The Lily of the Valley

The Lily of the Valley

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lily of the Valley, by Honore de
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Title: The Lily of the Valley
Author: Honore de Balzac
Release Date: January 25, 2005 [EBook #1569]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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OF THE VALLEY ***

Produced by John Bickers and Dagny

THE LILY OF THE VALLEY
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Monsieur J. B. Nacquart, Member of the Royal Academy of
Medicine.
Dear Doctor--Here is one of the most carefully hewn stones in the

second course of the foundation of a literary edifice which I have
slowly and laboriously constructed. I wish to inscribe your name upon
it, as much to thank the man whose science once saved me as to honor
the friend of my daily life.
De Balzac.

THE LILY OF THE VALLEY

ENVOI
Felix de Vandenesse to Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville:
I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love
more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the
ordinary rules of common-sense. To smooth the frown upon their brow,
to soften the pout upon their lips, what obstacles we miraculously
overcome! We shed our blood, we risk our future!
You exact the history of my past life; here it is. But remember this,
Natalie; in obeying you I crush under foot a reluctance hitherto
unconquerable. Why are you jealous of the sudden reveries which
overtake me in the midst of our happiness? Why show the pretty anger
of a petted woman when silence grasps me? Could you not play upon
the contradictions of my character without inquiring into the causes of
them? Are there secrets in your heart which seek absolution through a
knowledge of mine? Ah! Natalie, you have guessed mine; and it is
better you should know the whole truth. Yes, my life is shadowed by a
phantom; a word evokes it; it hovers vaguely above me and about me;
within my soul are solemn memories, buried in its depths like those
marine productions seen in calmest weather and which the storms of
ocean cast in fragments on the shore.
The mental labor which the expression of ideas necessitates has revived
the old, old feelings which give me so much pain when they come
suddenly; and if in this confession of my past they break forth in a way
that wounds you, remember that you threatened to punish me if I did
not obey your wishes, and do not, therefore, punish my obedience. I
would that this, my confidence, might increase your love.
Until we meet,
Felix.

CHAPTER I
TWO CHILDHOODS
To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching
of all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender
roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest buds are
torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by frost at
the moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the sorrows of the
child whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose smiles are checked by
the cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that tells of such poor hearts,
oppressed by beings placed about them to promote the development of
their natures, would contain the true history of my childhood.
What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral
or physical infirmity caused by mother's coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was a
reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first neglect;
as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not discovered it. Far
from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters found amusement in
making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which children hide each
other's peccadilloes, and which early teaches them the principles of
honor, was null and void in my case; more than that, I was often
punished for my brother's faults, without being allowed to prove the
injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in children taught
my brother and sisters to