A Daughter of Eve

By Honoré de Balzac.

Translated by Ellen Marriage.

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To Madame la Comtesse de Bolognini, née Vimercati.

If you remember, dear lady, the pleasure your conversation gave to a certain traveler, making Paris live for him in Milan, you will not be surprised that he should lay one of his works at your feet, as a token of gratitude for so many delightful evenings spent in your society, nor that he should seek for it the shelter of a name which, in old times, was given to not a few of the tales by one of your early writers, beloved of the Milanese. You have an Eugénie, with more than the promise of beauty, whose speaking smile proclaims her to have inherited from you the most precious gifts a woman can possess, and whose childhood, it is certain, will be rich in all those joys which a harsh mother refused to the Eugénie of these pages. If Frenchmen are accused of being frivolous and inconstant, I, you see, am Italian in my faithfulness and attachment. How often, as I wrote the name of Eugénie, have my thoughts carried me back to the cool stuccoed drawing-room and little garden of the Vicolo del Capuccini, which used to resound to the dear child’s merry laughter, to our quarrels, and our stories. You have left the Corso for the Tre Monasteri, where I know nothing of your manner of life, and I am forced to picture you, no longer amongst the pretty things, which doubtless still surround you, but like one of the beautiful heads of Carlo Dolci, Raphael, Titian, or Allori, which, in their remoteness, seem to us like abstractions.

If this book succeed in making its way across the Alps, it will tell you of the lively gratitude and respectful friendship of

Your humble servant,
De Balzac.

A Daughter of Eve

I

The Two Maries

It was half-past eleven in the evening, and two women were seated by the fire of a boudoir in one of the finest houses of the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. The room was hung in blue velvet, of the kind with tender melting lights, which French industry has only lately learned to manufacture. The doors and windows had been draped by a really artistic decorator with rich cashmere curtains, matching the walls in color. From a prettily moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling, hung, by three finely wrought chains, a silver lamp, studded with turquoises. The plan of decoration had been carried out to the very minutest detail; even the ceiling was covered with blue silk, while long bands of cashmere, folded across the silk at equal distances, made stars of white, looped up with pearl beading. The feet sank in the warm pile of a Belgian carpet, close as a lawn, where blue nosegays were sprinkled over a ground the color of unbleached linen. The warm tone of the furniture, which was of solid rosewood and carved after the best antique models, saved from insipidity the general effect which a painter might have called wanting in “accent.” On the chair backs small panels of splendid broche silk⁠—white with blue flowers⁠—were set in broad leafy frames, finely cut on the wood. On either side of the window stood a set of shelves, loaded with valuable knickknacks, the flower of mechanical art, sprung into being at the touch of creative fancy. The mantelpiece of African marble bore a platinum timepiece with arabesques in black enamel, flanked by extravagant specimens of old Dresden⁠—the inevitable shepherd with dainty bouquet forever tripping to meet his bride⁠—embodying the Teutonic conception of ceramic art. Above sparkled the beveled facets of a Venetian mirror in an ebony frame, crowded with figures in relief, relic of some royal residence. Two flower-stands displayed at this season the sickly triumphs of the hothouse, pale, spirit-like blossoms, the pearls of the world of flowers. The room might have been for sale, it was so desperately tidy and prim. It bore no impress of will and character such as marks a happy home, and even the women did not break the general chilly impression, for they were weeping.

The proprietor of the house, Ferdinand du Tillet, was one of the richest bankers in Paris, and the very mention of his name will account for the lavish style of the house decoration, of which the boudoir may be taken as a sample. Du Tillet, though a man of no family and sprung from Heaven knows where, had taken for wife, in 1831, the only unmarried daughter of the Comte de Granville, whose name was one of the most illustrious on the French bench, and who had been made a peer of the realm after the Revolution of July. This ambitious alliance was not got for nothing; in the settlement, du Tillet had to sign a receipt for a dowry of which he never touched a penny. This nominal dowry was the same in amount as the huge sum given to the elder sister on her marriage with Comte Félix de Vandenesse, and which, in fact, was the price paid by the Granvilles in their turn for a matrimonial prize. Thus, in the long run, the bank repaired the breach which aristocracy had made in the finances of the bench. Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen himself, three years in advance, brother-in-law of a Master Ferdinand, self-styled du Tillet, it is possible he might have declined the match; but who could have foreseen at the close of 1828 the strange upheavals which 1830 was to produce in the political, financial, and moral condition of France? Had Count Félix been told that in the general shuffle he would lose his peer’s coronet, to find it again on his father-in-law’s brow, he would have treated his informant as a lunatic.

Crouching in a listening attitude in one of those low chairs called a chauffeuse, Mme. du Tillet pressed her sister’s hand to her breast with motherly tenderness, and from time to time kissed it. This sister was known in society as Mme. Félix de Vandenesse, the Christian name being joined to that of the family, in order to distinguish the Countess from her sister-in-law, wife of the former ambassador, Charles de Vandenesse, widow of the late Comte de Kergarouët, whose wealth she had inherited, and by birth a de Fontaine. The Countess had thrown herself back upon a lounge, a handkerchief in her other hand, her eyes swimming, her breath choked with half-stifled sobs. She had just poured out her confidences to Mme. du Tillet in a way which proved the tenderness of their sisterly love. In an age like ours it would have seemed so natural for sisters, who had married into such very different spheres, not to be on intimate terms, that a rapid glance at the story of their childhood will be necessary in order to explain the origin of this affection which had survived, without jar or flaw, the alienating forces of society and the mutual scorn of their husbands.

The early home of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie was a dismal house in the Marais. Here they were brought up by a pious but narrow-minded woman, “imbued with high principle,” as the classic phrase has it, who conceived herself to have performed the whole duty of a mother when her girls arrived at the door of matrimony without ever having traveled beyond the domestic circle embraced by the maternal eye. Up to that time they had never even been to a play. A Paris church was their nearest approach to a theatre. In short, their upbringing in their mother’s house was as strict as it could have been in a convent. From the time that they had ceased to be mere infants they always slept in a room adjoining that of the Countess, the door of which was kept open at night. The time not occupied by dressing, religious observances, and the minimum of study requisite for the children of gentlefolk, was spent in making poor-clothes and in taking exercise, modeled on the English Sunday walk, where any quickening of the solemn pace is checked as being suggestive of cheerfulness. Their lessons were kept within the limits imposed by confessors, chosen from among the least liberal and most Jansenist of ecclesiastics. Never were girls handed over to their husbands more pure and virgin: in this point, doubtless one of great importance, their mother seemed to have seen the fulfilment of her whole duty to God and man. Not a novel did the poor things read till they were married. In drawing an old maid was their instructor, and their only copies were figures whose anatomy would have confounded Cuvier, and so drawn as to have made a woman of the Farnese Hercules. A worthy priest taught them grammar, French, history, geography, and the little arithmetic a woman needs to know. As for literature, they read aloud in the evening from certain authorized books, such as the Lettres édifiantes and Noël’s Leçons de littérature, but only in the presence of their mother’s confessor, since even here passages might occur, which, apart from heedful commentary, would be liable to stir the imagination. Fénelon’s Telemachus was held dangerous. The Comtesse de Granville was not without affection for her daughters, and it showed itself in wishing to make angels of them in the fashion of Marie Alacoque, but the daughters would have preferred a mother less saintly and more human.

This education bore its inevitable fruit. Religion, imposed as a yoke and presented under its harshest aspect, wearied these innocent young hearts with a discipline adapted for hardened sinners. It repressed their feelings, and, though striking deep root, could create no affection. The two Maries had no alternative but to sink into imbecility or to long for independence. Independence meant marriage, and to this they looked as soon as they began to see something of the world and could exchange a few ideas, while yet remaining utterly unconscious of their own touching grace and rare qualities. Ignorant of what innocence meant, without arms against misfortune, without experience of happiness, how should they be able to judge of life? Their only comfort in the depths of this maternal jail was drawn from each other. Their sweet whispered talks at night, the few sentences they could exchange when their mother left them for a moment, contained sometimes more thoughts than could be put in words. Often would a stolen glance, charged with sympathetic message and response, convey a whole poem of bitter melancholy. They found a marvelous joy in simple things⁠—the sight of a cloudless sky, the scent of flowers, a turn in the garden with interlacing arms⁠—and would exult with innocent glee over the completion of a piece of embroidery.

Their mother’s friends, far from providing intellectual stimulus or calling forth their sympathies, only deepened the surrounding gloom. They were stiff-backed old ladies, dry and rigid, whose conversation turned on their ailments, on the shades of difference between preachers or confessors, or on the most trifling events in the religious world, which might be found in the pages of La Quotidienne or L’Ami de la Religion. The men again might have served as extinguishers to the torch of love, so cold and mournfully impassive were their faces. They had all reached the age when a man becomes churlish and irritable, when his tastes are blunted except at table, and are directed only to procuring the comforts of life. Religious egotism had dried up hearts devoted to task work and entrenched behind routine. They spent the greater part of the evening over silent card-parties. At times the two poor little girls, placed under the ban of this sanhedrim, who abetted the maternal severity, would suddenly feel that they could bear no longer the sight of these wearisome persons with their sunken eyes and frowning faces.

Against the dull background of this life stood out in bold relief the single figure of a man, that of their music-master. The confessors had ruled that music was a Christian art, having its source in the Catholic church and developed by it, and therefore the two little girls were allowed to learn music. A spectacled lady, who professed sol-fa and the piano at a neighboring convent, bored them for a time with exercises. But, when the elder of the girls was ten years old, the Comte de Granville pointed out the necessity of finding a master.

Mme. de Granville, who could not deny it, gave to her concession all the merit of wifely submissiveness. A pious woman never loses an opportunity of taking credit for doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German, one of those men who are born old and will always remain fifty, even if they live to be eighty. His hollowed, wrinkled, swarthy face had kept something childlike and simple in its darkest folds. The blue of innocence sparkled in his eyes, and the gay smile of spring dwelt on his lips. His gray old hair, which fell in natural curls, like those of Jesus Christ, added to his ecstatic air a vague solemnity which was highly misleading, for he was a man to make a fool of himself with the most exemplar gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope to which he paid no attention, for his gaze soared too high in the clouds to come in contact with material things. And so this great unrecognized artist belonged to that generous race of the absentminded, who give their time and their hearts to others, just as they drop their gloves on every table, their umbrellas at every door. His hands were of the kind which look dirty after washing. Finally, his aged frame, badly set up on tottering, knotty limbs, gave ocular proof how far a man’s body can become a mere accessory to his mind. It was one of those strange freaks of nature which no one has ever properly described except Hoffmann, a German, who has made himself the poet of all which appears lifeless and yet lives. Such was Schmucke, formerly choirmaster to the Margrave of Anspach, a learned man who underwent inspection from a council of piety. They asked him whether he fasted. The master was tempted to reply, “Look at me!” but it is ill work jesting with saints and Jansenist confessors.

This apocryphal old man held so large a place in the life of the two Maries⁠—they became so much attached to the great simple-minded artist whose sole interest was in his art⁠—that, after they were married, each bestowed on him an annuity of three hundred francs, a sum which sufficed for his lodging, his beer, his pipe, and his clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons were a Paradise for Schmucke. He had not ventured to confide his poverty and his hopes to anyone except these two charming children, whose hearts had blossomed under the snow of maternal rigor and the frost of devotion, and this fact by itself sums up the character of Schmucke and the childhood of the two Maries.

No one could tell afterwards what abbé, what devout old lady, had unearthed this German, lost in Paris. No sooner did mothers of a family learn that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters than they all asked for his name and address. Schmucke had thirty houses in the Marais. This tardy success displayed itself in slippers with bronze steel buckles and lined with horsehair soles, and in a more frequent change of shirt. His childlike gaiety, long repressed by an honorable and seemly poverty, bubbled forth afresh. He let fall little jokes such as:⁠—“Young ladies, the cats supped off the dirt of Paris last night,” when a frost had dried the muddy streets overnight, only they were spoken in a Germano-Gallic lingo:⁠—“Younc ladies, de gads subbed off de dirt off Barees.” Gratified at having brought his adorable ladies this species of Vergiss mein nicht, culled from the flowers of his fancy, he put on an air of such ineffable roguishness in presenting it that mockery was disarmed. It made him so happy to call a smile to the lips of his pupils, the sadness of whose life was no mystery to him, that he would have made himself ridiculous on purpose if nature had not saved him the trouble. And yet there was no commonplace so vulgar that the warmth of his heart could not infuse it with fresh meaning. In the fine words of the late Saint-Martin, the radiance of his smile might have turned the mire of the highway to gold. The two Maries, following one of the best traditions of religious education, used to escort their master respectfully to the door of the suite when he left. There the poor girls would say a few kind words to him, happy in making him happy. It was the one chance they had of exercising their woman’s nature.

Thus, up to the time of their marriage, music became for the girls a life within life, just as, we are told, the Russian peasant takes his dreams for realities, his waking life for a restless sleep. In their eagerness to find some bulwark against the rising tide of pettiness and consuming ascetic ideas, they threw themselves desperately into the difficulties of the musical art. Melody, harmony, and composition, those three daughters of the skies, rewarded their labors, making a rampart for them with their aerial dances, while the old Catholic faun, intoxicated by music, led the chorus. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Paësiello, Cimarosa, Hummel, along with musicians of lesser rank, developed in them sensations which never passed beyond the modest limit of their veiled bosoms, but which went to the heart of that new world of fancy whither they eagerly betook themselves. When the execution of some piece had been brought to perfection, they would clasp hands and embrace in the wildest ecstasy. The old master called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries did not go to balls till they were sixteen, and then only four times a year, to a few selected houses. They only left their mother’s side when well fortified with rules of conduct, so strict that they could reply nothing but yes and no to their partners. The eye of the Countess never quitted her daughters and seemed to read the words upon their lips. The ball-dresses of the poor little things were models of decorum⁠—high-necked muslin frocks, with an extraordinary number of fluffy frills and long sleeves. This ungraceful costume, which concealed instead of setting off their beauty, reminded one of an Egyptian mummy, in spite of two sweetly pathetic faces which peeped out from the mass of cotton. With all their innocence, they were furious to find themselves the objects of a kindly pity. Where is the woman, however artless, who would not inspire envy rather than compassion? The white matter of their brains was unsoiled by a single perilous, morbid, or even equivocal thought; their hearts were pure, their hands were frightfully red; they were bursting with health. Eve did not leave the hands of her Creator more guileless than were these two girls when they left their mother’s home to go to the mairie and to the church, with one simple but awful command in their ears⁠—to obey in all things the man by whose side they were to spend the night, awake or sleeping. To them it seemed impossible that they should suffer more in the strange house whither they were to be banished than in the maternal convent.

