enough to risk their lives
among the reefs to reach the deep-sea fishing,--the staple industry of
Norwegians on the least dangerous portions of their coast. The fish of
the fiord were numerous enough to suffice, in part at least, for the
sustenance of the inhabitants; the valley pastures provided milk and
butter; a certain amount of fruitful, well-tilled soil yielded rye
and hemp and vegetables, which necessity taught the people to protect
against the severity of the cold and the fleeting but terrible heat of
the sun with the shrewd ability which Norwegians display in the two-fold
struggle. The difficulty of communication with the outer world, either
by land where the roads are impassable, or by sea where none but tiny
boats can thread their way through the maritime defiles that guard the
entrance to the bay, hinder these people from growing rich by the sale
of their timber. It would cost enormous sums to either blast a channel
out to sea or construct a way to the interior. The roads from Christiana
to Trondhjem all turn toward the Strom-fiord, and cross the Sieg by a
bridge some score of miles above its fall into the bay. The country to
the north, between Jarvis and Trondhjem, is covered with impenetrable
forests, while to the south the Falberg is nearly as much separated
from Christiana by inaccessible precipices. The village of Jarvis might
perhaps have communicated with the interior of Norway and Sweden by
the river Sieg; but to do this and to be thus brought into contact with
civilization, the Strom-fiord needed the presence of a man of genius.
Such a man did actually appear there,--a poet, a Swede of great
religious fervor, who died admiring, even reverencing this region as one
of the noblest works of the Creator.

Minds endowed by study with an inward sight, and whose quick perceptions
bring before the soul, as though painted on a canvas, the contrasting
scenery of this universe, will now apprehend the general features of
the Strom-fiord. They alone, perhaps, can thread their way through the
tortuous channels of the reef, or flee with the battling waves to the
everlasting rebuff of the Falberg whose white peaks mingle with the
vaporous clouds of the pearl-gray sky, or watch with delight the curving
sheet of waters, or hear the rushing of the Sieg as it hangs for an
instant in long fillets and then falls over a picturesque abatis of
noble trees toppled confusedly together, sometimes upright, sometimes
half-sunken beneath the rocks. It may be that such minds alone can dwell
upon the smiling scenes nestling among the lower hills of Jarvis; where
the luscious Northern vegetables spring up in families, in myriads,
where the white birches bend, graceful as maidens, where colonnades
of beeches rear their boles mossy with the growth of centuries, where
shades of green contrast, and white clouds float amid the blackness of
the distant pines, and tracts of many-tinted crimson and purple shrubs
are shaded endlessly; in short, where blend all colors, all perfumes of
a flora whose wonders are still ignored. Widen the boundaries of this
limited ampitheatre, spring upward to the clouds, lose yourself among
the rocks where the seals are lying and even then your thought cannot
compass the wealth of beauty nor the poetry of this Norwegian coast.
Can your thought be as vast as the ocean that bounds it? as weird as
the fantastic forms drawn by these forests, these clouds, these shadows,
these changeful lights?

Do you see above the meadows on that lowest <DW72> which undulates around
the higher hills of Jarvis two or three hundred houses roofed with
"noever," a sort of thatch made of birch-bark,--frail houses, long and
low, looking like silk-worms on a mulberry-leaf tossed hither by the
winds? Above these humble, peaceful dwellings stands the church, built
with a simplicity in keeping with the poverty of the villagers. A
graveyard surrounds the chancel, and a little farther on you see
the parsonage. Higher up, on a projection of the mountain is a
dwelling-house, the only one of stone; for which reason the inhabitants
of the village call it "the Swedish Castle." In fact, a wealthy Swede
settled in Jarvis about thirty years before this history begins, and did
his best to ameliorate its condition. This little house, certainly not
a castle, built with the intention of leading the inhabitants to build
others like it, was noticeable for its solidity and for the wall that
inclosed it, a rare thing in Norway where, notwithstanding the abundance
of stone, wood alone is used for all fences, even those of fields.
This Swedish house, thus protected against the climate, stood on rising
ground in the centre of an immense courtyard. The windows were sheltered
by those projecting pent-house roofs supported by squared trunks of
trees which give so patriarchal an air to Northern dwellings. From
beneath them the eye could see the savage nudity of the Falberg, or
compare the infinitude of the open sea with the tiny drop of water in
the foaming fiord; the ear could hear the flowing of the Sieg, whose
white sheet far away looked motionless as it fell into its granite
cup edged for miles around with glaciers,--in short, from this vantage
ground the whole landscape whereon our simple yet superhuman drama was
about to be enacted could be seen and noted.

