Vicomtesse de Beauséant—Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto

The relationship between the Vicomtesse de Beauséant and the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto is a love affair broken by the Marquis’s decision to marry another woman and by the social world that turns the Vicomtesse’s loss into a spectacle. Its final movement is not reconciliation: at the height of a crowded ball, she entrusts Eugène de Rastignac with recovering her letters, then burns them and resolves to withdraw from Paris.

The Marriage and the News

The rupture becomes explicit when Delphine de Nucingen tells Rastignac that the Marquis and the Rochefides have kept their plans secret. The king is to sign the marriage contract the following day, while the Vicomtesse knows nothing of it. Her ball cannot be postponed, and the Marquis will not attend. The news turns an intimate betrayal into a public crisis before the person most affected has even been informed.

Delphine expects Paris to descend on the ball to witness the Vicomtesse’s fall. Rastignac answers that society laughs at baseness while conniving at it, and fears that the shock will kill his cousin. Delphine dismisses that prediction: she says that the Vicomtesse is not the sort of woman to be destroyed in that way, and declares that she too will attend, ostensibly for Rastignac’s sake. The exchange sets the relationship’s private grief against a crowd already anticipating its entertainment.

The Farewell Ball

Five hundred carriages illuminate the darkness around the Hotel de Beauseant, while gendarmes stand at its brightly lit gateway. The crowd arrives eagerly to see the great lady at the moment of her fall. The ground-floor rooms are full when Delphine and Rastignac appear, and the gathering is compared to the court’s rush to visit an unfortunate princess in the time of Louis XIV. Ministers, ambassadors, decorated men of the court, and Paris’s most beautiful women fill the salons, where the Vicomtesse moves with queenly composure. The orchestra’s music rises beneath the palace’s golden ceiling, lending brilliance to a house described as desolate for its queen.

The Marquis is absent, but his absence governs the occasion. The ball continues amid the city’s curiosity, turning the Vicomtesse’s private catastrophe into an elaborate social performance. She appears to rise above her pain, yet the splendor around her only sharpens the contrast between the crowded rooms and the relationship that has ended.

Letters Returned

The Vicomtesse asks Rastignac to go to the Marquis with her footman Jacques and request the return of her letters. She hopes that the Marquis will surrender them all. The request gives Rastignac a precise task within the larger farewell: the remains of the love affair are to be recovered before she leaves the world of Parisian society.

Rastignac finds the Marquis at the Hotel Rochefide, as he expected, and accompanies him to his house. The Marquis hands over a casket, saying that the letters are all there. He seems close to speaking about the ball or the Vicomtesse; perhaps he is even close to confessing that he is in despair and believes his marriage a fatal mistake. But pride prevails. He keeps those feelings secret, asks Rastignac not even to mention his name to her, and turns away after grasping Rastignac’s hand sadly and affectionately. The encounter offers no reversal of the marriage decision, only a glimpse of feeling withheld at the moment when it might have mattered.

Burning the Past and Leaving Paris

Back at the Hotel Beauseant, Rastignac waits in the Vicomtesse’s room. Signs of preparations for a journey are already there. When she enters, she sees the casket; Rastignac sees the tears in her raised eyes and the trembling fingers of her other hand. Then she takes the casket and puts it into the fire. The act makes the return of the letters more than a practical arrangement: the private record of the affair is destroyed, while the Marquis remains absent from her farewell.

The Vicomtesse says that the guests are dancing and that they arrived early, but that death will take a long time in coming. She silences Rastignac with a finger to his lips and tells him she will never see Paris again. At five o’clock that morning she will set out for the remotest part of Normandy, intending to bury herself there. Since three that afternoon she has been signing documents and putting her affairs in order, with little time for arrangements and no one she could send. The relationship ends, then, not with a public confrontation or a return to the Marquis, but with the burning of its letters and the Vicomtesse’s planned departure into retirement.