De Marsay was not impulsive. Any other young man would have obeyed his

impulse to obtain at once some information about a girl who realized so

fully the most luminous ideas ever expressed upon women in the poetry

of the East; but, too experienced to compromise his good fortune, he had

told his coachman to continue along the Rue Saint Lazare and carry him

back to his house. The next day, his confidential valet, Laurent by

name, as cunning a fellow as the Frontin of the old comedy, waited in

the vicinity of the house inhabited by the unknown for the hour at which

letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and

hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police

officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of

an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the

postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed

by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a

person to whom he had to deliver a parcel, and consulted the postman.

Deceived at first by appearances, this personage, so picturesque in the

midst of Parisian civilization, informed him that the house in which

the girl with the golden eyes dwelt belonged to Don Hijos, Marquis de

San-Real, grandee of Spain. Naturally, it was not with the Marquis that

the Auvergnat was concerned.

“My parcel,” he said, “is for the marquise.”

“She is away,” replied the postman. “Her letters are forwarded to

London.”

“Then the marquise is not a young girl who...?”

“Ah!” said the postman, interrupting the _valet de chambre_ and

observing him attentively, “you are as much a porter as I’m...”

Laurent chinked some pieces of gold before the functionary, who began to

smile.

“Come, here’s the name of your quarry,” he said, taking from his leather

wallet a letter bearing a London stamp, upon which the address, “To

Mademoiselle Paquita Valdes, Rue Saint Lazare, Hotel San-Real, Paris,”

was written in long, fine characters, which spoke of a woman’s hand.

“Could you tap a bottle of Chablis, with a few dozen oysters, and a

_filet saute_ with mushrooms to follow it?” said Laurent, who wished to

win the postman’s valuable friendship.

“At half-past nine, when my round is finished---- Where?”

“At the corner of the Rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin and the Rue

Neuve-des-Mathurins, at the _Puits sans Vin_,” said Laurent.

“Hark ye, my friend,” said the postman, when he rejoined the valet an

hour after this encounter, “if your master is in love with the girl, he

is in for a famous task. I doubt you’ll not succeed in seeing her. In

the ten years that I’ve been postman in Paris, I have seen plenty of

different kinds of doors! But I can tell you, and no fear of being

called a liar by any of my comrades, there never was a door so

mysterious as M. de San-Real’s. No one can get into the house without

the Lord knows what counter-word; and, notice, it has been selected on

purpose between a courtyard and a garden to avoid any communication with

other houses. The porter is an old Spaniard, who never speaks a word

of French, but peers at people as Vidocq might, to see if they are not

thieves. If a lover, a thief, or you--I make no comparisons--could get

the better of this first wicket, well, in the first hall, which is shut

by a glazed door, you would run across a butler surrounded by lackeys,

an old joker more savage and surly even than the porter. If any one

gets past the porter’s lodge, my butler comes out, waits for you at the

entrance, and puts you through a cross-examination like a criminal. That

has happened to me, a mere postman. He took me for an eavesdropper in

disguise, he said, laughing at his nonsense. As for the servants, don’t

hope to get aught out of them; I think they are mutes, no one in the

neighborhood knows the color of their speech; I don’t know what wages

they can pay them to keep them from talk and drink; the fact is, they

are not to be got at, whether because they are afraid of being shot, or

that they have some enormous sum to lose in the case of an indiscretion.

If your master is fond enough of Mademoiselle Paquita Valdes to surmount

all these obstacles, he certainly won’t triumph over Dona Concha

Marialva, the duenna who accompanies her and would put her under her

petticoats sooner than leave her. The two women look as if they were

sewn to one another.”

“All that you say, worthy postman,” went on Laurent, after having drunk

off his wine, “confirms me in what I have learned before. Upon my word,

I thought they were making fun of me! The fruiterer opposite told me

that of nights they let loose dogs whose food is hung up on stakes just

out of their reach. These cursed animals think, therefore, that any one

likely to come in has designs on their victuals, and would tear one to

pieces. You will tell me one might throw them down pieces, but it seems

they have been trained to touch nothing except from the hand of the

porter.”

“The porter of the Baron de Nucingen, whose garden joins at the top that

of the Hotel San-Real, told me the same thing,” replied the postman.

“Good! my master knows him,” said Laurent, to himself. “Do you know,”

he went on, leering at the postman, “I serve a master who is a rare

man, and if he took it into his head to kiss the sole of the foot of an

empress, she would have to give in to him. If he had need of you, which

is what I wish for you, for he is generous, could one count on you?”

“Lord, Monsieur Laurent, my name is Moinot. My name is written exactly

like _Moineau_, magpie: M-o-i-n-o-t, Moinot.”

“Exactly,” said Laurent.

“I live at No. 11, Rue des Trois Freres, on the fifth floor,” went on

Moinot; “I have a wife and four children. If what you want of me doesn’t

transgress the limits of my conscience and my official duties, you

understand! I am your man.”

“You are an honest fellow,” said Laurent, shaking his hand....

“Paquita Valdes is, no doubt, the mistress of the Marquis de San-Real,

the friend of King Ferdinand. Only an old Spanish mummy of eighty years

is capable of taking such precautions,” said Henri, when his _valet de

chambre_ had related the result of his researches.

“Monsieur,” said Laurent, “unless he takes a balloon no one can get into

that hotel.”

“You are a fool! Is it necessary to get into the hotel to have Paquita,

when Paquita can get out of it?”

“But, sir, the duenna?”

“We will shut her up for a day or two, your duenna.”

“So, we shall have Paquita!” said Laurent, rubbing his hands.

“Rascal!” answered Henri, “I shall condemn you to the Concha, if you

carry your impudence so far as to speak so of a woman before she has

become mine.... Turn your thoughts to dressing me, I am going out.”

Henri remained for a moment plunged in joyous reflections. Let us say it

to the praise of women, he obtained all those whom he deigned to desire.

And what could one think of a woman, having no lover, who should

have known how to resist a young man armed with beauty which is the

intelligence of the body, with intelligence which is a grace of the

soul, armed with moral force and fortune, which are the only two real

powers? Yet, in triumphing with such ease, De Marsay was bound to grow

weary of his triumphs; thus, for about two years he had grown very weary

indeed. And diving deep into the sea of pleasures he brought back more

grit than pearls. Thus had he come, like potentates, to implore of

Chance some obstacle to surmount, some enterprise which should ask the

employment of his dormant moral and physical strength. Although Paquita

Valdes presented him with a marvelous concentration of perfections which

he had only yet enjoyed in detail, the attraction of passion was almost

_nil_ with him. Constant satiety had weakened in his heart the sentiment

of love. Like old men and people disillusioned, he had no longer

anything but extravagant caprices, ruinous tastes, fantasies, which,

once satisfied, left no pleasant memory in his heart. Amongst young

people love is the finest of the emotions, it makes the life of the soul

blossom, it nourishes by its solar power the finest inspirations and

their great thoughts; the first fruits in all things have a delicious

savor. Amongst men love becomes a passion; strength leads to abuse.

Amongst old men it turns to vice; impotence tends to extremes. Henri was

at once an old man, a man, and a youth. To afford him the feelings of

a real love, he needed like Lovelace, a Clarissa Harlowe. Without

the magic lustre of that unattainable pearl he could only have either

passions rendered acute by some Parisian vanity, or set determinations

with himself to bring such and such a woman to such and such a point of

corruption, or else adventures which stimulated his curiosity.

The report of Laurent, his _valet de chambre_ had just given an enormous

value to the girl with the golden eyes. It was a question of doing

battle with some secret enemy who seemed as dangerous as he was cunning;

and to carry off the victory, all the forces which Henri could dispose

of would be useful. He was about to play in that eternal old comedy

which will be always fresh, and the characters in which are an old man,

a young girl, and a lover: Don Hijos, Paquita, De Marsay. If Laurent was

the equal of Figaro, the duenna seemed incorruptible. Thus, the living

play was supplied by Chance with a stronger plot than it had ever been

by dramatic author! But then is not Chance too, a man of genius?

“It must be a cautious game,” said Henri, to himself.

“Well,” said Paul de Manerville, as he entered the room. “How are we

getting on? I have come to breakfast with you.”

“So be it,” said Henri. “You won’t be shocked if I make my toilette

before you?”

“How absurd!”

“We take so many things from the English just now that we might well

become as great prudes and hypocrites as themselves,” said Henri.

Laurent had set before his master such a quantity of utensils, so many

different articles of such elegance, that Paul could not refrain from

saying:

“But you will take a couple of hours over that?”

“No!” said Henri, “two hours and a half.”

“Well, then, since we are by ourselves, and can say what we like,

explain to me why a man as superior as yourself--for you are

superior--should affect to exaggerate a foppery which cannot be

natural. Why spend two hours and a half in adorning yourself, when it is

sufficient to spend a quarter of an hour in your bath, to do your hair

in two minutes, and to dress! There, tell me your system.”

“I must be very fond of you, my good dunce, to confide such high

thoughts to you,” said the young man, who was at that moment having his

feet rubbed with a soft brush lathered with English soap.

“Have I not the most devoted attachment to you,” replied Paul de

Manerville, “and do I not like you because I know your superiority?...”

“You must have noticed, if you are in the least capable of observing any

moral fact, that women love fops,” went on De Marsay, without replying

in any way to Paul’s declaration except by a look. “Do you know why

women love fops? My friend, fops are the only men who take care of

themselves. Now, to take excessive care of oneself, does it not imply

that one takes care in oneself of what belongs to another? The man who

does not belong to himself is precisely the man on whom women are keen.