The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to
Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a
usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A wind,
whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the ice of
the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf. Seldom
indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of frozen waters
reflecting the colors of the sky; a wondrous site in the bosom of
these mountains when all other aspects of nature are levelled beneath
successive sheets of snow, and crests and valleys are alike mere
folds of the vast mantle flung by winter across a landscape at once so
mournfully dazzling and so monotonous. The falling volume of the Sieg,
suddenly frozen, formed an immense arcade beneath which the inhabitants
might have crossed under shelter from the blast had any dared to risk
themselves inland. But the dangers of every step away from their own
surroundings kept even the boldest hunters in their homes, afraid lest
the narrow paths along the precipices, the clefts and fissures among the
rocks, might be unrecognizable beneath the snow.

Thus it was that no human creature gave life to the white desert where
Boreas reigned, his voice alone resounding at distant intervals. The
sky, nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of the
fiord. Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse, trusting
to the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious
rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come
to them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts alone across the sands
of Africa, the bird is neither seen nor heard; the torpid atmosphere,
deprived of its electrical conditions, echoes neither the whirr of its
wings nor its joyous notes. Besides, what human eye was strong enough to
bear the glitter of those pinnacles adorned with sparkling crystals, or
the sharp reflections of the snow, iridescent on the summits in the rays
of a pallid sun which infrequently appeared, like a dying man seeking to
make known that he still lives. Often, when the flocks of gray clouds,
driven in squadrons athwart the mountains and among the tree-tops, hid
the sky with their triple veils Earth, lacking the celestial lights, lit
herself by herself.

Here, then, we meet the majesty of Cold, seated eternally at the pole
in that regal silence which is the attribute of all absolute monarchy.
Every extreme principle carries with it an appearance of negation and
the symptoms of death; for is not life the struggle of two forces? Here
in this Northern nature nothing lived. One sole power--the unproductive
power of ice--reigned unchallenged. The roar of the open sea no longer
reached the deaf, dumb inlet, where during one short season of the year
Nature made haste to produce the slender harvests necessary for the food
of the patient people. A few tall pine-trees lifted their black pyramids
garlanded with snow, and the form of their long branches and depending
shoots completed the mourning garments of those solemn heights.

Each household gathered in its chimney-corner, in houses carefully
closed from the outer air, and well supplied with biscuit, melted
butter, dried fish, and other provisions laid in for the seven-months
winter. The very smoke of these dwellings was hardly seen, half-hidden
as they were beneath the snow, against the weight of which they were
protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some
distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around
each building.

During these terrible winter months the women spun and dyed the woollen
stuffs and the linen fabrics with which they clothed their families,
while the men read, or fell into those endless meditations which have
given birth to so many profound theories, to the mystic dreams of the
North, to its beliefs, to its studies (so full and so complete in one
science, at least, sounded as with a plummet), to its manners and its
morals, half-monastic, which force the soul to react and feed upon
itself and make the Norwegian peasant a being apart among the peoples of
Europe.

Such was the condition of the Strom-fiord in the first year of the
nineteenth century and about the middle of the month of May.

On a morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the
fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow
and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the
Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were
they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have been taken for
eider-ducks sailing in consort before the wind. Not the boldest hunter
nor the most superstitious fisherman would have attributed to human
beings the power to move safely along the slender lines traced beneath
the snow by the granite ledges, where yet this couple glided with the
terrifying dexterity of somnambulists who, forgetting their own weight
and the dangers of the slightest deviation, hurry along a ridge-pole and
keep their equilibrium by the power of some mysterious force.

"Stop me, Seraphitus," said a pale young girl, "and let me breathe. I
look at you, you only, while scaling these walls of the gulf; otherwise,
what would become of me? I am such a feeble creature. Do I tire you?"

"No," said the being on whose arm she leaned. "But let us go on, Minna;
the place where we are is not firm enough to stand on."

Once more the snow creaked sharply beneath the long boards fastened to
their feet, and soon they reached the upper terrace of the first ledge,
clearly defined upon the flank of the precipice. The person whom Minna
had addressed as Seraphitus threw his weight upon his right heel,
arresting the plank--six and a half feet long and narrow as the foot of
a child--which was fastened to his boot by a double thong of leather.
This plank, two inches thick, was covered with reindeer skin, which
bristled against the snow when the foot was raised, and served to stop
the wearer. Seraphitus drew in his left foot, furnished with another
"skee," which was only two feet long, turned swiftly where he stood,
caught his timid companion in his arms, lifted her in spite of the long
boards on her feet, and placed her on a projecting rock from which he
brushed the snow with his pelisse.

"You are safe there, Minna; you can tremble at your ease."

"We are a third of the way up the Ice-Cap," she said, looking at the
peak to which she gave the popular name by which it is known in Norway;
"I can hardly believe it."

Too much out of breath to say more, she smiled at Seraphitus, who,
without answering, laid his hand upon her heart and listened to its
sounding throbs, rapid as those of a frightened bird.

