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.