Love is essentially a thief. I say nothing about that excess of niceness

to which they are so devoted. Do you know of any woman who has had a

passion for a sloven, even if he were a remarkable man? If such a fact

has occurred, we must put it to the account of those morbid affections

of the breeding woman, mad fancies which float through the minds of

everybody. On the other hand, I have seen most remarkable people left in

the lurch because of their carelessness. A fop, who is concerned about

his person, is concerned with folly, with petty things. And what is a

woman? A petty thing, a bundle of follies. With two words said to the

winds, can you not make her busy for four hours? She is sure that the

fop will be occupied with her, seeing that he has no mind for great

things. She will never be neglected for glory, ambition, politics,

art--those prostitutes who for her are rivals. Then fops have the

courage to cover themselves with ridicule in order to please a woman,

and her heart is full of gratitude towards the man who is ridiculous for

love. In fine, a fop can be no fop unless he is right in being one. It

is women who bestow that rank. The fop is love’s colonel; he has his

victories, his regiment of women at his command. My dear fellow, in

Paris everything is known, and a man cannot be a fop there _gratis_.

You, who have only one woman, and who, perhaps, are right to have but

one, try to act the fop!... You will not even become ridiculous, you

will be dead. You will become a foregone conclusion, one of those men

condemned inevitably to do one and the same thing. You will come to

signify _folly_ as inseparably as M. de La Fayette signifies _America_;

M. de Talleyrand, _diplomacy_; Desaugiers, _song_; M. de Segur,

_romance_. If they once forsake their own line people no longer attach

any value to what they do. So, foppery, my friend Paul, is the sign of

an incontestable power over the female folk. A man who is loved by many

women passes for having superior qualities, and then, poor fellow, it

is a question who shall have him! But do you think it is nothing to have

the right of going into a drawing-room, of looking down at people from

over your cravat, or through your eye-glass, and of despising the most

superior of men should he wear an old-fashioned waistcoat?... Laurent,

you are hurting me! After breakfast, Paul, we will go to the Tuileries

and see the adorable girl with the golden eyes.”

When, after making an excellent meal, the two young men had traversed

the Terrasse de Feuillants and the broad walk of the Tuileries, they

nowhere discovered the sublime Paquita Valdes, on whose account some

fifty of the most elegant young men in Paris where to be seen, all

scented, with their high scarfs, spurred and booted, riding, walking,

talking, laughing, and damning themselves mightily.

“It’s a white Mass,” said Henri; “but I have the most excellent idea in

the world. This girl receives letters from London. The postman must be

bought or made drunk, a letter opened, read of course, and a love-letter

slipped in before it is sealed up again. The old tyrant, _crudel

tirano_, is certain to know the person who writes the letters from

London, and has ceased to be suspicious of them.”

The day after, De Marsay came again to walk on the Terrasse des

Feuillants, and saw Paquita Valdes; already passion had embellished her

for him. Seriously, he was wild for those eyes, whose rays seemed akin

to those which the sun emits, and whose ardor set the seal upon that

of her perfect body, in which all was delight. De Marsay was on fire to

brush the dress of this enchanting girl as they passed one another in

their walk; but his attempts were always vain. But at one moment, when

he had repassed Paquita and the duenna, in order to find himself on the

same side as the girl of the golden eyes, when he returned, Paquita,

no less impatient, came forward hurriedly, and De Marsay felt his

hand pressed by her in a fashion at once so swift and so passionately

significant that it was as though he had received the emotions surged up

in his heart. When the two lovers glanced at one another, Paquita seemed

ashamed, she dropped her eyes lest she should meet the eyes of Henri,

but her gaze sank lower to fasten on the feet and form of him whom

women, before the Revolution, called _their conqueror_.

“I am determined to make this girl my mistress,” said Henri to himself.

As he followed her along the terrace, in the direction of the Place

Louis XV., he caught sight of the aged Marquis de San-Real, who was

walking on the arm of his valet, stepping with all the precautions due

to gout and decrepitude. Dona Concha, who distrusted Henri, made Paquita

pass between herself and the old man.

“Oh, for you,” said De Marsay to himself, casting a glance of disdain

upon the duenna, “if one cannot make you capitulate, with a little opium

one can make you sleep. We know mythology and the fable of Argus.”

Before entering the carriage, the golden-eyed girl exchanged certain

glances with her lover, of which the meaning was unmistakable and which

enchanted Henri, but one of them was surprised by the duenna; she said

a few rapid words to Paquita, who threw herself into the _coupe_ with

an air of desperation. For some days Paquita did not appear in the

Tuileries. Laurent, who by his master’s orders was on watch by the

hotel, learned from the neighbors that neither the two women nor the

aged marquis had been abroad since the day upon which the duenna had

surprised a glance between the young girl in her charge and Henri. The

bond, so flimsy withal, which united the two lovers was already severed.

Some days later, none knew by what means, De Marsay had attained his

end; he had a seal and wax, exactly resembling the seal and wax affixed

to the letters sent to Mademoiselle Valdes from London; paper similar

to that which her correspondent used; moreover, all the implements and

stamps necessary to affix the French and English postmarks.

He wrote the following letter, to which he gave all the appearances of a

letter sent from London:--

“MY DEAR PAQUITA,--I shall not try to paint to you in words the

passion with which you have inspired me. If, to my happiness, you

reciprocate it, understand that I have found a means of

corresponding with you. My name is Adolphe de Gouges, and I live

at No. 54 Rue de l’Universite. If you are too closely watched to

be able to write to me, if you have neither pen nor paper, I shall

understand it by your silence. If then, to-morrow, you have not,

between eight o’clock in the morning and ten o’clock in the

evening, thrown a letter over the wall of your garden into that of

the Baron de Nucingen, where it will be waited for during the

whole of the day, a man, who is entirely devoted to me, will let

down two flasks by a string over your wall at ten o’clock the next

morning. Be walking there at that hour. One of the two flasks will

contain opium to send your Argus to sleep; it will be sufficient

to employ six drops; the other will contain ink. The flask of ink

is of cut glass; the other is plain. Both are of such a size as

can easily be concealed within your bosom. All that I have already

done, in order to be able to correspond with you, should tell you

how greatly I love you. Should you have any doubt of it, I will

confess to you, that to obtain an interview of one hour with you I

would give my life.”

“At least they believe that, poor creatures!” said De Marsay; “but they

are right. What should we think of a woman who refused to be beguiled by

a love-letter accompanied by such convincing accessories?”

This letter was delivered by Master Moinot, postman, on the following

day, about eight o’clock in the morning, to the porter of the Hotel

San-Real.

In order to be nearer to the field of action, De Marsay went and

breakfasted with Paul, who lived in the Rue de la Pepiniere. At

two o’clock, just as the two friends were laughingly discussing the

discomfiture of a young man who had attempted to lead the life of

fashion without a settled income, and were devising an end for him,

Henri’s coachman came to seek his master at Paul’s house, and presented

to him a mysterious personage who insisted on speaking himself with his

master.

This individual was a mulatto, who would assuredly have given Talma a

model for the part of Othello, if he had come across him. Never did any

African face better express the grand vengefulness, the ready suspicion,

the promptitude in the execution of a thought, the strength of the Moor,

and his childish lack of reflection. His black eyes had the fixity of

the eyes of a bird of prey, and they were framed, like a vulture’s, by

a bluish membrane devoid of lashes. His forehead, low and narrow, had

something menacing. Evidently, this man was under the yoke of some

single and unique thought. His sinewy arm did not belong to him.

He was followed by a man whom the imaginations of all folk, from those

who shiver in Greenland to those who sweat in the tropics, would paint

in the single phrase: _He was an unfortunate man_. From this phrase,

everybody will conceive him according to the special ideas of each

country. But who can best imagine his face--white and wrinkled, red at

the extremities, and his long beard. Who will see his lean and yellow

scarf, his greasy shirt-collar, his battered hat, his green frock coat,

his deplorable trousers, his dilapidated waistcoat, his imitation gold

pin, and battered shoes, the strings of which were plastered in mud? Who

will see all that but the Parisian? The unfortunate man of Paris is the

unfortunate man _in toto_, for he has still enough mirth to know the

extent of his misfortune. The mulatto was like an executioner of Louis

XI. leading a man to the gallows.

“Who has hunted us out these two extraordinary creatures?” said Henri.

“Faith! there is one of them who makes me shudder,” replied Paul.

“Who are you--you fellow who look the most like a Christian of the two?”

said Henri, looking at the unfortunate man.

The mulatto stood with his eyes fixed upon the two young men, like a man

who understood nothing, and who sought no less to divine something from

the gestures and movements of the lips.

“I am a public scribe and interpreter; I live at the Palais de Justice,

and am named Poincet.”

“Good!... and this one?” said Henri to Poincet, looking towards the

mulatto.

“I do not know; he only speaks a sort of Spanish _patois_, and he has

brought me here to make himself understood by you.”

The mulatto drew from his pocket the letter which Henri had written to

Paquita and handed it to him. Henri threw it in the fire.

“Ah--so--the game is beginning,” said Henri to himself. “Paul, leave us

alone for a moment.”

“I translated this letter for him,” went on the interpreter, when they

were alone. “When it was translated, he was in some place which I don’t

remember. Then he came back to look for me, and promised me two _louis_

to fetch him here.”

“What have you to say to me, nigger?” asked Henri.

“I did not translate _nigger_,” said the interpreter, waiting for the

mulatto’s reply....

“He said, sir,” went on the interpreter, after having listened to the

unknown, “that you must be at half-past ten to-morrow night on the

boulevard Montmartre, near the cafe. You will see a carriage there, in

which you must take your place, saying to the man, who will wait to

open the door for you, the word _cortejo_--a Spanish word, which means

_lover_,” added Poincet, casting a glance of congratulation upon Henri.

“Good.”

The mulatto was about to bestow the two _louis_, but De Marsay would not

permit it, and himself rewarded the interpreter. As he was paying him,

the mulatto began to speak.

“What is he saying?”

“He is warning me,” replied the unfortunate, “that if I commit a single

indiscretion he will strangle me. He speaks fair and he looks remarkably

as if he were capable of carrying out his threat.”

“I am sure of it,” answered Henri; “he would keep his word.”