"It often beats as fast when I run," she said.

Seraphitus inclined his head with a gesture that was neither coldness
nor indifference, and yet, despite the grace which made the movement
almost tender, it none the less bespoke a certain negation, which in a
woman would have seemed an exquisite coquetry. Seraphitus clasped the
young girl in his arms. Minna accepted the caress as an answer to her
words, continuing to gaze at him. As he raised his head, and threw back
with impatient gesture the golden masses of his hair to free his brow,
he saw an expression of joy in the eyes of his companion.

"Yes, Minna," he said in a voice whose paternal accents were charming
from the lips of a being who was still adolescent, "Keep your eyes on
me; do not look below you."

"Why not?" she asked.

"You wish to know why? then look!"

Minna glanced quickly at her feet and cried out suddenly like a child
who sees a tiger. The awful sensation of abysses seized her; one glance
sufficed to communicate its contagion. The fiord, eager for food,
bewildered her with its loud voice ringing in her ears, interposing
between herself and life as though to devour her more surely. From the
crown of her head to her feet and along her spine an icy shudder ran;
then suddenly intolerable heat suffused her nerves, beat in her veins
and overpowered her extremities with electric shocks like those of the
torpedo. Too feeble to resist, she felt herself drawn by a mysterious
power to the depths below, wherein she fancied that she saw some monster
belching its venom, a monster whose magnetic eyes were charming her,
whose open jaws appeared to craunch their prey before they seized it.

"I die, my Seraphitus, loving none but thee," she said, making a
mechanical movement to fling herself into the abyss.

Seraphitus breathed softly on her forehead and eyes. Suddenly, like
a traveller relaxed after a bath, Minna forgot these keen emotions,
already dissipated by that caressing breath which penetrated her body
and filled it with balsamic essences as quickly as the breath itself had
crossed the air.

"Who art thou?" she said, with a feeling of gentle terror. "Ah, but I
know! thou art my life. How canst thou look into that gulf and not die?"
she added presently.

Seraphitus left her clinging to the granite rock and placed himself at
the edge of the narrow platform on which they stood, whence his eyes
plunged to the depths of the fiord, defying its dazzling invitation. His
body did not tremble, his brow was white and calm as that of a marble
statue,--an abyss facing an abyss.

"Seraphitus! dost thou not love me? come back!" she cried. "Thy danger
renews my terror. Who art thou to have such superhuman power at thy
age?" she asked as she felt his arms inclosing her once more.

"But, Minna," answered Seraphitus, "you look fearlessly at greater
spaces far than that."

Then with raised finger, this strange being pointed upward to the blue
dome, which parting clouds left clear above their heads, where
stars could be seen in open day by virtue of atmospheric laws as yet
unstudied.

"But what a difference!" she answered smiling.

"You are right," he said; "we are born to stretch upward to the
skies. Our native land, like the face of a mother, cannot terrify her
children."

His voice vibrated through the being of his companion, who made no
reply.

"Come! let us go on," he said.

The pair darted forward along the narrow paths traced back and forth
upon the mountain, skimming from terrace to terrace, from line to line,
with the rapidity of a barb, that bird of the desert. Presently they
reached an open space, carpeted with turf and moss and flowers, where no
foot had ever trod.

"Oh, the pretty saeter!" cried Minna, giving to the upland meadow its
Norwegian name. "But how comes it here, at such a height?"

"Vegetation ceases here, it is true," said Seraphitus. "These few plants
and flowers are due to that sheltering rock which protects the meadow
from the polar winds. Put that tuft in your bosom, Minna," he added,
gathering a flower,--"that balmy creation which no eye has ever seen;
keep the solitary matchless flower in memory of this one matchless
morning of your life. You will find no other guide to lead you again to
this saeter."

So saying, he gave her the hybrid plant his falcon eye had seen amid the
tufts of gentian acaulis and saxifrages,--a marvel, brought to bloom
by the breath of angels. With girlish eagerness Minna seized the tufted
plant of transparent green, vivid as emerald, which was formed of little
leaves rolled trumpet-wise, brown at the smaller end but changing tint
by tint to their delicately notched edges, which were green. These
leaves were so tightly pressed together that they seemed to blend and
form a mat or cluster of rosettes. Here and there from this green ground
rose pure white stars edged with a line of gold, and from their throats
came crimson anthers but no pistils. A fragrance, blended of roses and
of orange blossoms, yet ethereal and fugitive, gave something as it
were celestial to that mysterious flower, which Seraphitus sadly
contemplated, as though it uttered plaintive thoughts which he alone
could understand. But to Minna this mysterious phenomenon seemed a mere
caprice of nature giving to stone the freshness, softness, and perfume
of plants.

"Why do you