How came it that the father of these girls did nothing to protect them from so crushing a despotism? The Comte de Granville had a great reputation as a judge, able and incorruptible, if sometimes a little carried away by party feeling. Unhappily, by the terms of a remarkable compromise, agreed upon after ten years of married life, husband and wife lived apart, each in their own suite of apartments. The father, who judged the repressive system less dangerous for women than for men, kept the education of his boys in his own hands, while leaving that of the girls to their mother. The two Maries, who could hardly escape the imposition of some tyranny, whether in love or marriage, would suffer less than boys, whose intelligence ought to be unfettered and whose natural spirit would be broken by the harsh constraint of religious dogma, pushed to an extreme. Of four victims the Count saved two. The Countess looked on her sons, both destined for the law⁠—the one for the magistrature assise, the other for the magistrature amovible1⁠—as far too badly brought up to be allowed any intimacy with their sisters. All intercourse between the poor children was strictly guarded. When the Count took his boys from school for a day he was careful that it should not be spent in the house. After luncheon with their mother and sisters he would find something to amuse them outside. Restaurants, theatres, museums, an expedition to the country in summertime, were their treats. Only on important family occasions, such as the birthday of the Countess or of their father, New Year’s Day, and prize-giving days, did the boys spend day and night under the paternal roof, in extreme discomfort, and not daring to kiss their sisters under the eye of the Countess, who never left them alone together for an instant. Seeing so little of their brothers, how was it possible the poor girls should feel any bond with them? On these days it was a perpetual, “Where is Angélique?” “What is Eugénie about?” “Where can my children be?” When her sons were mentioned, the Countess would raise her cold and sodden eyes to Heaven, as though imploring pardon for having failed to snatch them from ungodliness. Her exclamations and her silence in regard to them were alike eloquent as the most lamentable verses of Jeremiah, and the girls not unnaturally came to look on their brothers as hopeless reprobates.

The Count gave to each of his sons, at the age of eighteen, a couple of rooms in his own suite, and they then began to study law under the direction of his secretary, a barrister, to whom he entrusted the task of initiating them into the mysteries of their profession.

The two Maries, therefore, had no practical knowledge of what it is to have a brother. On the occasion of their sisters’ weddings it happened that both brothers were detained at a distance by important cases: the one having then a post as avocat général2 at a distant Court, while the other was making his first appearance in the provinces. In many families the reality of that home-life, which we are apt to picture as linked together by the closest and most vital ties, is something very different. The brothers are far away, engrossed in moneymaking, in pushing their way in the world, or they are chained to the public service; the sisters are absorbed in a vortex of family interests, outside their own circle. Thus the different members spend their lives apart and indifferent to each other, held together only by the feeble bond of memory. If on occasion pride or self-interest reunites them, just as often these motives act in the opposite sense and divide them in heart, as they have already been divided in life, so that it becomes a rare exception to find a family living in one home and animated by one spirit. Modern legislation, by splitting up the family into units, has created that most hideous evil⁠—the isolation of the individual.

Angélique and Eugénie, amid the profound solitude in which their youth glided by, saw their father but rarely, and it was a melancholy face which he showed in his wife’s handsome rooms on the ground floor. At home, as on the bench, he maintained the grave and dignified bearing of the judge. When the girls had passed the period of toys and dolls, when they were beginning, at twelve years of age, to think for themselves, and had given up making fun of Schmucke, they found out the secret of the cares which lined the Count’s forehead. Under the mask of severity they could read traces of a kindly, lovable nature. He had yielded to the Church his place as head of the household, his hopes of wedded happiness had been blighted, and his father’s heart was wounded in its tenderest spot⁠—the love he bore his daughters. Sorrows such as these rouse strange pity in the breasts of girls who have never known tenderness. Sometimes he would stroll in the garden between his daughters, an arm round each little figure, fitting his pace to their childish steps; then, stopping in the shrubbery, he would kiss them, one after the other, on the forehead, while his eyes, his mouth, and his whole expression breathed the deepest pity.

“You are not very happy, my darlings,” he said on one such occasion; “but I shall marry you early, and it will be a good day for me when I see you take wing.”

“Papa,” said Eugénie, “we have made up our minds to marry the first man who offers.”

“And this,” he exclaimed, “is the bitter fruit of such a system. In trying to make saints of them, they⁠ ⁠…”

He stopped. Often the girls were conscious of a passionate tenderness in their father’s farewell, or in the way he looked at them when by chance he dined with their mother. This father, whom they so rarely saw, became the object of their pity, and whom we pity we love. The marriage of both sisters⁠—welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina was by nature⁠—was the direct result of this strict conventual training. Many men, when thinking of marriage, prefer a girl taken straight from the convent and impregnated with an atmosphere of devotion to one who has been trained in the school of society. There is no medium. On the one hand is the girl with nothing left to learn, who reads and discusses the papers, who has spun round ballrooms in the arms of countless young men, who has seen every play and devoured every novel, whose knees have been made supple by a dancing-master, pressing them against his own, who does not trouble her head about religion and has evolved her own morality; on the other is the guileless, simple girl of the type of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie. Possibly the husband’s risk is no greater in the one case than in the other, but the immense majority of men, who have not yet reached the age of Arnolphe, would choose a saintly Agnes rather than a budding Célimène.

The two Maries were identical in figure, feet, and hands. Both were small and slight. Eugénie, the younger, was fair like her mother; Angélique, dark like her father. But they had the same complexion⁠—a skin of that mother-of-pearl white which tells of a rich and healthy blood and against which the carnation stands out in vivid patches, firm in texture like the jasmine, and like it also, delicate, smooth, and soft to the touch. The blue eyes of Eugénie, the brown eyes of Angélique, had the same naive expression of indifference and unaffected astonishment, betrayed by the indecisive wavering of the iris in the liquid white. Their figures were good; the shoulders, a little angular now, would be rounded by time. The neck and bosom, which had been so long veiled, appeared quite startlingly perfect in form, when, at the request of her husband, each sister for the first time attired herself for a ball in a low-necked dress. What blushes covered the poor innocent things, so charming in their shamefacedness, as they first saw themselves in the privacy of their own rooms; nor did the color fade all evening!

At the moment when this story opens, with the younger Marie consoling her weeping sister, they are no longer raw girls. Each had nursed an infant⁠—one a boy, the other a girl⁠—and the hands and arms of both were white as milk. Eugénie had always seemed something of a madcap to her terrible mother, who redoubled her watchful care and severity on her behalf. Angélique, stately and proud, had, she thought, a soul of high temper fitted to guard itself, while the skittish Eugénie seemed to demand a firmer hand. There are charming natures of this kind, misread by destiny, whose life ought to be unbroken sunshine, but who live and die in misery, plagued by some evil genius, the victims of chance. Thus the sprightly, artless Eugénie had fallen under the malign despotism of a parvenu when released from the maternal clutches. Angélique, high-strung and sensitive, had been sent adrift in the highest circles of Parisian society without any restraining curb.

II

Sisterly Confidences

Mme. de Vandenesse, it was plain, was crushed by the burden of troubles too heavy for a mind still unsophisticated after six years of marriage. She lay at length, her limbs flaccid, her body bent, her head fallen anyhow on the back of the lounge. Having looked in at the opera before hurrying to her sister’s, she had still a few flowers in the plaits of her hair, while others lay scattered on the carpet, together with her gloves, her mantle of fur-lined silk, her muff, and her hood. Bright tears mingled with the pearls on her white bosom and brimming eyes told a tale in gruesome contrast with the luxury around. The Countess had no heart for further words.

“You poor darling,” said Mme. du Tillet, “what strange delusion as to my married life made you come to me for help?”

It seemed as though the torrent of her sister’s grief had forced these words from the heart of the banker’s wife, as melting snow will set free stones that are held the fastest in the river’s bed. The Countess gazed stupidly on her with fixed eyes, in which terror had dried the tears.

“Can it be that the waters have closed over your head too, my sweet one?” she said in a low voice.

“Nay, dear, my troubles won’t lessen yours.”

“But tell me them, dear child. Do you think I am so sunk in self already as not to listen? Then we are comrades again in suffering as of old!”

“But we suffer apart,” sadly replied Mme. du Tillet. “We live in opposing camps. It is my turn to visit the Tuileries now that you have ceased to go. Our husbands belong to rival parties. I am the wife of an ambitious banker, a bad man. Your husband, sweetest, is kind, noble, generous⁠—”

“Ah! do not reproach me,” cried the Countess. “No woman has the right to do so, who has not suffered the weariness of a tame, colorless life and passed from it straight to the paradise of love. She must have known the bliss of living her whole life in another, of espousing the ever-varying emotions of a poet’s soul. In every flight of his imagination, in all the efforts of his ambition, in the great part he plays upon the stage of life, she must have borne her share, suffering in his pain and mounting on the wings of his measureless delights; and all this while never losing her cold, impassive demeanor before a prying world. Yes, dear, a tumult of emotion may rage within, while one sits by the fire at home, quietly and comfortably like this. And yet what joy to have at every instant one overwhelming interest which expands the heart and makes it live in every fibre. Nothing is indifferent to you; your very life seems to depend on a drive, which gives you the chance of seeing in the crowd the one man before the flash of whose eye the sunlight pales; you tremble if he is late, and could strangle the bore who steals from you one of those precious moments when happiness throbs in every vein! To be alive, only to be alive is rapture. Think of it, dear, to live, when so many women would give the world to feel as I do, and cannot. Remember, child, that for this poetry of life there is but one season⁠—the season of youth. Soon, very soon, will come the chills of winter. Oh! if you were rich as I am in these living treasures of the heart and were threatened with losing them⁠—”

Mme. du Tillet, terrified, had hidden her face in her hands during this wild rhapsody. At last, seeing the warm tears on her sister’s cheek, she began:

“I never dreamed of reproaching you, my darling. Your words have, in a single instant, stirred in my heart more burning thoughts than all my tears have quenched, for indeed the life I lead might well plead within me for a passion such as you describe. Let me cling to the belief that if we had seen more of each other we should not have drifted to this point. The knowledge of my sufferings would have enabled you to realize your own happiness, and I might perhaps have learned from you courage to resist the tyranny which has crushed the sweetness out of my life. Your misery is an accident which chance may remedy, mine is unceasing. My husband neither has real affection for me nor does he trust me. I am a mere peg for his magnificence, the hallmark of his ambition, a tidbit for his vanity.

“Ferdinand”⁠—and she struck her hand upon the mantelpiece⁠—“is hard and smooth like this marble. He is suspicious of me. If I ask anything for myself I know beforehand that refusal is certain; but for whatever may tickle his self-importance or advertise his wealth I have not even to express a desire. He decorates my rooms, and spends lavishly on my table; my servants, my boxes at the theatre, all the trappings of my life are of the smartest. He grudges nothing to his vanity. His children’s baby-linen must be trimmed with lace, but he would never trouble about their real needs, and would shut his ears to their cries. Can you understand such a state of things? I go to court loaded with diamonds, and my ornaments are of the most costly whenever I am in society; yet I have not a sou of my own. Mme. du Tillet, whom envious onlookers no doubt suppose to be rolling in wealth, cannot lay her hand on a hundred francs. If the father cares little for his children, he cares still less for their mother. Never does he allow me to forget that I have been paid for as a chattel, and that my personal fortune, which has never been in my possession, has been filched from him. If he stood alone I might have a chance of fascinating him, but there is an alien influence at work. He is under the thumb of a woman, a notary’s widow, over fifty, but who still reckons on her charms, and I can see very well that while she lives I shall never be free.

“My whole life here is planned out like a sovereign’s. A bell is rung for my lunch and dinner as at your castle. I never miss going to the Bois at a certain hour, accompanied by two footmen in full livery, and returning at a fixed time. In place of giving orders, I receive them. At balls and the theatre, a lackey comes up to me saying, ‘Your carriage waits, madame,’ and I have to go, whether I am enjoying myself or not. Ferdinand would be vexed if I did not carry out the code of rules drawn up for his wife, and I am afraid of him. Surrounded by all this hateful splendor, I sometimes look back with regret, and begin to think we had a kind mother. At least she left us our nights, and I had you to talk to. In my sufferings, then, I had a loving companion, but this gorgeous house is a desert to me.”

It was for the Countess now to play the comforter. As this tale of misery fell from her sister’s lips she took her hand and kissed it with tears.

“How is it possible for me to help you?” Eugénie went on in a low voice. “If he were to find us together he would suspect something. He would want to know what we had been talking about this hour, and it is not easy to put off the scent anyone so false and full of wiles. He would be sure to lay a trap for me. But enough of my troubles; let us think of you. Your forty thousand francs, darling, would be nothing to Ferdinand. He and the Baron de Nucingen, another of these rich bankers, are accustomed to handle millions. Sometimes at dinner I hear them talking of things to make your flesh creep. Du Tillet knows I am no talker, so they speak freely before me, confident that it will go no further, and I can assure you that highway murder would be an act of mercy compared to some of their financial schemes. Nucingen and he make as little of ruining a man as I do of all their display. Among the people who come to see me, often there are poor dupes whose affairs I have heard settled overnight, and who are plunging into speculations which will beggar them. How I long to act Leonarde in the brigands’ cave, and cry, ‘Beware!’ But what would become of me? I hold my tongue, but this luxurious mansion is nothing but a den of cutthroats. And du Tillet and Nucingen scatter banknotes in handfuls for any whim that takes their fancy. Ferdinand has bought the site of the old castle at Tillet, and intends rebuilding it, and then adding a forest and magnificent grounds. He says his son will be a count and his grandson a peer. Nucingen is tired of his house in the Hue Saint-Lazare and is having a palace built. His wife is a friend of mine.⁠ ⁠… Ah!” she cried, “she might be of use to us. She is not in awe of her husband, her property is in her own hands; she is the person to save you.”

“Darling,” cried Mme. de Vandenesse, throwing herself into her sister’s arms and bursting into tears, “there are only a few hours left. Let us go there tonight, this very instant.”

“How can I go out at eleven o’clock at night?”

“My carriage is here.”

“Well, what are you two plotting here?” It was du Tillet who threw open the door of the boudoir.

A false geniality lit up the blank countenance which met the sisters’ gaze. They had been too much absorbed in talking to notice the wheels of du Tillet’s carriage, and the thick carpets had muffled the sound of his steps. The Countess, who had an indulgent husband and was well used to society, had acquired a tact and address such as her sister, passing straight from a mother’s to a husband’s yoke, had had no opportunity of cultivating. She was able then to save the situation, which she saw that Eugénie’s terror was on the point of betraying, by a frank reply.

