The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac Read Free Book Online Page B

people of great taste, well bred and worldly. By an unspoken, unquestioned convention, everyone renounced his importance at supper. Absolute equality was the order of the night, though there was no one who was not entirely proud to be who he was. Mademoiselle des Touches keeps her guests at the table until they go on their way, having often observed the great mental change that takes place when one is forced to move. Between the dining room and the drawing room, the spell is broken. According to Sterne , the ideas of a freshly shaved author are not what they were just a few minutes before. If Sterne is right, could we not make so bold as to claim that the mood of a crowd of tablemates is no longer their mood when they have returned to the drawing room? Gone is the headiness of the atmosphere; no more does the eye gaze over the gleaming disarray of dessert, bathed in the benevolence, the salutary idleness of mind that settles over a man with a nicely filled belly, comfortably ensconced in one of those well-cushioned chairs that can be had nowadays. Perhaps people speak more freely over dessert, in the company of fine wines, come that delicious moment when each can rest his elbow on the table and his head on his hand—and not only speak but listen as well. Digestion nearly always sharpens the mind, but it can be silent or voluble, depending on the temperament. Everyone finds his own pleasure. Let us take this preamble as necessary to prepare you for the charms of a story told by a famous man, now deceased, portraying the innocent Jesuitism of womankind with the finesse peculiar to those who have seen much of life, and which makes of statesmen such captivating raconteurs, when, like the Princes de Talleyrand and von Metternich, they consent to recount their experiences.
    De Marsay, named prime minister six months before, had already given evidence of superior abilities. Although his longtime acquaintances were not surprised to see him display all the varied talents and aptitudes of a statesman, one might well wonder if he knew himself to be a great politician from the start or if he evolved in the heat of circumstances. This very question had just been put to him, in a philosophical frame of mind, by a man of intelligence and discernment whom he had named as prefect, a veteran journalist whose admiration for de Marsay was untainted by that vinegary dash of disparagement by which, in Paris, one superior man exculpates himself for admiring another.
    “Was there, in your earlier existence, some deed, some thought, some desire that taught you the nature of your vocation?” asked Émile Blondet. “For surely, like Newton, we all have our apple, revealing our true calling as it falls.”
    “There was,” answered de Marsay. “I’ll tell you the story.”
    Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men—de Marsay’s private circle—everyone then sat back, each in his own pose, and fixed their eyes on the prime minister. Need it be said that the servants had all withdrawn, that the doors had been shut and the portieres pulled? So deep was the silence that the coachmen’s muted conversation could be heard from the courtyard, and the stamping and snorting of the horses, impatient to be back in their stables.
    “One quality alone makes a statesman, my friends,” said the minister, playing with his gold- and mother-of-pearl knife, “an unfailing self-mastery, a talent for grasping the full import of an event, however fortuitous it may seem—in short, the possession of a cool-headed, disinterested self deep inside, who observes, as if from without, all the movements of our life, our passions, our emotions, and who in all things whispers to us the decree of a sort of moral multiplication table.”
    “Which explains why there are so few statesmen in France,” said old Lord Dudley .
    “Where the sentiments are concerned, this is a dreadful thing,” the minister resumed. “And so, when that phenomenon appears in a young