“He says, as well,” replied the interpreter, “that the person from whom

he is sent implores you, for your sake and for hers, to act with the

greatest prudence, because the daggers which are raised above your

head would strike your heart before any human power could save you from

them.”

“He said that? So much the better, it will be more amusing. You can come

in now, Paul,” he cried to his friend.

The mulatto, who had not ceased to gaze at the lover of Paquita Valdes

with magnetic attention, went away, followed by the interpreter.

“Well, at last I have an adventure which is entirely romantic,” said

Henri, when Paul returned. “After having shared in a certain number I

have finished by finding in Paris an intrigue accompanied by serious

accidents, by grave perils. The deuce! what courage danger gives a

woman! To torment a woman, to try and contradict her--doesn’t it give

her the right and the courage to scale in one moment obstacles which it

would take her years to surmount of herself? Pretty creature, jump then!

To die? Poor child! Daggers? Oh, imagination of women! They cannot help

trying to find authority for their little jests. Besides, can one think

of it, Paquita? Can one think of it, my child? The devil take me, now

that I know this beautiful girl, this masterpiece of nature, is mine,

the adventure has lost its charm.”

For all his light words, the youth in Henri had reappeared. In order

to live until the morrow without too much pain, he had recourse to

exorbitant pleasure; he played, dined, supped with his friends; he drank

like a fish, ate like a German, and won ten or twelve thousand francs.

He left the Rocher de Cancale at two o’clock in the morning, slept like

a child, awoke the next morning fresh and rosy, and dressed to go to

the Tuileries, with the intention of taking a ride, after having seen

Paquita, in order to get himself an appetite and dine the better, and so

kill the time.

At the hour mentioned Henri was on the boulevard, saw the carriage,

and gave the counter-word to a man who looked to him like the mulatto.

Hearing the word, the man opened the door and quickly let down the step.

Henri was so rapidly carried through Paris, and his thoughts left him so

little capacity to pay attention to the streets through which he passed,

that he did not know where the carriage stopped. The mulatto let him

into a house, the staircase of which was quite close to the entrance.

This staircase was dark, as was also the landing upon which Henri

was obliged to wait while the mulatto was opening the door of a damp

apartment, fetid and unlit, the chambers of which, barely illuminated

by the candle which his guide found in the ante-chamber, seemed to him

empty and ill furnished, like those of a house the inhabitants of which

are away. He recognized the sensation which he had experienced from the

perusal of one of those romances of Anne Radcliffe, in which the hero

traverses the cold, sombre, and uninhabited saloons of some sad and

desert spot.

At last the mulatto opened the door of a _salon_. The condition of

the old furniture and the dilapidated curtains with which the room was

adorned gave it the air of the reception-room of a house of ill fame.

There was the same pretension to elegance, and the same collection of

things in bad taste, of dust and dirt. Upon a sofa covered with red

Utrecht velvet, by the side of a smoking hearth, the fire of which was

buried in ashes, sat an old, poorly dressed woman, her head capped by

one of those turbans which English women of a certain age have invented

and which would have a mighty success in China, where the artist’s ideal

is the monstrous.

The room, the old woman, the cold hearth, all would have chilled love to

death had not Paquita been there, upon an ottoman, in a loose voluptuous

wrapper, free to scatter her gaze of gold and flame, free to show her

arched foot, free of her luminous movements. This first interview

was what every _rendezvous_ must be between persons of passionate

disposition, who have stepped over a wide distance quickly, who desire

each other ardently, and who, nevertheless, do not know each other. It

is impossible that at first there should not occur certain discordant

notes in the situation, which is embarrassing until the moment when two

souls find themselves in unison.

If desire gives a man boldness and disposes him to lay restraint aside,

the mistress, under pain of ceasing to be woman, however great may be

her love, is afraid of arriving at the end so promptly, and face to face

with the necessity of giving herself, which to many women is equivalent

to a fall into an abyss, at the bottom of which they know not what they

shall find. The involuntary coldness of the woman contrasts with her

confessed passion, and necessarily reacts upon the most passionate

lover. Thus ideas, which often float around souls like vapors, determine

in them a sort of temporary malady. In the sweet journey which two

beings undertake through the fair domains of love, this moment is like

a waste land to be traversed, a land without a tree, alternatively damp

and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed by marshes, which leads to

smiling groves clad with roses, where Love and his retinue of pleasures

disport themselves on carpets of soft verdure. Often the witty man

finds himself afflicted with a foolish laugh which is his only answer to

everything; his wit is, as it were, suffocated beneath the icy pressure

of his desires. It would not be impossible for two beings of equal

beauty, intelligence, and passion to utter at first nothing but the

most silly commonplaces, until chance, a word, the tremor of a certain

glance, the communication of a spark, should have brought them to the

happy transition which leads to that flowery way in which one does not

walk, but where one sways and at the same time does not lapse.

Such a state of mind is always in proportion with the violence of the

feeling. Two creatures who love one another weakly feel nothing similar.

The effect of this crisis can even be compared with that which is

produced by the glow of a clear sky. Nature, at the first view, appears

to be covered with a gauze veil, the azure of the firmament seems black,

the intensity of light is like darkness. With Henri, as with the Spanish

girl, there was an equal intensity of feeling; and that law of statics,

in virtue of which two identical forces cancel each other, might have

been true also in the moral order. And the embarrassment of the moment

was singularly increased by the presence of the old hag. Love takes

pleasure or fright at all, all has meaning for it, everything is an omen

of happiness or sorrow for it.

This decrepit woman was there like a suggestion of catastrophe, and

represented the horrid fish’s tail with which the allegorical geniuses

of Greece have terminated their chimeras and sirens, whose figures, like

all passions, are so seductive, so deceptive.

Although Henri was not a free-thinker--the phrase is always a

mockery--but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as a man can

be without faith, the conjunction struck him. Moreover, the strongest

men are naturally the most impressionable, and consequently the most

superstitious, if, indeed, one may call superstition the prejudice of

the first thoughts, which, without doubt, is the appreciation of the

result in causes hidden to other eyes but perceptible to their own.

The Spanish girl profited by this moment of stupefaction to let herself

fall into the ecstasy of that infinite adoration which seizes the heart

of a woman, when she truly loves and finds herself in the presence of

an idol for whom she has vainly longed. Her eyes were all joy, all

happiness, and sparks flew from them. She was under the charm, and

fearlessly intoxicated herself with a felicity of which she had dreamed

long. She seemed then so marvelously beautiful to Henri, that all this

phantasmagoria of rags and old age, of worn red drapery and of the green

mats in front of the armchairs, the ill-washed red tiles, all this sick

and dilapidated luxury, disappeared.

The room seemed lit up; and it was only through a cloud that one could

see the fearful harpy fixed and dumb on her red sofa, her yellow eyes

betraying the servile sentiments, inspired by misfortune, or caused by

some vice beneath whose servitude one has fallen as beneath a tyrant who

brutalizes one with the flagellations of his despotism. Her eyes had the

cold glitter of a caged tiger, knowing his impotence and being compelled

to swallow his rage of destruction.

“Who is that woman?” said Henri to Paquita.

But Paquita did not answer. She made a sign that she understood no

French, and asked Henri if he spoke English.

De Marsay repeated his question in English.

“She is the only woman in whom I can confide, although she has sold me

already,” said Paquita, tranquilly. “My dear Adolphe, she is my mother,

a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, little enough of which

remains to-day. She only speaks her native tongue.”

The attitude of this woman and her eagerness to guess from the gestures

of her daughter and Henri what was passing between them, were suddenly

explained to the young man; and this explanation put him at his ease.

“Paquita,” he said, “are we never to be free then?”

“Never,” she said, with an air of sadness. “Even now we have but a few

days before us.”

She lowered her eyes, looked at and counted with her right hand on the

fingers of her left, revealing so the most beautiful hands which Henri

had ever seen.

“One, two, three----”

She counted up to twelve.

“Yes,” she said, “we have twelve days.”

“And after?”

“After,” she said, showing the absorption of a weak woman before the

executioner’s axe, and slain in advance, as it were, by a fear which

stripped her of that magnificent energy which Nature seemed to have

bestowed upon her only to aggrandize pleasure and convert the most

vulgar delights into endless poems. “After----” she repeated. Her eyes

took a fixed stare; she seemed to contemplate a threatening object far

away.

“I do not know,” she said.

“This girl is mad,” said Henri to himself, falling into strange

reflections.

Paquita appeared to him occupied by something which was not himself,

like a woman constrained equally by remorse and passion. Perhaps she had

in her heart another love which she alternately remembered and forgot.

In a moment Henri was assailed by a thousand contradictory thoughts.

This girl became a mystery for him; but as he contemplated her with the

scientific attention of the _blase_ man, famished for new pleasures,

like that Eastern king who asked that a pleasure should be created

for him,--a horrible thirst with which great souls are seized,--Henri

recognized in Paquita the richest organization that Nature had ever

deigned to compose for love. The presumptive play of this machinery,

setting aside the soul, would have frightened any other man than Henri;

but he was fascinated by that rich harvest of promised pleasures, by

that constant variety in happiness, the dream of every man, and the

desire of every loving woman too. He was infuriated by the infinite

rendered palpable, and transported into the most excessive raptures

of which the creature is capable. All that he saw in this girl more

distinctly than he had yet seen it, for she let herself be viewed

complacently, happy to be admired. The admiration of De Marsay became

a secret fury, and he unveiled her completely, throwing a glance at her

which the Spaniard understood as though she had been used to receive

such.

“If you are not to be mine, mine only, I will kill you!” he cried.

Hearing this speech, Paquita covered her face in her hands, and cried

naively:

“Holy Virgin! What have I brought upon myself?”

She rose, flung herself down upon the red sofa, and buried her head in

the rags which covered the bosom of her mother, and wept there. The

old woman received her daughter without issuing from her state of

immobility, or displaying any emotion. The mother possessed in the

highest degree that gravity of savage races, the impassiveness of a

statue upon which all remarks are lost. Did she or did she not love her

daughter? Beneath that mask every human emotion might brood--good and

evil; and from this creature all might be expected. Her gaze passed

slowly from her daughter’s beautiful hair, which covered her like a

mantle, to the face of Henri, which she considered with an indescribable

curiosity.

