THE HUMAN COMEDY

STUDIES OF MANNERS

SCENES OF PARISIAN LIFE

HISTORY OF THE THIRTEEN

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

TO EUGÈNE DELACROIX, PAINTER

One of the spectacles in which the greatest terror is to be encountered is certainly the general aspect of the Parisian population, a people horrible to see, gaunt, yellow, tanned. Is Paris not a vast field incessantly churned by a tempest of interests, beneath which whirls a harvest of men whom death mows more often than elsewhere and who are always reborn just as densely packed, whose contorted, twisted faces exude through every pore the mind, the desires, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces, but indeed masks: masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all exhausted, all imprinted with the ineffaceable signs of a panting avidity? What do they want? Gold, or pleasure?

A few observations on the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has only two ages, either youth or decrepitude: wan and colorless youth, painted decrepitude that wishes to appear young. On seeing this exhumed people, foreigners, who are not obliged to reflect, at first experience a movement of disgust for this capital, vast workshop of enjoyments, from which soon they themselves cannot get out, and remain there willingly becoming deformed. Few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal tint of Parisian faces, for it is not only in jest that Paris has been named a hell. Hold this word to be true. There, everything smokes, everything burns, everything shines, everything seethes, everything blazes, evaporates, dies out, lights again, sparkles, crackles, and consumes itself. Never was life in any country more ardent, nor more searing. This social nature, always in fusion, seems to say to itself after each finished work: “On to another!” as nature itself says to itself. Like nature, this social nature occupies itself with insects, flowers of a day, trifles, ephemera, and also casts fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the causes that give a special physiognomy to each tribe of this intelligent and mobile nation, one must point out the general cause that discolors, blanches, blues, and browns its individuals to a greater or lesser degree.

By dint of taking an interest in everything, the Parisian ends by taking an interest in nothing. No feeling predominating upon his face, worn by friction, it becomes gray like the plaster of houses that has received every kind of dust and smoke. In fact, indifferent the day before to that with which he will intoxicate himself the next day, the Parisian lives as a child whatever his age. He complains of everything, consoles himself for everything, mocks everything, forgets everything, wants everything, tastes everything, takes everything up with passion, leaves everything with unconcern; his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idol, whether it is of bronze or glass; as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In Paris, no feeling withstands the jet of things, and their current compels a struggle that relaxes the passions: love there is a desire, and hatred a velleity; there is no true relative there but the thousand-franc note, no other friend but the Mont-de-Piété. This general laxity bears its fruits; and, in the drawing room as in the street, no one there is one too many, no one there is absolutely useful, nor absolutely harmful: fools and rogues, as well as people of wit or probity. Everything is tolerated there, the government and the guillotine, religion and cholera. You always suit this world, you are never missed in it. What, then, rules in this country without morals, without belief, without any feeling; but from which all feelings, all beliefs, and all morals depart and at which they arrive? Gold and pleasure. Take these two words as a light and traverse this great cage of plaster, this hive with black streams, and follow within it the little serpents of this thought that agitates it, lifts it, works it? Look. First examine the world that has nothing?

The worker, the proletarian, the man who moves his feet, his hands, his tongue, his back, his single arm, his five fingers in order to live; well! that man, who first of all ought to economize the principle of his life, exceeds his strength, harnesses his wife to some machine, wears out his child and nails him to a cog. The manufacturer, the I-know-not-what secondary thread whose movement agitates this people who, with their dirty hands, turn and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, thin iron, diminish wood, weave steel, solidify hemp and thread, satin bronze, scallop crystal, imitate flowers, embroider wool, train horses, braid harnesses and braids, cut copper, paint carriages, round old elms, vaporize cotton, blow tulles, corrode diamond, polish metals, transform marble into sheets, lick pebbles, dress thought, color, whiten, and blacken everything; well! this sub-chief has come to promise this world of sweat and will, of study and patience, an excessive wage, whether in the name of the city's caprices or at the voice of the monster named Speculation. Then these quadrumana set themselves to staying awake, suffering, working, swearing, fasting, walking; all overtaxed themselves to earn that gold which fascinates them. Then, unconcerned about the future, avid for enjoyments, counting on their arms as the painter counts on his palette, they throw, great lords for a day, their money on Monday into the taverns, which form an enclosure of mud around the city; the belt of the most shameless of Venuses, incessantly folded and unfolded, where the periodic fortune of this people is lost as at gaming, a people as ferocious in pleasure as it is tranquil at work. For five days, then, no rest for this active part of Paris! It gives itself over to movements that make it warp, grow fat, grow thin, turn pale, burst forth in a thousand jets of creative will.

Then its pleasure, its rest, is a tiring debauch, brown of skin, black with blows, pale with drunkenness, or yellow with indigestion, which lasts only two days, but steals the bread of the future, the soup of the week, the wife's dresses, the child's swaddling clothes, all in rags. These men, born no doubt to be beautiful, for every creature has its relative beauty, have been regimented, from childhood, under the command of force, under the reign of the hammer, the shears, the spinning mill, and have promptly been Vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his ugliness and his strength, the emblem of this ugly and strong nation, sublime in mechanical intelligence, patient at its hours, terrible one day per century, inflammable as powder, and prepared for the revolutionary conflagration by brandy, in short witty enough to catch fire at a captious word that always means to it: gold and pleasure! Including all those who hold out their hand for alms, for legitimate wages, or for the five francs accorded to every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short for all money well or badly earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Without the taverns, would the government not be overthrown every Tuesday? Fortunately, on Tuesday this people is benumbed, sleeps off its pleasure, no longer has a sou, and returns to work, to dry bread, stimulated by a need for material procreation which, for it, becomes a habit. Nevertheless this people has its phenomena of virtue, its complete men, its unknown Napoleons, who are the type of its forces carried to their highest expression, and sum up its social reach in an existence where thought and movement combine less to cast joy into it than to regulate in it the action of pain.

Chance has made a worker thrifty, chance has gratified him with a thought, he has been able to cast his eyes upon the future, he has met a woman, he has found himself a father, and after some years of hard privations he undertakes a small haberdashery trade, rents a shop. If neither illness nor vice stops him on his path, if he has prospered, here is the sketch of this normal life.

And, first, salute this king of Parisian movement, who has subjected time and space to himself. Yes, salute this creature composed of saltpeter and gas who gives children to France during his laborious nights, and during the day remultiplies his individual self for the service, glory, and pleasure of his fellow citizens. This man solves the problem of sufficing, at once, for an amiable wife, his household, the Constitutionnel, his office, the National Guard, the Opera, God; but in order to transform into crowns the Constitutionnel, the Office, the Opera, the National Guard, the wife, and God. In short, salute an irreproachable holder of multiple posts. Risen every day at five o'clock, he has crossed like a bird the space separating his home from the rue Montmartre. Whether it blows or thunders, rains or snows, he is at the Constitutionnel and there awaits the load of newspapers whose distribution he has contracted for. He receives this political bread with avidity, takes it and carries it. At nine o'clock, he is in the bosom of his household, dispenses a pun to his wife, steals a big kiss from her, savors a cup of coffee, or scolds his children. At a quarter to ten, he appears at the Town Hall. There, placed upon an armchair, like a parrot on its perch, heated at the expense of the city of Paris, until four o'clock he records, without giving them a tear or a smile, the deaths and births of a whole arrondissement. The happiness, the unhappiness of the neighborhood passes through the beak of his pen, as the mind of the Constitutionnel lately traveled upon his shoulders. Nothing weighs upon him! He always goes straight ahead, takes his patriotism ready-made from the newspaper, contradicts no one, shouts or applauds with everyone, and lives like a swallow. Two steps from his parish church, in the event of an important ceremony, he can leave his place to a supernumerary and go sing a requiem at the church lectern, of which on Sundays and feast days he is the finest ornament, the most imposing voice, where he twists his wide mouth energetically while making a joyful Amen thunder. He is a cantor. Freed at four o'clock from his official service, he appears to spread joy and gaiety in the bosom of the most celebrated shop in the Cité. Happy is his wife, he has no time to be jealous; he is more a man of action than of feeling.

Thus, as soon as he arrives, he teases the young counter-women, whose lively eyes attract customers in force; makes merry amid ornaments, fichus, and muslin fashioned by these skillful workwomen; or, more often still, before dining, he serves a customer, copies a page of the newspaper, or carries some overdue bill to the bailiff. At six o'clock, every other day, he is faithful to his post. Immovable bass voice of the choruses, he is at the Opera, ready to become there Arab soldier, prisoner, savage, peasant, shade, camel's paw, lion, devil, genie, slave, black or white eunuch, always expert at producing joy, pain, pity, astonishment, at uttering invariable cries, at being silent, at hunting, at fighting, at representing Rome or Egypt; but always in petto, a haberdasher. At midnight, he becomes again good husband, man, tender father, he slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still stretched by the deceptive forms of the nymphs of the Opera, and thus turns, to the profit of conjugal love, the depravities of the world and Taglioni's voluptuous circles of the leg. Finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps quickly, and dispatches his sleep as he has dispatched his life. Is this not movement made man, space incarnate, the Proteus of civilization? This man sums up everything: history, literature, politics, government, religion, military art. Is he not a living encyclopedia, a grotesque atlas, incessantly on the march like Paris and never resting? In him everything is legs. No physiognomy could preserve itself pure in such labors. Perhaps the worker who dies old at thirty, his stomach tanned by progressive doses of his brandy, will be found, according to some well-endowed philosophers, happier than the haberdasher is. One perishes at a single stroke and the other in detail. From his eight trades, from his shoulders, his throat, his hands, his wife, and his business, the latter draws, as from so many farms, children, a few thousand francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever refreshed the heart of man. This fortune and these children, or the children who sum up everything for him, become the prey of the higher world, to which he carries his crowns and his daughter, or his son educated at college, who, better instructed than his father, casts his ambitious eyes higher. Often the younger son of a small retailer wants to be something in the State.

This ambition introduces thought into the second of the Parisian spheres. Go up one floor, then, and go to the mezzanine; or come down from the attic and remain on the fourth; in short, penetrate the world that has something: there, the same result. The wholesale merchants and their clerks, the employees, the people of small banking and great probity, the rogues, the damned souls, the first and the last clerks, the clerks of the bailiff, the attorney, the notary, in short the active, thinking, speculating members of that petty bourgeoisie which triturates the interests of Paris and watches over its grain, corners foodstuffs, stores the products made by the proletarians, packs in casks the fruits of the South, the fish of the Ocean, the wines of every coast loved by the sun; which stretches its hands over the Orient, there takes the shawls disdained by the Turks and the Russians; goes to harvest as far as the Indies, lies down to await the sale, aspires after profit, discounts bills, turns over and cashes all securities; packs all Paris in detail, carts it, watches for the fancies of childhood, spies upon the caprices and vices of mature age, presses out its illnesses; well, without drinking brandy like the worker, nor going to wallow in the mire of the barriers, all likewise exceed their strength; stretch beyond measure their body and their moral being, one by means of the other; dry themselves out with desires, ruin themselves with precipitate errands. Among them, physical torsion is accomplished beneath the whip of interests, beneath the scourge of the ambitions that torment the higher worlds of this monstrous city, as that of the proletarians was accomplished beneath the cruel press of the material elaborations incessantly desired by the despotism of the aristocratic I want it. There too, then, in order to obey this universal master, pleasure or gold, one must devour time, press time, find more than twenty-four hours in day and night, enervate oneself, kill oneself, sell thirty years of old age for two years of sickly rest. Only the worker dies in the hospital, when the last stage of his stunting has been completed, while the petty bourgeois persists in living and lives, but cretinized: you meet him with a worn, flat, old face, without light in his eyes, without firmness in his leg, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard, the belt of his Venus, of his beloved city. What did the bourgeois want? the short saber of the National Guardsman, an unchanging pot-au-feu, a decent place in Père-Lachaise, and for his old age a little legitimately earned gold.

His Monday is Sunday; his rest is the excursion in a hired carriage, the outing in the country, during which wife and children joyfully swallow dust or roast in the sun; his barrier is the restaurateur whose poisonous dinner has renown, or some family ball where people suffocate until midnight. Certain fools are astonished by the St. Vitus's dance with which the monads that the microscope reveals in a drop of water are afflicted, but what would Rabelais's Gargantua, figure of a misunderstood sublime audacity, what would this giant, fallen from the celestial spheres, say if he amused himself by contemplating the movement of this second Parisian life, of which here is one of the formulas? Have you seen those little huts, cold in summer, with no other hearth than a foot-warmer in winter, placed beneath the vast copper skullcap that caps the grain market? Madame is there from morning onward, she is a market commission agent and earns twelve thousand francs a year at this trade, they say. Monsieur, when Madame rises, passes into a dark office, where he lends at short weekly terms to the tradesmen of his neighborhood. At nine o'clock, he is at the passport office, of which he is one of the deputy heads. In the evening, he is at the box office of the Théâtre-Italien, or of any other theater you please to choose. The children are put out to nurse, and return from it to go to college or to a boarding school. Monsieur and Madame live on a third floor, have only one cook, give balls in a drawing room twelve feet by eight, and lit by oil lamps; but they give one hundred and fifty thousand francs to their daughter, and rest at fifty, the age at which they begin to appear in the third-tier boxes at the Opera, in a hackney cab at Longchamp, or in faded dress, on every sunny day, upon the boulevards, the espalier of these fructifications. Esteemed in the neighborhood, loved by the government, allied to the upper bourgeoisie, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five the cross of the Legion of Honor, and the father of his son-in-law, mayor of an arrondissement, invites him to his evenings. The labors of an entire life thus profit children whom this petty bourgeoisie tends fatally to raise as far as the upper one. Each sphere thus casts all its spawn into its higher sphere. The son of the rich grocer makes himself a notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. Not a tooth is missing to bite its groove, and everything stimulates the ascending movement of money.

Here we are, then, brought to the third circle of this hell, which perhaps one day will have its Dante. In this third social circle, a kind of Parisian belly where the interests of the city are digested and where they condense beneath the form called business, the crowd of attorneys, doctors, notaries, advocates, business people, bankers, large merchants, speculators, magistrates moves and agitates itself with an acrid and bilious intestinal movement. There are encountered still more causes for physical and moral destruction than anywhere else. These people live, almost all, in infected Offices, in pestilential courtrooms, in small barred offices, pass the day bent beneath the weight of business, rise at dawn to be in a position to act, not to let themselves be plundered, to gain everything or to lose nothing, to seize a man or his money, to put a handle on or take a handle off an affair, to profit from a fleeting circumstance, to have a man hanged or acquitted. They react upon their horses, they founder them, overdrive them, age their legs too, before their time. Time is their tyrant, they lack it, it escapes them; they can neither extend nor contract it. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, generous, and consequently what face remains beautiful in the depraving exercise of a profession that forces one to bear the weight of public miseries, to analyze them, weigh them, value them, subject them to regulated exploitation? These people deposit their heart, where?... I do not know; but they leave it somewhere, when they have one, before descending every morning to the bottom of the sorrows that pierce families. For them, no mysteries, they see the reverse of the society whose confessors they are, and despise it. Now, whatever they do, by dint of measuring themselves against corruption, they hold it in horror and grow sad; or through weariness, through secret compromise, they marry it; finally, necessarily, they become jaded toward all feelings, they whom the laws, men, institutions make fly like jackdaws over still-warm corpses. At every hour, the man of money weighs the living, the man of contracts weighs the dead, the man of law weighs conscience. Obliged to speak incessantly, all replace the idea with speech, feeling with the phrase, and their soul becomes a larynx. They wear themselves out and demoralize themselves. Neither the great merchant, nor the judge, nor the advocate preserves his right sense: they no longer feel, they apply the rules that cases falsify. Carried away by their torrential existence, they are neither husbands, nor fathers, nor lovers; they slide on a sled over the things of life, and live at every hour, driven by the business of the great city. When they return home, they are required to go to the ball, to the Opera, to the festivities where they go to make clients, acquaintances, protectors for themselves.

