Study of a Woman | Page 3

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

STUDY OF A WOMAN
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To the Marquis Jean-Charles di Negro.

STUDY OF A WOMAN

The Marquise de Listomere is one of those young women who have
been brought up in the spirit of the Restoration. She has principles, she
fasts, takes the sacrament, and goes to balls and operas very elegantly
dressed; her confessor permits her to combine the mundane with
sanctity. Always in conformity with the Church and with the world, she
presents a living image of the present day, which seems to have taken
the word "legality" for its motto. The conduct of the marquise shows
precisely enough religious devotion to attain under a new Maintenon to
the gloomy piety of the last days of Louis XIV., and enough
worldliness to adopt the habits of gallantry of the first years of that
reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is strictly
virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for the last
seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those deputies who
expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct will promote
the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving their opinion of
her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere becomes a peer of
France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of age,--a period of life
when most women discover that they are the dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court; his
good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no more
make him a reputation for virtue than the latter can give him the sort of
glamor cast by vice. As deputy, he never speaks, but he votes RIGHT.
He behaves in his own home as he does in the Chamber. Consequently,
he is held to be one of the best husbands in France. Though not
susceptible of lively interest, he never scolds, unless, to be sure, he is
kept waiting. His friends have named him "dull weather,"--aptly
enough, for there is neither clear light nor total darkness about him. He
is like all the ministers who have succeeded one another in France since
the Charter. A woman with principles could not have fallen into better
hands. It is certainly a great thing for a virtuous woman to have married
a man incapable of follies.
Occasionally some fops have been sufficiently impertinent to press the
hand of the marquise while dancing with her. They gained nothing in
return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the germs
of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments are

fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great fame, those
of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they all blanch
before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long and as often
as she chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable, without being
entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish women are capable
of following a plan of this kind for seven years in order to gratify their
fancies later; but to suppose any such reservations in the Marquise de
Listomere would be to calumniate her.
I have had the happiness of knowing this phoenix. She talks well; I
know how to listen; consequently I please her, and I go to her parties.
That, in fact, was the object of my ambition.
Neither plain nor pretty, Madame de Listomere has white teeth, a
dazzling skin, and very red lips; she is tall and well-made; her foot is
small and slender, and she does not put it forth; her eyes, far from being
dulled like those of so many Parisian women, have a gentle glow