She seemed to ask by what fatality he was there, from what caprice

Nature had made so seductive a man.

“These women are making sport of me,” said Henri to himself.

At that moment Paquita raised her head, cast at him one of those looks

which reach the very soul and consume it. So beautiful seemed she that

he swore he would possess such a treasure of beauty.

“My Paquita! Be mine!”

“Wouldst thou kill me?” she said fearfully, palpitating and anxious, but

drawn towards him by an inexplicable force.

“Kill thee--I!” he said, smiling.

Paquita uttered a cry of alarm, said a word to the old woman, who

authoritatively seized Henri’s hand and that of her daughter. She gazed

at them for a long time, and then released them, wagging her head in a

fashion horribly significant.

“Be mine--this evening, this moment; follow me, do not leave me! It must

be, Paquita! Dost thou love me? Come!”

In a moment he had poured out a thousand foolish words to her, with the

rapidity of a torrent coursing between the rocks, and repeating the same

sound in a thousand different forms.

“It is the same voice!” said Paquita, in a melancholy voice, which

De Marsay could not overhear, “and the same ardor,” she added. “So be

it--yes,” she said, with an abandonment of passion which no words can

describe. “Yes; but not to-night. To-night Adolphe, I gave too little

opium to La Concha. She might wake up, and I should be lost. At this

moment the whole household believes me to be asleep in my room. In two

days be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. That man is

my foster-father. Cristemio worships me, and would die in torments for

me before they could extract one word against me from him. Farewell,”

she said seizing Henri by the waist and twining round him like a

serpent.

She pressed him on every side at once, lifted her head to his, and

offered him her lips, then snatched a kiss which filled them both with

such a dizziness that it seemed to Henri as though the earth opened; and

Paquita cried: “Enough, depart!” in a voice which told how little

she was mistress of herself. But she clung to him still, still crying

“Depart!” and brought him slowly to the staircase. There the mulatto,

whose white eyes lit up at the sight of Paquita, took the torch from the

hands of his idol, and conducted Henri to the street. He left the light

under the arch, opened the door, put Henri into the carriage, and set

him down on the Boulevard des Italiens with marvelous rapidity. It was

as though the horses had hell-fire in their veins.

The scene was like a dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams

which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural

voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life.

A single kiss had been enough. Never had _rendezvous_ been spent in a

manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of

which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous

divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri’s imagination like some

infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious,

which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet conceived. In

effect, no _rendezvous_ had ever irritated his senses more, revealed

more audacious pleasures, or better aroused love from its centre to

shed itself round him like an atmosphere. There was something sombre,

mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained, and expansive, an intermingling

of the awful and the celestial, of paradise and hell, which made De

Marsay like a drunken man.

He was no longer himself, and he was, withal, great enough to be able to

resist the intoxication of pleasure.

In order to render his conduct intelligible in the catastrophe of this

story, it is needful to explain how his soul had broadened at an age

when young men generally belittle themselves in their relations with

women, or in too much occupation with them. Its growth was due to a

concurrence of secret circumstances, which invested him with a vast and

unsuspected power.

This young man held in his hand a sceptre more powerful than that of

modern kings, almost all of whom are curbed in their least wishes by the

laws. De Marsay exercised the autocratic power of an Oriental despot.

But this power, so stupidly put into execution in Asia by brutish men,

was increased tenfold by its conjunction with European intelligence,

with French wit--the most subtle, the keenest of all intellectual

instruments. Henri could do what he would in the interest of his

pleasures and vanities. This invisible action upon the social world

had invested him with a real, but secret, majesty, without emphasis and

deriving from himself. He had not the opinion which Louis XIV. could

have of himself, but that which the proudest of the Caliphs, the

Pharoahs, the Xerxes, who held themselves to be of divine origin, had

of themselves when they imitated God, and veiled themselves from their

subjects under the pretext that their looks dealt forth death. Thus,

without any remorse at being at once the judge and the accuser, De

Marsay coldly condemned to death the man or the woman who had seriously

offended him. Although often pronounced almost lightly, the verdict

was irrevocable. An error was a misfortune similar to that which a

thunderbolt causes when it falls upon a smiling Parisienne in some

hackney coach, instead of crushing the old coachman who is driving

her to a _rendezvous_. Thus the bitter and profound sarcasm which

distinguished the young man’s conversation usually tended to frighten

people; no one was anxious to put him out. Women are prodigiously fond

of those persons who call themselves pashas, and who are, as it were

accompanied by lions and executioners, and who walk in a panoply of

terror. The result, in the case of such men, is a security of action,

a certitude of power, a pride of gaze, a leonine consciousness, which

makes women realize the type of strength of which they all dream. Such

was De Marsay.

Happy, for the moment, with his future, he grew young and pliable, and

thought of nothing but love as he went to bed. He dreamed of the girl

with the golden eyes, as the young and passionate can dream. His dreams

were monstrous images, unattainable extravagances--full of light,

revealing invisible worlds, yet in a manner always incomplete, for an

intervening veil changes the conditions of vision.

For the next and succeeding day Henri disappeared and no one knew

what had become of him. His power only belonged to him under certain

conditions, and, happily for him, during those two days he was a private

soldier in the service of the demon to whom he owed his talismanic

existence. But at the appointed time, in the evening, he was

waiting--and he had not long to wait--for the carriage. The mulatto

approached Henri, in order to repeat to him in French a phrase which he

seemed to have learned by heart.

“If you wish to come, she told me, you must consent to have your eyes

bandaged.”

And Cristemio produced a white silk handkerchief.

“No!” said Henri, whose omnipotence revolted suddenly.

He tried to leap in. The mulatto made a sign, and the carriage drove

off.

“Yes!” cried De Marsay, furious at the thought of losing a piece of good

fortune which had been promised him.

He saw, moreover, the impossibility of making terms with a slave

whose obedience was as blind as the hangman’s. Nor was it this passive

instrument upon whom his anger could fall.

The mulatto whistled, the carriage returned. Henri got in hastily.

Already a few curious onlookers had assembled like sheep on the

boulevard. Henri was strong; he tried to play the mulatto. When the

carriage started at a gallop he seized his hands, in order to master

him, and retain, by subduing his attendant, the possession of his

faculties, so that he might know whither he was going. It was a vain

attempt. The eyes of the mulatto flashed from the darkness. The fellow

uttered a cry which his fury stifled in his throat, released himself,

threw back De Marsay with a hand like iron, and nailed him, so to

speak, to the bottom of the carriage; then with his free hand, he drew

a triangular dagger, and whistled. The coachman heard the whistle and

stopped. Henri was unarmed, he was forced to yield. He moved his head

towards the handkerchief. The gesture of submission calmed Cristemio,

and he bound his eyes with a respect and care which manifested a sort

of veneration for the person of the man whom his idol loved. But, before

taking this course, he had placed his dagger distrustfully in his side

pocket, and buttoned himself up to the chin.

“That nigger would have killed me!” said De Marsay to himself.

Once more the carriage moved on rapidly. There was one resource still

open to a young man who knew Paris as well as Henri. To know whither

he was going, he had but to collect himself and count, by the number of

gutters crossed, the streets leading from the boulevards by which the

carriage passed, so long as it continued straight along. He could thus

discover into which lateral street it would turn, either towards the

Seine or towards the heights of Montmartre, and guess the name or

position of the street in which his guide should bring him to a halt.

But the violent emotion which his struggle had caused him, the rage into

which his compromised dignity had thrown him, the ideas of vengeance

to which he abandoned himself, the suppositions suggested to him by the

circumstantial care which this girl had taken in order to bring him

to her, all hindered him from the attention, which the blind have,

necessary for the concentration of his intelligence and the perfect

lucidity of his recollection. The journey lasted half an hour. When the

carriage stopped, it was no longer on the street. The mulatto and the

coachman took Henri in their arms, lifted him out, and, putting him

into a sort of litter, conveyed him across a garden. He could smell its

flowers and the perfume peculiar to trees and grass.

The silence which reigned there was so profound that he could

distinguish the noise made by the drops of water falling from the moist

leaves. The two men took him to a staircase, set him on his feet, led

him by his hands through several apartments, and left him in a room

whose atmosphere was perfumed, and the thick carpet of which he could

feel beneath his feet.

A woman’s hand pushed him on to a divan, and untied the handkerchief for

him. Henri saw Paquita before him, but Paquita in all her womanly

and voluptuous glory. The section of the boudoir in which Henri found

himself described a circular line, softly gracious, which was faced

opposite by the other perfectly square half, in the midst of which a

chimney-piece shone of gold and white marble. He had entered by a door

on one side, hidden by a rich tapestried screen, opposite which was a

window. The semicircular portion was adorned with a real Turkish divan,

that is to say, a mattress thrown on the ground, but a mattress as broad

as a bed, a divan fifty feet in circumference, made of white cashmere,

relieved by bows of black and scarlet silk, arranged in panels. The top

of this huge bed was raised several inches by numerous cushions, which

further enriched it by their tasteful comfort. The boudoir was lined

with some red stuff, over which an Indian muslin was stretched, fluted

after the fashion of Corinthian columns, in plaits going in and out, and

bound at the top and bottom by bands of poppy-colored stuff, on which

were designs in black arabesque.

Below the muslin the poppy turned to rose, that amorous color, which

was matched by window-curtains, which were of Indian muslin lined with

rose-colored taffeta, and set off with a fringe of poppy-color and

black. Six silver-gilt arms, each supporting two candles, were attached

to the tapestry at an equal distance, to illuminate the divan. The

ceiling, from the middle of which a lustre of unpolished silver hung,

was of a brilliant whiteness, and the cornice was gilded. The carpet was

like an Oriental shawl; it had the designs and recalled the poetry of

Persia, where the hands of slaves had worked on it. The furniture

was covered in white cashmere, relieved by black and poppy-colored

ornaments. The clock, the candelabra, all were in white marble and gold.