All eat immoderately, gamble, stay awake, and their faces grow round, grow flat, grow red. Against such terrible expenditures of intellectual forces, against moral contractions so multiplied, they oppose not pleasure, it is too pale and produces no contrast, but debauchery, secret, frightening debauchery, for they can dispose of everything, and make the morality of society. Their real stupidity hides beneath a special science. They know their trade, but they are ignorant of everything that is not it. Then, to save their self-love, they call everything into question, criticize wrongly and indiscriminately; appear doubters and are in reality gullible dupes, drown their mind in their interminable discussions. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices to dispense themselves from having an opinion; just as they shelter their consciences behind the code, or the commercial court. Having set out early to be remarkable men, they become mediocre, and crawl upon the summits of the world. Thus their faces present that acrid pallor, those false colorations, those dulled, ringed eyes, those talkative and sensual mouths in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the debasement of thought and its rotation in the circus of a specialty that kills the generative faculties of the brain, the gift of seeing on a large scale, of generalizing and deducing. They almost all shrivel in the furnace of business. Thus a man who has allowed himself to be caught in the crushings or in the gearing of these immense machines can never become great. If he is a doctor, either he has practiced little medicine, or he is an exception, a Bichat who dies young. If, as a great merchant, something remains of him, he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did Robespierre practice? Danton was an idler who waited. But who, moreover, has ever envied the faces of Danton and Robespierre, however superb they may be? These busy men par excellence draw money to themselves and heap it up in order to ally themselves with aristocratic families. If the worker's ambition is that of the petty bourgeois, here, the same passions again. In Paris, vanity sums up all passions. The type of this class would be either the ambitious bourgeois who, after a life of anguish and continual maneuvers, passes into the Council of State as an ant passes through a crack; or some newspaper editor, broken on the wheel of intrigues, whom the king makes a Peer of France, perhaps to avenge himself upon the nobility; or some notary become Mayor of his arrondissement, all people rolled flat by business and who, if they arrive at their goal, arrive there killed. In France, the custom is to enthrone the wig. Napoleon, Louis XIV, the great kings alone have always wanted young men to carry out their designs.

Above this sphere lives the world of artists. But there again the faces marked with the seal of originality are nobly broken, but broken, tired, sinuous. Driven beyond endurance by a need to produce, surpassed by their costly fantasies, wearied by a devouring genius, famished for pleasure, the artists of Paris all want to regain through excessive labors the gaps left by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and glory, money and art. At the beginning, the artist is incessantly panting beneath the creditor; his needs beget debts, and his debts demand his nights from him. After work, pleasure. The actor performs until midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor bends beneath his statue; the journalist is a thought on the march like the soldier at war; the painter in vogue is overwhelmed with work, the unoccupied painter gnaws his entrails if he feels himself a man of genius. Competition, rivalries, slanders assassinate these talents. Some, desperate, roll into the abysses of vice, the others die young and unknown for having discounted their future too soon. Few of these faces, originally sublime, remain beautiful. Moreover the flaming beauty of their heads remains misunderstood. An artist's face is always exorbitant, it is always above or below the accepted lines for what imbeciles call ideal beauty. What power destroys them? Passion. Every passion in Paris resolves itself into two terms: gold and pleasure.

Now, are you not breathing? Do you not feel the air and space purified? Here, neither labors nor pains. The swirling volute of gold has reached the summits. From the depths of the basement openings where its channels begin, from the depths of the shops where feeble cofferdams stop it, from the bosom of the counters and the great workshops where it allows itself to be put into bars, gold, in the form of dowries or inheritances, brought by the hand of young girls or by the bony hands of the old man, gushes toward the aristocratic race where it will shine, spread itself, stream. But before leaving the four grounds upon which the higher Parisian property rests, must one not, after the moral causes have been stated, deduce the physical causes, and cause to be observed an underlying plague, so to speak, which acts constantly upon the faces of the porter, the shopkeeper, the worker; point out a deleterious influence whose corruption equals that of the Parisian administrators who complaisantly allow it to subsist! If the air of the houses where most bourgeois live is infected, if the atmosphere of the streets spits cruel miasmas into back shops where the air grows rare; know that besides this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of this great city bathe their feet in filth which the authorities have not yet seriously wished to enclose within concrete walls that might prevent the foulest mud from filtering through the soil, poisoning the wells there, and underground continuing for Lutetia its celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps in the putrid exhalations of courtyards, streets, and privies. But let us approach the great airy and gilded drawing rooms, the mansions with gardens, the rich, idle, happy, propertied world. Faces there are etiolated and gnawed by vanity. There, nothing real. Is seeking pleasure not finding boredom? The people of society have early worn out their nature. Occupied only with manufacturing joy for themselves, they have promptly abused their senses, as the worker abuses brandy.

Pleasure is like certain medical substances: to obtain constantly the same effects, one must double the doses, and death or brutishness is contained in the last. All the lower classes lie crouched before the rich and watch for their tastes in order to make vices of them and exploit them. How resist the skillful seductions plotted in this country? Thus Paris has its theriac-users, for whom gambling, belly-worship, or the courtesan is an opium. Thus you see early in these people tastes and not passions, romantic fantasies and chilly loves. There impotence reigns; there no more ideas, they have passed, like energy, into the posturings of the boudoir, into feminine mimicries. There are forty-year-old greenhorns, old doctors of sixteen. In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, science all chewed, opinions all formulated, which dispense them from having wit, science, or opinion. In this world, unreason is equal to weakness and libertinism. People there are miserly with time by dint of losing it. Seek there no more affections than ideas. Embraces cover a profound indifference, and politeness a continual contempt. One never loves another there. Sallies without depth, many indiscretions, gossip, above all commonplaces; such is the substance of their language; but these unhappy Happy claim that they do not assemble to say and enact maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld; as if there did not exist a middle, found by the eighteenth century, between overfullness and absolute emptiness. If a few vigorous men use a fine and light pleasantry, it is misunderstood; soon tired of giving without receiving, they remain at home and leave fools to reign over their ground. This hollow life, this continual expectation of a pleasure that never arrives, this permanent boredom, this inanition of mind, heart, and brain, this weariness of the great Parisian rout reproduce themselves upon the features, and manufacture those cardboard faces, those premature wrinkles, that physiognomy of the rich in which impotence grimaces, in which gold is reflected, and from which intelligence has fled.

This view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be otherwise than it is. This diademed city is a queen who, always pregnant, has irresistibly furious cravings. Paris is the head of the globe, a brain that bursts with genius and leads human civilization, a great man, an incessantly creative artist, a statesman with second sight who must necessarily have the wrinkles of the brain, the vices of the great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the jadedness of the statesman. Its physiognomy implies the germination of good and evil, combat and victory; the moral battle of '89 whose trumpets still resound in all corners of the world; and also the dejection of 1814. This city can therefore be no more moral, nor more cordial, nor cleaner than is the driving boiler of those magnificent steamships that you admire cleaving the waves! Is Paris not a sublime vessel charged with intelligence? Yes, its arms are one of those oracles that fate sometimes permits itself. The city of Paris has its great mast all of bronze, sculpted with victories, and Napoleon as lookout. This ship certainly has its pitching and rolling; but it furrows the world, fires upon it through the hundred mouths of its tribunes, plows the scientific seas, sails there under full canvas, cries from the height of its tops through the voice of its scholars and its artists: “Forward, march! Follow me!” It carries an immense crew that delights in dressing it with new banners. They are cabin boys and street urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy bourgeoisie; workers and tarred sailors; in its cabins, the happy passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars, leaning over the rail; then on the deck, its soldiers, innovators or ambitious men, go to land upon every shore, and, while spreading bright gleams there, ask for glory which is a pleasure, or loves which want gold.

Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletarians, thus the depravity of the interests that crush the two bourgeoisies, thus the cruelties of artistic thought, and the excesses of pleasure incessantly sought by the great, explain the normal ugliness of the Parisian physiognomy. In the Orient alone, the human race offers a magnificent bust; but it is an effect of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with long pipes, short legs, square torsos, who despise movement and hold it in horror; while in Paris, Small, Middling, and Great run, jump, and caper, whipped by a pitiless goddess, Necessity: necessity of money, glory, or amusement. Thus any fresh, rested, graceful, truly young face is there the most extraordinary of exceptions: it is rarely encountered there. If you see one, assuredly it belongs: to a young and fervent churchman, or to some good forty-year-old abbé with three chins; to a young person of pure morals such as are raised in certain bourgeois families; to a mother of twenty, still full of illusions and nursing her firstborn; to a young man freshly disembarked from the provinces, and entrusted to a devout dowager who leaves him without a sou; or perhaps to some shopboy, who goes to bed at midnight, very tired from having folded or unfolded calico, and who rises at seven to arrange the display; or, often, to a man of science or poetry, who lives monastically in a happy liaison with a beautiful idea, who remains sober, patient, and chaste; or to some fool, content with himself, nourishing himself on stupidity, bursting with health, always occupied in smiling at himself; or to the happy and indolent species of flâneurs, the only people truly happy in Paris, and who taste its changing poetries at every hour. Nevertheless, there is in Paris a portion of privileged beings who profit from this excessive movement of manufactures, interests, business, arts, and gold. These beings are women.

Although they too have a thousand secret causes that there, more than elsewhere, destroy their physiognomy, there are found, in the female world, small happy peoples who live in the Oriental manner, and can preserve their beauty; but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets, they remain hidden, like rare plants that unfold their petals only at certain hours, and that constitute true exotic exceptions. Yet Paris is essentially also the country of contrasts. If true feelings are rare there, there are also found, there as elsewhere, noble friendships, boundless devotions. Upon this battlefield of interests and passions, just as amid those societies on the march where egoism triumphs, where each is obliged to defend himself alone, and which we call armies, it seems that feelings delight in being complete when they show themselves, and are sublime through juxtaposition. So it is with faces. In Paris, sometimes, in the high aristocracy, a few ravishing faces of young men are seen sparsely scattered, fruits of an entirely exceptional education and morals. To the youthful beauty of English blood they unite the firmness of southern features, French wit, purity of form. The fire of their eyes, a delicious redness of the lips, the lustrous black of their fine hair, a white complexion, a distinguished cut of face make them beautiful human flowers, magnificent to see upon the mass of other physiognomies, dulled, aged, hooked, grimacing. Thus women immediately admire these young men with that avid pleasure which men take in looking at a pretty person, decent, graceful, adorned with all the virginities with which our imagination delights in embellishing the perfect girl. If this glance rapidly cast upon the population of Paris has made one conceive the rarity of a Raphaelesque face, and the passionate admiration it must inspire there at first sight, the principal interest of our story will be justified. Quod erat demonstrandum, which was to be demonstrated, if it is permitted to apply the formulas of scholasticism to the science of morals.

Now, on one of those beautiful spring mornings when the leaves are not yet green, although unfolded; when the sun begins to set the roofs aflame and the sky is blue; when the Parisian population leaves its cells, comes to buzz on the boulevards, flows like a thousand-colored serpent, by way of the rue de la Paix toward the Tuileries, saluting the pomps of the nuptials that the countryside begins anew; on one of those joyous days, then, a young man, handsome as the day was on that day, dressed with taste, easy in his manners (let us tell the secret), a child of love, the natural son of Lord Dudley and the celebrated Marquise de Vordac, was walking in the great avenue of the Tuileries. This Adonis, named Henri de Marsay, was born in France, where Lord Dudley came to marry the young person, already Henri's mother, to an old gentleman called Monsieur de Marsay. This faded and almost extinguished butterfly acknowledged the child as his own, in exchange for the usufruct of an income of one hundred thousand francs definitively allotted to his putative son; a folly that did not cost Lord Dudley very much: French government bonds were then worth seventeen francs fifty centimes. The old gentleman died without having known his wife. Madame de Marsay later married the Marquis de Vordac; but before becoming a marquise, she concerned herself little with her child and with Lord Dudley. First, the war declared between France and England had separated the two lovers, and fidelity in spite of everything was not and will scarcely ever be fashionable in Paris. Then the successes of the elegant, pretty, universally adored woman stunned the maternal feeling in the Parisienne. Lord Dudley was no more attentive to his progeny than the mother was. The prompt infidelity of a young girl ardently loved perhaps gave him a kind of aversion for everything that came from her. Moreover, perhaps fathers too love only the children with whom they have made an ample acquaintance; a social belief of the highest importance for the repose of families, and which all bachelors must maintain, by proving that paternity is a feeling raised in a hothouse by woman, by morals, and by the laws.

Poor Henri de Marsay found a father only in the one of the two who was not obliged to be one. Monsieur de Marsay's Paternity was naturally very incomplete. In the natural order, children have a father for only a few moments; and the gentleman imitated nature. The good man would not have sold his name if he had had no vices. So he ate without remorse in the gambling houses, and drank elsewhere, the few half-yearly payments that the national treasury paid to annuitants. Then he delivered the child to an elderly sister of his, Mademoiselle de Marsay, who took great care of him, and from the meager pension allotted by her brother gave him a tutor, an abbé without sou or farthing, who took the measure of the young man's future and resolved to pay himself, out of the hundred thousand livres of income, for the care given to his pupil, whom he came to love. This tutor happened by chance to be a true priest, one of those churchmen cut out to become cardinals in France or Borgia beneath the tiara. In three years he taught the child what he would have been taught in ten years at college. Then this great man, named the Abbé de Maronis, completed his pupil's education by making him study civilization under all its aspects: he nourished him on his experience, dragged him very little into the churches, then closed; took him sometimes into the wings, more often to the courtesans; he dismantled human feelings for him piece by piece; taught him politics at the heart of the drawing rooms where it was then roasting; numbered for him the machines of government, and attempted, through friendship for a fine nature abandoned but rich in promise, manfully to replace the mother: is not the Church the mother of orphans? The pupil responded to so much care. This worthy man died a bishop in 1812, with the satisfaction of having left beneath heaven a child whose heart and mind were so well fashioned at sixteen that he could run rings around a man of forty. Who would have expected to encounter a heart of bronze, a brain steeped in alcohol beneath the most seductive exterior that the old painters, those naïve artists, gave to the serpent in the earthly paradise?

