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The Hated Son By: Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) |
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By Honore De Balzac Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION To Madame la Baronne James Rothschild. THE HATED SON PART I. HOW THE MOTHER LIVED
CHAPTER I. A BEDROOM OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
On a winter's night, about two in the morning, the Comtesse Jeanne
d'Herouville felt such violent pains that in spite of her inexperience,
she was conscious of an approaching confinement; and the instinct which
makes us hope for ease in a change of posture induced her to sit up
in her bed, either to study the nature of these new sufferings, or to
reflect on her situation. She was a prey to cruel fears, caused less
by the dread of a first lying in, which terrifies most women, than by
certain dangers which awaited her child. In order not to awaken her husband who was sleeping beside her, the poor
woman moved with precautions which her intense terror made as minute as
those of a prisoner endeavoring to escape. Though the pains became
more and more severe, she ceased to feel them, so completely did she
concentrate her own strength on the painful effort of resting her two
moist hands on the pillow and so turning her suffering body from a
posture in which she could find no ease. At the slightest rustling of
the huge green silk coverlet, under which she had slept but little since
her marriage, she stopped as though she had rung a bell. Forced to watch
the count, she divided her attention between the folds of the rustling
stuff and a large swarthy face, the moustache of which was brushing her
shoulder. When some noisier breath than usual left her husband's lips,
she was filled with a sudden terror that revived the color driven from
her cheeks by her double anguish. The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying
to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly
bold. When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without awakening
her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which revealed the
touching naivete of her nature. But the half formed smile on her burning
lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken that pure brow,
and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression. She gave a sigh
and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on the fatal conjugal
pillow. Then as if for the first time since her marriage she found
herself free in thought and action she looked at the things around her,
stretching out her neck with little darting motions like those of a bird
in its cage. Seeing her thus, it was easy to divine that she had once
been all gaiety and light heartedness, but that fate had suddenly mown
down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous gaiety to sadness. The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters
of old chateaus point out to visitors as "the state bedroom where Louis
XIII. once slept." Fine pictures, mostly brown in tone, were framed
in walnut, the delicate carvings of which were blackened by time. The
rafters of the ceiling formed compartments adorned with arabesques in
the style of the preceding century, which preserved the colors of the
chestnut wood. These decorations, severe in tone, reflected the light
so little that it was difficult to see their designs, even when the sun
shone full into that long and wide and lofty chamber. The silver lamp,
placed upon the mantel of the vast fireplace, lighted the room so feebly
that its quivering gleam could be compared only to the nebulous stars
which appear at moments through the dun gray clouds of an autumn night.
The fantastic figures crowded on the marble of the fireplace, which was
opposite to the bed, were so grotesquely hideous that she dared not fix
her eyes upon them, fearing to see them move, or to hear a startling
laugh from their gaping and twisted mouths. At this moment a tempest was growling in the chimney, giving to every
puff of wind a lugubrious meaning, the vast size of the flute putting
the hearth into such close communication with the skies above that the
embers upon it had a sort of respiration; they sparkled and went out at
the will of the wind... Continue reading book >>
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