Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

The single window which gave light to the room in the summer was now carefully closed. For a curtain, an old piece of tapestry hung from a rod in heavy folds. There was no attempt at the picturesque or showy—austere simplicity, genuine homeliness, the unpretentiousness of nature, all the habits of domestic life free from troubles and anxieties. Many dwellings leave the impression of a dream; the dazzling flash of transient pleasure seems to hide a ruin under the chill smile of luxury; but this parlor was sublimely real, harmonious in color, and apt to suggest patriarchal ideas of a busy and devout life.

The silence was broken only by the heavy step of the maid preparing the supper, and by the singing in the pan of the dried fish she was frying in salt butter, after the fashion

~ of the country.

‘“Will you smoke a pipe?’’ said the pastor presently,
when he thought that Wilfrid would heed him.
‘‘No, thank you, dear Pastor Becker,’’ he replied.

p. 48

“You seem less well than usual this evening,’’ said
Minna, struck by the visitor’s weak voice.

‘‘T am always so when | have been to the castle.’

Minna was startled.

‘‘A strange creature dwells there, Pastor Becker,’’ he went on after a pause. ‘‘I have been six months in the village, and have never dared to question you about her; and to-night I have to do violence to my feelings even to speak of her. At first I greatly regretted to find my travels interrupted by the winter, and to be obliged to remain here; for the last two months, however, the chains binding me to Jarvis have been more closely riveted, and I fear I may end my days here.—You know how I first met Seraphita, and the impression made on me by her eyes and her voice, and how at last I was admitted to visit her though she receives nobody. On the very first day, I came to you for information concerning that mysterious creature. Then began for me the series of enchantments—”’

‘‘Of enchantments?’’ exclaimed the pastor, shaking out the ashes of his pipe into a coarse pan of sand that served him as a spittoon. ‘Are enchantments possible ?”’

‘‘You, certainly, who at this very moment are so conscientiously studying Jean Wier’s book of ‘Incantations,’ will understand the account I can give you of my sensations,’ Wilfrid replied quickly. ‘If we study nature attentively, alike in its great revolutions and in its minutest works, it is impossible not to admit the possibility of enchantment—giving the word its fullest meaning. Man can create no force; he can but use the only existing force, which includes all others, namely, Motion—the incomprehensible Breath of the Sovereign Maker of the Universe. The elements are too completely separated for the hand ofp. 49 man to combine them; the only miracle he can work consists in the mingling of two hostile substances. Even so, gunpowder is akin to thunder!

‘As to effecting an act of creation, and that suddenly !— All creation needs time, and time will neither hurry nor turn backward at our bidding. Hence, outside us, plastic nature obeys laws whose order and procedure cannot be reversed by any human effort.