That is nothing yet. Moreover, the good purple devil had caused his favorite child to make certain acquaintances in Parisian high society which, as yield in the young man's hands, could equal another hundred thousand livres of income. Finally, this priest, vicious but politic, unbelieving but learned, perfidious but amiable, weak in appearance but as vigorous in head as in body, was so truly useful to his pupil, so complaisant toward his vices, so good a calculator of every kind of force, so profound when it was necessary to make some human reckoning, so young at table, at Frascati, at... I do not know where, that in 1814 the grateful Henri de Marsay scarcely ever grew tender except on seeing the portrait of his dear bishop, the only movable thing this prelate had been able to bequeath him, an admirable type of the men whose genius will save the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, compromised at this moment by the weakness of its recruits and by the old age of its pontiffs; but only if the Church wills it. The Continental War prevented the young de Marsay from knowing his true father, whose name it is doubtful he knew. An abandoned child, he likewise did not know Madame de Marsay. Naturally he regretted his putative father very little. As for Mademoiselle de Marsay, his only mother, when she died he had a very pretty little tomb erected for her in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Monsignor de Maronis had guaranteed this old bonnet with ribbon loops one of the best places in heaven, so that, seeing her happy to die, Henri gave her selfish tears, he began to mourn her for himself. Seeing this grief, the abbé dried his pupil's tears by pointing out to him that the good woman took her snuff very disgustingly, and was becoming so ugly, so deaf, so tedious, that he owed thanks to death. The bishop had had his pupil emancipated in 1811. Then, when Monsieur de Marsay's mother remarried, the priest chose, in a family council, one of those honest headless men handpicked by him through the shutter of the confessional, and charged him with administering the fortune, whose income he duly applied to the needs of the community, but whose capital he wished to preserve.

Toward the end of 1814, Henri de Marsay therefore had upon earth no obligatory feeling and found himself as free as the bird without a mate. Although he was fully twenty-two, he appeared scarcely seventeen. Generally, the most difficult of his rivals regarded him as the prettiest boy in Paris. From his father, Lord Dudley, he had taken the most amorously deceptive blue eyes; from his mother, the thickest black hair; from both, pure blood, a young girl's skin, a gentle and modest air, a fine and aristocratic figure, very beautiful hands. For a woman, to see him was to be mad about him; you know? to conceive one of those desires that bite the heart, but that are forgotten through the impossibility of satisfying it, because in Paris woman is commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to themselves, in the manner of men, the House of Orange's: I will maintain. Beneath this freshness of life, and despite the limpid water of his eyes, Henri had the courage of a lion, the dexterity of a monkey. At ten paces he split a bullet upon the blade of a knife; rode a horse in such a way as to realize the fable of the centaur; gracefully drove a carriage with long reins; was nimble as Cherubino and placid as a sheep; but he knew how to beat a man of the faubourg at the terrible game of savate or the stick; then he played the piano in such a way that he could make himself an artist if he fell into misfortune, and possessed a voice that would have earned him, from Barbaja, fifty thousand francs per season. Alas, all these fine qualities, these pretty defects, were tarnished by a frightful vice: he believed neither in men nor in women, neither in God nor in the devil. Capricious nature had begun to endow him; a priest had finished him.

To make this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to strike off a few copies of so delightful a portrait. His second masterpiece of this kind was a young girl named Euphémie, born of a Spanish lady, raised in Havana, brought back to Madrid with a young Creole woman from the Antilles, with the ruinous tastes of the colonies; but fortunately married to an old and powerfully rich Spanish lord, Don Hijos, Marquis de San-Réal, who, since the occupation of Spain by the French troops, had come to live in Paris, and resided in the rue Saint-Lazare. As much through unconcern as through respect for the innocence of tender age, Lord Dudley gave his children no notice of the kinships he was creating for them everywhere. This is a slight disadvantage of civilization, it has so many advantages, its misfortunes must be pardoned for the sake of its benefits. Lord Dudley, to speak of him no more, came in 1816 to take refuge in Paris, in order to avoid the proceedings of English justice, which protects nothing from the Orient but merchandise. On seeing Henri, the traveling lord asked who this handsome young man was. Then, on hearing him named: “Ah! He is my son. What a misfortune!” he said.

Such was the history of the young man who, toward the middle of the month of April, in 1815, was traversing nonchalantly the great avenue of the Tuileries, in the manner of all animals that, knowing their strength, walk in their peace and their majesty; bourgeois women turned around quite naïvely to see him again, women did not turn around, they waited for him on his return, and engraved in their memory, in order to remember it at the appropriate time, this sweet face which would not have disfigured the body of the most beautiful among them.

“What are you doing here on Sunday, then?” the Marquis de Ronquerolles said to Henri as he passed.

“There is fish in the trap,” replied the young man.

This exchange of thoughts took place by means of two significant glances and without either Ronquerolles or de Marsay appearing to know the other. The young man examined the strollers with that quickness of glance and hearing peculiar to the Parisian who appears, at first sight, to see nothing and hear nothing, but who sees and hears everything. At this moment, a young man came to him, familiarly took his arm, saying to him: “How is it going, my good de Marsay?”

“Why, very well,” de Marsay replied to him with that apparently affectionate air which, among Parisian young men, proves nothing, either for the present or for the future.

In fact, the young men of Paris do not resemble the young men of any other city. They divide into two classes: the young man who has something and the young man who has nothing; or, the young man who thinks and the one who spends. But understand it well, what is at issue here is only those natives who lead in Paris the delightful train of an elegant life. There do indeed exist a few other young men, but those are children who conceive Parisian existence very late and remain its dupes. They do not speculate, they study, they work hard, the others say. Finally, there are still seen there certain young men, rich or poor, who embrace careers and follow them quite simply; they are somewhat Rousseau's Émile, citizen-flesh, and never appear in society. Diplomats impolitely call them fools. Fools or not, they increase the number of those mediocre people beneath whose weight France bends. They are always there; always ready to spoil public or private business with the flat trowel of mediocrity, while priding themselves upon their impotence, which they call morals and probity. These kinds of social Prizes for Excellence infest the administration, the army, the magistracy, the Chambers, the court. They diminish, flatten the country, and constitute, as it were, in the body politic, a lymph that overloads it and makes it soft. These honest persons call talented people immoral, or rogues. If these rogues make people pay for their services, at least they serve; while the former do harm and are respected by the crowd; but fortunately for France, elegant youth incessantly stigmatizes them with the name of old fossils.

Thus, at first glance, it is natural to believe very distinct the two species of young men who lead an elegant life; the amiable corporation to which Henri de Marsay belonged. But observers who do not stop at the surface of things are soon convinced that the differences are purely moral, and that nothing is as deceptive as this pretty bark. Nevertheless all equally take precedence over everyone; speak wrongly and indiscriminately about things, men, literature, fine arts; always have upon their lips each year's Pitt and Coburg; interrupt a conversation with a pun; turn science and the scholar to ridicule; despise everything they do not know or everything they fear; then put themselves above everything, by constituting themselves supreme judges of everything. All would dupe their fathers, and would be ready to pour crocodile tears into the bosom of their mothers; but generally they believe in nothing, speak ill of women, or play at modesty, and in reality obey a bad courtesan, or some old woman. All are equally decayed to the bone by calculation, by depravity, by a brutal desire to get on, and if they are threatened with the stone, by probing them it would be found in all of them, in the heart. In their normal state, they have the prettiest exteriors, put friendship into play at every turn, are equally captivating. The same mockery dominates their changing jargons; they aim at oddity in their dress, glory in repeating the stupidities of this or that actor in vogue, and begin with anyone whatever through contempt or impertinence in order to have, as it were, the first round in this game; but woe to him who does not know how to let them put out one of his eyes in order to put out two of theirs. They appear equally indifferent to the misfortunes of the fatherland, and to its scourges. Finally, they all indeed resemble the pretty white foam that crowns the wave of tempests. They dress, dine, dance, amuse themselves on the day of the Battle of Waterloo, during cholera, or during a revolution. Finally, they all indeed make the same expenditure; but here the parallel begins. Of this floating and agreeably squandered fortune, some have the capital, and the others await it; they have the same tailors, but the bills of the latter remain to be paid. Then if the former, like sieves, receive every kind of idea without retaining any; the latter compare them and assimilate all the good ones.

If the former believe they know something, know nothing and understand everything; lend everything to those who need nothing and offer nothing to those who need something; the latter secretly study the thoughts of others, and invest their money as well as their follies at high interest. The former no longer have faithful impressions, because their soul, like a mirror dulled by wear, no longer reflects any image; the others economize their senses and their life while appearing to throw it, like the former, out of the windows. The first, on the faith of a hope, devote themselves without conviction to a system that has the wind and goes up against the current, but they leap onto another political craft when the first goes adrift; the second measure the future, sound it, and see in political fidelity what the English see in commercial probity, an element of success. But where the young man who has something makes a pun or says a witticism about the reversal of the throne; the one who has nothing makes a public calculation, or a secret baseness, and gets on while shaking hands with his friends. The former never credit others with faculties, take all their ideas for new ones, as though the world had been made the day before, they have unlimited confidence in themselves, and have no enemy more cruel than their own person. But the others are armed with a continual distrust of men whom they estimate at their value, and are profound enough to have one thought more than the friends they exploit; then in the evening, when their head is on the pillow, they weigh men as a miser weighs his gold coins. The former grow angry at an impertinence without consequence and allow diplomats to make sport of them, who make them pose before them by pulling the principal string of these puppets, self-love; while the others make themselves respected and choose their victims and their protectors. Then, one day, those who had nothing have something; and those who had something have nothing. The latter regard their comrades who have attained a position as underhanded men, bad hearts, but also as strong men. “He is very strong!...” is the immense praise awarded to those who have arrived, quibuscumque viis, at politics, at a woman, or at a fortune. Among them are encountered certain young men who play this role by beginning it with debts; and naturally, they are more dangerous than those who play it without having a sou.

The young man who styled himself Henri de Marsay's friend was a scatterbrain, arrived from the provinces, to whom the young men then in fashion were teaching the art of properly nibbling away an inheritance, but he had one last cake to eat in his province, a certain establishment. He was quite simply an heir who had passed without transition from his meager hundred francs a month to the whole paternal fortune, and who, if he did not have enough wit to perceive that people were making fun of him, knew enough calculation to stop at two-thirds of his capital. He came to discover in Paris, at the cost of a few thousand-franc notes, the exact value of harnesses, the art of not respecting his gloves too much, to hear there learned meditations upon the wages to give servants, and to seek what lump-sum arrangement was most advantageous to conclude with them; he cared greatly about being able to speak in correct terms of his horses, of his Pyrenean dog, to recognize from the dress, the walk, the ankle boot, to what species a woman belonged; to study écarté, retain a few fashionable words, and conquer, through his stay in Parisian society, the authority necessary to import later into the provinces the taste for tea, silverware of English form, and to give himself the right to despise everything around him for the rest of his days. De Marsay had taken him into friendship in order to use him in society, as a bold speculator uses a trusted clerk. De Marsay's friendship, false or true, was a social position for Paul de Manerville who, for his part, thought himself very clever in exploiting his intimate friend in his own way. He lived in his friend's reflection, constantly put himself beneath his umbrella, put on his boots, gilded himself in his rays. In placing himself near Henri, or even in walking at his side, he had the air of saying: “Do not insult us, we are true tigers.” Often he allowed himself to say with fatuity: “If I asked Henri for such and such a thing, he is enough my friend to do it...” But he took care never to ask him for anything. He feared him, and his fear, although imperceptible, reacted upon others, and served de Marsay. “De Marsay is a formidable man,” Paul would say. “Ha, ha, you will see, he will be what he wants to be. I would not be surprised to find him one day Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nothing resists him.” Then he made of de Marsay what Corporal Trim made of his cap, a perpetual stake. “Ask de Marsay, and you will see!”

Or else: “The other day, de Marsay and I were hunting; he would not believe me: I jumped a bush without stirring from my horse!”

Or else: “De Marsay and I were with some women, and, upon my word of honor, I was, etc.”

Thus Paul de Manerville could be classed only in the great, illustrious, and powerful family of fools who get on. One day he was to be a deputy. For the moment he was not even a young man. His friend de Marsay defined him thus: “You ask me what Paul is. But Paul?... Paul is Paul de Manerville.”

“I am surprised, my good fellow,” he said to de Marsay, “that you are here on Sunday.”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“An intrigue?”

“Perhaps...”

“Bah!”

“I can tell you this, without compromising my passion. Besides, a woman who comes to the Tuileries on Sunday has no value, aristocratically speaking.”

“Ha! ha!”

“Be quiet, then, or I shall tell you nothing more. You are laughing too loudly; you will make people believe that we breakfasted too much. Last Thursday, here, on the terrace of the Feuillants, I was walking without thinking of anything at all. But on reaching the gate of the rue de Castiglione, by which I intended to leave, I find myself face to face with a woman, or rather with a young person who, if she did not throw herself upon my neck, was stopped, I believe, less by human respect than by one of those profound astonishments that cut off the strength of arms and legs, descend the length of the spine, and stop in the soles of the feet to fasten you to the ground. I have often produced effects of this kind, a species of animal magnetism that becomes very powerful when the relations are hooked on both sides. But, my dear fellow, this was neither mere stupefaction nor a common girl. Morally speaking, her face seemed to say: ‘What, here you are, my ideal, the being of my thoughts, of my dreams at evening and morning. How are you here? Why this morning? Why not yesterday? Take me, I am yours, et cætera!’ ‘Good,’ I said within myself, ‘another one!’ So I examine her. Ah! my dear fellow, physically speaking, the unknown girl is the most adorably womanly person I have ever met. She belongs to that feminine variety the Romans called fulva, flava, the woman of fire. And first, what struck me most, what I am still enamored of, is two yellow eyes like those of tigers; a shining golden yellow, living gold, gold that thinks, gold that loves and absolutely wants to come into your pocket!”

“Why, we all know her, my dear fellow!” cried Paul. “She sometimes comes here; she is the Girl with the Golden Eyes. We gave her that name. She is a young person of about twenty-two, whom I saw here when the Bourbons were here, but with a woman worth a hundred thousand times more than she is.”

“Be quiet, Paul! It is impossible for any woman whatever to surpass this girl, like a she-cat that wants to come rub against your legs, a white girl with ash-colored hair, delicate in appearance, but who must have cottony threads on the third phalanx of her fingers, and along her cheeks a white down whose line, luminous on a fine day, begins at the ears and loses itself upon the neck.”

“Ah! the other one, my dear de Marsay. She has black eyes that have never wept, but that burn; black eyebrows that meet and give her an air of hardness contradicted by the puckered network of her lips, on which a kiss does not remain, ardent and fresh lips; a Moorish complexion at which a man warms himself as at the sun; but, upon my word of honor, she resembles you...”

“You flatter her!”

“A curved waist, the slender waist of a corvette built for privateering, which rushes upon the merchant vessel with French impetuosity, bites it, and sinks it in two movements.”

“In short, my dear fellow, what is the one I have not seen to me!” de Marsay resumed. “Since I have studied women, my unknown girl is the only one whose virgin breast, whose ardent and voluptuous forms, have realized for me the one woman whom I have dreamed, I myself! She is the original of the delirious image called the woman caressing her chimera, the hottest, most infernal inspiration of ancient genius; a holy poetry prostituted by those who copied it for frescoes and mosaics, for a heap of bourgeois who see in this cameo only a trinket and put it on their watch keys, whereas it is the whole woman, an abyss of pleasures in which one rolls without finding the end, whereas it is an ideal woman who is sometimes seen in reality in Spain, in Italy, almost never in France. Well, I saw this girl with the golden eyes again, this woman caressing her chimera; I saw her here again on Friday. I foresaw that the next day she would return at the same hour. I was not mistaken. I took pleasure in following her without her seeing me, in studying that indolent gait of the unoccupied woman, but in whose movements one divines the voluptuousness that sleeps. Well, she turned, she saw me, adored me again, started again, shuddered. Then I noticed the true Spanish duenna who guards her, a hyena upon whom a jealous man has put a dress, some she-devil well paid to guard this sweet creature... Oh! then the duenna made me more than enamored; I became curious. Saturday, no one. Here I am today, waiting for this girl whose chimera I am, and asking nothing better than to pose as the monster of the fresco.”