The only table there had a cloth of cashmere. Elegant flower-pots held

roses of every kind, flowers white or red. In fine, the least detail

seemed to have been the object of loving thought. Never had richness

hidden itself more coquettishly to become elegance, to express grace,

to inspire pleasure. Everything there would have warmed the coldest

of beings. The caresses of the tapestry, of which the color changed

according to the direction of one’s gaze, becoming either all white

or all rose, harmonized with the effects of the light shed upon the

diaphanous tissues of the muslin, which produced an appearance of

mistiness. The soul has I know not what attraction towards white, love

delights in red, and the passions are flattered by gold, which has the

power of realizing their caprices. Thus all that man possesses within

him of vague and mysterious, all his inexplicable affinities, were

caressed in their involuntary sympathies. There was in this perfect

harmony a concert of color to which the soul responded with vague and

voluptuous and fluctuating ideas.

It was out of a misty atmosphere, laden with exquisite perfumes, that

Paquita, clad in a white wrapper, her feet bare, orange blossoms in her

black hair, appeared to Henri, knelt before him, adoring him as the god

of this temple, whither he had deigned to come. Although De Marsay

was accustomed to seeing the utmost efforts of Parisian luxury, he was

surprised at the aspect of this shell, like that from which Venus rose

out of the sea. Whether from an effect of contrast between the darkness

from which he issued and the light which bathed his soul, whether from

a comparison which he swiftly made between this scene and that of their

first interview, he experienced one of those delicate sensations which

true poetry gives. Perceiving in the midst of this retreat, which

had been opened to him as by a fairy’s magic wand, the masterpiece of

creation, this girl, whose warmly colored tints, whose soft skin--soft,

but slightly gilded by the shadows, by I know not what vaporous effusion

of love--gleamed as though it reflected the rays of color and light, his

anger, his desire for vengeance, his wounded vanity, all were lost.

Like an eagle darting on his prey, he took her utterly to him, set her

on his knees, and felt with an indescribable intoxication the voluptuous

pressure of this girl, whose richly developed beauties softly enveloped

him.

“Come to me, Paquita!” he said, in a low voice.

“Speak, speak without fear!” she said. “This retreat was built for

love. No sound can escape from it, so greatly was it desired to guard

avariciously the accents and music of the beloved voice. However loud

should be the cries, they would not be heard without these walls. A

person might be murdered, and his moans would be as vain as if he were

in the midst of the great desert.”

“Who has understood jealousy and its needs so well?”

“Never question me as to that,” she answered, untying with a gesture of

wonderful sweetness the young man’s scarf, doubtless in order the better

to behold his neck.

“Yes, there is the neck I love so well!” she said. “Wouldst thou please

me?”

This interrogation, rendered by the accent almost lascivious, drew

De Marsay from the reverie in which he had been plunged by Paquita’s

authoritative refusal to allow him any research as to the unknown being

who hovered like a shadow about them.

“And if I wished to know who reigns here?”

Paquita looked at him trembling.

“It is not I, then?” he said, rising and freeing himself from the girl,

whose head fell backwards. “Where I am, I would be alone.”

“Strike, strike!...” said the poor slave, a prey to terror.

“For what do you take me, then?... Will you answer?”

Paquita got up gently, her eyes full of tears, took a poniard from one

of the two ebony pieces of furniture, and presented it to Henri with a

gesture of submission which would have moved a tiger.

“Give me a feast such as men give when they love,” she said, “and whilst

I sleep, slay me, for I know not how to answer thee. Hearken! I am bound

like some poor beast to a stake; I am amazed that I have been able to

throw a bridge over the abyss which divides us. Intoxicate me, then kill

me! Ah, no, no!” she cried, joining her hands, “do not kill me! I love

life! Life is fair to me! If I am a slave, I am a queen too. I could

beguile you with words, tell you that I love you alone, prove it to you,

profit by my momentary empire to say to you: ‘Take me as one tastes the

perfume of a flower when one passes it in a king’s garden.’ Then, after

having used the cunning eloquence of woman and soared on the wings of

pleasure, after having quenched my thirst, I could have you cast into a

pit, where none could find you, which has been made to gratify vengeance

without having to fear that of the law, a pit full of lime which would

kindle and consume you, until no particle of you were left. You would

stay in my heart, mine forever.”

Henri looked at the girl without trembling, and this fearless gaze

filled her with joy.

“No, I shall not do it! You have fallen into no trap here, but upon the

heart of a woman who adores you, and it is I who will be cast into the

pit.”

“All this appears to me prodigiously strange,” said De Marsay,

considering her. “But you seem to me a good girl, a strange nature; you

are, upon my word of honor, a living riddle, the answer to which is very

difficult to find.”

Paquita understood nothing of what the young man said; she looked at

him gently, opening wide eyes which could never be stupid, so much was

pleasure written in them.

“Come, then, my love,” she said, returning to her first idea, “wouldst

thou please me?”

“I would do all that thou wouldst, and even that thou wouldst not,”

answered De Marsay, with a laugh. He had recovered his foppish ease, as

he took the resolve to let himself go to the climax of his good fortune,

looking neither before nor after. Perhaps he counted, moreover, on his

power and his capacity of a man used to adventures, to dominate this

girl a few hours later and learn all her secrets.

“Well,” said she, “let me arrange you as I would like.”

Paquita went joyously and took from one of the two chests a robe of red

velvet, in which she dressed De Marsay, then adorned his head with a

woman’s bonnet and wrapped a shawl round him. Abandoning herself to

these follies with a child’s innocence, she laughed a convulsive laugh,

and resembled some bird flapping its wings; but he saw nothing beyond.

If it be impossible to paint the unheard-of delights which these two

creatures--made by heaven in a joyous moment--found, it is perhaps

necessary to translate metaphysically the extraordinary and almost

fantastic impressions of the young man. That which persons in the social

position of De Marsay, living as he lived, are best able to recognize is

a girl’s innocence. But, strange phenomenon! The girl of the golden eyes

might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic

union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and

beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been

met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime

being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most

refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses

which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this

girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they

made.

She was an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that Hafiz,

have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of Saadi,

nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy--full of confusion

and stupefaction--which seized the delicious girl when the error in

which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.

“Dead!” she said, “I am dead, Adolphe! Take me away to the world’s

end, to an island where no one knows us. Let there be no traces of our

flight! We should be followed to the gates of hell. God! here is the

day! Escape! Shall I ever see you again? Yes, to-morrow I will see

you, if I have to deal death to all my warders to have that joy. Till

to-morrow.”

She pressed him in her arms with an embrace in which the terror of death

mingled. Then she touched a spring, which must have been in connection

with a bell, and implored De Marsay to permit his eyes to be bandaged.

“And if I would not--and if I wished to stay here?”

“You would be the death of me more speedily,” she said, “for now I know

I am certain to die on your account.”

Henri submitted. In the man who had just gorged himself with pleasure

there occurs a propensity to forgetfulness, I know not what ingratitude,

a desire for liberty, a whim to go elsewhere, a tinge of contempt and,

perhaps, of disgust for his idol; in fine, indescribable sentiments

which render him ignoble and ashamed. The certainty of this confused,

but real, feeling in souls who are not illuminated by that celestial

light, nor perfumed with that holy essence from which the performance

of sentiment springs, doubtless suggested to Rousseau the adventures of

Lord Edward, which conclude the letters of the _Nouvelle Heloise_. If

Rousseau is obviously inspired by the work of Richardson, he departs

from it in a thousand details, which leave his achievement magnificently

original; he has recommended it to posterity by great ideas which it is

difficult to liberate by analysis, when, in one’s youth, one reads this

work with the object of finding in it the lurid representation of the

most physical of our feelings, whereas serious and philosophical writers

never employ its images except as the consequence or the corollary of

a vast thought; and the adventures of Lord Edward are one of the most

Europeanly delicate ideas of the whole work.

Henri, therefore, found himself beneath the domination of that confused

sentiment which is unknown to true love. There was needful, in

some sort, the persuasive grip of comparisons, and the irresistible

attraction of memories to lead him back to a woman. True love rules

above all through recollection. A woman who is not engraven upon the

soul by excess of pleasure or by strength of emotion, how can she ever

be loved? In Henri’s case, Paquita had established herself by both of

these reasons. But at this moment, seized as he was by the satiety of

his happiness, that delicious melancholy of the body, he could hardly

analyze his heart, even by recalling to his lips the taste of the

liveliest gratifications that he had ever grasped.

He found himself on the Boulevard Montmartre at the break of day,

gazed stupidly at the retreating carriage, produced two cigars from his

pocket, lit one from the lantern of a good woman who sold brandy and

coffee to workmen and street arabs and chestnut venders--to all the

Parisian populace which begins its work before daybreak; then he went

off, smoking his cigar, and putting his hands in his trousers’ pockets

with a devil-may-care air which did him small honor.

“What a good thing a cigar is! That’s one thing a man will never tire

of,” he said to himself.

Of the girl with the golden eyes, over whom at that time all the elegant

youth of Paris was mad, he hardly thought. The idea of death, expressed

in the midst of their pleasure, and the fear of which had more than once

darkened the brow of that beautiful creature, who held to the houris of

Asia by her mother, to Europe by her education, to the tropics by her

birth, seemed to him merely one of those deceptions by which women seek

to make themselves interesting.

“She is from Havana--the most Spanish region to be found in the New

World. So she preferred to feign terror rather than cast in my teeth

indisposition or difficulty, coquetry or duty, like a Parisian woman. By

her golden eyes, how glad I shall be to sleep.”

He saw a hackney coach standing at the corner of Frascati’s waiting for

some gambler; he awoke the driver, was driven home, went to bed, and

slept the sleep of the dissipated, which for some queer reason--of which

no rhymer has yet taken advantage--is as profound as that of innocence.

