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.