“I thought my sister wealthier than she is,” she said, looking her brother-in-law in the face. “Women sometimes get into difficulties which they don’t care to speak of to their husbands⁠—witness Napoleon and Joséphine⁠—and I came to ask a favor of her.”

“There will be no difficulty about that. Eugénie is a rich woman,” replied du Tillet, in a tone of honeyed acerbity.

“Only for you,” said the Countess, with a bitter smile.

“How much do you want?” said du Tillet, who was not sorry at the prospect of getting his sister-in-law into his toils.

“How dense you are! Didn’t I tell you that we want to keep our husbands out of this?” was the prudent reply of Mme. de Vandenesse, who feared to place herself at the mercy of the man whose character had by good luck just been sketched by her sister. “I shall come and see Eugénie tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? No,” said the banker coldly. “Mme. du Tillet dines tomorrow with a future peer of the realm, Baron de Nucingen, who is resigning to me his seat in the Chamber of Deputies.”

“Won’t you allow her to accept my box at the opera?” said the Countess, without exchanging even a look with her sister, in her terror lest their secret understanding should be betrayed.

“Thank you, she has her own,” said du Tillet, offended.

“Very well, then, I shall see her there,” replied the Countess.

“It will be the first time you have done us that honor,” said du Tillet.

The Countess felt the reproach and began to laugh.

“Keep your mind easy, you shan’t be asked to pay this time,” she said.⁠—“Goodbye, darling.”

“The jade!” cried du Tillet, picking up the flowers which had fallen from the Countess’ hair. “You would do well,” he said to his wife, “to take a lesson from Mme. de Vandenesse. I should like to see you as saucy in society as she was here just now. Your want of style and spirit are enough to drive a man wild.”

For all reply, Eugénie raised her eyes to heaven.

“Well, madame, what have you two been about here?” said the banker after a pause, pointing to the flowers. “What has happened to bring your sister to your box tomorrow?”

In order to get away to her bedroom, and escape the cross-questioning she dreaded, the poor thrall made an excuse of being sleepy. But du Tillet took his wife’s arm and, dragging her back, planted her before him beneath the full blaze of the candles, flaming in their silver-gilt branches between two beautiful bunches of flowers. Fixing her eyes with his keen glance, he began with cold deliberation.

“Your sister came to borrow forty thousand francs to pay the debts of a man in whom she is interested, and who, within three days, will be under lock and key in the Rue de Clichy. He’s too precious to be left loose.”

The miserable woman tried to repress the nervous shiver which ran through her.

“You gave me a fright,” she said. “But you know that my sister has too much principle and too much affection for her husband to take that sort of interest in any man.”

“On the contrary,” he replied drily. “Girls brought up as you were, in a very straitlaced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.”

“Speak for me if you like,” said poor Eugénie, in a tone of bitter irony, “but respect my sister. The Comtesse de Vandenesse is too happy, too completely trusted by her husband, not to be attached to him. Besides, supposing what you say were true, she would not have told me.”

“It is as I said,” persisted du Tillet, “and I forbid you to have anything to do with the matter. It is to my interest that the man go to prison. Let that suffice.”

Mme. du Tillet left the room.

“She is sure to disobey me,” said du Tillet to himself, left alone in the boudoir, “and if I keep my eye on them I may be able to find out what they are up to. Poor fools, to pit themselves against us!”

He shrugged his shoulders and went to rejoin his wife, or, more properly speaking, his slave.

III

The Story of a Happy Woman

The confession which Mme. Félix de Vandenesse had poured into her sister’s ear was so intimately connected with her history during the six preceding years that a brief narrative of the chief incidents of her married life is necessary to its understanding.

Félix de Vandenesse was one of the band of distinguished men who owed their fortune to the Restoration, till a shortsighted policy excluded them, as followers of Martignac, from the inner circle of Government. In the last days of Charles X he was banished with some others to the Upper Chamber; and this disgrace, though in his eyes only temporary, led him to think of marriage. He was the more inclined to it from a sort of nausea of intrigue and gallantry not uncommon with men when the hour of youth’s gay frenzy is past. There comes then a critical moment when the serious side of social ties makes itself felt. Félix de Vandenesse had had his bright and his dark hours, but the latter predominated, as is apt to be the case with a man who has quite early in life become acquainted with passion in its noblest form. The initiated become fastidious. A long experience of life and study of character reconciles them at last to the second-best, when they take refuge in a universal tolerance. Having lost all illusions, they are proof against guile, yet they wear their cynicism with a grace, and, being prepared for the worst, are saved the pangs of disappointment.

In spite of this, Félix still passed for one of the handsomest and most agreeable men in Paris. With women his reputation was largely due to one of the noblest of their contemporaries, who was said to have died of a broken heart for him; but it was the beautiful Lady Dudley who had the chief hand in forming him. In the eyes of many Paris ladies Félix was a hero of romance, owing not a few of his conquests to his evil repute. Madame de Manerville had closed the chapter of his intrigues. Although not a Don Juan, he retired from the world of love, as from that of politics, a disillusioned man. That ideal type of woman and of love which, for his misfortune, had brightened and dominated his youth, he despaired of finding again. At the age of thirty, Count Félix resolved to cut short by marriage pleasures which had begun to pall. On one point he was determined: he would have none but a girl trained in the strictest dogmas of Catholicism. No sooner did he hear how the Comtesse de Granville brought up her daughters than he asked for the hand of the elder. His own mother had been a domestic tyrant; and he could still remember enough of his dismal childhood to descry, through the veil of maidenly modesty, what effect had been produced on a young girl’s character by such a bondage, to see whether she were sulky, soured, and inclined to revolt, or had remained sweet and loving, responsive to the voice of nobler feeling. Tyranny produces two results, exactly opposite in character, and which are symbolized in those two great types of the slave in classical times⁠—Epictetus and Spartacus. The one is hatred with its evil train, the other, meekness with its Christian graces. The Comte de Vandenesse read the history of his life again in Marie-Angélique de Granville. In thus choosing for wife a young girl in her fresh innocence and purity, he had made up his mind beforehand, as befitted a man old in everything but years, to unite paternal with conjugal affection. He was conscious that in him politics and society had blighted feeling, and that he had only the dregs of a used-up life to offer in exchange for one in the bloom of youth. The flowers of spring would be matched with winter frosts, hoary experience with a saucy, impulsive waywardness. Having thus impartially taken stock of his position, he entrenched himself in his married quarters with an ample store of provisions. Indulgence and trust were his two sheet anchors. Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother’s place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.

The refinements and luxuries to which his habits as a man of fashion and of pleasure had accustomed Félix, his training in affairs of state, the insight of a life alternately devoted to action, reflection, and literature; all the resources, in short, at his command were applied intelligently to work out his wife’s happiness.

Marie-Angélique passed at once from the maternal purgatory to the wedded paradise prepared for her by Félix in their house in the Rue du Rocher, where every trifle breathed of distinction at the same time that the conventions of fashion were not allowed to interfere with that gracious spontaneity natural to warm young hearts. She began by enjoying to the full the merely material pleasures of life, her husband for two years acting as majordomo. Félix expounded to his wife very gradually and with great tact the facts of life, initiated her by degrees into the mysteries of the best society, taught her the genealogies of all families of rank, instructed her in the ways of the world, directed her in the arts of dress and conversation, took her to all the theatres, and put her through a course of literature and history. He carried out this education with the assiduity of a lover, a father, a master, and a husband combined; but with a wise discretion he allowed neither amusements nor studies to undermine his wife’s faith. In short, he acquitted himself of his task in a masterly manner, and had the gratification of seeing his pupil, at the end of four years, one of the most charming and striking women of her time.

Marie-Angélique’s feelings towards her husband were precisely such as he wished to inspire⁠—true friendship, lively gratitude, sisterly affection, with a dash of wifely fondness on occasion, not passing the due limits of dignity and self-respect. She was a good mother to her child.

Thus Félix, without any appearance of coercion, attached his wife to himself by all possible ties, reckoning on the force of habit to keep his heaven cloudless. Only men practised in worldly arts and who have run the gamut of disillusion in politics and love, have the knowledge necessary for acting on this system. Félix found in it also the pleasure which painters, authors, and great architects take in their work, while in addition to the artistic delight in creation he had the satisfaction of contemplating the result and admiring in his wife a woman of polished but unaffected manners and an unforced wit, a maiden and a mother, modestly attractive, unfettered and yet bound.

The history of a happy household is like that of a prosperous state; it can be summed up in half a dozen words, and gives no scope for fine writing. Moreover, the only explanation of happiness is the fact that it exists, these four years present nothing but the gray wash of an eternal lovemaking, insipid as manna, and as exciting as the romance of Astraea.

In 1833, however, this edifice of happiness, so carefully put together by Félix, was on the point of falling to the ground; the foundations had been sapped without his knowledge. The fact is, the heart of a woman of five-and-twenty is not that of a girl of eighteen, any more than the heart of a woman of forty is that of one ten years younger. A woman’s life has four epochs, and each epoch creates a new woman. Vandenesse was certainly not ignorant of the laws which determine this development, induced by our modern habits, but he neglected to apply them in his own case. Thus the soundest grammarian may be caught tripping when he turns author; the greatest general on the field of battle, under stress of fire, and at the mercy of the accidents of the ground, will cast to the winds a theoretic rule of military science. The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

Four years had passed of unruffled calm, four years of tuneful concert without one jarring note. The Countess, under these influences, felt her nature expanding like a healthy plant in good soil under the warm kisses of a sun shining in unclouded azure, and she now began to question her heart. The crisis in her life, which this tale is to unfold, would be unintelligible but for some explanations which may perhaps extenuate in the eyes of women the guilt of this young Countess, happy wife and happy mother, who at first sight might seem inexcusable.

Life is the result of a balance between two opposing forces; the absence of either is injurious to the creature. Vandenesse, in piling up satisfaction, had quenched desire, that lord of the universe, at whose disposal lie vast stores of moral energy. Extreme heat, extreme suffering, unalloyed happiness, like all abstract principles, reign over a barren desert. They demand solitude, and will suffer no existence but their own. Vandenesse was not a woman, and it is women only who know the art of giving variety to a state of bliss. Hence their coquetry, their coldness, their tremors, their tempers, and that ingenious battery of unreason, by which they demolish today what yesterday they found entirely satisfactory. Constancy in a man may pall, in a woman never. Vandenesse was too thoroughly good-hearted wantonly to plague the woman he loved; the heaven into which he plunged her could not be too ardent or too cloudless. The problem of perpetual felicity is one the solution of which is reserved for another and higher world. Here below, even the most inspired of poets do not fail to bore their readers when they attempt to sing of Paradise. The rock on which Dante split was to be the ruin also of Vandenesse; all honor to a desperate courage!

His wife began at last to find so well-regulated an Eden a little monotonous. The perfect happiness of Eve in her terrestrial paradise produced in her the nausea which comes from living too much on sweets. A longing seized her, as it seized Rivarol on reading Morian, to come across some wolf in the sheepfold. This, it appears, has been the meaning in all ages of that symbolical serpent to whom the first woman made advances, some day no doubt when she was feeling bored. The moral of this may not commend itself to certain Protestants who take Genesis more seriously than the Jews themselves, but the situation of Madame de Vandenesse requires no biblical images to explain it. She was conscious of a force within, which found no exercise. She was happy, but her happiness caused her no pangs; it was placid and uneventful; she was not haunted by the dread of losing it. It arrived every morning with the same smile and sunshine, the same soft words. Not a zephyr’s breath wrinkled this calm expanse; she longed for a ripple on the glassy surface.

There was something childish in all this, which may partly excuse her; but society is no more lenient in its judgments than was the Jehovah of Genesis. The Countess was quite enough woman of the world now to know how improper these feelings were, and nothing would have induced her to confide them to her “darling husband.” This was the most impassioned epithet her innocence could devise, for it is given to no one to forge in cold blood that delicious language of hyperbole which love dictates to its victims at the stake. Vandenesse, pleased with this pretty reserve, applied his arts to keep his wife within the temperate zone of wedded fervor. Moreover, this model husband wanted to be loved for himself, and judged unworthy of an honorable man those tricks of the trade which might have imposed upon his wife or awakened her feeling. He would owe nothing to the expedients of wealth. The Comtesse Marie would smile to see a shabby turnout in the Bois, and turn her eyes complacently to her own elegant equipage and the horses which, harnessed in the English fashion, moved with very free action and kept their distance perfectly. Félix would not stoop to gather the fruit of all his labors; his lavish expenditure, and the good taste which guided it, were accepted as a matter of course by his wife, ignorant that to them she owed her perfect immunity from vexations or wounding comparisons. It was the same throughout. Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper, and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.

About this period Mme. de Vandenesse was sufficiently drilled in the practices of society to abandon the insignificant part of timid supernumerary, all eyes and ears, which even Grisi is said, once on a time, to have played in the choruses of the La Scala theatre. The young Countess felt herself equal to the part of prima donna, and made some essays in it. To the great satisfaction of Félix, she began to take her share in conversation. Sharp repartees and shrewd reflections, which were the fruit of talks with her husband, brought her into notice, and this success emboldened her. Vandenesse, whose wife had always been allowed to be pretty, was charmed when she showed herself clever also. On her return from the ball or concert or rout where she had shone, Marie, as she laid aside her finery, would turn to Félix and say with a little air of prim delight, “Please, have I done well tonight?”

At this stage the Countess began to rouse jealousy in the breasts of certain women, amongst whom was the Marquise de Listomère, her husband’s sister, who hitherto had patronized Marie, looking on her as a good foil for her own charms. Poor innocent victim! A Countess with the sacred name of Marie, beautiful, witty, and good, a musician and not a flirt⁠—no wonder society whetted its teeth. Félix de Vandenesse numbered amongst his acquaintance several women who⁠—although their connection with him was broken off, whether by their own doing or his⁠—were by no means indifferent to his marriage. When these ladies saw in Marie de Vandenesse a sheepish little woman with red hands, rather silent, and to all appearance stupid also, they considered themselves sufficiently avenged.

Then came the disasters of July 1830, and for the space of two years society was broken up. Rich people spent the troubled interval on their estates or traveling in Europe; and the salons hardly reopened before 1833. The Faubourg Saint-Germain sulked, but it admitted as neutral ground a few houses, amongst others, that of the Ambassador of Austria. In these select rooms legitimist society and the new society met, represented by their most fashionable leaders. Vandenesse, though strong in his convictions and attached by a thousand ties of sympathy and gratitude to the exiled family, did not feel himself bound to follow his party in its stupid fanaticism. At a critical moment he had performed his duty at the risk of life by breasting the flood of popular fury in order to propose a compromise. He could afford therefore to take his wife into a society which could not possibly expose his good faith to suspicion.

