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Maitre Cornelius-Part10_Honore de Balzac(1799-1850)_Translated Works(翻译文学)-第2页

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them into the void. Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the

powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and



obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought,

consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more



cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting

with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury,



--a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the

miseries of life and in those of death.



Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident

into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has,



like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.

But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of



neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his

treasure,--a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture.



Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of

his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that



already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his

untilled garden, absolutelymotionless, and casting on those who



watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them

with terror. If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he



seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether

the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those



who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to

be in search of something lost.



The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea

by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the



fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel

claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture,



Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his

secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier



could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown

gulf into which he had cast his riches,--those riches he had watered



with the blood of so many innocent men. And then, beside his fear,

arose Remorse.



In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden

treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides



which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining

powerful anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful--alone



with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that

man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied--obedient thus to a



moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.

At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and



commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the

horrors of the torture he had himself created. Maddened by certain



thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his

throat with a razor.



This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI. Nothing then

restrained the populace, and Malemaison, that Evil House, was



pillaged. A tradition exists among the older inhabitants of Touraine

that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser's



treasure and used it in the construction of Chenonceaux, that

marvellous chateau which, in spite of the wealth of several kings and



the taste of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de' Medici for building,

remains unfinished to the present day.



Happily for Marie de Sassenage, the Comte de Saint-Vallier died, as we

know, in his embassy. The family did not become extinct. After the



departure of the count, the countess gave birth to a son, whose career

was famous in the history of France under the reign of Francois I. He



was saved by his daughter, the celebrated Diane de Poitiers, the

illegitimate great-granddaughter of Louis XI., who became the



illegitimate wife, the belovedmistress of Henri II.--for bastardy and

love were hereditary in that family of nobles.



End



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