A Drama on the Seashore

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Madame la Princesse Caroline Galitzin de Genthod, nee Comtesse

Walewska. Homage and remembrances of
The Author.

A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE
Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in

measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the
angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon

of the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which
for all men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of

great thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense
desires. After that age, short as the seed-time, comes that of

execution. There are, as it were, two youths,--the youth of belief,
the youth of action; these are often commingled in men whom Nature has

favored and who, like Caesar, like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the
greatest among great men.

I was measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop.
Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the

ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed
my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on

vacant ground a palace or a fort.
The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaited

Pauline, who was also bathing, in a granite cove floored with fine
sand, the most coquettish bath-room that Nature ever devised for her

water-fairies. The spot was at the farther end of Croisic, a dainty
little peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so

inaccessible that the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass
that way. To float in ether after floating on the wave!--ah! who would

not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence
comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads

without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more
imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like

fortune, by the hair when it comes.
Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was

galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I
looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild

imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a
woman issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur

of the rippling fringes as their flux and reflux marked a white line
along the shore. Hearing that note as it gushed from a soul, I fancied

I saw among the rocks the foot of an angel, who with outspread wings
cried out to me, "Thou shalt succeed!" I came down radiant, light-

hearted; I bounded like a pebble rolling down a rapid slope. When she
saw me, she said,--

"What is it?"
I did not answer; my eyes were moist. The night before, Pauline had

understood my sorrows, as she now understood my joy, with the magical
sensitiveness of a harp that obeys the variations of the atmosphere.

Human life has glorious moments. Together we walked in silence along
the beach. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a ripple; others

might have thought them merely two blue surfaces, the one above the
other, but we--we who heard without the need of words, we who could

evoke between these two infinitudes the illusions that nourish youth,
--we pressed each other's hands at every change in the sheet of water

or the sheets of air, for we took those slight phenomena as the
visible translation of our double thought. Who has never tasted in

wedded love that moment of illimitable joy when the soul seems freed
from the trammels of flesh, and finds itself restored, as it were, to

the world whence it came? Are there not hours when feelings clasp each
other and fly upward, like children taking hands and running, they

scarce know why? It was thus we went along.
At the moment when the village roofs began to show like a faint gray

line on the horizon, we met a fisherman, a poor man returning to
Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousersragged round the

bottom; his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This
abject poverty pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmonies. We

looked at each other, grieving mutually that we had not at that moment
the power to dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a

splendid lobster and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman
was dangling in his right hand, while with the left he held his tackle

and his net.
We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which

came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was

one of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place

where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments

when life sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery
is that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not

remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,

sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope

descended to the soul! At this moment, the sun, sympathizing with
these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon

the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were
visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,--

really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath its
scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their

velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh,
happy exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne had

spoken to me thus. The rock of Croisic may be perhaps the last of
these my joys. If so, what will become of Pauline?

"Have you had a good catch to-day, my man?" I said to the fisherman.
"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping and turning toward us the

swarthy face of those who spend whole days exposed to the reflection
of the sun upon the water.

That face was an emblem of long resignation, of the patience of a
fisherman and his quiet ways. The man had a voice without harshness,

kind lips, evidently" target="_blank" title="ad.明显地">evidently no ambition, and something frail and puny about
him. Any other sort of countenance would, at that moment, have jarred

upon us.
"Where shall you sell your fish?"

"In the town."
"How much will they pay you for that lobster?"

"Fifteen sous."
"And the crab?"

"Twenty sous."
"Why so much difference between a lobster and a crab?"

"Monsieur, the crab is much more delicate eating. Besides, it's as
malicious as a monkey, and it seldom lets you catch it."

"Will you let us buy the two for a hundred sous?" asked Pauline.
The man seemed petrified.

"You shall not have it!" I said to her, laughing. "I'll pay ten
francs; we should count the emotions in."

"Very well," she said, "then I'll pay ten francs, two sous."
"Ten francs, ten sous."

"Twelve francs."
"Fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs, fifty centimes," she said.
"One hundred francs."

"One hundred and fifty francs."
I yielded. We were not rich enough at that moment to bid higher. Our

poor fisherman did not know whether to be angry at a hoax, or to go
mad with joy; we drew him from his quandary by giving him the name of