Vandenesse’s former friends hardly recognized the young bride in the graceful, sparkling, and gentle Countess, who took her place with all the breeding of the highborn lady. Mmes. d’Espard and de Manerville, Lady Dudley, and other ladies of less distinction felt the stirring of a brood of vipers in their hearts; the dulcet moan of angry pride piped in their ears. The happiness of Félix enraged them, and they would have given a brand-new pair of shoes to do him an ill turn. In place of showing hostility to the Countess, these amiable intriguers buzzed about her with protestations of extreme friendliness and sang her praises to their male friends. Félix, who perfectly understood their little game, kept his eye upon their intercourse with Marie and warned her to be upon her guard. Divining, every one of them, the anxiety which their assiduity caused the Count, they could not pardon his suspicions. They redoubled their nattering attentions to their rival, and in this way contrived an immense success for her, to the disgust of the Marquise de Listomère, who was quite in the dark about it all. The Comtesse Félix de Vandenesse was everywhere pointed to as the most charming and brilliant woman in Paris; and Marie’s other sister-in-law, the Marquise Charles de Vandenesse, endured many mortifications from the confusion produced by the similarity of name and the comparisons to which it gave rise. For, though the Marquise was also a handsome and clever woman, the Countess had the advantage of her in being twelve years younger, a point of which her rivals did not fail to make use. They well knew what bitterness the success of the Countess would infuse into her relations with her sisters-in-law, who, indeed, were most chilling and disagreeable to Marie-Angélique in her triumph.

And so danger lurked in the family, enmity in friendship. It is well known how the literature of that day tried to overcome the indifference of the public, engrossed in the exciting political drama, by the production of more or less Byronic works, exclusively occupied with illicit love affairs. Conjugal infidelity furnished at this time the sole material of magazines, novels, and plays. This perennial theme came more than ever into fashion. The lover, that nightmare of the husband, was everywhere, except perhaps in the family circle, which saw less of him during that reign of the middle-class than at any other period. When the streets are ablaze with light and “Stop thief” is shouted from every window, it is hardly the moment robbers choose to be abroad. If, in the course of those years, so fruitful in civic, political, and moral upheavals, an occasional domestic misadventure took place, it was exceptional and attracted less notice than it would have done under the Restoration. Nevertheless, women talked freely among themselves of a subject in which both lyric and dramatic poetry then reveled. The lover, that being so rare and so bewitching, was a favorite theme. The few intrigues which came to light supplied matter for such conversation, which, then as ever, was confined to women of unexceptionable life. The repugnance to this sort of talk shown by women who have a stolen joy to conceal is indeed a noteworthy fact. They are the prudes of society, cautious, and even bashful; their attitude is one of perpetual appeal for silence or pardon. On the other hand, when a woman takes pleasure in hearing of such disasters and is curious about the temptations which lead to them, you may be sure she is halting at the crossroads, uncertain and hesitating.

During this winter the Comtesse de Vandenesse caught the distant roll of society’s thunder, and the rising storm whistled about her ears. Her so-called friends, whose reputations were under the safeguard of exalted rank and position, drew many sketches of the irresistible gallant for her benefit, and dropped into her heart burning words about love, the one solution of life for women, the master passion, according to Mme. de Staël, who did not speak without experience. When the Countess, in a friendly conclave, naively asked why a lover was so different from a husband, not one of these women failed to reply in such a way as to pique her curiosity, haunt her imagination, touch her heart, and interest her mind. They burned to see Vandenesse in trouble.

“With one’s husband, dear, one simply rubs along; with a lover it’s life,” said her sister-in-law, the Marquise de Vandenesse.

“Marriage, my child, is our purgatory, love is paradise,” said Lady Dudley.

“Don’t believe her,” cried Mlle. des Touches, “it’s hell!”

“Yes, but a hell with love in it,” observed the Marquise de Rochefide. “There may be more satisfaction in suffering than in an easy life. Look at the martyrs!”

“Little simpleton,” said the Marquise d’Espard, “in marriage, we live, so to speak, our own life; love is living in another.”

“In short, a lover is the forbidden fruit, and that’s enough for me!” laughingly spoke the pretty Moïna de Saint-Héren.

When there were no diplomatic at homes, or balls given by wealthy foreigners, such as Lady Dudley or the Princesse de Galathionne, the Countess went almost every evening after the opera to one of the few aristocratic drawing-rooms still open⁠—whether that of the Marquise d’Espard, Mme. de Listomère, Mlle. des Touches, the Comtesse de Montcornet, or the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu. Never did she leave these gatherings without some seeds of evil scattered in her soul. She heard talk about “completing her life,” an expression much in vogue then, or about being “understood,” another word to which women attach marvelous meanings. She would return home uneasy, pensive, dreamy, and curious. Her life seemed somehow impoverished, but she had not yet gone so far as to feel it entirely barren.

IV

A Man of Note

The most lively, but also the most mixed, company to be found in any of the houses where Mme. de Vandenesse visited, was decidedly that which met at the Comtesse de Montcornet’s. She was a charming little woman, who opened her doors to distinguished artists, commercial princes, and celebrated literary men; but the tests to which she submitted them before admission were so rigorous that the most exclusive need not fear rubbing up against persons of an inferior grade; the most unapproachable were safe from pollution. During the winter, society (which never loses its rights, and at all costs will be amused) began to rally again, and a few drawing-rooms⁠—including those of Mmes. d’Espard and de Listomère, of Mlle. des Touches, and of the Duchesse de Grandlieu⁠—had picked up recruits from among the latest celebrities in art, science, literature, and politics. At a concert given by the Comtesse de Montcornet, toward the end of the winter, Raoul Nathan, a well-known name in literature and politics, made his entry, introduced by Émile Blondet, a very brilliant but also very indolent writer. Blondet too was a celebrity, but only among the initiated few; much made of by the critics, he was unknown to the general public. Blondet was perfectly aware of this, and in general was a man of few illusions. In regard to fame, he said, among other disparaging remarks, that it was a poison best taken in small doses.

Raoul Nathan had a long struggle before emerging to the surface. Having reached it, he had at once made capital out of that sudden craze for external form then distinguishing certain exquisites, who swore by the Middle Ages, and were humorously known as “young France.” He adopted the eccentricities of genius, and enrolled himself among these worshipers of art, whose intentions at least we cannot but admire, since nothing is more absurd than the dress of a Frenchman of the nineteenth century, and courage was needed to change it. Raoul, to do him justice, has something unusual and fantastic in his person, which seems to demand a setting. His enemies or his friends⁠—there is little to choose between them⁠—are agreed that nothing in the world so well matches the inner Nathan as the outer. He would probably look even more remarkable if left to nature than he is when touched by art. His worn and wasted features suggest a wrestling with spirits, good or evil. His face has some likeness to that which German painters give to the dead Christ, and bears innumerable traces of a constant struggle between weak human nature and the powers on high. But the deep hollows of his cheeks, the knobs on his craggy and furrowed skull, the cavities round his eyes and temples, point to nothing weak in the constitution. There is remarkable solidity about the tough tissues and prominent bones; and though the skin, tanned by excess, sticks to them as though parched by same fire within, it none the less covers a massive framework. He is tall and thin. His long hair, which always needs brushing, aims at effect. He is a Byron, badly groomed and badly put together, with legs like a heron’s, congested knees, an exaggeratedly small waist, a hand with muscles of whipcord, the grip of a crab’s claw, and lean, nervous fingers.

Raoul’s eyes are Napoleonic, blue and soul-piercing; his nose is sensitive and finely chiseled, his mouth charming and adorned with teeth white enough to excite a woman’s envy. There is life and fire in the head, genius on the brow. Raoul belongs to the small number of men who would not pass unnoticed in the street, and who, in a drawing-room, at once form a centre of light, drawing all eyes. He attracts attention by his negligee if one may borrow from Molière the word used in Éliante to describe personal slovenliness. His clothes look as though they had been pulled about, frayed, and crumpled on purpose to harmonize with his countenance. He habitually thrusts one hand into his open waistcoat in the pose which Girodet’s portrait of Chateaubriand has made famous, but not so much for the sake of copying Chateaubriand (he would disdain to copy anyone) as to take the stiffness out of his shirt front. His tie becomes all in a moment a mere wisp, from a trick he has of throwing back his head with a sudden convulsive movement, like that of a racehorse champing its bit and tossing its head in the effort to break loose from bridle and curb. His long, pointed beard is very different from that of the dandy, combed, brushed, scented, sleek, shaped like a fan or cut into a peak; Nathan’s is left entirely to nature. His hair, caught in by his coat-collar and tie, and lying thick upon his shoulders, leaves a grease spot wherever it rests. His dry, stringy hands are innocent of nailbrush or the luxury of a lemon. There are even journalists who declare that only on rare occasions is their grimy skin laved in baptismal waters.

In a word, this awe-inspiring Raoul is a caricature. He moves in a jerky way, as though propelled by some faulty machinery; and when walking the boulevards of Paris he offends all sense of order by impetuous zigzags and unexpected halts, which bring him into collision with peaceful citizens as they stroll along. His conversation, full of caustic humor and stinging epigrams, imitates the gait of his body; of a sudden it will drop the tone of fury to become, for no apparent reason, gracious, dreamy, soothing, and gentle; then come unaccountable pauses or mental somersaults, which at times grow fatiguing. In society he does not conceal an unblushing awkwardness, a scorn of convention, and an attitude of criticism towards things usually held in respect there, which make him objectionable to plain people, as well as to those who strive to keep up the traditions of old-world courtliness. Yet, after all, he is an oddity, like a Chinese image, and women have a weakness for such things. Besides, with women he often puts on an air of elaborate suavity, and seems to take a pleasure in making them forget his grotesque exterior, and in vanquishing their antipathy. This is a salve to his vanity, his self-esteem, and his pride.

“Why do you behave so?” said the Marquise de Vandenesse to him one day.

“Are not pearls found in oyster shells?” was the pompous reply.

To someone else, who put a similar question, he answered:

“If I made myself agreeable to everyone, what should I have left for her whom I design to honor supremely?”

Raoul Nathan carries into his intellectual life the irregularity which he has made his badge. Nor is the device misleading: like poor girls, who go out as maids-of-all-work in humble homes, he can turn his hand to anything. He began with serious criticism, but soon became convinced that this was a losing trade. His articles, he said, cost as much as books. The profits of the theatre attracted him, but, incapable of the slow, sustained labor involved in putting anything on the boards, he was driven to ally himself with du Bruel, who worked up his ideas and converted them into light paying pieces with plenty of humor, and composed in view of some particular actor or actress. Between them they unearthed Florine, a popular actress.

Ashamed, however, of this Siamese-like union, Nathan, unaided, brought out at the Théâtre Français a great drama, which fell with all the honors of war amidst salvoes from the artillery of the press. In his youth he had already tried the theatre which represents the fine traditions of the French drama with a splendid romantic play in the style of Pinto, and this at a time when classicism held undisputed sway. The result was that the Odéon became for three nights the scene of such disorder that the piece had to be stopped. The second play, no less than the first, seemed to many people a masterpiece, and it won for him, though only within the select world of judges and connoisseurs, a far higher reputation than the light remunerative pieces at which he worked with others.

“One more such failure,” said Émile Blondet, “and you will be immortal.”

But Nathan, instead of sticking to this arduous path, was driven by stress of poverty to fall back upon more profitable work, such as the production of spectacular pieces or of an eighteenth-century powder and patches vaudeville, and the adaptation of popular novels to the stage. Nevertheless, he was still counted as a man of great ability, whose last word had not yet been heard. He made an excursion also into pure literature and published three novels, not reckoning those which he kept going in the press, like fishes in an aquarium. As often happens, when a writer has stuff in him for only one work, the first of these three was a brilliant success. Its author rashly put it at once in the front rank of his works as an artistic creation, and lost no opportunity of getting it puffed as the “finest book of the period,” the “novel of the century.”

Yet he complained loudly of the exigencies of art, and did as much as any man towards having it accepted as the one standard for all kinds of creative work⁠—painting, sculpture, literature, architecture. He had begun by perpetrating a book of verse, which won him a place in the pleiad of poets of the day, and which contained one obscure poem that was greatly admired. Compelled by straitened circumstances to go on producing, he turned from the theatre to the press, and from the press back to the theatre, breaking up and scattering his powers, but with unshaken confidence in his inspiration. He did not suffer, therefore, from lack of a publisher for his fame, differing in this from certain celebrities, whose nickering flame is kept from extinction by the titles of books still in the future, for which a public will be a more pressing necessity than a new edition.

Nathan kept near to being a genius, and, had destiny crowned his ambition by marching him to the scaffold, he would have been justified in striking his forehead after André de Chénier. The sudden accession to power of a dozen authors, professors, metaphysicians, and historians fired him with emulation, and he regretted not having devoted his pen to politics rather than to literature. He believed himself superior to these upstarts, who had foisted themselves on to the party-machine during the troubles of 1830⁠–⁠3 and whose fortune now filled him with consuming envy. He belonged to the type of man who covets everything and looks on all success as a fraud on himself, who is always stumbling on some luminous track but settles down nowhere, drawing all the while on the tolerance of his neighbors. At this moment he was traveling from Saint-Simonism to Republicanism, which might serve, perhaps, as a stage to Ministerialism. His eye swept every corner for some bone to pick, some safe shelter whence he might bark beyond the reach of kicks, and make himself a terror to the passersby. He had, however, the mortification of finding himself not taken seriously by the great de Marsay, then at the head of affairs, who had a low opinion of authors as lacking in what Eichelieu called the logical spirit, or rather in coherence of ideas. Besides, no minister could have failed to reckon on Raoul’s constant pecuniary difficulties which, sooner or later, would drive him into the position of accepting rather than imposing conditions.

Raoul’s real and studiously suppressed character accords with that which he shows to the public. He is carried away by his own acting, declaims with great eloquence, and could not be more self-centered were he, like Louis XIV, the State in person. None knows better how to play at sentiment or to deck himself out in a shoddy greatness. The grace of moral beauty and the language of self-respect are at his command, he is a very Alceste in pose, while acting like Philinte. His selfishness ambles along under cover of this painted cardboard, and not seldom attains the end he has in view. Excessively idle, he never works except under the prick of necessity. Continuous labor applied to the construction of a lasting fabric is beyond his conception; but in a paroxysm of rage, the result of wounded vanity, or in some crisis precipitated by his creditors, he will leap the Eurotas and perform miracles of mental forestalment; after which, worn out and amazed at his own fertility, he falls back into the enervating dissipations of Paris life. Does necessity once more threaten, he has no strength to meet it; he sinks a step and traffics with his honor. Impelled by a false idea of his talents and his future, founded on the rapid rise of one of his old comrades (one of the few cases of administrative ability brought to light by the Revolution of July), he tries to regain his footing by taking liberties with his friends, which are nothing short of a moral outrage, though they remain buried among the skeletons of private life, without a word of comment or blame.

