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 Need it be said that the servants had all withdrawn, that the doors had been shut and the portieres pulled?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 man—think of Richelieu: a letter informs him that his benefactor Concini will be murdered the next morning at ten, and he sleeps until noon!—when that phenomenon occurs in a young man, say Pitt or Napoleon, then he is a monster. I myself became that monstrosity at a very early age, and all thanks to a woman.”

“I would have thought,” said Madame de Montcornet, with a smile, “that we women unmade many more politicians than we made.”

“The monster of which I speak is a monster only because he resists you,” replied de Marsay, archly bowing his head.

“If this is to be a tale of amorous adventure,” said the Baronne de Nucingen, “may I ask that it not be interrupted by incidental reflections?”

“Reflection has no place in such things!” cried Joseph Bridau.

“I was seventeen years old,” de Marsay resumed. “The Restoration was beginning in earnest, and my old friends will remember the impetuous young hothead I was in those days. I was in love for the first time, and, I can say this today, I was one of the prettiest young men in Paris. I had youth, beauty, two advantages conferred by chance, and of which we are as proud as if they were hard-won. I will hold my tongue concerning the others. Like all young men, I loved a woman six years older than I. None of you,” he said, glancing around the table, “can guess her name nor recognize her. Only Ronquerolles, at the time, saw through my secret; he kept it well. I would have feared his smile, but he has left us,” said the minister, looking around him.

“He declined the invitation to supper,” said Madame de Sérizy.

“For six months, possessed by my love, unable to grasp that my passion was becoming my master, I gave myself over to those charming idolatries that are both the triumph and the fragile joy of youth. I kept her old gloves, I drank an infusion of the flowers she had worn, I rose at night to go and gaze up at her windows. My head grew light on inhaling the perfume she had adopted. I was a thousand leagues from the realization that every woman is a stove with a marble top.”

“Oh! Spare us your horrible judgments, won’t you?” said Madame de Camps with a smile.

“I believe I would have poured withering scorn on any philosopher who published that terrible, profoundly true thought,” de Marsay went on. “You all know too well what’s what for me to say anything more of it. Those few words will remind you of your own follies. A grande dame if ever there was one, and a childless widow—oh! nothing was missing!—my idol closeted herself away to stitch a mark into my linens with her hair; in short, she answered my follies with follies of her own. And how not to believe in passion, when it is vouchsafed by folly? We devoted our every thought to concealing so perfect and so beautiful a love from the eyes of the world, and we succeeded. Oh, what charms did our escapades not possess? Of her I will tell you nothing: Perfect back then, still today she is considered one of the most beautiful women of Paris, but in those days people would have signed their own death warrant for one glance from her. Her fortune was still quite sufficient for a woman worshipped and in love, but scarcely suited to her name, now that the Restoration had granted it a new luster. Things being as they were, I was too full of myself to think of being wary. Although my jealousy had the strength of a hundred and twenty Othellos, that redoubtable sentiment slumbered inside me, like the gold in a nugget. I would have ordered my servant to beat me with a stick had I been so ignoble as to doubt the purity of that angel, so frail and so strong, so blond and so naïve, pure, artless, whose adorably docile blue eyes let my gaze plunge straight into them, all the way to her heart.