“There she is,” said Paul; “everyone is turning to see her...”

The unknown girl blushed; her eyes sparkled on perceiving Henri; she closed them and passed.

“You say that she notices you?” Paul de Manerville cried playfully.

The duenna looked fixedly and attentively at the two young men. When the unknown girl and Henri met again, the young girl brushed against him and with her hand pressed the young man's hand. Then she turned, smiled passionately; but the duenna was drawing her very quickly toward the gate of the rue Castiglione. The two friends followed the young girl, admiring the magnificent torsion of that neck to which the head was joined by a combination of vigorous lines, and from which a few rolls of short hair rose forcefully. The girl with the golden eyes had that well-attached, slender, curved foot that offers so many attractions to fastidious imaginations. Accordingly she was elegantly shod and wore a short dress. During this passage she turned from moment to moment to see Henri again, and appeared to follow reluctantly the old woman whose mistress and slave she seemed to be at once: she could have her beaten mercilessly, but could not have her dismissed. All this could be seen. The two friends reached the gate. Two liveried servants were unfolding the step of a tasteful coupé laden with coats of arms. The girl with the golden eyes entered it first, took the side where she was to be seen when the carriage turned; put her hand on the door, and waved her handkerchief without the duenna's knowledge, mocking the curious spectators' what-will-people-say and publicly saying to Henri with strokes of the handkerchief: “Follow me...”

“Have you ever seen the handkerchief thrown better?” Henri said to Paul de Manerville.

Then, perceiving a hackney cab ready to leave after bringing people, he signaled the driver to remain.

“Follow that coupé; see into which street, into which house it enters; you will have ten francs. Farewell, Paul.”

The hackney cab followed the coupé. The coupé went into the rue Saint-Lazare, into one of the finest mansions in that quarter.

De Marsay was not a scatterbrain. Any other young man would have obeyed the desire to obtain at once some information about a girl who so well realized the most luminous ideas expressed about women by Oriental poetry; but, too adroit to compromise in this way the future of his good fortune, he had told his cab to continue along the rue Saint-Lazare and take him back to his mansion. The next day, his first valet de chambre, named Laurent, a fellow as cunning as a Frontin of the old comedy, waited near the house inhabited by the unknown girl for the hour at which letters are distributed. In order to spy at his ease and prowl around the mansion, he had, following the custom of police agents who wish to disguise themselves well, bought on the spot the cast-off clothes of an Auvergnat, while trying to assume his physiognomy. When the postman who that morning served the rue Saint-Lazare came by, Laurent pretended to be an errand porter at pains 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 amid Parisian civilization, informed him that the mansion where the Girl with the Golden Eyes lived belonged to Don Hijos, Marquis de San-Réal, a Grandee of Spain. Naturally the Auvergnat had no business with the marquis.

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

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

“So the marquise is not a young girl who...”

“Ah!” said the postman, interrupting the valet de chambre and looking at him attentively. “You are an errand porter as much as I dance.”

Laurent showed a few gold pieces to the official with the clapper, who began to smile.

“Here, this is the name of your quarry,” he said, taking from his leather box a letter that bore the London postmark and on which this address:

To Mademoiselle

Paquita Valdès,

was written in elongated, fine characters that announced a woman's hand.

“Would you be cruel to a bottle of Chablis wine, accompanied by a fillet sautéed with mushrooms and preceded by a few dozen oysters?” said Laurent, who wished to conquer the postman's precious friendship.

“At half past nine, after my service. Where?”

“At the corner of the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at the Well without Wine,” said Laurent.

“Listen, friend,” said the postman on rejoining the valet de chambre an hour after this meeting, “if your master is in love with that girl, he is inflicting a famous labor upon himself! I doubt that you will succeed in seeing her. In the ten years that I have been a postman in Paris, I have been able to observe many systems of doors there! but I may well say, without fear of being contradicted by any of my comrades, that there is no door as mysterious as Monsieur de San-Réal's. No one can penetrate the mansion without I do not know what password, and observe that it was chosen expressly between courtyard and garden in order to avoid all communication with other houses. The porter is an old Spaniard who never says a word of French, but who stares people over, as Vidocq would do, to know whether they are not thieves. If this first wicket-keeper could allow himself to be deceived by a lover, by a thief, or by you, with no comparison intended, well! in the first room, which is closed by a glass door, you would encounter a majordomo surrounded by lackeys, an old joker still wilder and surlier than the porter. If anyone passes through the carriage gate, my majordomo comes out, waits for you beneath the portico, and makes you undergo an interrogation like a criminal. It happened to me, a simple postman. He took me for a disguised hemisphere,” he said, laughing at his non sequitur. “As for the servants, do not hope to draw anything from them; I believe them mute; no one in the neighborhood knows the color of their words. I do not know what wages they are given not to speak and not to drink; the fact is that they are unapproachable, whether they are afraid of being shot or have an enormous sum to lose in case of indiscretion. If your master loves Mademoiselle Paquita Valdès enough to surmount all these obstacles, he certainly will not triumph over Doña Concha Marialva, the duenna who accompanies her and who would put her beneath her skirts rather than leave her. Those two women look as though they were sewn together.”

“What you tell me, estimable postman,” Laurent resumed after tasting the wine, “confirms what I have just learned. On the faith of an honest man, I thought they were making fun of me. The fruit seller opposite told me that at night dogs are loosed in the gardens whose food is suspended from posts so that they cannot reach it. Those damned animals then believe that people liable to enter want their food, and would tear them to pieces. You will tell me that one can throw them pellets, but it appears that they are trained to eat nothing except from the gatekeeper's hand.”

“The porter of Monsieur le Baron de Nucingen, whose garden adjoins the upper end of the San-Réal mansion's garden, did in fact tell me so,” the postman resumed.

“Good, my master knows him,” Laurent said to himself. “Do you know,” he resumed, glancing sideways at the postman, “that I belong to a master who is a formidable man, and if he took it into his head to kiss the soles of an empress's feet, she would certainly have to submit to it? If he needed you, which I wish for you, because he is generous, could he count on you?”

“Well, Monsieur Laurent, my name is Moinot. My name is written absolutely like a sparrow: M-o-i-n-o-t, not, Moinot.”

“Indeed,” said Laurent.

“I live at number 11, rue des Trois-Frères, on the fifth floor,” Moinot resumed; “I have a wife and four children. If what you want from me does not exceed the possibilities of conscience and my administrative duties, you understand! I am yours.”

“You are a good man,” Laurent told him, shaking his hand.

“Paquita Valdès is no doubt the mistress of the Marquis de San-Réal, the friend of King Ferdinand. An old Spanish corpse of eighty is alone capable of taking such precautions,” Henri said when his valet de chambre had related to him the result of his researches.

“Monsieur,” Laurent told him, “unless one arrives there by balloon, no one can enter that mansion.”

“You are a beast! Is it then necessary to enter the mansion in order to have Paquita, when Paquita can come out of it?”

“But, monsieur, and the duenna?”

“That duenna of yours will be confined for a few days.”

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

“Rascal!” Henri replied. “I condemn you to Concha if you carry insolence so far as to speak thus of a woman before I have had her. Think of dressing me; I am going out.”

Henri remained for a moment plunged in joyful reflections. Let it be said in praise of women: he obtained all those whom he deigned to desire. And what, then, would one have to think of a woman without a lover who had known how to resist a young man armed with beauty, which is the spirit of the body, armed with wit, which is a grace of the soul, armed with moral strength and fortune, which are the only two real powers? But by triumphing so easily, de Marsay was bound to grow bored with his triumphs; thus, for about two years, he had been very bored. In plunging to the bottom of sensual pleasures, he brought back more gravel than pearls. He had therefore come, like sovereigns, to implore chance for some obstacle to conquer, some enterprise that demanded the deployment of his inactive moral and physical forces. Although Paquita Valdès presented to him the marvelous assemblage of perfections he had until then enjoyed only in detail, the attraction of passion was almost null in him. Constant satiety had weakened the feeling of love in his heart. Like old men and jaded people, he had nothing left but extravagant caprices, ruinous tastes, fantasies which, once satisfied, left no good memory in his heart. In young people, love is the most beautiful of feelings; it makes life flower in the soul; by its solar power it brings the finest inspirations and their great thoughts into bloom: the first fruits of everything have a delicious savor. In men, love becomes a passion: strength leads to abuse. In old men, it turns into vice: impotence leads to the extreme. Henri was at once old man, man, and young man. To restore to him the emotions of a true love, he needed, as Lovelace did, a Clarissa Harlowe. Without the magical reflection of that unfindable pearl, he could no longer have anything but passions sharpened by some Parisian vanity, or resolutions taken with himself to bring a particular woman to a particular degree of corruption, or adventures that stimulated his curiosity. The report of Laurent, his valet de chambre, had just given an enormous price to the Girl with the Golden Eyes. It was a matter of doing battle with some secret enemy who appeared as dangerous as he was skillful; and, to carry off the victory, none of the forces at Henri's disposal would be useless. He was going to play that eternal old comedy which will always be new and whose characters are an old man, a young girl, and a lover: Don Hijos, Paquita, de Marsay. If Laurent was worth Figaro, the duenna appeared incorruptible. Thus the living play was more strongly knotted by chance than it had ever been by any dramatist! But then, is not chance a man of genius?

“It will be necessary to play close,” Henri said to himself.

“Well,” Paul de Manerville said to him on entering, “where are we? I have come to breakfast with you.”

“So be it,” said Henri. “You will not be shocked if I make my toilette before you?”

“What a joke!”

“We are taking so many things from the English at this moment that we might become hypocrites and prudes like them,” said Henri.

Laurent had brought before his master so many implements, so many different pieces of furniture, and such pretty things, that Paul could not keep from saying: “But this is going to take you two hours?”

“No!” said Henri. “Two and a half hours.”

“Well, since we are between ourselves and can tell each other everything, explain to me why a man as superior as you are, for you are superior, affects to carry to excess a foppery that cannot be natural in him. Why spend two and a half hours currying oneself, when it is enough to enter a bath for a quarter of an hour, comb one's hair in two movements, and dress? Come, tell me your system.”

“I must love you very much, you great blockhead, to entrust such lofty thoughts to you,” said the young man, whose feet were at that moment being brushed with a soft brush rubbed with English soap.

“But I have vowed the sincerest attachment to you,” Paul de Manerville replied, “and I love you while finding you superior to me...”

“You must have noticed, if indeed you are capable of observing a moral fact, that woman loves the fop,” de Marsay resumed, answering Paul's declaration only with a look. “Do you know why women love fops? My friend, fops are the only men who take care of themselves. Now, to take too much care of oneself, is that not to say that one tends in oneself another's property? The man who does not belong to himself is precisely the man women relish. Love is essentially a thief. I do not speak to you of that excess of cleanliness of which they are mad. Find one who has become passionate about a careless man, even if he were a remarkable man? If the fact has occurred, we must put it down to the cravings of a pregnant woman, those mad ideas that pass through everyone's head. On the contrary, I have seen very remarkable people left flat because of their negligence. A fop who occupies himself with his person occupies himself with a foolish thing, with little things. And what is woman? A little thing, an assemblage of foolish things. With two words spoken into the air, does one not set her to work for four hours? She is certain that the fop will occupy himself with her, since he does not think of great things. She will never be neglected for glory, ambition, politics, art, those great public women who, for her, are rivals. Then fops have the courage to cover themselves with ridicule in order to please woman, and her heart is full of rewards for the man who is ridiculous through love. Finally, a fop can be a fop only if he has some reason to be one. It is women who give us that rank. The fop is the colonel of love; he has successes, he has his regiment of women to 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 only one, try to play the fop?... you will not even become ridiculous; you will be dead. You would become a prejudice on two legs, one of those men inevitably condemned to do one single and identical thing. You would signify stupidity, as Monsieur de La Fayette signifies America; Monsieur de Talleyrand, diplomacy; Désaugiers, song; Monsieur de Ségur, romance. If they leave their genre, people no longer believe in the value of what they do. That is how we are in France, always sovereignly unjust! Monsieur de Talleyrand is perhaps a great financier, Monsieur de La Fayette a tyrant, and Désaugiers an administrator. You might have forty women the following year; not a single one would be granted to you publicly. Thus foppery, my friend Paul, is the sign of an incontestable power conquered over the female people. A man loved by several women is reputed to have superior qualities; and then each one wants to have him, the unfortunate man! But do you think it is nothing, too, to have the right to enter a salon, to look at everyone there from the height of one's cravat or through an eyeglass, and to be able to despise the most superior man if he wears an out-of-date waistcoat? Laurent, you are hurting me! After breakfast, Paul, we shall go to the Tuileries to see the adorable Girl with the Golden Eyes.”

When, after making an excellent meal, the two young men had paced the terrace of the Feuillants and the great avenue of the Tuileries, they nowhere met the sublime Paquita Valdès, on whose account fifty of the most elegant young men in Paris were there, all musked, high-cravatted, booted, spurred, flourishing riding crops, walking, talking, laughing, and consigning themselves to all the devils.

“White Mass,” said Henri; “but the most excellent idea in the world has come to me. This girl receives letters from London; we must buy or get the postman drunk, unseal a letter, naturally read it, slip a little love note into it, and reseal it. The old tyrant, crudel tiranno, must no doubt know the person who writes the letters coming from London and no longer distrust that person.”

The next day, de Marsay again came to walk in the sun on the terrace of the Feuillants, and there saw Paquita Valdès: already, for him, passion had embellished her. He became seriously mad over those eyes whose rays seemed to have the nature of those cast by the sun and whose ardor summed up that of this perfect body in which everything was voluptuousness. De Marsay burned to brush the dress of this seductive girl when they met in their walk; but his attempts were always vain. At a moment when he had gone past the duenna and Paquita in order to be able to find himself on the side of the Girl with the Golden Eyes when he turned, Paquita, no less impatient, advanced quickly, and de Marsay felt his hand pressed by her in a manner at once so rapid and so passionately significant that he believed he had received the shock of an electric spark. In an instant all the emotions of his youth welled up in his heart. When the two lovers looked at each other, Paquita appeared ashamed; she lowered her eyes so as not to see Henri's eyes again, but her gaze slid beneath them to look at the feet and figure of the man whom women before the Revolution called their conqueror.

“I shall decidedly have this girl as my mistress,” Henri said to himself.

Following her to the end of the terrace, on the side of the place Louis XV, he perceived the old Marquis de San-Réal, who was walking supported on the arm of his valet de chambre, moving with all the precaution of a gouty and decrepit man. Doña Concha, who distrusted Henri, made Paquita pass between herself and the old man.

“Oh! you,” de Marsay said to himself, casting a contemptuous look upon the duenna, “if one cannot make you capitulate, one will put you to sleep with a little opium. We know Mythology and the fable of Argus.”