His heart, devoid of nicety, his shameless hand, hail-fellow-well-met with every vice, every degradation, every treachery, every party, have placed him as much beyond reach of attack as a constitutional king. The peccadillo, which would raise hue and cry after a man of high character, counts for nothing in him; while conduct bordering on grossness is barely noticed. In making his excuses people find their own.

The very man who would fain despise him shakes him by the hand, fearing to need his help. So numerous are his friends that he would prefer enemies. This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice. There are men who, by exacting this general slackness of conscience, get themselves absolved for playing the traitor and the turncoat. Thus it is that the most enlightened portion of the nation becomes the least worthy of respect.

From the literary point of view, Nathan is deficient in style and information. Like most young aspirants in literature, he gives out today what he learned yesterday. He has neither the time nor the patience to make an author. He does not use his own eyes, but can pick up from others, and, while he fails in producing a vigorously constructed plot, he sometimes covers this defect by the fervor he throws into it. He “went in” for passion, to use a slang word, because there is no limit to the variety of modes in which passion may express itself, while the task of genius is to sift out from these various expressions the element in each which will appeal to everyone as natural. His heroes do not stir the imagination; they are magnified individuals, exciting only a passing sympathy; they have no connection with the wider interests of life, and therefore stand for nothing but themselves. Yet the author saves himself by means of a ready wit and of those lucky hits which billiard players call “flukes.” He is the best man for a flying shot at the ideas which swoop down upon Paris, or which Paris starts. His teeming brain is not his own, it belongs to the period. He lives upon the event of the day, and, in order to get all he can from it, exaggerates its bearing. In short, we miss the accent of truth, his words ring false; there is something of the juggler in him, as Count Félix said. One feels that his pen has dipped in the ink of an actress’ dressing-room.

In Nathan we find an image of the literary youth of the day, with their sham greatness and real poverty; he represents their irregular charm and their terrible falls, their life of seething cataracts, sudden reverses, and unlooked-for triumphs. He is a true child of this jealousy-ridden age, in which a thousand personal rivalries, cloaking themselves under the name of schools, make profit out of their failures by feeding fat with them a hydra-headed anarchy; an age which expects fortune without work, glory without talent, and success without effort, but which, after many a revolt and skirmish, is at last brought by its vices to swell the civil list, in submission to the powers that be. When so many young ambitions start on foot to meet at the same goal, there must be competing wills, frightful destitution, and a relentless struggle. In this merciless combat it is the fiercest or the adroitest selfishness which wins. The lesson is not lost on an admiring world; spite of bawling, as Molière would say, it acquits and follows suit.

When, in his capacity of opponent to the new dynasty, Raoul was introduced to Mme. de Montcornet’s drawing-room his specious greatness was at its height. He was recognized as the political critic of the de Marsays, the Rastignacs, and the la Roche-Hugons, who constituted the party in power. His sponsor, Émile Blondet, handicapped by his fatal indecision and dislike of action where his own affairs were concerned, stuck to his trade of scoffer and took sides with no party, while on good terms with all. He was the friend of Raoul, of Rastignac, and of Montcornet.

“You are a political triangle,” said de Marsay, with a laugh, when he met him at the Opera; “that geometrical form is the peculiar property of the deity, who can afford to be idle; but a man who wants to get on should adopt a curve, which is the shortest road in politics.”

Beheld from afar, Raoul Nathan was a resplendent meteor. The fashion of the day justified his manner and appearance. His pose as a Republican gave him, for the moment, that puritan ruggedness assumed by champions of the popular cause, men whom Nathan in his heart derided. This is not without attraction for women, who love to perform prodigies, such as shattering rocks, melting an iron will. Raoul’s moral costume, therefore, was in keeping with the external. He was bound to be, and he was, for this Eve, listless in her paradise of the Rue du Rocher, the insidious serpent, bright to the eye and flattering to the ear, with magnetic gaze and graceful motion, who ruined the first woman.

Marie, on seeing Raoul, at once felt that inward shock, the violence of which is almost terrifying. This would-be great man, by a mere glance, sent a thrill right through to her heart, causing a delicious flutter there. The regal mantle which fame had for the moment draped on Nathan’s shoulders dazzled this simple-minded woman. When tea came Marie left the group of chattering women, among whom she had stood silent since the appearance of this wonderful being⁠—a fact which did not escape her so-called friends. The Countess drew near the ottoman in the centre of the room where Raoul was perorating. She remained standing, her arm linked in that of Mme. Octave de Camps, an excellent woman, who kept the secret of the nervous quivering by which Marie betrayed her strong emotion. Despite the sweet magic distilled from the eye of the woman who loves or is startled into self-betrayal, Raoul was just then entirely occupied with a regular display of fireworks. He was far too busy letting off epigrams like rockets, winding and unwinding indictments like Catherine-wheels, and tracing blazing portraits in lines of fire, to notice the naive admiration of a little Eve, lost in the crowd of women surrounding him. The love of novelty which would bring Paris flocking to the Zoological Gardens, if a unicorn had been brought there from those famous Mountains of the Moon, virgin yet of European tread, intoxicates minds of a lower stamp, as much as it saddens the truly wise. Raoul was enraptured and far too much engrossed with women in general to pay attention to one woman in particular.

“Take care, dear, you had better come away,” her fair companion, sweetest of women, whispered to Marie.

The Countess turned to her husband and, with one of those speaking glances which husbands are sometimes slow in interpreting, begged for his arm. Félix led her away.

“Well, you are in luck, my good friend,” said Mme. d’Espard in Raoul’s ear. “You’ve done execution in more than one quarter tonight, and, best of all, with that charming Countess who has just left us so abruptly.”

“Do you know what the Marquise d’Espard meant?” asked Raoul of Blondet, repeating the great lady’s remark, when almost all the other guests had departed, between one and two in the morning.

“Why, yes, I have just heard that the Comtesse de Vandenesse has fallen wildly in love with you. Lucky dog!”

“I did not see her,” said Raoul.

“Ah! but you will see her, you rascal,” said Émile Blondet, laughing. “Lady Dudley has invited you to her great ball with the very purpose of bringing about a meeting.”

Raoul and Blondet left together, and joining Rastignac, who offered them a place in his carriage, the three made merry over this conjunction of an eclectic Undersecretary of State with a fierce Republican and a political sceptic.

“Suppose we sup at the expense of law and order?” said Blondet, who had a fancy for reviving the old-fashioned supper.

Rastignac took them to Véry’s, and dismissed his carriage; the three then sat down to table and set themselves to pull to pieces their contemporaries amidst Rabelaisian laughter. During the course of supper Rastignac and Blondet urged their counterfeit opponent not to neglect the magnificent opportunity thrown in his way. The story of Marie de Vandenesse was caricatured by these two profligates, who applied the scalpel of epigram and the keen edge of mockery to that transparent childhood, that happy marriage. Blondet congratulated Raoul on having found a woman who so far had been guilty only of execrable red-chalk drawings and feeble watercolor landscapes, of embroidering slippers for her husband, and performing sonatas with a most ladylike absence of passion; a woman who had been tied for eighteen years to her mother’s apron-strings, pickled in devotion, trained by Vandenesse, and cooked to a turn by marriage for the palate of love. At the third bottle of champagne Raoul Nathan became more expansive than he had ever shown himself before.

“My dear friends,” he said, “you know my relations with Florine, you know my life, you will not be surprised to hear me confess that I have never yet seen the color of a Countess’ love. It has often been a humiliating thought to me that only in poetry could I find a Beatrice, a Laura! A pure and noble woman is like a spotless conscience, she raises us in our own estimation. Elsewhere we may be soiled, with her we keep our honor, pride, and purity. Elsewhere life is a wild frenzy, with her we breathe the peace, the freshness, the bloom of the oasis.”

“Come, come, my good soul,” said Rastignac, “shift the prayer of Moses on to the high notes, as Paganini does.”

Raoul sat speechless with fixed and besotted eyes. At last he opened his mouth.

“This beast of a ’prentice minister does not understand me!”

Thus, whilst the poor Eve of the Rue du Rocher went to bed, swathed in shame, terrified at the delight which had filled her while listening to this poetic pretender, hovering between the stern voice of gratitude to Vandenesse and the flattering tongue of the serpent, these three shameless spirits trampled on the tender white blossoms of her opening love. Ah! if women knew how cynical those men can be behind their backs, who show themselves all meekness and cajolery when by their side! if they knew how they mock their idols! Fresh, lovely, and timid creature, whose charms lie at the mercy of some graceless buffoon! And yet she triumphs! The more the veils are rent, the clearer her beauty shines.

Marie at this moment was comparing Raoul and Félix, all-ignorant of the danger to her heart in such a process. No better contrast could be found to the robust and unconventional Raoul than Félix de Vandenesse, with his clothes fitting like a glove, the finish of a fine lady in his person, his charming natural disinvoltura, combined with a touch of English refinement, picked up from Lady Dudley. A contrast like this pleases the fancy of a woman, ever ready to fly from one extreme to another. The Countess was too well-principled and pious not to forbid her thoughts dwelling on Raoul, and next day, in the heart of her paradise, she took herself to task for base ingratitude.

“What do you think of Raoul Nathan?” she asked her husband during lunch.

“He is a charlatan,” replied the Count; “one of those volcanoes which a sprinkling of gold-dust will keep tranquil. The Comtesse de Montcornet ought not to have had him at her house.”

This reply was the more galling to Marie because Félix, who knew the literary world well, supported his verdict with proofs drawn from the life of Raoul⁠—a life of shifts, in which Florine, a well-known actress, played a large part.

“Granting the man has genius,” he concluded, “he is without the patience and persistency which make genius a thing apart and sacred. He tries to impress people by assuming a position which he cannot live up to. That is not the behavior of really able men and students; if they are honorable men they stick to their own line, and don’t try to hide their rags under frippery.”

A woman’s thought has marvelous elasticity; it may sink under a blow, to all appearance crushed, but in a given time it is up again, as though nothing had happened.

“Félix must be right,” was the first thought of the Countess.

Three days later, however, her mind traveled back to the tempter, allured by that sweet yet ruthless emotion which it was the mistake of Vandenesse not to have aroused. The Count and Countess went to Lady Dudley’s great ball, where de Marsay made his last appearance in society. Two months later he died, leaving the reputation of a statesman so profound that, as Blondet said, he was unfathomable. Here Vandenesse and his wife again met Raoul Nathan, amid a concourse of people made remarkable by the number of actors in the political drama whom, to their mutual surprise, it brought together.

It was one of the chief social functions in the great world. The reception-rooms offered a magic picture to the eye. Flowers, diamonds, shining hair, the plunder of countless jewel-cases, every art of the toilet⁠—all contributed to the effect. The room might be compared to one of those show hothouses where wealthy amateurs collect the most marvelous varieties. There was the same brilliancy, the same delicacy of texture. It seemed as though the art of man would compete also with the animal world. On all sides fluttered gauze, white or painted like the wings of prettiest dragonfly, crepe, lace, blonde, tulle, pucked, puffed, or notched, vying in eccentricity of form with the freaks of nature in the insect tribe. There were spider’s threads in gold or silver, clouds of silk, flowers which some fairy might have woven or imprisoned spirit breathed into life; feathers, whose rich tints told of a tropical sun, drooping willow-like over haughty heads, ropes of pearls, drapery in broad folds, ribbed, or slashed, as though the genius of arabesque had presided over French millinery.

This splendor harmonized with the beauties gathered together as though to form a “keepsake.” The eye roamed over a wealth of fair shoulders in every tone of white that man could conceive⁠—some amber-tinted, others glistening like some glazed surface or glossy as satin, others, again, of a rich lustreless color which the brush of Rubens might have mixed. Then the eyes, sparkling like onyx stones or turquoises, with their dark velvet edging or fair fringes; and profiles of every contour, recalling the noblest types of different lands. There were brows lofty with pride; rounded brows, index of thought within; level brows, the seat of an indomitable will. Lastly⁠—most bewitching of all in a scene of such studied splendor⁠—necks and bosoms in the rich voluptuous folds adored by George IV, or with the more delicate modeling which found favor in the eighteenth century and at the Court of Louis XV; but all, whatever the type, frankly exhibited, either without drapery or through the dainty plaited tuckers of Raphael’s portraits, supreme triumph of his laborious pupils. Prettiest of feet, itching for the dance, figures yielding softly to the embrace of the waltz, roused the most apathetic to attention; murmurings of gentle voices, rustling dresses, whispering partners, vibrations of the dance, made a fantastic burden to the music.

A fairy’s wand might have called forth this witchery, bewildering to the senses, the harmony of scents, the rainbow tints flashing in the crystal chandeliers, the blaze of the candles, the mirrors which repeated the scene on every side. The groups of lovely women in lovely attire stood out against a dark background of men, where might be observed the delicate, regular features of the aristocracy, the tawny moustache of the sedate Englishman, the gay, smiling countenance of the French noble. Every European order glittered in the room, some hanging from a collar on the breast, others dangling by the side.

To a watchful observer the scene presented more than this gaily decorated surface. It had a soul; it lived, it thought, it felt, it found expression in the hidden passions which now and again forced their way to the surface. Now it would be an interchange of malicious glances; now some fair young girl, carried away by excitement and novelty, would betray a touch of passion; jealous women talked scandal behind their fans and paid each other extravagant compliments. Society, decked out, curled, and perfumed, abandoned itself to that frenzy of the fête which goes to the head like the fumes of wine. From every brow, as from every heart, seemed to emanate sensations and thoughts, which, forming together one potent influence, inflamed the most cold-blooded.

It was the most exciting moment of this entrancing evening. In a corner of the gilded drawing-room, where a few bankers, ambassadors, and retired ministers, together with that old reprobate, Lord Dudley (an unexpected arrival), were seated at play, Mme. Félix de Vandenesse found herself unable to resist the impulse to enter into conversation with Nathan. She, too, may have been yielding to that ballroom intoxication which has wrung many a confession from the lips of the most coy.

