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.”