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
End of Project Gutenberg’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, by Honore de Balzac