Before entering the carriage, the Girl with the Golden Eyes exchanged with her lover a few looks whose meaning was not doubtful and with which Henri was delighted; but the duenna caught one of them and sharply said a few words to Paquita, who threw herself into the coupé with an air of despair. For several days Paquita no longer came to the Tuileries. Laurent, who at his master's order went to keep watch around the mansion, learned from the neighbors that neither the two women nor the old marquis had gone out since the day when the duenna had caught a look between the young girl committed to her keeping and Henri. The bond so weak that united the two lovers was therefore already broken.

A few days later, without anyone knowing by what means, de Marsay had reached his goal: he had a seal and wax absolutely similar to the seal and wax that sealed the letters sent from London to Mademoiselle Valdès, paper like that used by the correspondent, then all the implements and irons necessary to affix to it the English and French postal marks. He had written the following letter, to which he gave every appearance of a letter sent from London.

Dear Paquita, I shall not try to paint for you, in words, the passion you have inspired in me. If, to my happiness, you share it, know that I have found the means of corresponding with you. My name is Adolphe de Gouges, and I live at number 54, rue de l'Université. If you are too closely watched to write to me, if you have neither paper nor pens, I shall know it by your silence. Therefore, if tomorrow, from eight in the morning until ten at night, you have not thrown a letter over the wall of your garden into Baron de Nucingen's, where someone will wait all day, a man entirely devoted to me will lower two vials to you over the wall, at the end of a cord, at ten in the morning on the following day. Be walking there around that time; one of the two vials will contain opium to put your Argus to sleep; it will be enough to give her six drops. The other will contain ink. The ink vial is cut, the other is smooth. Both are flat enough for you to hide them in your corset. Everything I have already done in order to be able to correspond with you must tell you how much I love you. If you doubted it, I confess to you that, to obtain a rendezvous of one hour, I would give my life.

“Yet they believe that, those poor creatures!” de Marsay said to himself; “but they are right. What would we think of a woman who did not allow herself to be seduced by a love letter accompanied by such convincing circumstances?”

This letter was delivered by Sieur Moinot, postman, the next day, at about eight in the morning, to the gatekeeper of the San-Réal mansion.

To draw nearer to the field of battle, de Marsay had come to breakfast at Paul's, who lived in the rue de la Pépinière. At two o'clock, at the moment when the two friends were laughingly relating to each other the ruin of a young man who had wished to maintain the pace of elegant life without an established fortune, and were seeking an ending for him, Henri's coachman came all the way to Paul's to fetch his master and presented to him a mysterious personage who absolutely wished to speak to him himself. This personage was a mulatto from whom Talma would certainly have taken inspiration to play Othello if he had met him. Never had an African face better expressed grandeur in vengeance, rapidity of suspicion, promptness in the execution of a thought, the strength of the Moor and his childish want of reflection. His black eyes had the fixity of the eyes of a bird of prey, and they were set, like those of a vulture, in a bluish membrane without lashes. His forehead, small and low, had something menacing. Evidently this man was under the yoke of one single and identical thought. His sinewy arm did not belong to him. He was followed by a man whom every imagination, from those that shiver in Greenland to those that sweat in New England, will picture from this phrase: he was an unhappy man. At that word, everyone will divine him, will represent him according to the ideas peculiar to each country. But who will picture his white, wrinkled face, red at the extremities, and his long beard? who will see his yellowish rope-like cravat, his greasy shirt collar, his wholly worn hat, his greenish frock coat, his pitiful trousers, his shriveled waistcoat, his false-gold pin, his muddy shoes whose ribbons had wallowed in the mud? who will comprehend him in the whole immensity of his present and past misery? Who? The Parisian alone. The unhappy man of Paris is the complete unhappy man, for he still finds enough joy to know how unhappy he is. The mulatto seemed a headsman of Louis XI holding a man due to hang.

“Where were these two rascals fished up for us?” said Henri.

“Slipper! one of them gives me a shiver,” Paul replied.

“Who are you, you who look the more Christian of the two?” Henri said, looking at the unhappy man.

The mulatto kept his eyes fixed upon the two young men, like a man who understood nothing and nevertheless sought to divine something from the gestures and the movement of the lips.

“I am a public letter writer and interpreter. I live at the Palais de Justice and my name is Poincet.”

“Good! And that one?” Henri said to Poincet, pointing to the mulatto.

“I do not know; he speaks only a kind of Spanish patois, and brought me here in order to be able to make himself understood by you.”

The mulatto drew from his pocket the letter written to Paquita by Henri and handed it to him; Henri threw it into the fire.

“Well, this is beginning to take shape,” Henri said within himself. “Paul, leave us alone for a moment.”

“I translated this letter for him,” the interpreter resumed when they were alone. “When it was translated, he went I do not know where. Then he came back to fetch me in order to bring me here, promising me two louis.”

“What have you to tell me, Chinaman?” Henri asked.

“I did not say Chinaman to him,” said the interpreter while waiting for the mulatto's answer.

“He says, monsieur,” the interpreter resumed after listening to the unknown man, “that you must be tomorrow evening, at half past ten, on the boulevard Montmartre, near the café. You will see a carriage there, into which you will enter after saying to the man who will be ready to open the door the word cortejo, a Spanish word that means lover,” Poincet added, casting a congratulatory look at Henri.

“Good!”

The mulatto wished to give two louis; but de Marsay did not permit it and rewarded the interpreter; while he was paying him, the mulatto uttered a few words.

“What does he say?”

“He warns me,” the unhappy man replied, “that if I commit a single indiscretion, he will strangle me. He is agreeable, and he very much looks capable of it.”

“I am sure of it,” Henri replied. “He would do it as he says.”

“He adds,” the interpreter resumed, “that the person whose envoy he is begs you, for your sake and for hers, to put the greatest prudence into your actions, because the daggers raised above your heads would fall into your hearts without any human power being able to protect you from them.”

“He said that! So much the better; it will be more amusing.” “But you may come in, Paul!” he cried to his friend.

The mulatto, who had not ceased looking at Paquita Valdès's lover with magnetic attention, went away followed by the interpreter.

“At last, here then is a very romantic adventure,” Henri said to himself when Paul returned. “By dint of taking part in a few, I have ended by finding in this Paris an intrigue accompanied by grave circumstances, by major perils. Ah! devil, how bold danger makes woman! To hamper a woman, to wish to constrain her, is that not to give her the right and courage to cross in a moment barriers she would take years to leap? Go, sweet creature, leap. Die? poor child! Daggers? women's imagination! They all feel the need to set off their little joke. Besides, we shall think about that, Paquita! we shall think about it, my girl! The devil take me, now that I know this beautiful girl, this masterpiece of nature, is mine, the adventure has lost its piquancy.”

Despite this light speech, the young man had reappeared in Henri. In order to wait until the next day without suffering, he had recourse to exorbitant pleasures: he gambled, dined, supped with his friends; he drank like a cabdriver, ate like a German, and won ten or twelve thousand francs. He left the Rocher de Cancale at two in the morning, slept like a child, awoke the next day fresh and rosy, and dressed to go to the Tuileries, proposing to ride after seeing Paquita in order to gain an appetite and dine better, so as to be able to burn up time.

At the appointed hour, Henri was on the boulevard, saw the carriage, and gave the password to a man who appeared to him to be the mulatto. On hearing this word, the man opened the door and quickly unfolded the step. Henri was carried so rapidly through Paris, and his thoughts left him so little faculty to pay attention to the streets through which he passed, that he did not know where the carriage stopped. The mulatto introduced him into a house where the staircase was near the carriage gate. This staircase was dark, as was the landing on which Henri was obliged to wait during the time the mulatto took to open the door of an apartment that was damp, nauseating, without light, and whose rooms, scarcely lit by the candle his guide found in the anteroom, appeared to him empty and poorly furnished, as are those of a house whose inhabitants are traveling. He recognized that sensation which the reading of one of those novels by Anne Radcliffe gave him, in which the hero passes through the cold, dark, uninhabited rooms of some sad and deserted place. At last the mulatto opened the door of a salon. The condition of the old furniture and faded draperies with which this room was adorned made it resemble the salon of a house of ill repute. It was the same pretension to elegance and the same assemblage of things in bad taste, of dust and filth. On a sofa covered in red Utrecht velvet, at the corner of a smoking fireplace whose fire was buried in the ashes, sat an old woman rather badly dressed, wearing one of those turbans Englishwomen know how to invent when they reach a certain age, and which would have infinite success in China, where the artists' ideal of beauty is monstrosity. This salon, this old woman, this cold hearth, everything would have frozen love, if Paquita had not been there on a love seat in a voluptuous peignoir, free to cast her looks of gold and flame, free to show her curved foot, free in her luminous movements. This first interview was what all first rendezvous are that passionate persons give each other when they have rapidly crossed the distances and ardently desire each other without nevertheless knowing each other. It is impossible that some discordances should not at first be encountered in this situation, awkward until the moment when the souls have put themselves in the same key. If desire gives boldness to the man and disposes him to spare nothing, on pain of not being a woman, the mistress, however extreme her love may be, is frightened to find herself so promptly arrived at the goal and face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which for many women is equivalent to a fall into an abyss at the bottom of which they do not know what they will find.

The involuntary coldness of this woman contrasts with her avowed passion and necessarily reacts upon the most enamored lover. These ideas, which often float like vapors around souls, thus determine in them a kind of passing sickness. In the gentle journey that two beings undertake through the beautiful countries of love, this moment is like a heath to cross, a heath without heather, alternately damp and hot, full of burning sands, cut by marshes, and leading to smiling groves clothed in roses where love and its procession of pleasures unfold upon carpets of fine greenery. Often the man of wit finds himself endowed with a stupid laugh that serves him as an answer to everything; his mind is as if benumbed beneath the icy compression of his desires. It would not be impossible for two beings equally beautiful, witty, and passionate to speak at first of the most foolish commonplaces, until chance, a word, the trembling of a certain look, the communication of a spark, has made them encounter the happy transition that brings them into the flowered path where one does not walk, but where one rolls without nevertheless descending. This state of the soul is always in proportion to the violence of the feelings. Two beings who love each other weakly experience nothing similar. The effect of this crisis may also be compared to that produced by the ardor of a clear sky. Nature at first sight seems covered by a gauze veil, the blue of the firmament appears black, extreme light resembles darkness. In Henri, as in the Spanish girl, an equal violence was encountered; and that law of statics by virtue of which two identical forces cancel each other on meeting might also be true in the moral realm. Then the embarrassment of this moment was singularly increased by the presence of the old mummy. Love takes fright or gaiety from everything; for it everything has a meaning, everything is a happy or fatal omen. This decrepit woman was there like a possible dénouement and represented the horrible fish tail with which the symbol-making geniuses of Greece ended the Chimeras and Sirens, so seductive, so deceptive in the torso, as all passions are at the beginning. Although Henri was not a freethinker - the word is always a mockery - but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as one can be without belief, the assemblage of all these circumstances struck him. Besides, the strongest men are naturally the most impressionable and consequently the most superstitious, if one may indeed call superstition the prejudice of the first impulse, which is doubtless a glimpse of the result in causes hidden from other eyes but perceptible to theirs.

The Spanish girl took advantage of this moment of stupefaction to abandon herself to the ecstasy of that infinite adoration which seizes a woman's heart when she truly loves and finds herself in the presence of an idol vainly hoped for. Her eyes were all joy, all happiness, and sparks escaped from them. She was under the charm and intoxicated herself without fear on a felicity long dreamed of. She then appeared so marvelously beautiful to Henri that all this phantasmagoria of rags, old age, worn red draperies, green mats before the armchairs, the badly scoured red tile, all this infirm and suffering luxury, disappeared at once. The salon was illuminated; he saw the terrible harpy only through a cloud, fixed and mute upon her red sofa, whose yellow eyes betrayed the servile feelings that misfortune inspires or that are caused by a vice beneath whose slavery one has fallen as beneath a tyrant who stupefies you under the lashings of his despotism. Her eyes had the cold gleam of those of a caged tiger that knows its impotence and finds itself obliged to devour its desires for destruction.

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

But Paquita did not answer. She signaled that she did not understand French and asked Henri whether he spoke English. De Marsay repeated his question in English.

“She is the only woman whom I can trust, although she has already sold me,” Paquita said calmly. “My dear Adolphe, she is my mother, a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, of which little remains today. She speaks only her mother tongue.”

This woman's attitude and her desire to divine, from her daughter's and Henri's movements, what was passing between them were suddenly explained to the young man, whom this explanation put at ease.

“Paquita,” he said to her, “then we shall not be free?”

“Never!” she said with a sad air. “We even have few days to ourselves.”

She lowered her eyes, looked at her hand, and counted with her right hand upon the fingers of her left hand, thus showing the most beautiful hands Henri had ever seen.

“One, two, three...”

She counted to twelve.

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

“And afterward?”

“Afterward,” she said, remaining absorbed like a weak woman before the executioner's axe and killed in advance by a fear that stripped her of that magnificent energy which nature seemed to have allotted to her only to enlarge sensual pleasures and convert the grossest pleasures into poems without end. “Afterward,” she repeated. Her eyes became fixed; she appeared to contemplate a distant, threatening object. “I do not know,” she said.

“This girl is mad,” Henri said to himself, and himself fell into strange reflections.

Paquita appeared to him occupied with something that was not him, like a woman constrained equally by remorse and by passion. Perhaps she had in her heart another love that she forgot and recalled by turns. In a moment, Henri was assailed by a thousand contradictory thoughts. For him this girl became a mystery; but, contemplating her with the learned attention of the jaded man, famished for new sensual pleasures, like that king of the East who demanded that a pleasure be created for him, a horrible thirst by which great souls are seized, Henri recognized in Paquita the richest organization that nature had taken pleasure in composing for love. The presumed action of this machine, the soul set apart, would have frightened any man other than de Marsay; but he was fascinated by this rich harvest of promised pleasures, by this constant variety in happiness, the dream of every man, and which every loving woman also aspires to. He was driven mad by the infinite made palpable and transported into the creature's most excessive gratifications. He saw all this in this girl more distinctly than he had yet seen it, for she complacently allowed herself to be seen, happy to be admired. De Marsay's admiration became a secret rage, and he disclosed it entire by casting a look that the Spanish girl understood, as though she were accustomed to receiving similar ones.

“If you were not to be mine alone, I would kill you!” he cried.

On hearing this word, Paquita veiled her face with her hands and cried naïvely, “Holy Virgin, where have I gotten myself into!”

She rose, went to throw herself upon the red sofa, plunged her head into the rags covering her mother's breast, and wept there. The old woman received her daughter without leaving her immobility, without showing her any feeling. The mother possessed to the highest degree that gravity of savage peoples, that impassivity of statuary upon which observation founders. Did she love, did she not love her daughter? No answer. Beneath this mask all human feelings smoldered, the good and the bad, and everything could be expected from this creature. Her gaze went slowly from her daughter's beautiful hair, which covered her as with a mantilla, to Henri's face, which she observed with inexpressible curiosity. She seemed to ask herself by what spell he was there, by what caprice nature had made so seductive a man.

“These women are making fun of me!” Henri said to himself.

At that moment Paquita raised her head and cast upon him one of those looks that reach the soul and burn it. She appeared so beautiful to him that he swore to himself to possess this treasure of beauty.

“My Paquita, be mine!”

“You want to kill me?” she said, fearful, palpitating, anxious, but brought back to him by an inexplicable force.

