A Drama on the Seashore | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and
Dagny, [email protected]

A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Madame la Princesse Caroline Galitzin de Genthod, nee Comtesse
Walewska. Homage and remembrances of
The Author.

A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE
Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in
measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the
angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of
the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all
men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great
thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires.
After that age, short as the seed-time, comes that of execution. There
are, as it were, two youths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action;
these are often commingled in men whom Nature has favored and who,
like Caesar, like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the greatest among great
men.
I was measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop.
Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the
ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed
my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on
vacant ground a palace or a fort.
The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaited
Pauline, who was also bathing, in a granite cove floored with fine sand,
the most coquettish bath-room that Nature ever devised for her
water-fairies. The spot was at the farther end of Croisic, a dainty little
peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so inaccessible that
the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass that way. To float
in ether after floating on the wave!--ah! who would not have floated on
the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?--who
knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads without consulting
us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more imperious than
conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like fortune, by the hair when
it comes.
Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was
galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I
looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild
imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a
woman issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the
murmur of the rippling fringes as their flux and reflux marked a white
line along the shore. Hearing that note as it gushed from a soul, I
fancied I saw among the rocks the foot of an angel, who with outspread

wings cried out to me, "Thou shalt succeed!" I came down radiant,
light- hearted; I bounded like a pebble rolling down a rapid slope.
When she saw me, she said,--
"What is it?"
I did not answer; my eyes were moist. The night before, Pauline had
understood my sorrows, as she now understood my joy, with the
magical sensitiveness of a harp that obeys the variations of the
atmosphere. Human life has glorious moments. Together we walked in
silence along the beach. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a ripple;
others might have thought them merely two blue surfaces, the one
above the other, but we--we who heard without the need of words, we
who could evoke between these two infinitudes the illusions that
nourish youth, --we pressed each other's hands at every change in the
sheet of water or the sheets of air, for we took those slight phenomena
as the visible translation of our double thought. Who has never tasted in
wedded love that moment of illimitable joy when the soul seems freed
from the trammels of flesh, and