Perhaps it is an instance of the proverbial axiom, _extremes meet_.

About noon De Marsay awoke and stretched himself; he felt the grip of

that sort of voracious hunger which old soldiers can remember having

experienced on the morrow of victory. He was delighted, therefore, to

see Paul de Manerville standing in front of him, for at such a time

nothing is more agreeable than to eat in company.

“Well,” his friend remarked, “we all imagined that you had been shut up

for the last ten days with the girl of the golden eyes.”

“The girl of the golden eyes! I have forgotten her. Faith! I have other

fish to fry!”

“Ah! you are playing at discretion.”

“Why not?” asked De Marsay, with a laugh. “My dear fellow, discretion

is the best form of calculation. Listen--however, no! I will not say

a word. You never teach me anything; I am not disposed to make you a

gratuitous present of the treasures of my policy. Life is a river which

is of use for the promotion of commerce. In the name of all that is most

sacred in life--of cigars! I am no professor of social economy for the

instruction of fools. Let us breakfast! It costs less to give you a

tunny omelette than to lavish the resources of my brain on you.”

“Do you bargain with your friends?”

“My dear fellow,” said Henri, who rarely denied himself a sarcasm,

“since all the same, you may some day need, like anybody else, to use

discretion, and since I have much love for you--yes, I like you! Upon my

word, if you only wanted a thousand-franc note to keep you from blowing

your brains out, you would find it here, for we haven’t yet done any

business of that sort, eh, Paul? If you had to fight to-morrow, I would

measure the ground and load the pistols, so that you might be killed

according to rule. In short, if anybody besides myself took it into his

head to say ill of you in your absence, he would have to deal with the

somewhat nasty gentleman who walks in my shoes--there’s what I call a

friendship beyond question. Well, my good fellow, if you should

ever have need of discretion, understand that there are two sorts of

discretion--the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that

of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the

discretion of locked doors--mere impotence! Active discretion proceeds

by affirmation. Suppose at the club this evening I were to say: ‘Upon my

word of honor the golden-eyed was not worth all she cost me!’ Everybody

would exclaim when I was gone: ‘Did you hear that fop De Marsay, who

tried to make us believe that he has already had the girl of the golden

eyes? It’s his way of trying to disembarrass himself of his rivals: he’s

no simpleton.’ But such a ruse is vulgar and dangerous. However gross a

folly one utters, there are always idiots to be found who will believe

it. The best form of discretion is that of women when they want to take

the change out of their husbands. It consists in compromising a woman

with whom we are not concerned, or whom we do not love, in order to save

the honor of the one whom we love well enough to respect. It is what is

called the _woman-screen_.... Ah! here is Laurent. What have you got for

us?”

“Some Ostend oysters, Monsieur le Comte.”

“You will know some day, Paul, how amusing it is to make a fool of the

world by depriving it of the secret of one’s affections. I derive an

immense pleasure in escaping from the stupid jurisdiction of the crowd,

which knows neither what it wants, nor what one wants of it, which takes

the means for the end, and by turns curses and adores, elevates and

destroys! What a delight to impose emotions on it and receive none from

it, to tame it, never to obey it. If one may ever be proud of anything,

is it not a self-acquired power, of which one is at once the cause and

effect, the principle and the result? Well, no man knows what I love,

nor what I wish. Perhaps what I have loved, or what I may have wished

will be known, as a drama which is accomplished is known; but to let

my game be seen--weakness, mistake! I know nothing more despicable than

strength outwitted by cunning. Can I initiate myself with a laugh into

the ambassador’s part, if indeed diplomacy is as difficult as life? I

doubt it. Have you any ambition? Would you like to become something?”

“But, Henri, you are laughing at me--as though I were not sufficiently

mediocre to arrive at anything.”

“Good Paul! If you go on laughing at yourself, you will soon be able to

laugh at everybody else.”

At breakfast, by the time he had started his cigars, De Marsay began to

see the events of the night in a singular light. Like many men of great

intelligence, his perspicuity was not spontaneous, as it did not at once

penetrate to the heart of things. As with all natures endowed with the

faculty of living greatly in the present, of extracting, so to speak,

the essence of it and assimilating it, his second-sight had need of a

sort of slumber before it could identify itself with causes. Cardinal

de Richelieu was so constituted, and it did not debar in him the gift of

foresight necessary to the conception of great designs.

De Marsay’s conditions were alike, but at first he only used his weapons

for the benefit of his pleasures, and only became one of the most

profound politicians of his day when he had saturated himself with

those pleasures to which a young man’s thoughts--when he has money and

power--are primarily directed. Man hardens himself thus: he uses woman

in order that she may not make use of him.

At this moment, then, De Marsay perceived that he had been fooled by

the girl of the golden eyes, seeing, as he did, in perspective, all that

night of which the delights had been poured upon him by degrees until

they had ended by flooding him in torrents. He could read, at last,

that page in effect so brilliant, divine its hidden meaning. The purely

physical innocence of Paquita, the bewilderment of her joy, certain

words, obscure at first, but now clear, which had escaped her in the

midst of that joy, all proved to him that he had posed for another

person. As no social corruption was unknown to him, as he professed a

complete indifference towards all perversities, and believed them to be

justified on the simple ground that they were capable of satisfaction,

he was not startled at vice, he knew it as one knows a friend, but he

was wounded at having served as sustenance for it. If his presumption

was right, he had been outraged in the most sensitive part of him. The

mere suspicion filled him with fury, he broke out with the roar of a

tiger who has been the sport of a deer, the cry of a tiger which united

a brute’s strength with the intelligence of the demon.

“I say, what is the matter with you?” asked Paul.

“Nothing!”

“I should be sorry, if you were to be asked whether you had anything

against me and were to reply with a _nothing_ like that! It would be a

sure case of fighting the next day.”

“I fight no more duels,” said De Marsay.

“That seems to me even more tragical. Do you assassinate, then?”

“You travesty words. I execute.”

“My dear friend,” said Paul, “your jokes are of a very sombre color this

morning.”

“What would you have? Pleasure ends in cruelty. Why? I don’t know, and

am not sufficiently curious to try and find out.... These cigars are

excellent. Give your friend some tea. Do you know, Paul, I live a

brute’s life? It should be time to choose oneself a destiny, to employ

one’s powers on something which makes life worth living. Life is a

singular comedy. I am frightened, I laugh at the inconsequence of our

social order. The Government cuts off the heads of poor devils who

may have killed a man and licenses creatures who despatch, medically

speaking, a dozen young folks in a season. Morality is powerless

against a dozen vices which destroy society and which nothing can

punish.--Another cup!--Upon my word of honor! man is a jester dancing

upon a precipice. They talk to us about the immorality of the _Liaisons

Dangereuses_, and any other book you like with a vulgar reputation; but

there exists a book, horrible, filthy, fearful, corrupting, which is

always open and will never be shut, the great book of the world; not to

mention another book, a thousand times more dangerous, which is composed

of all that men whisper into each other’s ears, or women murmur behind

their fans, of an evening in society.”

“Henri, there is certainly something extraordinary the matter with you;

that is obvious in spite of your active discretion.”

“Yes!... Come, I must kill the time until this evening. Let’s to the

tables.... Perhaps I shall have the good luck to lose.”

De Marsay rose, took a handful of banknotes and folded them into his

cigar-case, dressed himself, and took advantage of Paul’s carriage to

repair to the Salon des Etrangers, where until dinner he consumed the

time in those exciting alternations of loss and gain which are the last

resource of powerful organizations when they are compelled to exercise

themselves in the void. In the evening he repaired to the trysting-place

and submitted complacently to having his eyes bandaged. Then, with

that firm will which only really strong men have the faculty of

concentrating, he devoted his attention and applied his intelligence to

the task of divining through what streets the carriage passed. He had

a sort of certitude of being taken to the Rue Saint-Lazare, and

being brought to a halt at the little gate in the garden of the Hotel

San-Real. When he passed, as on the first occasion, through this gate,

and was put in a litter, carried, doubtless by the mulatto and the

coachman, he understood, as he heard the gravel grate beneath their

feet, why they took such minute precautions. He would have been able,

had he been free, or if he had walked, to pluck a twig of laurel,

to observe the nature of the soil which clung to his boots; whereas,

transported, so to speak, ethereally into an inaccessible mansion, his

good fortune must remain what it had been hitherto, a dream. But it is

man’s despair that all his work, whether for good or evil, is imperfect.

All his labors, physical or intellectual, are sealed with the mark

of destruction. There had been a gentle rain, the earth was moist. At

night-time certain vegetable perfumes are far stronger than during the

day; Henri could smell, therefore, the scent of the mignonette which

lined the avenue along which he was conveyed. This indication was enough

to light him in the researches which he promised himself to make in

order to recognize the hotel which contained Paquita’s boudoir. He

studied in the same way the turnings which his bearers took within the

house, and believed himself able to recall them.

As on the previous night, he found himself on the ottoman before

Paquita, who was undoing his bandage; but he saw her pale and altered.

She had wept. On her knees like an angel in prayer, but like an angel

profoundly sad and melancholy, the poor girl no longer resembled the

curious, impatient, and impetuous creature who had carried De Marsay

on her wings to transport him to the seventh heaven of love. There was

something so true in this despair veiled by pleasure, that the terrible

De Marsay felt within him an admiration for this new masterpiece

of nature, and forgot, for the moment, the chief interest of his

assignation.

“What is the matter with thee, my Paquita?”

“My friend,” she said, “carry me away this very night. Bear me to some

place where no one can answer: ‘There is a girl with a golden gaze here,

who has long hair.’ Yonder I will give thee as many pleasures as thou

wouldst have of me. Then when you love me no longer, you shall leave me,

I shall not complain, I shall say nothing; and your desertion need cause

you no remorse, for one day passed with you, only one day, in which I

have had you before my eyes, will be worth all my life to me. But if I

stay here, I am lost.”