“Kill you, I!” he said, smiling.

Paquita uttered a cry of fright, said a word to the old woman, who authoritatively took Henri's hand and her daughter's, looked at them for a long time, then returned them to them, shaking her head in a horribly significant manner.

“Be mine tonight, this instant; follow me; do not leave me; I will it, Paquita! Do you love me? Come!”

In a moment he said a thousand senseless words to her with the rapidity of a torrent that bounds among rocks and repeats the same sound in a thousand different forms.

“It is the same voice!” Paquita said sadly, without de Marsay being able to hear her, “and... the same ardor,” she added.

“Well, yes,” she said with an abandonment of passion that nothing could express. “Yes, but not tonight. Tonight, Adolphe, I gave too little opium to Concha; she might wake; I would be lost. At this moment, the whole house believes me asleep in my room. In two days, be at the same place; say the same word to the same man. That man is my foster father; Christemio adores me and would die for me in torments without anyone tearing from him a word against me. Farewell,” she said, seizing Henri around the body and twisting herself around him like a serpent.

She pressed him from every side at once, brought her head beneath his, presented her lips to him, and took a kiss that gave them both such vertigo that de Marsay believed the earth was opening, and Paquita cried, “Go away!” in a voice that sufficiently announced how little mistress of herself she was. But she kept him while still crying to him, “Go away!” and slowly led him as far as the staircase.

There the mulatto, whose white eyes lit up at the sight of Paquita, took the torch from his idol's hands and conducted Henri as far as the street. He left the torch beneath the archway, opened the door, put Henri back into the carriage, and deposited him on the boulevard des Italiens with marvelous rapidity. The horses seemed to have hell in their bodies.

This scene was like a dream for de Marsay, but one of those dreams that, while vanishing, leave in the soul a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness after which a man runs for the rest of his life. A single kiss had sufficed. No rendezvous had taken place in a more decent manner, nor more chastely, nor perhaps more coldly, in a place more horrible in its details, before a more hideous divinity; for this mother had remained in Henri's imagination as something infernal, crouching, cadaverous, vicious, savagely ferocious, which the fancy of painters and poets had not yet divined. Indeed, no rendezvous had ever more irritated his senses, had revealed bolder sensual pleasures, had better made love spring from its center to spread like an atmosphere around a man. It was something dark, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained, and expansive, a coupling of the horrible and the celestial, of paradise and hell, which left de Marsay as if drunk. He was no longer himself, and yet he was great enough to be able to resist the intoxications of pleasure.

To understand his conduct well at the dénouement of this story, it is necessary to explain how his soul had enlarged at the age when young men ordinarily make themselves smaller by mixing with women or concerning themselves too much with them. He had grown through a concurrence of secret circumstances that invested him with an immense unknown power. This young man held in his hand a scepter more powerful than that of modern kings, almost all bridled by laws in their slightest wishes. De Marsay exercised the autocratic power of the Oriental despot. But this power, so stupidly put into operation in Asia by brutalized men, was increased tenfold by European intelligence, by the French mind, the liveliest, the sharpest of all intellectual instruments. Henri could do what he wished in the interest of his pleasures and vanities. This invisible action upon the social world had clothed him in a real majesty, but one that was secret, without emphasis, and folded back upon himself. He had of himself, not the opinion that Louis XIV might have had of himself, but that which the proudest Caliphs, Pharaohs, and Xerxes, who believed themselves of divine race, had of themselves when they imitated God by veiling themselves from their subjects, on the pretext that their looks dealt death. Thus, without having the least remorse at being both judge and party, de Marsay coldly condemned to death the man or woman who had seriously offended him. Although often pronounced almost lightly, the sentence was irrevocable. An error was a misfortune similar to that caused by lightning when it falls upon some happy Parisian woman in a hackney cab instead of crushing the old coachman who is driving her to a rendezvous. Thus the bitter and profound jesting that distinguished this young man's conversation rather generally caused fright; no one felt the desire to offend him. Women prodigiously love those men who call themselves pashas, who seem accompanied by lions and executioners and walk amid an apparatus of terror. From this there results in these men a security of action, a certainty of power, a pride of gaze, a leonine consciousness that realizes for women the type of strength they all dream of. Such was de Marsay.

Happy at that moment with the future before him, he became young and supple again and thought only of loving as he went to bed. He dreamed of the Girl with the Golden Eyes as passionate young men dream. There were monstrous images, elusive oddities full of light, which reveal invisible worlds, but always in an incomplete manner, for an interposed veil changes the conditions of optics. The next day and the day after, he disappeared without anyone being able to know where he had gone. His power belonged to him only under certain conditions, and fortunately for him, during those two days, he was a simple soldier in the service of the demon from whom he held his talismanic existence. But at the appointed hour, in the evening, on the boulevard, he waited for the carriage, which did not keep him waiting. The mulatto approached Henri to say to him in French a sentence he appeared to have learned by heart: “‘If you wish to come,’ she told me, ‘you must consent to let yourself be blindfolded.’”

And Christemio showed a white silk scarf.

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

And he tried to get in. The mulatto made a sign; the carriage left.

“Yes!” cried de Marsay, furious at losing a happiness he had promised himself. Besides, he saw the impossibility of coming to terms with a slave whose obedience was as blind as an executioner’s. Then, was it upon this passive instrument that his anger ought to fall?

The mulatto whistled; the carriage returned. Henri got in hurriedly. Already a few curious people were stupidly gathering on the boulevard. Henri was strong; he wanted to make sport of the mulatto. When the carriage set off at a fast trot, he seized the man’s hands in order to get control of him and, by subduing his guard, retain the use of his faculties so as to know where he was going. A useless attempt. The mulatto’s eyes flashed in the darkness. The man uttered cries that fury smothered in his throat, freed himself, threw de Marsay back with an iron hand and, so to speak, nailed him to the bottom of the carriage; then, with his free hand, he drew a triangular dagger while whistling. The coachman heard the whistle and stopped. Henri was unarmed; he was forced to yield; he held out his head toward the scarf. This gesture of submission calmed Christemio, who blindfolded him with a respect and care that attested to a kind of veneration for the person of the man loved by his idol. But, before taking this precaution, he had distrustfully put his dagger away in his side pocket and buttoned himself up to the chin.

“That Chinaman would have killed me!” de Marsay said to himself.

The carriage rolled rapidly again. One resource remained to a young man who knew Paris as well as Henri knew it. To know where he was going, it was enough for him to collect himself, to count, by the number of gutters crossed, the streets before which they would pass on the boulevards for as long as the carriage continued to go straight. He could thus recognize by which side street the carriage would head, either toward the Seine or toward the heights of Montmartre, and guess the name or the position of the street where his guide would have him stop. But the violent emotion his struggle had caused him, the fury into which his compromised dignity put him, the ideas of vengeance to which he gave himself up, the suppositions suggested to him by the minute care this mysterious girl took to have him reach her, all prevented him from possessing that blind man’s attention necessary to the concentration of his intelligence and to the perfect perspicacity of memory. The journey lasted half an hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on paving stones. The mulatto and the coachman seized Henri around the body, lifted him, put him on a kind of stretcher, and carried him through a garden whose flowers and the odor particular to trees and greenery he smelled. The silence reigning there was so deep that he could distinguish the sound made by a few drops of water falling from the damp leaves. The two men carried him up a staircase, made him stand, led him through several rooms, guiding him by the hands, and left him in a room whose atmosphere was perfumed and whose thick carpet he felt beneath his feet. A woman’s hand pushed him onto a divan and untied the scarf. Henri saw Paquita before him, but Paquita in her glory as a voluptuous woman.

Half of the boudoir where Henri found himself described a softly graceful circular line that contrasted with the other part, which was perfectly square and in the middle of which shone a fireplace of white marble and gold. He had entered by a side door, hidden by a rich tapestry curtain, which faced a window. The horseshoe was adorned with a true Turkish divan, that is, a mattress laid on the floor, but a mattress as broad as a bed, a divan fifty feet around, in white cashmere, set off by puffs of black and poppy-red silk arranged in lozenges. The back of this immense bed rose several inches above the many cushions that further enriched it by the taste of their trimmings. This boudoir was hung with a red fabric over which was placed Indian muslin fluted as a Corinthian column is, by folds alternately hollow and round, secured at top and bottom in a band of poppy-red fabric on which black arabesques were drawn. Beneath the muslin, the poppy red became pink, the color of love, which was repeated by the window curtains, made of Indian muslin lined with pink taffeta and adorned with fringes of poppy red mixed with black. Six silver-gilt arms, each supporting two candles, were attached to the hanging at equal distances to light the divan. The ceiling, from the middle of which hung a chandelier of matte silver-gilt, sparkled with whiteness, and the cornice was gilded. The carpet resembled an Oriental shawl, presented its designs, and recalled the poetry of Persia, where slaves’ hands had worked it. The furniture was covered in white cashmere, heightened by black and poppy-red trimmings. The clock, the candelabra, everything was in white marble and gold. The only table there was had a cashmere for its covering. Elegant jardinières contained roses of every species, flowers either white or red. In short, the least detail seemed to have been the object of care taken with love. Never had wealth hidden itself more coquettishly in order to become elegance, to express grace, to inspire voluptuousness. There everything would have warmed the coldest being. The shifting gleams of the hanging, whose color changed according to the direction of the gaze, becoming either wholly white or wholly pink, accorded with the effects of the light that infused itself into the diaphanous folds of muslin, producing cloudy appearances. The soul has some indefinable attachment to white, love takes pleasure in red, and gold flatters the passions; it has the power to realize their fantasies. Thus everything vague and mysterious that man has within himself, all his unexplained affinities, found their involuntary sympathies caressed. In this perfect harmony there was a concert of colors to which the soul responded with voluptuous, indeterminate, floating ideas.

It was in the midst of a vaporous atmosphere laden with exquisite perfumes that Paquita, dressed in a white peignoir, barefoot, orange blossoms in her black hair, appeared to Henri kneeling before him, adoring him as the god of this temple to which he had deigned to come. Although de Marsay was accustomed to seeing the refinements of Parisian luxury, he was surprised at the sight of this shell, like the one in which Venus was born. Whether through the effect of the contrast between the darkness from which he emerged and the light that bathed his soul, or through a comparison rapidly made between this scene and that of the first meeting, he experienced one of those delicate sensations given by true poetry. On seeing, in the midst of this retreat hatched by a fairy’s wand, the masterpiece of creation, this girl whose warmly colored complexion, whose soft skin, but slightly gilded by the reflections of red and by the effusion of some indefinable vapor of love, sparkled as though it reflected the rays of the lights and colors, his anger, his desires for vengeance, his wounded vanity, everything fell away. Like an eagle that swoops upon its prey, he took her bodily, seated her on his knees, and felt with an inexpressible intoxication the voluptuous pressure of this girl whose so amply developed beauties softly enveloped him.

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

“Speak! speak without fear,” she told him. “This retreat was built for love. No sound escapes from it, so ambitiously does one wish to preserve there the accents and the music of the beloved voice. However loud cries may be, they could not be heard beyond this enclosure. Someone could be murdered here; his complaints would be as vain as if he were in the middle of the Great Desert.”

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

“Never question me about that,” she replied, undoing the young man’s cravat with an incredibly charming gesture, no doubt in order to see his neck well.

“Yes, there is the neck I love so much!” she said. “Do you want to please me?”

This question, which her accent made almost lascivious, drew de Marsay from the reverie into which the despotic answer by which Paquita had forbidden him all inquiry into the unknown being who hovered like a shadow above them had plunged him.

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

Paquita looked at him, trembling.

“Then it is not I,” he said, rising and freeing himself from this girl, who fell with her head backward. “I mean to be alone where I am.”

“Hitting! hitting!” said the poor slave, in the grip of terror.

“What, then, do you take me for? Will you answer?”

Paquita rose gently, her eyes in tears, went to take a dagger from one of the two ebony cabinets, and offered it to Henri with a gesture of submission that would have moved a tiger.

“Give me a feast such as men give when they love,” she said, “and while I am sleeping, kill me, for I cannot answer you. Listen: I am tied like a poor animal to its stake; I am astonished to have been able to throw a bridge across the abyss that separates us. Intoxicate me, then kill me. Oh! no, no,” she said, clasping her hands, “do not kill me! I love life! Life is so beautiful to me! If I am a slave, I am also a queen. I could deceive you with words, tell you that I love only you, prove it to you, profit from my momentary dominion to say to you: ‘Take me as one tastes in passing the perfume of a flower in a king’s garden.’ Then, after having unfurled woman’s cunning eloquence and the wings of pleasure, after having quenched my thirst, I could have you thrown into a well where no one would find you, and which was built to satisfy vengeance without having to fear that of justice, a well full of lime that would ignite in order to consume you without a particle of your being being found. You would remain in my heart, mine forever.”

Henri looked at this girl without trembling, and this fearless gaze filled her with joy.

“No, I will not do it! You have not fallen here into a trap, but into a woman’s heart that adores you, and it is I who will be thrown into the well.”

“All that seems prodigiously funny to me,” de Marsay told her while examining her. “But you seem to me a good girl, a strange nature; upon the word of an honest man, you are a living charade whose answer seems very difficult to me to find.”

Paquita understood nothing of what the young man was saying; she looked at him gently, opening eyes that could never be stupid, so much voluptuousness was depicted in them.

“Look, my love,” she said, returning to her first idea, “do you want to please me?”

“I will do everything you want, and even what you do not want,” de Marsay replied, laughing, recovering his fop’s ease as he resolved to let himself follow the course of his good fortune without looking either backward or forward. Then perhaps he counted on his power and on his savoir-faire as a man of conquests to master this girl a few hours later and learn all her secrets.

“Well then,” she told him, “let me arrange you to my taste.”

“Then put me to your taste,” said Henri.

Paquita, joyful, went to take from one of the two cabinets a red velvet dress, in which she dressed de Marsay; then she put a woman’s cap on his head and wrapped him in a shawl. As she gave herself up to her follies, done with a child’s innocence, she laughed with a convulsive laugh and resembled a bird beating its wings; but she saw nothing beyond.

If it is impossible to paint the unheard-of delights encountered by these two beautiful creatures made by heaven at a moment when it was joyful, it is perhaps necessary to translate metaphysically the young man’s extraordinary and almost fantastic impressions. What people who occupy the social position de Marsay occupied and who live as he lived know best how to recognize is a girl’s innocence. But, strange thing! if the Girl with the Golden Eyes was a virgin, she was certainly not innocent. The so bizarre union of the mysterious and the real, of shadow and light, of the horrible and the beautiful, of pleasure and danger, of paradise and hell, which had already occurred in this adventure, continued in the capricious and sublime being whom de Marsay was toying with. Everything most learned that the most refined voluptuousness possesses, everything Henri could know of that poetry of the senses called love, was surpassed by the treasures unfolded by this girl whose bursting eyes did not belie any of the promises they made. It was an Oriental poem in which shone the sun that Saadi and Hafiz put into their bounding stanzas. Only neither Saadi’s rhythm nor Pindar’s could have expressed the ecstasy full of confusion and the stupefaction that seized this delightful girl when the error in which an iron hand made her live came to an end.