The sight of this splendid pageant of a world to which he was still a stranger stung Nathan to the heart with redoubled ambition. He looked at Rastignac, whose brother, at the age of twenty-seven, had just been made a Bishop, and whose brother-in-law, Martial de la Roche-Hugon, held office, while he himself was an Undersecretary of State, and about to marry, as rumor said, the only daughter of the Baron de Nucingen. He saw among the members of the diplomatic body an obscure writer who used to translate foreign newspapers for a journal that passed over to the reigning dynasty after 1830; he saw leader-writers members of the Council and professors peers of France. And he perceived, with bitterness, that he had taken the wrong road in preaching the overthrow of an aristocracy which counted among its ornaments the true nobility of fortunate talent and successful scheming. Blondet, though still a mere journalistic hack, was much made of in society, and had it yet in his power to strike the road to fortune by means of his intimacy with Mme. de Montcornet. Blondet, therefore, with all his ill-luck, was a striking example in Nathan’s eyes of the importance of having friends in high places. In the depths of his heart he resolved upon following the example of men like de Marsay, Rastignac, Blondet, and Talleyrand, the leader of the sect. He would throw conviction to the winds, paying allegiance only to accomplished facts, which he would wrest to his own advantage; no system should be to him more than an instrument; and on no account would he upset the balance of a society so admirably constructed, so decorative, and so consonant with nature.

“My future,” he said to himself, “is in the hands of a woman belonging to the great world.”

Full of this thought, the outcome of a frantic cupidity, Nathan pounced upon the Comtesse de Vandenesse like a hawk upon its prey. She was looking charming in a headdress of marabout feathers, which produced the delicious melting effect of Lawrence’s portraits, well suited to her gentle character. The fervid rhapsodies of the poet, crazed by ambition, carried the sweet creature quite off her feet. Lady Dudley, whose eye was everywhere, secured the tête-à-tête by handing over the Comte de Vandenesse to Mme. de Manerville. It was the first time the parted lovers had spoken face to face since their rupture. The woman, strong in the habit of ascendency, caught Félix in the toils of a coquettish controversy, with plenty of blushing confidences, regrets deftly cast like flowers at his feet, and recriminations, where self-defence was intended to stimulate reproach.

Whilst her husband’s former mistress was raking among the ashes of dead joys to find some spark of life, Mme. Félix de Vandenesse experienced those violent heartthrobs which assail a woman with the certainty of going astray and treading forbidden paths. These emotions are not without fascination, and rouse many dormant faculties. Now, as in the days of Bluebeard, all women love to use the bloodstained key, that splendid mythological symbol which is one of Perrault’s glories.

The dramatist, who knew his Shakespeare, unfolded the tale of his hardships, described his struggle with men and things, opened up glimpses of his unstable success, his political genius wasting in obscurity, his life unblessed by any generous affection. Without a word directly to that effect, he conveyed to this gracious lady the suggestion that she might play for him the noble part of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, might love and shelter him. Not a syllable overstepped the pure regions of sentiment. The blue of the forget-me-not, the white of the lily, are not more pure than were his flowers of rhetoric and the things signified by them; the radiance of a seraph lighted the brow of this artist, who might yet utilize his discourse with a publisher. He acquitted himself well of the serpent’s part, and flashed before the eyes of the Countess the tempting colors of the fatal fruit. Marie left the ball consumed by remorse, which was akin to hope, thrilled by compliments flattering to her vanity, and agitated to the remotest corner of her heart. Her very goodness was her snare; she could not resist her own pity for the unfortunate.

Whether Mme. de Manerville brought Vandenesse to the room where his wife was talking with Nathan, whether he came there of his own accord, or whether the conversation had roused in him a slumbering pain, the fact remains, whatever the cause, that, when his wife came to ask for his arm, she found him gloomy and abstracted. The Countess was afraid she had been seen. As soon as she was alone with Félix in the carriage, she threw him a smile full of meaning, and began:

“Was not that Mme. de Manerville with whom you were talking, dear?”

Félix had not yet got clear of the thorny ground, through which his wife’s neat little attack marched him, when the carriage stopped at their door. It was the first stratagem prompted by love. Marie was delighted to have thus got the better of a man whom till then she had considered so superior. She tasted for the first time the joy of victory at a critical moment.

V

Florine

In a passage between the Rue Basse-du-Rempart and the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, Raoul had one or two bare, cold rooms on the third floor of a thin, ugly house. This was his abode for the general public, for literary novices, creditors, intruders, and the whole race of bores who were not allowed to cross the threshold of private life. His real home, which was the stage of his wider life and public appearances, he made with Florine, a second-rate actress who, ten years before, had been raised to the rank of a great dramatic artist by the combined efforts of Nathan’s friends, the newspaper critics, and a few literary men.

For ten years Raoul had been so closely attached to this woman, that he spent half his life in her house, taking his meals there whenever he had no engagements outside nor friends to entertain. Florine, to a finished depravity, added a very pretty wit, which constant intercourse with artists and daily practice had developed and sharpened. Wit is generally supposed to be a rare quality among actors. It seems an easy inference that those who spend their lives in bringing the outside to perfection should have little left with which to furnish the interior. But anyone who considers the small number of actors and actresses in a century, compared with the quantity of dramatic authors and attractive women produced by the same population, will see reason to dispute this notion. It rests, in fact, on the common assumption that personal feeling must disappear in the imitative expression of passion, whereas the real fact is that intelligence, memory, and imagination are the only powers employed in such imitation. Great artists are those who, according to Napoleon’s definition, can intercept at will the communication established by nature between sensation and thought. Molière and Talma loved more passionately in their old age than is usual with ordinary mortals.

Florine’s position forced her to listen to the talk of alert and calculating journalists and to the prophecies of garrulous literary men, while keeping an eye on certain politicians who used her house as a means of profiting by the sallies of her guests. The mixture of angel and demon which she embodied made her a fitting hostess for these profligates, who reveled in her impudence and found unfailing amusement in the perversity of her mind and heart.

Her house, enriched with offerings from admirers, displayed in its exaggerated magnificence an entire regardlessness of cost. Women of this type set a purely arbitrary value on their possessions; in a fit of temper they will smash a fan or a scent-bottle worthy of a queen, and they will be inconsolable if anything happens to a ten-franc basin which their lapdogs drink out of. The dining-room, crowded with rare and costly gifts, may serve as a specimen of the regal and insolent profusion of the establishment.

The whole room, including the ceiling, was covered with carved oak, left unstained, and set off with lines of dull gold. In the panels, encircled by groups of children playing with chimaeras, were placed the lights, which illuminated here a rough sketch by Decamps; there a plaster angel holding a basin of holy water, a present from Antonin Moine; further on a dainty picture of Eugène Devéria; the sombre figure of some Spanish alchemist by Louis Boulanger; an autograph letter from Lord Byron to Caroline in an ebony frame, carved by Elschoet, with a letter of Napoleon to Josephine to match it. The things were arranged without any view to symmetry, and yet with a sort of unstudied art; the whole effect took one, as it were, by storm. There was a union of carelessness and desire to please, such as can only be found in the homes of artists. The exquisitely-carved mantelpiece was bare except for a whimsical Florentine statue in ivory, attributed to Michelangelo, representing a Pan discovering a woman disguised as a young herd, the original of which is at the Treasury in Vienna. On either side of this hung an iron candelabrum, the work of some Renaissance chisel. A Boule timepiece on a tortoiseshell bracket, lacquered with copper arabesques, glittered in the middle of a panel between two statuettes, survivals from some ruined abbey. In the corners of the room on pedestals stood gorgeously resplendent lamps⁠—the fee paid by some maker to Florine for trumpeting his wares among her friends, who were assured that Japanese pots, with rich fittings, made the only possible stand for lamps. On a marvelous whatnot lay a display of silver, well-earned trophy of a combat in which some English lord had been forced to acknowledge the superiority of the French nation. Next came porcelain reliefs. The whole room displayed the charming profusion of an artist whose furniture represents his capital.

The bedroom, in violet, was a young ballet-girl’s dream: velvet curtains, lined with silk, were draped over inner folds of tulle; the ceiling was in white cashmere relieved with violet silk; at the foot of the bed lay an ermine rug; within the bed-curtains, which fell in the form of an inverted lily, hung a lantern by which to read the proofs of next day’s papers. A yellow drawing-room, enriched with ornaments the color of Florentine bronze, carried out the same impression of magnificence, but a detailed description would make these pages too much of a broker’s inventory. To find anything comparable to these treasures, it would be necessary to visit the Rothschilds’ house close by.

Sophie Grignoult, who, following the usual custom of taking a stage name, was known as Florine, had made her debut, beautiful as she was, in a subordinate capacity. Her triumph and her wealth she owed to Raoul Nathan. The association of these two careers, common enough in the dramatic and literary world, did not injure Raoul, who, in his character as a man of high pretensions, respected the proprieties. Nevertheless, Florine’s fortune was far from assured. Her professional income, arising from her salary and what she could earn in her holidays, barely sufficed for dress and housekeeping. Nathan helped her with contributions levied on new ventures in trade, and was always chivalrous and ready to act as her protector; but the support he gave was neither regular nor solid. This instability, this hand-to-mouth life, had no terrors for Florine. She believed in her talent and her beauty; and this robust faith had something comic in it for those who heard her, in answer to remonstrances, mortgaging her future on such security.

“I can live on my means whenever I like,” she would say. “I have fifty francs in the funds now.”

No one could understand how, with her beauty, Florine had remained seven years in obscurity; but as a matter of fact, she was enrolled as a supernumerary at the age of thirteen, and made her debut two years later in a humble theatre on the boulevards. At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman. She was now twenty-eight, an age which with French women is the culminating point of their beauty. Painters admired most of all her shoulders, glossy white, with olive tints about the back of the neck, but firm and polished, reflecting the light like watered silk. When she turned her head, the neck made magnificent curves in which sculptors delighted. On this neck rose the small, imperious head of a Roman empress, graceful and finely moulded, round and self-assertive, like that of Poppaea. The features were correct, yet expressive, and the unlined forehead was that of an easygoing woman who takes all trouble lightly, yet can be obstinate as a mule on occasion and deaf to all reason. This forehead, with its pure unbroken sweep, gave value to the lovely flaxen hair, generally raised in front, in Roman fashion, in two equal masses and twisted into a high knot at the back, so as to prolong the curve of the neck and bring out its whiteness. Dark, delicate eyebrows, such as a Chinese artist pencils, framed the heavy lids, covered with a network of tiny pink veins. The pupils, sparkling with fire but spotted with patches of brown, gave to her look the fierce fixity of a wild beast, emblematic of the courtesan’s cold heartlessness. The lovely gazelle-like iris was a beautiful gray, and fringed with black lashes, a bewitching contrast which brought out yet more strikingly the expression of calm and expectant desire. Darker tints encircled the eyes; but it was the artistic finish with which she used them that was most remarkable. Those darting, sidelong glances which nothing escaped, the upward gaze of her dreamy pose, the way she had of keeping the iris fixed, while charging it with the most intense passion and without moving the head or stirring a muscle of the face⁠—a trick, this, learned on the stage⁠—the keen sweep which would embrace a whole room to find out the man she wanted⁠—these were the arts which made of her eyes the most terrible, the sweetest, the strangest in the world.

Rouge had spoiled the delicate transparency of her soft cheeks. But if it was beyond her power to blush or grow pale, she had a slender nose, indented by pink, quivering nostrils, which seemed to breathe the sarcasm and mockery of Molière’s waiting-maids. Her mouth, sensual and luxurious, lending itself to irony as readily as to love, owed much of its beauty to the finely-cut edges of the little groove joining the upper lip to the nose. Her white, rather fleshy, chin portended storms in love. Her hands and arms might have been an empress’. But the feet were short and thick, ineradicable sign of low birth. Never had heritage wrought more woe. In her efforts to change it, Florine had stopped short only at amputation. But her feet were obstinate, like the Bretons from whom she sprang, and refused to yield to any science or manipulation. Florine therefore wore long boots, stuffed with cotton, to give her an arched instep. She was of medium height, and threatened with corpulence, but her figure still kept its curves and precision.

Morally, she was past mistress in all the airs and graces, tantrums, quips, and caresses of her trade; but she gave them a special character by affecting childishness and edging in a sly thrust under cover of innocent laughter. With all her apparent ignorance and giddiness, she was at home in the mysteries of discount and commercial law. She had waded through so many bad times to reach her day of precarious triumph! She had descended, story by story, to the ground-floor, through such a coil of intrigue! She knew life under so many forms; from that which dines off bread and cheese to that which toys listlessly with apricot fritters; from that which does its cooking and washing in the corner of a garret with an earthen stove to that which summons its vassal host of big-paunched chefs and impudent scullions. She had indulged in credit without killing it. She knew everything of which good women are ignorant, and could speak all languages. A child of the people by her origin, the refinement of her beauty allied her to the upper classes. She was hard to overreach and impossible to mystify; for, like spies, barristers, and those who have grown old in statecraft, she kept an open mind for every possibility. She knew how to deal with tradespeople and their little tricks, and could quote prices with an auctioneer. Lying back, like some fair young bride, on her couch, with the part she was learning in her hand, she might have passed for a guileless and ignorant girl of sixteen, protected only by her innocence. But let some importunate creditor arrive, and she was on her feet like a startled fawn, a good round oath upon her lips.

“My good fellow,” she would address him, “your insolence is really too high an interest on my debt. I am tired of the sight of you; go and send the bailiffs. Rather them than your imbecile face.”

Florine gave charming dinners, concerts, and crowded receptions, where the play was very high. Her women friends were all beautiful. Never had an old woman been seen at her parties; she was entirely free from jealousy, which seemed to her a confession of weakness. Among her old acquaintances were Coralie and la Torpille; among those of the day, the Tullias, Euphrasie, the Aquilinas, Mme. du Val-Noble, Mariette;⁠—those women who float through Paris like threads of gossamer in the air, no one knowing whence they come or whither they go; queens today, tomorrow drudges. Her rivals, too, came, actresses and singers, the whole company, in short, of that unique feminine world, so kindly and gracious in its recklessness, whose Bohemian life carries away with its dash, its spirit, its scorn of tomorrow, the men who join the frenzied dance. Though in Florine’s house Bohemianism flourished unchecked to a chorus of gay artists, the mistress had all her wits about her, and could use them as not one of her guests. Secret saturnalia of literature and art were held there side by side with politics and finance. There passion reigned supreme; there temper and the whim of the moment received the reverence which a simple society pays to honor and virtue. There might be seen Blondet, Finot, Étienne Lousteau, her seventh lover, who believed himself to be the first, Félicien Vernou, the journalist, Couture, Bixiou, Rastignac formerly, Claude Vignon, the critic, Nucingen the banker, du Tillet, Conti the composer; in a word, the whole diabolic legion of ferocious egotists in every walk of life. There also came the friends of the singers, dancers, and actresses whom Florine knew.