“I cannot leave Paris, little one!” replied Henri. “I do not belong to

myself, I am bound by a vow to the fortune of several persons who stand

to me, as I do to them. But I can place you in a refuge in Paris, where

no human power can reach you.”

“No,” she said, “you forget the power of woman.”

Never did phrase uttered by human voice express terror more absolutely.

“What could reach you, then, if I put myself between you and the world?”

“Poison!” she said. “Dona Concha suspects you already... and,” she

resumed, letting the tears fall and glisten on her cheeks, “it is easy

enough to see I am no longer the same. Well, if you abandon me to the

fury of the monster who will destroy me, your holy will be done! But

come, let there be all the pleasures of life in our love. Besides, I

will implore, I will weep and cry out and defend myself; perhaps I shall

be saved.”

“Whom will your implore?” he asked.

“Silence!” said Paquita. “If I obtain mercy it will perhaps be on

account of my discretion.”

“Give me my robe,” said Henri, insidiously.

“No, no!” she answered quickly, “be what you are, one of those angels

whom I have been taught to hate, and in whom I only saw ogres, whilst

you are what is fairest under the skies,” she said, caressing Henri’s

hair. “You do not know how silly I am. I have learned nothing. Since I

was twelve years old I have been shut up without ever seeing any one. I

can neither read nor write, I can only speak English and Spanish.”

“How is it, then, that you receive letters from London?”

“My letters?... See, here they are!” she said, proceeding to take some

papers out of a tall Japanese vase.

She offered De Marsay some letters, in which the young man saw, with

surprise, strange figures, similar to those of a rebus, traced in blood,

and illustrating phrases full of passion.

“But,” he cried, marveling at these hieroglyphics created by the

alertness of jealousy, “you are in the power of an infernal genius?”

“Infernal,” she repeated.

“But how, then, were you able to get out?”

“Ah!” she said, “that was my ruin. I drove Dona Concha to choose between

the fear of immediate death and anger to be. I had the curiosity of

a demon, I wished to break the bronze circle which they had described

between creation and me, I wished to see what young people were like,

for I knew nothing of man except the Marquis and Cristemio. Our coachman

and the lackey who accompanies us are old men....”

“But you were not always thus shut up? Your health...?”

“Ah,” she answered, “we used to walk, but it was at night and in the

country, by the side of the Seine, away from people.”

“Are you not proud of being loved like that?”

“No,” she said, “no longer. However full it be, this hidden life is but

darkness in comparison with the light.”

“What do you call the light?”

“Thee, my lovely Adolphe! Thee, for whom I would give my life. All the

passionate things that have been told me, and that I have inspired, I

feel for thee! For a certain time I understood nothing of existence, but

now I know what love is, and hitherto I have been the loved one only;

for myself, I did not love. I would give up everything for you, take me

away. If you like, take me as a toy, but let me be near you until you

break me.”

“You will have no regrets?”

“Not one”! she said, letting him read her eyes, whose golden tint was

pure and clear.

“Am I the favored one?” said Henri to himself. If he suspected the

truth, he was ready at that time to pardon the offence in view of a love

so single minded. “I shall soon see,” he thought.

If Paquita owed him no account of the past, yet the least recollection

of it became in his eyes a crime. He had therefore the sombre strength

to withhold a portion of his thought, to study her, even while

abandoning himself to the most enticing pleasures that ever peri

descended from the skies had devised for her beloved.

Paquita seemed to have been created for love by a particular effort of

nature. In a night her feminine genius had made the most rapid progress.

Whatever might be the power of this young man, and his indifference in

the matter of pleasures, in spite of his satiety of the previous night,

he found in the girl with the golden eyes that seraglio which a loving

woman knows how to create and which a man never refuses. Paquita

responded to that passion which is felt by all really great men for the

infinite--that mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so

poetically translated in Manfred, and which urged Don Juan to search

the heart of women, in his hope to find there that limitless thought in

pursuit of which so many hunters after spectres have started, which wise

men think to discover in science, and which mystics find in God alone.

The hope of possessing at last the ideal being with whom the struggle

could be constant and tireless ravished De Marsay, who, for the first

time for long, opened his heart. His nerves expanded, his coldness was

dissipated in the atmosphere of that ardent soul, his hard and fast

theories melted away, and happiness colored his existence to the tint of

the rose and white boudoir. Experiencing the sting of a higher pleasure,

he was carried beyond the limits within which he had hitherto confined

passion. He would not be surpassed by this girl, whom a somewhat

artificial love had formed all ready for the needs of his soul, and then

he found in that vanity which urges a man to be in all things a victor,

strength enough to tame the girl; but, at the same time, urged beyond

that line where the soul is mistress over herself, he lost himself

in these delicious limboes, which the vulgar call so foolishly “the

imaginary regions.” He was tender, kind, and confidential. He affected

Paquita almost to madness.

“Why should we not go to Sorrento, to Nice, to Chiavari, and pass all

our life so? Will you?” he asked of Paquita, in a penetrating voice.

“Was there need to say to me: ‘Will you’?” she cried. “Have I a will? I

am nothing apart from you, except in so far as I am a pleasure for you.

If you would choose a retreat worthy of us, Asia is the only country

where love can unfold his wings....”

“You are right,” answered Henri. “Let us go to the Indies, there where

spring is eternal, where the earth grows only flowers, where man can

display the magnificence of kings and none shall say him nay, as in the

foolish lands where they would realize the dull chimera of equality. Let

us go to the country where one lives in the midst of a nation of slaves,

where the sun shines ever on a palace which is always white, where the

air sheds perfumes, the birds sing of love and where, when one can love

no more, one dies....”

“And where one dies together!” said Paquita. “But do not let us start

to-morrow, let us start this moment... take Cristemio.”

“Faith! pleasure is the fairest climax of life. Let us go to Asia; but

to start, my child, one needs much gold, and to have gold one must set

one’s affairs in order.”

She understood no part of these ideas.

“Gold! There is a pile of it here--as high as that,” she said holding up

her hand.

“It is not mine.”

“What does that matter?” she went on; “if we have need of it let us take

it.”

“It does not belong to you.”

“Belong!” she repeated. “Have you not taken me? When we have taken it,

it will belong to us.”

He gave a laugh.

“Poor innocent! You know nothing of the world.”

“Nay, but this is what I know,” she cried, clasping Henri to her.

At the very moment when De Marsay was forgetting all, and conceiving the

desire to appropriate this creature forever, he received in the midst of

his joy a dagger-thrust, which Paquita, who had lifted him vigorously in

the air, as though to contemplate him, exclaimed: “Oh, Margarita!”

“Margarita!” cried the young man, with a roar; “now I know all that I

still tried to disbelieve.”

He leaped upon the cabinet in which the long poniard was kept. Happily

for Paquita and for himself, the cupboard was shut. His fury waxed at

this impediment, but he recovered his tranquillity, went and found his

cravat, and advanced towards her with an air of such ferocious meaning

that, without knowing of what crime she had been guilty, Paquita

understood, none the less, that her life was in question. With one bound

she rushed to the other end of the room to escape the fatal knot which

De Marsay tried to pass round her neck. There was a struggle. On either

side there was an equality of strength, agility, and suppleness. To end

the combat Paquita threw between the legs of her lover a cushion which

made him fall, and profited by the respite which this advantage gave

to her, to push the button of the spring which caused the bell to ring.

Promptly the mulatto arrived. In a second Cristemio leaped on De Marsay

and held him down with one foot on his chest, his heel turned towards

the throat. De Marsay realized that, if he struggled, at a single sign

from Paquita he would be instantly crushed.

“Why did you want to kill me, my beloved?” she said. De Marsay made no

reply.

“In what have I angered you?” she asked. “Speak, let us understand each

other.”

Henri maintained the phlegmatic attitude of a strong man who feels

himself vanquished; his countenance, cold, silent, entirely English,

revealed the consciousness of his dignity in a momentary resignation.

Moreover, he had already thought, in spite of the vehemence of his

anger, that it was scarcely prudent to compromise himself with the law

by killing this girl on the spur of the moment, before he had arranged

the murder in such a manner as should insure his impunity.

“My beloved,” went on Paquita, “speak to me; do not leave me without one

loving farewell! I would not keep in my heart the terror which you have

just inspired in it.... Will you speak?” she said, stamping her foot

with anger.

De Marsay, for all reply, gave her a glance, which signified so plainly,

“_You must die!_” that Paquita threw herself upon him.

“Ah, well, you want to kill me!... If my death can give you any

pleasure--kill me!”

She made a sign to Cristemio, who withdrew his foot from the body of the

young man, and retired without letting his face show that he had formed

any opinion, good or bad, with regard to Paquita.

“That is a man,” said De Marsay, pointing to the mulatto, with a

sombre gesture. “There is no devotion like the devotion which obeys in

friendship, and does not stop to weigh motives. In that man you possess

a true friend.”

“I will give him you, if you like,” she answered; “he will serve you

with the same devotion that he has for me, if I so instruct him.”

She waited for a word of recognition, and went on with an accent replete

with tenderness:

“Adolphe, give me then one kind word!... It is nearly day.”

Henri did not answer. The young man had one sorry quality, for one

considers as something great everything which resembles strength, and

often men invent extravagances. Henri knew not how to pardon. That

_returning upon itself_ which is one of the soul’s graces, was a

non-existent sense for him. The ferocity of the Northern man, with which

the English blood is deeply tainted, had been transmitted to him by his

father. He was inexorable both in his good and evil impulses. Paquita’s

exclamation had been all the more horrible to him, in that it had

dethroned him from the sweetest triumph which had ever flattered his

man’s vanity. Hope, love, and every emotion had been exalted with him,

all had lit up within his heart and his intelligence, then these torches

illuminating his life had been extinguished by a cold wind. Paquita, in

her stupefaction of grief, had only strength enough to give the signal

for departure.

“What is the use of that!” she said, throwing away the bandage. “If he

does not love me, if he hates me, it is all over.”