“Dead!” she said, “I am dead! Adolphe, take me, then, to the end of the earth, to an island where no one knows of us. Let our flight leave no traces! We would be followed into hell. God! here is day. Save yourself. Will I ever see you again? Yes, tomorrow, I want to see you again, even if, in order to have that happiness, I must put all my guards to death. Until tomorrow.”

She clasped him in her arms with an embrace in which there was the terror of death. Then she pressed a spring that must have corresponded to a bell, and begged de Marsay to allow himself to be blindfolded.

“And if I no longer wanted to, and if I wanted to remain here.”

“You would cause my death more quickly,” she said, “for now I am certain to die for you.”

Henri let it be done. In the man who has just gorged himself on pleasure there is an inclination toward forgetfulness, some indefinable ingratitude, a desire for freedom, a fancy to go walking, a tinge of contempt and perhaps of disgust for his idol; there are, in short, inexplicable feelings that make him infamous and ignoble. The certainty of this confused state, real, however, in souls that are neither illuminated by that celestial light nor perfumed by that holy balm from which comes to us the tenacity of feeling, doubtless dictated to Rousseau the adventures of Milord Edward with which the letters of La Nouvelle Héloïse conclude. If Rousseau was clearly inspired by Richardson’s work, he departed from it through a thousand details that leave his monument magnificently original; he commended it to posterity through great ideas that are difficult to disengage by analysis when, in youth, one reads this work with the intention of finding in it the warm painting of the most physical of our feelings, whereas serious and philosophical writers never employ its images except as the consequence or the necessity of a vast thought; and the adventures of Milord Edward are one of the most Europeanly delicate ideas of this work.

Henri was therefore under the dominion of that confused feeling which true love does not know. It required, so to speak, the persuasive judgment of comparisons and the irresistible attraction of memories to bring him back to a woman. True love reigns above all through memory. Can the woman who has engraved herself in the soul neither by the excess of pleasure nor by the strength of feeling ever be loved? Without Henri’s knowledge, Paquita had established herself within him by these two means. But at that moment, wholly given over to the fatigue of happiness, that delightful melancholy of the body, he could scarcely analyze his heart while taking back upon his lips the taste of the keenest voluptuous pleasures he had yet plucked from the cluster. He found himself on the boulevard Montmartre at daybreak, looked stupidly at the carriage fleeing away, took two cigars from his pocket, lit one at the lantern of an old woman who sold brandy and coffee to workers, street boys, market gardeners, to all that Parisian population which begins its life before day; then he went away, smoking his cigar and putting his hands into the pockets of his trousers with a truly dishonorable unconcern.

“What a good thing a cigar is! There is what a man will never grow tired of,” he said to himself.

That Girl with the Golden Eyes, about whom all the elegant youth of Paris was wild at that time, he scarcely thought of her! The idea of death expressed through pleasures, and the fear of which had several times darkened the brow of this beautiful creature who was linked to the houris of Asia through her mother, to Europe through her education, to the Tropics through her birth, seemed to him to be one of those deceptions by which all women try to make themselves interesting.

“She is from Havana, from the most Spanish country there is in the New World; she therefore preferred to act terror rather than throw suffering, difficulty, coquetry, or duty in my face, as Parisian women do. By her golden eyes, I very much want to sleep.”

He saw a hired cabriolet that was standing at the corner of Frascati while waiting for a few gamblers; he woke its driver, had himself driven home, went to bed, and fell asleep with the sleep of bad characters, which, through an oddity no song writer has yet used, happens to be as deep as that of innocence. Perhaps this is an effect of the proverbial axiom, extremes meet.

Toward noon, de Marsay stretched his arms as he woke and felt the attacks of one of those canine hungers that all old soldiers can remember having experienced on the day after victory. Thus he saw Paul de Manerville before him with pleasure, for nothing is then more agreeable than to eat in company.

“Well!” his friend said to him, “we all imagined that you had shut yourself up for ten days with the Girl with the Golden Eyes.”

“The Girl with the Golden Eyes! I no longer think of her. Upon my word! I have many other fish to fry.”

“Ah! You are being discreet.”

“Why not?” said de Marsay, laughing. “My dear fellow, discretion is the most skillful of calculations. Listen... But no, I will not tell you a word. You never teach me anything; I am not disposed to give away the treasures of my policy at a pure loss. Life is a river used for commerce. By all that is most sacred on earth, by cigars, I am not a professor of social economy brought within the reach of fools. Let us breakfast. It is less costly to give you a tuna omelet than to lavish my brain upon you.”

“You keep accounts with your friends?”

“My dear fellow,” said Henri, who rarely denied himself an irony, “since it might nevertheless happen to you, just as to another man, to need discretion, and since I love you very much... Yes, I love you! Upon my word of honor, if you needed only a thousand-franc note to prevent yourself from blowing out your brains, you would find it here, for we have not yet mortgaged anything up there, have we, Paul? If you were to fight tomorrow, I would measure the distance and load the pistols, so that you would be killed according to the rules. In short, if anyone other than I took it into his head to speak ill of you in your absence, he would have to measure himself against a rough gentleman who is inside my skin; that is what I call a friendship proof against everything. Well then, when you need discretion, my little fellow, learn that there are two kinds of discretion: active discretion and negative discretion. Negative discretion is that of fools who employ silence, denial, a sullen look, the discretion of closed doors, true impotence! Active discretion proceeds by affirmation. If this evening, at the Club, I said: ‘Upon the word of an honest man, the Girl with the Golden Eyes was not worth what she cost me!’ everyone, once I had left, would exclaim: ‘Did you hear that fop de Marsay, who would like to make us believe that he has already had the Girl with the Golden Eyes? He would like in this way to rid himself of his rivals; he is not unskillful.’ But this ruse is common and dangerous. However gross the foolishness that escapes us, there are always fools who may believe it. The best discretion is that used by skillful women when they want to mislead their husbands. It consists in compromising a woman for whom we care nothing, or whom we do not love, or whom we do not have, in order to preserve the honor of the woman we love enough to respect. That is what I call the screen-woman.” “Ah! here is Laurent. What are you bringing us?”

“Ostend oysters, Monsieur le Comte...”

“One day you will know, Paul, how amusing it is to make sport of the world by stealing from it the secret of our affections. I experience an immense pleasure in escaping the stupid jurisdiction of the mass, which never knows either what it wants or what it is made to want, which takes the means for the result, which by turns adores and curses, raises up and destroys! What happiness to impose emotions upon it and receive none from it, to subdue it, never to obey it! If one can be proud of something, is it not of a power acquired by oneself, of which we are at once the cause, the effect, the principle, and the result? Well then, no man knows whom I love or what I want. Perhaps people will know whom I have loved, what I will have loved, what I will have wanted, as completed dramas are known; but let people see into my game?... weakness, dupery. I know nothing more contemptible than strength outwitted by cleverness. Laughing all the while, I am initiating myself into the profession of ambassador, if diplomacy is as difficult as life! I doubt it. Do you have ambition? Do you want to become something?”

“But Henri, you are making fun of me, as if I were not mediocre enough to attain anything.”

“Good! Paul. If you continue to make fun of yourself, you will soon be able to make fun of everyone.”

While breakfasting, de Marsay began, when he had reached the point of smoking his cigars, to see the events of his night in a singular light. Like many great minds, his perspicacity was not spontaneous; he did not enter all at once into the depths of things. As in all natures endowed with the faculty of living greatly in the present, of expressing, so to speak, its juice and devouring it, his second sight needed a kind of sleep in order to identify itself with causes. Cardinal de Richelieu was like this, which did not exclude in him the gift of foresight necessary to the conception of great things. De Marsay was in all these conditions, but at first he used his weapons only for the benefit of his pleasures, and became one of the most profound politicians of the present time only when he had saturated himself with the pleasures of which a young man thinks first when he has gold and power. Man is bronzed in this way: he wears out woman so that woman cannot wear him out. At that moment, then, de Marsay perceived that he had been played by the Girl with the Golden Eyes, on seeing as a whole this night whose pleasures had only gradually trickled before ending by pouring out in torrents. He was then able to read in this page so brilliant in effect and divine its hidden meaning. Paquita’s purely physical innocence, the astonishment of her joy, a few words at first obscure and now clear, escaped in the midst of joy, everything proved to him that he had posed for another person. Since none of the social corruptions was unknown to him, since he professed a perfect indifference concerning all caprices and believed them justified by the very fact that they could be satisfied, he was not alarmed by vice; he knew it as one knows a friend, but he was wounded at having served as its fodder. If his presumptions were correct, he had been outraged in the quick of his being. This suspicion alone threw him into a fury; he let burst forth the roar of the tiger of whom a gazelle had made fun, the cry of a tiger that joined the intelligence of the demon to the strength of the beast.

“Well then, what is the matter with you?” Paul said to him.

“Nothing!”

“I would not want, if someone asked you whether you had anything against me, you to answer with a similar nothing; we would doubtless have to fight the next day.”

“I no longer fight,” said de Marsay.

“This seems still more tragic to me. Then you murder?”

“You travesty words. I execute.”

“My dear friend,” said Paul, “your jokes are very dark indeed this morning.”

“What do you want? Voluptuousness leads to ferocity. Why? I know nothing of it, and I am not curious enough to seek the cause.” “These cigars are excellent. Give your friend some tea.” “Do you know, Paul, that I lead a brute’s life? It would be quite time to choose a destiny for oneself, to employ one’s powers at something worth living for. Life is a singular comedy. I am frightened; I laugh at the inconsistency of our social order. The government has the heads cut off poor devils who have killed one man, and it licenses creatures who dispatch, medically speaking, a dozen young men each winter. Morality is powerless against a dozen vices that destroy society and that nothing can punish.” “Another cup?” “Upon my word of honor! Man is a buffoon who dances on a precipice. We are told of the immorality of Dangerous Liaisons, and of some other book I do not know which that has a chambermaid’s name; but there exists a horrible, dirty, frightful, corrupting book, always open, that will never be closed, the great book of the world, without counting another book a thousand times more dangerous, which is composed of everything said in the ear between men, or beneath the fan between women, in the evening, at the ball.”

“Henri, certainly something extraordinary is taking place in you, and it can be seen despite your active discretion.”

“Yes! look, I must devour the time until this evening. Let us go gamble. Perhaps I shall have the happiness of losing.”

De Marsay rose, took a handful of banknotes, rolled them in his cigar case, dressed, and took advantage of Paul’s carriage to go to the Salon des Étrangers, where, until dinner, he consumed time in those moving alternations of loss and gain which are the last resource of strong constitutions when they are constrained to exercise themselves in emptiness. In the evening he came to the rendezvous and obligingly allowed himself to be blindfolded. Then, with that firm will which truly strong men alone have the faculty of concentrating, he directed his attention and applied his intelligence to guessing through which streets the carriage passed. He had a kind of certainty that he was being taken to the rue Saint-Lazare and stopped at the small garden door of the San-Réal mansion. When, as on the first occasion, he passed through this door and was put on a stretcher borne doubtless by the mulatto and the coachman, he understood, on hearing the sand cry beneath their feet, why such minute precautions were taken. He could, had he been free, or had he walked, have picked a branch from a shrub, examined the nature of the sand that would have clung to his boots; whereas, carried so to speak through the air into an inaccessible mansion, his good fortune had to be what it had been until then, a dream. But, to man’s despair, he can do nothing except imperfectly, either in good or in evil. All his intellectual or physical works are signed with a mark of destruction. It had rained lightly; the earth was damp. During the night certain vegetal odors are much stronger than during the day; Henri therefore smelled the perfumes of mignonette along the path by which he was being conveyed. This indication was to enlighten him in the searches he promised himself he would make in order to recognize the mansion where Paquita’s boudoir was situated. He likewise studied the turns his bearers made in the house and believed he could remember them. He saw himself, as the day before, on the ottoman before Paquita, who was undoing his blindfold; but he saw her pale and changed. She had wept. Kneeling like an angel at prayer, but like a sad and profoundly melancholy angel, the poor girl no longer resembled the curious, impatient, bounding creature who had taken de Marsay upon her wings to carry him into the seventh heaven of love. There was something so true in this despair veiled by pleasure that the terrible de Marsay felt within himself an admiration for this new masterpiece of nature and momentarily forgot the principal interest of this rendezvous.

“What is the matter with you, my Paquita?”

“My friend,” she said, “take me away, this very night! Cast me somewhere where, on seeing me, no one can say: ‘Here is Paquita’; where no one will answer: ‘There is here a girl with a golden gaze, who has long hair.’ There I will give you pleasures for as long as you want to receive them from me. Then, when you no longer love me, you will leave me; I will not complain, I will say nothing; and my abandonment ought to cause you no remorse, for one day spent near you, a single day during which I shall have looked at you, will have been worth a whole lifetime to me. But if I remain here, I am lost.”

“I cannot leave Paris, my little one,” Henri replied. “I do not belong to myself; I am bound by an oath to the fate of several people who are mine as I am theirs. But I can make you a refuge in Paris where no human power will reach.”

“No,” she said, “you forget feminine power.”

Never did a sentence spoken by a human voice express terror more completely.

“Who, then, could reach you if I place myself between you and the world?”

“Poison!” she said. “Already dona Concha suspects you. And,” she resumed, letting tears flow that shone along her cheeks, “it is very easy to see that I am no longer the same. Well then, if you abandon me to the fury of the monster who will devour me, let your holy will be done! But come, make all the voluptuous pleasures of life be in our love. Besides, I will implore, I will weep, I will cry out, I will defend myself, perhaps I will save myself.”

“Whom, then, will you implore?” he said.

“Silence!” Paquita resumed. “If I obtain my pardon, it will perhaps be because of my discretion.”

“Give me my robe,” Henri said insidiously.

“No, no,” she replied quickly, “remain what you are, one of those angels whom I had been taught to hate and in whom I saw only monsters, whereas you are what is most beautiful beneath heaven,” she said, caressing Henri’s hair. “You do not know to what point I am stupid? I have learned nothing. Since the age of twelve I have been shut away without having seen anyone. I can neither read nor write; I speak only English and Spanish.”

“How is it, then, that you receive letters from London?”

“My letters! Look, here they are!” she said, going to take some papers from a tall Japanese vase.

She handed de Marsay letters in which the young man saw with surprise bizarre figures like those of rebuses, traced with blood and expressing sentences full of passion.

“But,” he cried, admiring these hieroglyphs created by a skillful jealousy, “you are under the power of an infernal genius?”

“Infernal,” she repeated.

“But how, then, were you able to go out...”

“Ah!” she said. “From that comes my ruin. I placed dona Concha between the fear of an immediate death and an anger to come. I had a demon’s curiosity; I wanted to break this circle of bronze that had been traced between creation and me; I wanted to see what young men were, for the only men I know are the marquis and Christemio. Our coachman and the servant who accompanies us are old men...”

“But you were not always shut away? Your health required...”

“Ah!” she resumed. “We went walking, but during the night and in the country, on the bank of the Seine, far from the world.”

“Are you not proud to be loved in this way?”

“No,” she said, “no longer! Although well filled, this hidden life is only darkness in comparison with the light.”

“What do you call the light?”

“You, my beautiful Adolphe! You, for whom I would give my life. All the things of passion that were said to me and that I inspired, I feel them for you! During certain moments I understood nothing of existence, but now I know how we love, and until now I was only loved; I did not love. I would leave everything for you; take me away. If you wish it, take me as a toy, but leave me near you until you break me.”

“You will have no regret?”