Every member of this society hated or loved every other member according to circumstances. This house of call, open to celebrities of every kind, was a sort of brothel of wit, a galleys of the mind. Not a guest there but had filched his fortune within the four corners of the law, had worked through ten years of squalor, had strangled two or three love affairs, and had made his mark, whether by a book or a waistcoat, a drama or a carriage and pair. Their time was spent in hatching mischief, in exploring roads to wealth, in ridiculing popular outbreaks, which they had incited the day before, and in studying the fluctuations of the money market. Each man, as he left the house, donned again the livery of his beliefs, which he had cast aside on entering in order to abuse at his ease his own party, and admire the strategy and skill of its opponents, to put in plain words thoughts which men keep to themselves, to practise, in fine, that license of speech which goes with license in action. Paris is the one place in the world where houses of this eclectic sort exist, in which ever taste, every vice, every opinion, finds a welcome, so long as it comes in decent garb.

It remains to be said that Florine is still a second-rate actress. Further, her life is neither an idle nor an enviable one. Many people, deluded by the splendid vantage ground which the theatre gives to a woman, imagine her to live in a perpetual carnival. How many a poor girl, buried in some porter’s lodge or under an attic roof, dreams on her return from the theatre of pearls and diamonds, of dresses decked with gold and rich sashes, and pictures herself, the glitter of the footlights on her hair, applauded, purchased, worshiped, carried off. And not one of them knows the facts of that treadmill existence, how an actress is forced to attend rehearsals under penalty of a fine, to read plays, and perpetually study new parts, at a time when two or three hundred pieces a year are played in Paris. In the course of each performance, Florine changes her dress two or three times, and often she returns to her dressing-room half-dead with exhaustion. Then she has to get rid of the red or white paint with the aid of plentiful cosmetics, and dust the powder out of her hair, if she has heen playing an eighteenth century part. Barely has she time to dine. When she is playing, an actress can neither lace her stays, nor eat, nor talk. For supper again Florine has no time. On returning from a performance, which nowadays is not over till past midnight, she has her toilet for the night to make and orders to give. After going to bed at one or two in the morning, she has to be up in time to revise her parts, to order her dresses, to explain them and try them on; then lunch, read her love-letters, reply to them, transact business with her hired applauders, so that she may be properly greeted on entering and leaving the stage, and, while paying the bill for her triumphs of the past month, order wholesale those of the present. In the days of Saint Genest, a canonized actor, who neglected no means of grace and wore a hair-shirt, the stage, we must suppose, did not demand this relentless activity. Often Florine is forced to feign an illness if she wants to go into the country and pick flowers like an ordinary mortal.

Yet these purely mechanical occupations are nothing in comparison with the mental worries, arising from intrigues to be conducted, annoyances to vanity, preferences shown by authors, competition for parts, with its triumphs and disappointments, unreasonable actors, ill-natured rivals, and the importunities of managers and critics, all of which demand another twenty-four hours in the day.

And, lastly, there is the art itself and all the difficulties it involves⁠—the interpretation of passion, details of mimicry, and stage effects, with thousands of opera-glasses ready to pounce on the slightest flaw in the most brilliant presentment. These are the things which wore away the life and energy of Talma, Lekain, Baron, Contat, Clairon, Champmeslé. In the pandemonium of the greenroom self-love is sexless; the successful artist, man or woman, has all other men and women for enemies.

As to profits, however handsome Florine’s salaries may be, they do not cover the cost of the stage finery, which⁠—not to speak of costumes⁠—demands an enormous expenditure in long gloves and shoes, and does not do away with the necessity for evening and visiting dresses. One-third of such a life is spent in begging favors, another in making sure the ground already won, and the remainder in repelling attacks; but all alike is work. If it contains also moments of intense happiness, that is because happiness here is rare and stolen, long waited for, a chance godsend amid the hateful grind of forced pleasure and stage smiles.

To Florine, Raoul’s power was a sovereign protection. He saved her many a vexation and worry, in the fashion of a great noble of former days defending his mistress; or, to take a modern instance, like the old men who go on their knees to the editor when their idol has been scarified by some halfpenny print. He was more than a lover to her; he was a staff to lean on. She tended him like a father, and deceived him like a husband; but there was nothing in the world she would not have sacrificed for him. Raoul was indispensable to her artistic vanity, to the tranquillity of her self-esteem, and to her dramatic future. Without the intervention of some great writer, no great actress can be produced; we owe la Champmeslé to Racine, as we owe Mars to Monvel and Andrieux. Florine, on her side, could do nothing for Raoul, much as she would have liked to be useful or necessary to him. She counted on the seductions of habit, and was always ready to open her rooms and offer the profusion of her table to help his plans or his friends. In fact, she aspired to be for him what Madame de Pompadour was for Louis XV; and there were actresses who envied her position, just as there were journalists who would have changed places with Raoul.

Now, those who know the bent of the human mind to opposition and contrast will easily understand that Raoul, after ten years of this rakish Bohemian life, should weary of its ups and downs, its revelry and its writs, its orgies and its fasts, and should feel drawn to a pure and innocent love, as well as to the gentle harmony of a great lady’s existence. In the same way, the Comtesse Félix longed to introduce the torments of passion into a life the bliss of which had cloyed through its sameness. This law of life is the law of all art, which exists only through contrast. A work produced independently of such aid is the highest expression of genius, as the cloister is the highest effort of Christianity.

Raoul, on returning home, found a note from Florine, which her maid had brought, but was too sleepy to read it. He went to bed in the restful satisfaction of a tender love, which had so far been lacking to his life. A few hours later, he found important news in this letter, news of which neither Rastignac nor de Marsay had dropped a hint. Florine had learned from some indiscreet friend that the Chamber was to be dissolved at the close of the session. Raoul at once went to Florine’s, and sent for Blondet to meet him there.

In Florine’s boudoir, their feet upon the firedogs, Émile and Raoul dissected the political situation of France in 1834. On what side lay the best chance for a man who wanted to get on? Every shade of opinion was passed in review⁠—Republicans pure and simple, Republicans with a President, Republicans without a republic, Dynastic Constitutionalists and Constitutionalists without a dynasty, Conservative Ministerialists and Absolutist Ministerialists; lastly, the compromising right, the aristocratic right, the Legitimist right, the Henri-quinquist right, and the Carlist right. As between the party of obstruction and the party of progress there could be no question; as well might one hesitate between life and death.

The vast number of newspapers at this time in circulation, representing different shades of party, was significant of the chaotic confusion⁠—the slush, as it might vulgarly be called⁠—to which politics were reduced. Blondet, the man of his day with most judgment, although, like a barrister unable to plead his own cause, he could use it only on behalf of others, was magnificent in these friendly discussions. His advice to Nathan was not to desert abruptly.

“It was Napoleon who said that young republics cannot be made out of old monarchies. Therefore, do you, my friend, become the hero, the pillar, the creator of a left centre in the next Chamber, and a political future is before you. Once past the barrier, once in the Ministry, a man can do what he pleases, he can wear the winning colors.”

Nathan decided to start a political daily paper, of which he should have the complete control, and to affiliate to it one of those small society sheets with which the press swarmed, establishing at the same time a connection with some magazine. The press had been the mainspring of so many fortunes around him that Nathan refused to listen to Blondet’s warnings against trusting to it. In Blondet’s opinion, the speculation was unsafe, because of the multitude of competing papers, and because the power of the press seemed to him used up. Raoul, strong in his supposed friends and in his courage, was keen to go forward; with a gesture of pride he sprang to his feet and exclaimed:

“I shall succeed!”

“You haven’t a penny!”

“I shall write a play!”

“It will fall dead.”

“Let it,” said Nathan.

He paced up and down Florine’s room, followed by Blondet, who thought he had gone crazy; he cast covetous glances on the costly treasures piled up around; then Blondet understood him.

“There’s more than one hundred thousand francs’ worth here,” said Émile.

“Yes,” said Raoul, with a sigh towards Florine’s sumptuous bed; “but I would sell patent safety-chains on the boulevards and live on fried potatoes all my life rather than sell a single patera from these rooms.”

“Not one patera, no,” said Blondet, “but the whole lot! Ambition is like death; it clutches all because life, it knows, is hounding it on.”

“No! a thousand times, no! I would accept anything from that Countess of yesterday, but to rob Florine of her nest?⁠ ⁠…”

“To overthrow one’s mint,” said Blondet, with a tragic air, “to smash up the coining-press, and break the stamp, is certainly serious.”

“From what I can gather, you are abandoning the stage for politics,” said Florine, suddenly breaking in on them.

“Yes, my child, yes,” said Raoul good-naturedly, putting his arm round her neck and kissing her forehead. “Why that frown? It will be no loss to you. Won’t the minister be better placed than the journalist for getting a first-rate engagement for the queen of the boards? You will still have your parts and your holidays.”

“Where is the money to come from?” she asked.

“From my uncle,” replied Raoul.

Florine knew this “uncle.” The word meant a moneylender, just as “my aunt” was the vulgar name for a pawnbroker.

“Don’t bother yourself, my pretty one,” said Blondet to Florine, patting her on the shoulder. “I will get Massol to help him. He’s a barrister, and, like the rest of them, intends to have a turn at being Minister of Justice. Then there’s du Tillet, who wants a seat in the Chamber; Finot, who is still backing a society paper; Plantin, who has his eye on a post under the Conseil d’État, and who has some share in a magazine. No fear! I won’t let him ruin himself. We will get a meeting here with Étienne Lousteau, who will do the light stuff, and Claude Vignon for the serious criticism. Félicien Vernou will be the charwoman of the paper, the barrister will sweat for it, du Tillet will look after trade and the Exchange, and we shall see where this union of determined men and their tools will land us.”

“In the workhouse or on the Government bench, those refuges for the ruined in body or mind,” said Raoul.

“What about the dinner?”

“We’ll have it here,” said Raoul, “five days hence.”

“Let me know how much you need,” said Florine simply.

“Why, the barrister, du Tillet, and Raoul can’t start with less than one hundred thousand francs apiece,” said Blondet. “That will run the paper very well for eighteen months, time enough to make a hit or miss in Paris.”

Florine made a gesture of approval. The two friends then took a cab and set out in quest of guests, pens, ideas, and sources of support. The beautiful actress on her part sent for four dealers in furniture, curiosities, pictures, and jewelry. The dealers, who were all men of substance, entered the sanctuary and made an inventory of its whole contents, just as though Florine were dead. She threatened them with a public auction in case they hardened their hearts in hopes of a better opportunity. She had, she told them, excited the admiration of an English lord in a medieval part, and she wished to dispose of all her personal property, in order that her apparently destitute condition might move him to present her with a splendid house, which she would furnish as a rival to Rothschilds’. With all her arts, she only succeeded in getting an offer of seventy thousand francs for the whole of the spoil, which was well worth one hundred and fifty thousand. Florine, who did not care a button for the things, promised they should be handed over in seven days for eighty thousand francs.

“You can take it or leave it,” she said.

The bargain was concluded. When the dealers had gone, the actress skipped for joy, like the little hills of King David. She could not contain herself for delight; never had she dreamed of such wealth. When Raoul returned, she pretended to be offended with him, and declared that she was deserted. She saw through it all now; men don’t change their party or leave the stage for the Chamber without some reason. There must be a rival! Her instinct told her so! Vows of eternal love rewarded her little comedy.

Five days later, Florine gave a magnificent entertainment. The ceremony of christening the paper was then performed amidst floods of wine and wit, oaths of fidelity, of good fellowship, and of serious alliance. The name, forgotten now, like the Libéral, the Communal, the Départemental, the Garde National, the Fédéral, the Impartial, was something which ended in al, and was bound not to take. Descriptions of banquets have been so numerous in a literary period which had more firsthand experience of starving in an attic, that it would be difficult to do justice to Florine’s. Suffice it to say that, at three in the morning, Florine was able to undress and go to bed as if she had been alone, though not one of her guests had left. These lights of their age were sleeping like pigs. When, early in the morning, the packers, commissionaires, and porters arrived to carry off the gorgeous trappings of the famous actress, she laughed aloud to see them lifting these celebrities like heavy pieces of furniture and depositing them on the floor.

Thus the splendid collection went its way.

Florine carried her personal remembrances to shops where the sight of them did not enlighten passersby as to how and when these flowers of luxury had been paid for. It was agreed to leave her until the evening a few specially reserved articles, including her bed, her table, and her crockery, so that she might offer breakfast to her guests. These witty gentlemen, having fallen asleep under the beauteous drapery of wealth, awoke to the cold, naked walls of poverty, studded with nail-marks and disfigured by those incongruous patches which are found at the back of wall decorations, as ropes behind an opera scene.

“Why, Florine, the poor girl has an execution in the house!” cried Bixiou, one of the guests. “Quick! your pockets, gentlemen! A subscription!”

At these words the whole company was on foot. The net sweepings of the pockets came to thirty-seven francs, which Raoul handed over with mock ceremony to the laughing Florine. The happy courtesan raised her head from the pillow and pointed to a heap of banknotes on the sheet, thick as in the golden days of her trade. Raoul called Blondet.

“I see it now,” said Blondet. “The little rogue has sold off without a word to us. Well done, Florine!”

Delighted with this stroke, the few friends who remained carried Florine in triumph and deshabille to the dining-room. The barrister and the bankers had gone. That evening Florine had a tremendous reception at the theatre. The rumor of her sacrifice was all over the house.

“I should prefer to be applauded for my talent,” said Florine’s rival to her in the greenroom.

“That is very natural on the part of an artist who has never yet won applause except for the lavishness of her favors,” she replied.

During the evening Florine’s maid had her things moved to Raoul’s flat in the Passage Sandrié. The journalist was to pitch his camp in the building where the newspaper office was opened.

Such was the rival of the ingenuous Mme. de Vandenesse. Raoul’s fancy was a link binding the actress to the lady of title. It was a ghastly tie like this which was severed by that Duchess of Louis XIV’s time who poisoned Lecouvreur; nor can such an act of vengeance be wondered at, considering the magnitude of the offence.

VI

Love Versus Society

Florine proved no difficulty in the early stages of Raoul’s passion. Foreseeing financial disappointments in the hazardous scheme into which he had plunged, she begged leave of absence for six months. Raoul took an active part in the negotiation, and by bringing it to a successful issue still further endeared himself to Florine. With the good sense of the peasant in La Fontaine’s fable, who makes sure of his dinner while the patricians are chattering over plans, the actress hurried off to the provinces and abroad, to glean the wherewithal to support the great man during his place-hunting.