She waited for one look, did not obtain it, and fell, half dead. The

mulatto cast a glance at Henri, so horribly significant, that, for the

first time in his life, the young man, to whom no one denied the gift of

rare courage, trembled. “_If you do not love her well, if you give her

the least pain, I will kill you_.” such was the sense of that brief

gaze. De Marsay was escorted, with a care almost obsequious, along the

dimly lit corridor, at the end of which he issued by a secret door into

the garden of the Hotel San-Real. The mulatto made him walk cautiously

through an avenue of lime trees, which led to a little gate opening upon

a street which was at that hour deserted. De Marsay took a keen notice

of everything. The carriage awaited him. This time the mulatto did not

accompany him, and at the moment when Henri put his head out of the

window to look once more at the gardens of the hotel, he encountered the

white eyes of Cristemio, with whom he exchanged a glance. On either side

there was a provocation, a challenge, the declaration of a savage

war, of a duel in which ordinary laws were invalid, where treason and

treachery were admitted means. Cristemio knew that Henri had sworn

Paquita’s death. Henri knew that Cristemio would like to kill him before

he killed Paquita. Both understood each other to perfection.

“The adventure is growing complicated in a most interesting way,” said

Henri.

“Where is the gentleman going to?” asked the coachman.

De Marsay was driven to the house of Paul de Manerville. For more than a

week Henri was away from home, and no one could discover either what he

did during this period, nor where he stayed. This retreat saved him from

the fury of the mulatto and caused the ruin of the charming creature who

had placed all her hope in him whom she loved as never human heart had

loved on this earth before. On the last day of the week, about eleven

o’clock at night, Henri drove up in a carriage to the little gate in the

garden of the Hotel San-Real. Four men accompanied him. The driver was

evidently one of his friends, for he stood up on his box, like a man who

was to listen, an attentive sentinel, for the least sound. One of the

other three took his stand outside the gate in the street; the second

waited in the garden, leaning against the wall; the last, who carried in

his hand a bunch of keys, accompanied De Marsay.

“Henri,” said his companion to him, “we are betrayed.”

“By whom, my good Ferragus?”

“They are not all asleep,” replied the chief of the Devourers; “it is

absolutely certain that some one in the house has neither eaten nor

drunk.... Look! see that light!”

“We have a plan of the house; from where does it come?”

“I need no plan to know,” replied Ferragus; “it comes from the room of

the Marquise.”

“Ah,” cried De Marsay, “no doubt she arrived from London to-day. The

woman has robbed me even of my revenge! But if she has anticipated me,

my good Gratien, we will give her up to the law.”

“Listen, listen!... The thing is settled,” said Ferragus to Henri.

The two friends listened intently, and heard some feeble cries which

might have aroused pity in the breast of a tiger.

“Your marquise did not think the sound would escape by the chimney,”

said the chief of the Devourers, with the laugh of a critic, enchanted

to detect a fault in a work of merit.

“We alone, we know how to provide for every contingency,” said Henri.

“Wait for me. I want to see what is going on upstairs--I want to know

how their domestic quarrels are managed. By God! I believe she is

roasting her at a slow fire.”

De Marsay lightly scaled the stairs, with which he was familiar, and

recognized the passage leading to the boudoir. When he opened the door

he experienced the involuntary shudder which the sight of bloodshed

gives to the most determined of men. The spectacle which was offered to

his view was, moreover, in more than one respect astonishing to him.

The Marquise was a woman; she had calculated her vengeance with that

perfection of perfidy which distinguishes the weaker animals. She had

dissimulated her anger in order to assure herself of the crime before

she punished it.

“Too late, my beloved!” said Paquita, in her death agony, casting her

pale eyes upon De Marsay.

The girl of the golden eyes expired in a bath of blood. The great

illumination of candles, a delicate perfume which was perceptible,

a certain disorder, in which the eye of a man accustomed to amorous

adventures could not but discern the madness which is common to all

the passions, revealed how cunningly the Marquise had interrogated the

guilty one. The white room, where the blood showed so well, betrayed a

long struggle. The prints of Paquita’s hands were on the cushions. Here

she had clung to her life, here she had defended herself, here she

had been struck. Long strips of the tapestry had been torn down by her

bleeding hands, which, without a doubt, had struggled long. Paquita must

have tried to reach the window; her bare feet had left their imprints

on the edge of the divan, along which she must have run. Her body,

mutilated by the dagger-thrusts of her executioner, told of the fury

with which she had disputed a life which Henri had made precious to her.

She lay stretched on the floor, and in her death-throes had bitten the

ankles of Madame de San-Real, who still held in her hand her dagger,

dripping blood. The hair of the Marquise had been torn out, she was

covered with bites, many of which were bleeding, and her torn dress

revealed her in a state of semi-nudity, with the scratches on her

breasts. She was sublime so. Her head, eager and maddened, exhaled the

odor of blood. Her panting mouth was open, and her nostrils were not

sufficient for her breath. There are certain animals who fall upon their

enemy in their rage, do it to death, and seem in the tranquillity of

victory to have forgotten it. There are others who prowl around their

victim, who guard it in fear lest it should be taken away from them, and

who, like the Achilles of Homer, drag their enemy by the feet nine times

round the walls of Troy. The Marquise was like that. She did not see

Henri. In the first place, she was too secure of her solitude to be

afraid of witnesses; and, secondly, she was too intoxicated with warm

blood, too excited with the fray, too exalted, to take notice of the

whole of Paris, if Paris had formed a circle round her. A thunderbolt

would not have disturbed her. She had not even heard Paquita’s last

sigh, and believed that the dead girl could still hear her.

“Die without confessing!” she said. “Go down to hell, monster of

ingratitude; belong to no one but the fiend. For the blood you gave him

you owe me all your own! Die, die, suffer a thousand deaths! I have

been too kind--I was only a moment killing you. I should have made you

experience all the tortures that you have bequeathed to me. I--I shall

live! I shall live in misery. I have no one left to love but God!”

She gazed at her.

“She is dead!” she said to herself, after a pause, in a violent

reaction. “Dead! Oh, I shall die of grief!”

The Marquise was throwing herself upon the divan, stricken with a

despair which deprived her of speech, when this movement brought her in

view of Henri de Marsay.

“Who are you?” she asked, rushing at him with her dagger raised.

Henri caught her arm, and thus they could contemplate each other face

to face. A horrible surprise froze the blood in their veins, and their

limbs quivered like those of frightened horses. In effect, the two

Menoechmi had not been more alike. With one accord they uttered the same

phrase:

“Lord Dudley must have been your father!”

The head of each was drooped in affirmation.

“She was true to the blood,” said Henri, pointing to Paquita.

“She was as little guilty as it is possible to be,” replied Margarita

Euphemia Porraberil, and she threw herself upon the body of Paquita,

giving vent to a cry of despair. “Poor child! Oh, if I could bring thee

to life again! I was wrong--forgive me, Paquita! Dead! and I live! I--I

am the most unhappy.”

At that moment the horrible face of the mother of Paquita appeared.

“You are come to tell me that you never sold her to me to kill,” cried

the Marquise. “I know why you have left your lair. I will pay you twice

over. Hold your peace.”

She took a bag of gold from the ebony cabinet, and threw it

contemptuously at the old woman’s feet. The chink of the gold was potent

enough to excite a smile on the Georgian’s impassive face.

“I come at the right moment for you, my sister,” said Henri. “The law

will ask of you----”

“Nothing,” replied the Marquise. “One person alone might ask for a

reckoning for the death of this girl. Cristemio is dead.”

“And the mother,” said Henri, pointing to the old woman. “Will you not

always be in her power?”

“She comes from a country where women are not beings, but

things--chattels, with which one does as one wills, which one buys,

sells, and slays; in short, which one uses for one’s caprices as you,

here, use a piece of furniture. Besides, she has one passion which

dominates all the others, and which would have stifled her maternal

love, even if she had loved her daughter, a passion----”

“What?” Henri asked quickly, interrupting his sister.

“Play! God keep you from it,” answered the Marquise.

“But whom have you,” said Henri, looking at the girl of the golden eyes,

“who will help you to remove the traces of this fantasy which the law

would not overlook?”

“I have her mother,” replied the Marquise, designating the Georgian, to

whom she made a sign to remain.

“We shall meet again,” said Henri, who was thinking anxiously of his

friends and felt that it was time to leave.

“No, brother,” she said, “we shall not meet again. I am going back to

Spain to enter the Convent of _los Dolores_.”

“You are too young yet, too lovely,” said Henri, taking her in his arms

and giving her a kiss.

“Good-bye,” she said; “there is no consolation when you have lost that

which has seemed to you the infinite.”

A week later Paul de Manerville met De Marsay in the Tuileries, on the

Terrasse de Feuillants.

“Well, what has become of our beautiful girl of the golden eyes, you

rascal?”

“She is dead.”

“What of?”

“Consumption.”

PARIS, March 1834-April 1835.

ADDENDUM

Note: The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a trilogy.

Part one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de

Langeais. In other addendum references all three stories are usually

combined under the title The Thirteen.

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bourignard, Gratien-Henri-Victor-Jean-Joseph

Ferragus

Dudley, Lord

The Lily of the Valley

A Man of Business

Another Study of Woman

A Daughter of Eve

Manerville, Paul Francois-Joseph, Comte de

The Ball at Sceaux

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

A Marriage Settlement

Marsay, Henri de

Ferragus

The Duchesse of Langeais

The Unconscious Humorists

Another Study of Woman

The Lily of the Valley

Father Goriot

Jealousies of a Country Town

Ursule Mirouet

A Marriage Settlement

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Letters of Two Brides

The Ball at Sceaux

Modeste Mignon

The Secrets of a Princess

The Gondreville Mystery

A Daughter of Eve

Ronquerolles, Marquis de

The Imaginary Mistress

The Peasantry

Ursule Mirouet

A Woman of Thirty

Another Study of Woman

Ferragus

The Duchesse of Langeais

The Member for Arcis