“Not a single one!” she said, letting it be read in her eyes, whose tint of gold remained pure and clear.

“Am I the preferred one?” Henri said within himself; if he glimpsed the truth, he then found himself disposed to forgive the offense in favor of so ingenuous a love. “I shall see clearly,” he thought.

If Paquita owed him no account of the past, the least memory became a crime in his eyes. He therefore had the sad strength to have a thought of his own, to judge his mistress, to study her while abandoning himself to the most compelling pleasures that any Peri descended from heaven had ever found for her beloved. Paquita seemed to have been created for love, with special care from nature. From one night to the next, her woman’s genius had made the most rapid progress. Whatever the power of this young man and his unconcern in matters of pleasure, despite the satiety of the preceding night, he found in the Girl with the Golden Eyes that seraglio which the loving woman knows how to create, and whom a man never renounces. Paquita answered to that passion which all truly great men feel for the infinite, a mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so poetically translated in Manfred, and which drove Don Juan to search the hearts of women in the hope of finding there that boundless thought in search of which so many hunters of specters set out, which scholars believe they glimpse in science, and which mystics find in God alone. The hope of at last having the Ideal Being with whom the struggle could be constant without fatigue enraptured de Marsay, who, for the first time in a long while, opened his heart. His nerves relaxed, his coldness melted in the atmosphere of this burning soul, his trenchant doctrines flew away, and happiness colored his existence as this white and pink boudoir was colored. Feeling the spur of a superior voluptuousness, he was carried beyond the limits within which he had until then confined passion. He did not want to be surpassed by this girl whom a love artificial in some manner had formed in advance for the needs of his soul, and then he found, in that vanity which drives man to remain victor in everything, the strength to subdue this girl; but also, cast beyond that line where the soul is mistress of itself, he lost himself in those delightful limbos which the vulgar so foolishly call imaginary spaces. He was tender, good, and communicative. He made Paquita almost mad.

“Why should we not go to Sorrento, to Nice, to Chiavari, to spend our whole life in this way? Do you want to?” he said to Paquita in a penetrating voice.

“Do you ever need to say to me: ‘Do you want to?’” she cried. “Do I have a will? I am something outside you only in order to be a pleasure for you. If you want to choose a retreat worthy of us, Asia is the only country where love can spread its wings...”

“You are right,” Henri resumed. “Let us go to the Indies, where spring is eternal, where the earth has nothing but flowers, where man can display the apparatus of sovereigns without people commenting on it as they do in the foolish countries where they want to realize the flat chimera of equality. Let us go to the country where one lives in the midst of a people of slaves, where the sun always illuminates a palace that remains white, where perfumes are sown in the air, where birds sing love, and where one dies when one can no longer love...”

“And where one dies together!” said Paquita. “But let us not leave tomorrow; let us leave this instant; let us take Christemio.”

“Upon my word, pleasure is the most beautiful conclusion of life. Let us go to Asia, but to leave, child! A great deal of gold is needed, and to have gold, one must put one’s affairs in order.”

She understood nothing of these ideas.

“Gold, there is some here this high!” she said, raising her hand.

“It is not mine.”

“What does that matter?” she resumed. “If we need it, let us take it.”

“It does not belong to you.”

“Belong!” she repeated. “Did you not take me? When we have taken it, it will belong to us.”

He began to laugh.

“Poor innocent! You know nothing of the things of this world.”

“No, but here is what I know,” she cried, drawing Henri down upon her.

At the very moment when de Marsay forgot everything and conceived the desire to appropriate this creature to himself forever, he received in the midst of his joy a dagger blow that pierced straight through his heart, mortified for the first time. Paquita, who had vigorously lifted him into the air as if to contemplate him, had cried: “Oh! Mariquita!”

“Mariquita!” cried the young man, roaring. “I now know everything I still wanted to doubt.”

He sprang toward the cabinet in which the long dagger was enclosed. Fortunately for her and for him, the cupboard was locked. His rage increased because of this obstacle; but he recovered his calm, went to take his cravat, and advanced toward her with an expression so ferociously significant that, without knowing of what crime she was guilty, Paquita nevertheless understood that for her it was a matter of dying. Then she sprang in a single bound to the end of the room to avoid the fatal knot that de Marsay wanted to pass around her neck. There was a struggle. On both sides suppleness, agility, and vigor were equal. To end the struggle, Paquita threw between her lover’s legs a cushion that made him fall, and profited from the respite this advantage left her to press the trigger of the spring to which a warning responded. The mulatto arrived abruptly. In the blink of an eye Christemio sprang upon de Marsay, threw him down, placed his foot on his chest, the heel turned toward the throat. De Marsay understood that if he struggled he would be crushed at once at a single sign from Paquita.

“Why did you want to kill me, my love?” she said to him.

De Marsay did not answer.

“In what have I displeased you?” she said to him. “Speak, let us explain ourselves.”

Henri retained the phlegmatic attitude of the strong man who feels himself defeated; a cold, silent, wholly English countenance that announced the consciousness of his dignity through a momentary resignation. Besides, despite the violence of his anger, he had already thought that it was imprudent to compromise himself with justice by killing this girl unexpectedly and without having prepared the murder in such a way as to assure himself of impunity.

“My beloved,” Paquita resumed, “speak to me; do not leave me without a farewell of love! I would not want to keep in my heart the terror you have just put there. Will you speak?” she said, stamping her foot angrily.

For answer, de Marsay cast her a look that signified so well: you will die! that Paquita rushed upon him.

“Well then, do you want to kill me? If my death can give you pleasure, kill me!”

She made a sign to Christemio, who lifted his foot from upon the young man and went away without letting it be seen on his face whether he passed a good or bad judgment on Paquita.

“There is a man!” de Marsay said to himself, indicating the mulatto with a dark gesture. “There is no devotion except the devotion that obeys friendship without judging it. You have a true friend in this man.”

“I will give him to you if you want,” she replied; “he will serve you with the same devotion he has for me if I charge him to do so.”

She waited for a word in reply and resumed with an accent full of tenderness: “Adolphe, say a kind word to me. Here is day coming soon.”

Henri did not answer. This young man had an unfortunate quality, for people regard as a great thing everything that resembles strength, and men often deify extravagances. Henri did not know how to forgive. The ability to relent, which certainly is one of the graces of the soul, was nonsense to him. The ferocity of the men of the North, with which English blood is rather strongly tinged, had been transmitted to him by his father. He was unshakable in his good feelings as in his bad. Paquita’s exclamation was all the more horrible to him because he had been dethroned from the sweetest triumph that had ever enlarged his vanity as a man. Hope, love, and all the feelings had become exalted in him; everything had blazed in his heart and in his intelligence; then these torches, lit to illuminate his life, had been blown out by a cold wind. Paquita, stupefied, had in her grief only the strength to give the signal for departure.

“This is useless,” she said, throwing aside the blindfold. “If he no longer loves me, if he hates me, everything is over.”

She waited for a look, did not obtain one, and fell half dead. The mulatto cast upon Henri a glance so frightfully significant that it made this young man tremble for the first time in his life, a young man to whom no one denied the gift of rare intrepidity. “If you do not love her well, if you cause her the least pain, I will kill you.” Such was the meaning of this rapid glance. De Marsay was conducted with almost servile care along a corridor lit by borrowed lights, at the end of which he passed through a secret door onto a hidden staircase that led to the garden of the San-Réal mansion. The mulatto made him walk cautiously along an avenue of lindens that ended at a small door opening onto a street deserted at that time. De Marsay noticed everything well; the carriage was waiting for him; this time the mulatto did not accompany him; and, at the moment when Henri put his head through the carriage door to see the gardens and the mansion again, he met the white eyes of Christemio, with whom he exchanged a look. On both sides it was a provocation, a challenge, the announcement of a war of savages, of a duel in which the ordinary laws ceased, in which treachery or perfidy was an admitted means. Christemio knew that Henri had sworn Paquita's death. Henri knew that Christemio wanted to kill him before he killed Paquita. Both understood each other marvelously.

“The adventure is becoming complicated in a rather interesting way,” Henri said to himself.

“Where is monsieur going?” the coachman asked him.

De Marsay had himself driven to Paul de Manerville’s.

For more than a week Henri was absent from his home, without anyone’s being able to know either what he did during that time or in what place he stayed. This retreat saved him from the mulatto’s fury and caused the ruin of the poor creature who had placed all her hope in the man she loved as no creature ever loved on this earth. On the last day of this week, toward eleven o’clock in the evening, Henri came by carriage to the small garden door of the San-Réal mansion. Three men accompanied him. The coachman was obviously one of his friends, for he rose upright on his seat, like a man who wanted, as an attentive sentinel, to listen for the least noise. One of the other three remained outside the door, in the street; the second remained standing in the garden, leaning against the wall; the last, who held a ring of keys in his hand, accompanied de Marsay.

“Henri,” his companion told him, “we are betrayed.”

“By whom, my good Ferragus?”

“They are not all asleep,” replied the chief of the Devourers: “someone in the house absolutely must have neither drunk nor eaten. Look, see that light.”

“We have the plan of the house; where does that light come from?”

“I do not need the plan to know that,” Ferragus replied; “it comes from the marquise’s room.”

“Ah!” cried de Marsay. “She will doubtless have arrived from London today. That woman will have taken even my vengeance from me! But if she has preceded me, my good Gratien, we will deliver her to justice.”

“Listen, then! The affair is done,” Ferragus said to Henri.

The two friends listened and heard weakened cries that would have softened tigers.

“Your marquise did not think that the sounds would come out through the chimney flue,” said the chief of the Devourers with the laugh of a critic delighted to discover a fault in a beautiful work.

“We alone know how to foresee everything,” said Henri. “Wait for me; I want to go see how things are taking place up there, in order to learn the manner in which their household quarrels are treated. By the name of God, I believe she is cooking her over a low fire.”

De Marsay nimbly climbed the staircase he knew and recognized the way to the boudoir. When he opened its door, he had the involuntary shudder that the sight of spilled blood causes in the most determined man. Moreover, the spectacle offered to his gaze had for him more than one cause of astonishment. The marquise was a woman: she had calculated her vengeance with that perfection of perfidy which distinguishes weak animals. She had concealed her anger in order to make certain of the crime before punishing it.

“Too late, my beloved!” said the dying Paquita, whose pale eyes turned toward de Marsay.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes was expiring, drowned in blood. All the candles lighted, a delicate perfume that made itself felt, a certain disorder in which the eye of a man of conquests was bound to recognize follies common to all passions, announced that the marquise had skillfully questioned the guilty woman. This white apartment, where the blood showed so well, betrayed a long struggle. Paquita’s hands were imprinted on the cushions. Everywhere she had clung to life, everywhere she had defended herself, and everywhere she had been struck. Whole strips of the fluted hanging had been torn away by her bloodied hands, which had doubtless struggled for a long time. Paquita must have tried to climb the ceiling. Her bare feet were marked along the back of the divan, upon which she had doubtless run. Her body, cut to pieces by dagger blows from her executioner, said with what fury she had disputed a life that Henri made so dear to her. She lay on the ground and, while dying, had bitten the muscles of Madame de San-Réal’s instep; the latter still held in her hand her dagger soaked with blood. The marquise’s hair had been torn out; she was covered with bites, several of which were bleeding, and her torn dress let her be seen half naked, her breasts scratched. She was sublime in this state. Her avid and furious head breathed the odor of blood. Her panting mouth remained half open, and her nostrils were not enough for her inhalations. Certain animals, put into a fury, swoop upon their enemy, put him to death, and, calm in their victory, seem to have forgotten everything. There are others that circle their victim, that guard it for fear someone may come to take it from them, and that, like Homer’s Achilles, make the circuit of Troy nine times while dragging their enemy by the feet. Such was the marquise. She did not see Henri. First, she knew herself to be too completely alone to fear witnesses; then, she was too intoxicated with hot blood, too animated by the struggle, too exalted to perceive all Paris, had Paris formed an arena around her. She would not have felt the thunderbolt. She had not even heard Paquita’s last sigh and believed that she could still be heard by the dead woman.

“Die without confession!” she was saying to her. “Go to hell, monster of ingratitude; belong to no one now but the demon. For the blood you gave him, you owe me all of yours! Die, die, suffer a thousand deaths; I was too good, I took only a moment to kill you; I would have liked to make you experience all the pains you bequeath to me. I shall live, I! I shall live unhappy; I am reduced to loving no one but God!” She contemplated her. “She is dead!” she said to herself after a pause, making a violent return upon herself. “Dead, ah! I shall die of grief over it!”

The marquise moved to throw herself upon the divan, overwhelmed by a despair that deprived her of speech, and this movement then allowed her to see Henri de Marsay.

“Who are you?” she said to him, running at him with the dagger raised.

Henri stopped her arm, and they were thus able to contemplate each other face to face. A horrible surprise made icy blood flow through both their veins, and they trembled on their legs like frightened horses. Indeed, two Menaechmi could not have resembled each other better. They said the same word together: “Lord Dudley must be your father?”

Each of them lowered their head in affirmation.

“She was faithful to the blood,” said Henri, indicating Paquita.

“She was as little guilty as is possible,” resumed Margarita-Euphémia Porrabéril, who threw herself upon Paquita’s body with a cry of despair. “Poor girl! Oh! I would like to revive you! I was wrong; forgive me, Paquita! You are dead, and I live, I! I am the most unhappy.”

At this moment the horrible face of Paquita's mother appeared.

“You are going to tell me that you had not sold her so that I might kill her,” cried the marquise. “I know why you are coming out of your lair. I will pay you twice for her. Be silent.”

She went to take a bag of gold from the ebony cabinet and threw it contemptuously at this old woman’s feet. The sound of gold had the power to draw a smile upon the Georgian woman’s motionless physiognomy.

“I arrive in time for you, my sister,” said Henri. “Justice is going to ask you...”

“Nothing,” replied the marquise. “Only one person could demand an account of this girl. Christemio is dead.”

“And this mother,” Henri asked, indicating the old woman, “will she not always hold you to ransom?”

“She is from a country where women are not beings but things with which one does what one wants, which one sells, which one buys, which one kills, which, in short, one uses for one’s caprices, as you use your furniture here. Besides, she has a passion that makes all the others capitulate and that would have annihilated her maternal love, if she had loved her daughter; a passion...”

“Which one?” said Henri quickly, interrupting his sister.

“Gambling, from which may God preserve you!” replied the marquise.

“But by whom will you have yourself helped,” said Henri, indicating the Girl with the Golden Eyes, “to remove the traces of this caprice, which justice would not overlook?”

“I have her mother,” replied the marquise, indicating the old Georgian woman, to whom she made a sign to remain.

“We shall see each other again,” said Henri, who was thinking of his friends’ anxiety and felt the necessity of leaving.

“No, my brother,” she said, “we shall never see each other again. I am returning to Spain to go place myself in the convent of los Dolores.”

“You are still too young, too beautiful,” said Henri, taking her in his arms and giving her a kiss.

“Farewell,” she said, “nothing consoles one for having lost what seemed to us to be the infinite.”

Eight days later, Paul de Manerville met de Marsay at the Tuileries, on the terrace of the Feuillants.

“Well then, what has become of our beautiful girl with the golden eyes, great scoundrel?”

“She is dead.”

“Of what?”

“Of a chest complaint.”

Paris, March 1834 - April 1835.