The Hated Son | Page 3

Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small

Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following
each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual
(or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Carnegie-Mellon
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

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

THE HATED SON 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,