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

More than once had Seraphita chosen to show Wilfrid that she knew that motley inner part which forms the second life of most men. She had often said to him, in herp. 97 dovelike tone, when Wilfrid had vowed on the way up that he would carry her off to be his own possession, ‘““Why so much vehemence?’’ Wilfrid, when alone, was strong enough to utter the cry of rebellion he had given vent to at Pastor Becker’s, to be soothed by the old man’s narrative. This man—a mocker, a scorner—at last saw the light of a starlike belief rising in his darkness; he wondered whether Seraphita were not an exile from the upper spheres on her homeward road. He did not offer this Norwegian lily the homage of such idealization as lovers of every land are apt to squander; he really believed in her divinity.

Why was she buried in the depths of this fiord? What was she doing there? Unanswerable questions crowded on his mind. Wkat could happen between him and her? What fate had led him thither?

To him Seraphita was the motionless statue, as light as a shade, that Minna had just seen standing on the brink of the abyss. Seraphita could thus confront every abyss, and nothing could hurt her; the line of her brow would be unmoved, the light in her eye would never tremble. His love, then, was without hope, but not without curiosity.

From the first moment when Wilfrid suspected the ethereal nature in this sorceress, who had told him the secret of his life in harmonious dreams, he resolved to try to subjugate her, to keep her, to steal her from heaven, where perhaps they awaited her. He would be the representative of humanity, of this earth, recapturing their prey. His pride, the only sentiment which can uplift a man for any length of time, would make him rejoice in that triumph for the rest of his life. At the mere thought his blood boiled in his veins, his heart swelled. If he could not succeed, he would crush her. It is so natural to destroy what you cannot get (5)—Vol, 25p. 98 possession of, to deny what you do not understand, to insult what you covet.

Next day Wilfrid, full of the ideas to which the extraordinary spectacle he had witnessed had naturally given rise, wanted to cross-question David, and came to see him, making a pretext of his wish for news of Seraphita. Though Pastor Becker thought the poor old man was childish, the stranger trusted to his own perspicacity to guide him in discovering the grains of truth the old serving-man might drop in the torrent of his wandering talk.

David had the rigid but undecided expression of a man of eighty; under his white hair his brow showed deep wrinkles, forming broken stratifications, and his whole face was furrowed like the dry bed of a torrent. All his vitality seemed to be concentrated in his eyes, where a spark still gleamed; but that ight even was hidden behind clouds, and might be either the fitful activity of a feeble mind, or the stupid glare of intoxication. His slow, heavy movements betrayed the chill of old age, and seemed to communicate it to any one who gazed at him for long, for he had the strength of inertia. His narrow intelligence awoke only at the sound of his mistress’s voice, at the sight or the thought of her. She was the soul of this merely material wreck. When David was alone you would have thought him a corpse; if Seraphita appeared, or spoke, or was spoken of, the dead rose from the grave and recovered motion and speech.

Never were the dry bones that the breath of God shall revive in the valley of Jehoshaphat—never was that Apocalyptic parable more vividly realized than in this Lazarus perennially called forth from the sepulchre by the voice of this young girl. His mode of speech, always highly figuraSERAPHITA Be Sie)

tive, and often incomprehensible, kept the villagers from talking to him; but they greatly respected a mind so far removed from the vulgar routine; it commands the instinctive reverence of common folk.