Up to the present time the art of fiction has seldom dealt with love as it shows itself in the highest society, a compound of noble impulse and hidden wretchedness. There is a terrible strain in the constant check imposed on passion by the most trivial and trumpery incidents, and not unfrequently the thread snaps from sheer lassitude. Perhaps some glimpse of what it means may be obtained here.

The day after Lady Dudley’s ball, although nothing approaching a declaration had escaped on either side, Marie felt that Raoul’s love was the realization of her dreams, and Raoul had no doubt that he was the chosen of Marie’s heart. Neither of the two had reached that point of depravity where preliminaries are curtailed, and yet they advanced rapidly towards the end. Raoul, sated with pleasure, was in the mood for Platonic affection; whilst Marie, from whom the idea of an actual fault was still remote, had never contemplated passing beyond it. Never, therefore, was love more pure and innocent in fact, or more impassioned and rapturous in thought, than this of Raoul and Marie. The Countess had been fascinated by ideas which, though clothed in modern dress, belonged to the times of chivalry. In her role, as she conceived it, her husband’s dislike to Nathan no longer appeared an obstacle to her love. The less Raoul merited esteem, the nobler was her mission. The inflated language of the poet stirred her imagination rather than her blood. It was charity which wakened at the call of passion. This queen of the virtues lent what in the eyes of the Countess seemed almost a sanction to the tremors, the delights, the turbulence of her love. She felt it a fine thing to be the human providence of Raoul. How sweet to think of supporting with her feeble, white hand this colossal figure, whose feet of clay she refused to see, of sowing life where none had been, of working in secret at the foundation of a great destiny. With her help this man of genius should wrestle with and overcome his fate; her hand should embroider his scarf for the tourney, buckle on his armor, give him a charm against sorcery, and balm for all his wounds!

In a woman with Marie’s noble nature and religious upbringing this passionate charity was the only form love could assume. Hence her boldness. The pure in mind have a superb disdain for appearances, which may be mistaken for the shamelessness of the courtesan. No sooner had the Countess assured herself by casuistical arguments that her husband’s honor ran no risk, than she abandoned herself completely to the bliss of loving Raoul. The most trivial things in life had now a charm for her. The boudoir in which she dreamed of him became a sanctuary. Even her pretty writing-table recalled to her the countless joys of correspondence; there she would have to read, to hide, his letters; there reply to them. Dress, that splendid poem of a woman’s life, the significance of which she had either exhausted or ignored, now appeared to her full of a magic hitherto unknown. Suddenly it became to her what it is to all women⁠—a continuous expression of the inner thought, a language, a symbol. What wealth of delight in a costume designed for his pleasure, in his honor! She threw herself with all simplicity into those charming nothings which make the business of a Paris woman’s life, and which charge with meaning every detail in her house, her person, her clothes. Rare indeed are the women who frequent dress shops, milliners, and fashionable tailors simply for their own pleasure. As they become old they cease to think of dress. Scrutinize the face which in passing you see for a moment arrested before a shopfront: “Would he like me better in this?” are the words written plain in the clearing brow, in eyes sparkling with hope, and in the smile that plays upon the lips.

Lady Dudley’s ball took place on a Saturday evening; on the Monday the Countess went to the opera, allured by the certainty of seeing Raoul. Raoul, in fact, was there, planted on one of the staircases which lead down to the amphitheatre stalls. He lowered his eyes as the Countess entered her box. With what ecstasy did Mme. de Vandenesse observe the unwonted carefulness of her lover’s attire! This contemner of the laws of elegance might be seen with well-brushed hair, which shone with scent in the recesses of every curl, a fashionable waistcoat, a well-fastened tie, and an immaculate shirtfront. Under the yellow gloves, which were the order of the day, his hands showed very white. Raoul kept his arms crossed over his breast, as though posing for his portrait, superbly indifferent to the whole house, which murmured with barely restrained impatience. His eyes, though bent on the ground, seemed turned towards the red velvet bar on which Marie’s arm rested. Félix, seated in the opposite corner of the box, had his back to Nathan. The Countess had been adroit enough to place herself so that she looked straight down on the pillar against which Raoul leaned. In a single hour, then, Marie had brought this clever man to abjure his cynicism in dress. The humblest, as well as the most distinguished, woman must feel her head turned by the first open declaration of her power in such a transformation. Every change is a confession of servitude.

“They were right, there is a great happiness in being understood,” she said to herself, calling to mind her unworthy instructors.

When the two lovers had scanned the house in a rapid all-embracing survey, they exchanged a glance of intelligence. For both it was as though a heavenly dew had fallen with cooling power upon their fevered suspense. “I have been in hell for an hour; now the heavens open,” spoke the eyes of Raoul.

“I knew you were there, but am I free?” replied those of the Countess.

None but slaves of every variety, including thieves, spies, lovers, and diplomatists, know all that a flash of the eye can convey of information or delight. They alone can grasp the intelligence, the sweetness, the humor, the wrath, and the malice with which this changeful lightning of the soul is pregnant. Raoul felt his passion kick against the pricks of necessity and grow more vigorous in presence of obstacles. Between the step on which he was perched and the box of the Comtesse Félix de Vandenesse was a space of barely thirty feet, impassable for him. To a passionate man who, so far in his life, had known but little interval between desire and satisfaction, this abyss of solid ground, which could not be spanned, inspired a wild desire to spring upon the Countess in a tiger-like bound. In a paroxysm of fury he tried to feel his way. He bowed openly to the Countess, who replied with a slight, scornful inclination of the head, such as women use for snubbing their admirers. Félix turned to see who had greeted his wife, and perceiving Nathan, of whom he took no notice beyond a mute inquiry as to the cause of this liberty, turned slowly away again, with some words probably approving of his wife’s assumed coldness. Plainly the door of the box was barred against Nathan, who hurled a threatening glance at Félix, which it required no great wit to interpret by one of Florine’s sallies, “Look out for your hat; it will soon not rest on your head!”

Mme. d’Espard, one of the most insolent women of her time, who had been watching these manoeuvres from her box, now raised her voice in some meaningless bravo. Raoul, who was standing beneath her, turned. He bowed, and received in return a gracious smile, which so clearly said, “If you are dismissed there, come to me!” that Raoul left his column and went to pay a visit to Mme. d’Espard. He wanted to be seen there in order to show that fellow Vandenesse that his fame was equal to a patent of nobility, and that before Nathan blazoned doors flew open. The Marchioness made him sit down in the front of the box opposite to her. She intended to play the inquisitor.

“Mme. Félix de Vandenesse looks charming tonight,” she said, congratulating him on the lady’s dress, as though it were a book he had just published.

“Yes,” said Raoul carelessly, “marabouts are very becoming to her. But she is too constant, she wore them the day before yesterday,” he added, with an easy air, as though by his critical attitude to repudiate the flattering complicity which the Marchioness had laid to his charge.

“You know the proverb?” she replied. “ ‘Every feast day should have a morrow.’ ”

At the game of repartee literary giants are not always equal to ladies of title. Raoul took refuge in a pretended stupidity, the last resource of clever men.

“The proverb is true for me,” he said, casting an admiring look on the Marchioness.

“Your pretty speech, sir, comes too late for me to accept it,” she replied, laughing. “Come, come, don’t be a prude; in the small hours of yesterday morning, you thought Mme. de Vandenesse entrancing in marabouts; she was perfectly aware of it, and puts them on again to please you. She is in love with you, and you adore her; no time has been lost, certainly; still I see nothing in it but what is most natural. If it were not as I say, you would not be tearing your glove to pieces in your rage at having to sit here beside me, instead of in the box of your idol⁠—which has just been shut in your face by supercilious authority⁠—whispering low what you would fain hear said aloud.”

Raoul was in fact twisting one of his gloves, and the hand which he showed was surprisingly white.

“She has won from you,” she went on, fixing his hand with an impertinent stare, “sacrifices which you refused to society. She ought to be enchanted at her success, and, I daresay, she is a little vain of it; but in her place I think I should be more so. So far she has only been a woman of good parts, now she will pass for a woman of genius. We shall find her portrait in one of those delightful books of yours. But, my dear friend, do me the kindness not to forget Vandenesse. That man is really too fatuous. I could not stand such self-complacency in Jupiter Olympus himself, who is said to have been the only god in mythology exempt from domestic misfortune.”

“Madame,” cried Raoul, “you credit me with a very base soul if you suppose that I would make profit out of my feelings, out of my love. Sooner than be guilty of such literary dishonor, I would follow the English custom, and drag a woman to market with a rope round her neck.”

“But I know Marie; she will ask you to do it.”

“No, she is incapable of it,” protested Raoul.

“You know her intimately then?”

Nathan could not help laughing that he, a playwright, should be caught in this little comedy dialogue.

“The play is no longer there,” he said, pointing to the footlights; “it rests with you.”

To hide his confusion, he took the opera-glass and began to examine the house.

“Are you vexed with me?” said the Marchioness, with a sidelong glance at him. “Wouldn’t your secret have been mine in any case? It won’t be hard to make peace. Come to my house, I am at home every Wednesday; the dear Countess won’t miss an evening when she finds you come, and I shall be the gainer. Sometimes she comes to me between four and five o’clock; I will be very good-natured, and add you to the select few admitted at that hour.”

“Only see,” said Raoul, “how unjust people are! I was told you were spiteful.”

“Oh! so I am,” she said, “when I want to be. One has to fight for one’s own hand. But as for your Countess, I adore her. You have no idea how charming she is! You will be the first to have your name inscribed on her heart with that infantine joy which causes all lovers, even drill-sergeants, to cut their initials on the bark of a tree. A woman’s first love is a luscious fruit. Later, you see, there is always some calculation in our attentions and caresses. I’m an old woman, and can say what I like; nothing frightens me, not even a journalist. Well, then, in the autumn of life, we know how to make you happy; but when love is a new thing, we are happy ourselves, and that gives endless satisfaction to your pride. We are full of delicious surprises then, because the heart is fresh. You, who are a poet, must prefer flowers to fruit. Six months hence you shall tell me about it.”

Raoul began with denying everything, as all men do when they are brought to the bar, but found that this only supplied weapons to so practised a champion. Entangled in the noose of a dialogue, manipulated with all the dangerous adroitness of a woman and a Parisian, he dreaded to let fall admissions which would serve as fuel for the lady’s wit, and he beat a prudent retreat when he saw Lady Dudley enter.

“Well,” said the Englishwoman, “how far have they gone?”

“They are desperately in love. Nathan has just told me so.”

“I wish he had been uglier,” said Lady Dudley, with a venomous scowl at Félix. “Otherwise, he is exactly what I would have wished; he is the son of a Jewish broker, who died bankrupt shortly after his marriage; unfortunately, his mother was a Catholic, and has made a Christian of him.”

Nathan’s origin, which he kept a most profound secret, was a new discovery to Lady Dudley, who gloated in advance over the delight of drawing thence some pointed shaft to aim at Vandenesse.

“And I’ve just asked him to my house!” exclaimed the Marchioness.

“Wasn’t he at my ball yesterday?” replied Lady Dudley. “There are pleasures, my dear, for which one pays heavily.”

The news of a mutual passion between Raoul and Mme. de Vandenesse went the round of society that evening, not without calling forth protests and doubts; but the Countess was defended by her friends, Lady Dudley, Mmes. d’Espard, and de Manerville, with a clumsy eagerness which gained some credence for the rumor. Yielding to necessity, Raoul went on Wednesday evening to Mme. d’Espard’s, and found there the usual distinguished company. As Félix did not accompany his wife, Raoul was able to exchange a few words with Marie, the tone of which expressed more than the matter. The Countess, warned against malicious gossips by Mme. Octave de Camps, realized her critical position before society, and contrived to make Raoul understand it also.

Amidst this gay assembly, the lovers found their only joy in a long draught of the delicious sensations arising from the words, the voice, the gestures, and the bearing of the loved one. The soul clings desperately to such trifles. At times the eyes of both will converge upon the same spot, embedding there, as it were, a thought of which they thus risk the interchange. They talk, and longing looks follow the peeping foot, the quivering hand, the fingers which toy with some ornament, flicking it, twisting it about, then dropping it, in significant fashion. It is no longer words or thoughts which make themselves heard, it is things; and that in so clear a voice, that often the man who loves will leave to others the task of handing a cup of tea, a sugar-basin, or whatnot, to his ladylove, in dread lest his agitation should be visible to eyes which, apparently seeing nothing, see all. Thronging desires, mad wishes, passionate thoughts, find their way into a glance and die out there. The pressure of a hand, eluding a thousand Argus eyes, is eloquent as written pages, burning as a kiss. Love grows by all that it denies itself; it treads on obstacles to reach the higher. And barriers, more often cursed than cleared, are hacked and cast into the fire to feed its flames. Here it is that women see the measure of their power, when love, that is boundless, coils up and hides itself within a thirsty glance, a nervous thrill, behind the screen of formal civility. How often has not a single word, on the last step of a staircase, paid the price of an evening’s silent agony and empty talk!

Raoul, careless of social forms, gave rein to his anger in brilliant oratory. Everybody present could hear the lion’s roar, and recognized the artist’s nature, intolerant of disappointment. This Orlando-like rage, this cutting and slashing wit, this laying on of epigrams as with a club, enraptured Marie and amused the onlookers, much as the spectacle of a maddened bull, covered with streamers, in a Spanish amphitheatre, might have done.

“Hit out as much as you like, you can’t clear the ring,” Blondet said to him.

This sarcasm restored to Raoul his presence of mind; he ceased making an exhibition of himself and his vexation. The Marchioness came to offer him a cup of tea, and said, loud enough for Marie to hear:

“You are really very amusing; come and see me sometimes at four o’clock.”

Raoul took offence at the word “amusing,” although it had served as passport to the invitation. He began to give ear, as actors do, when they are attending to the house and not to the stage. Blondet took pity on him.

“My dear fellow,” he said, drawing him aside into a corner, “you behave in polite society exactly as you might at Florine’s. Here nobody flies into a passion, nobody lectures; from time to time a smart thing may be said, and you must look most impassive at the very moment when you long to throw someone out of the window; a gentle raillery is allowed, and some show of attention to the lady you adore, but you can’t lie down and kick like a donkey in the middle of the road. Here, my good soul, love proceeds by rule. Either carry off Mme. de Vandenesse or behave like a gentleman. You are too much the lover of one of your own romances.”

Nathan listened with hanging head; he was a wild beast caught in the toils.

“I shall never set foot here again,” said he. “This papier-mâché Marchioness puts too high a price upon her tea. She thinks me amusing, does she? Now I know why St. Just guillotined all these people.”

“You’ll come back tomorrow.”

Blondet was right. Passion is as cowardly as it is cruel. The next day, after fluctuating long between “I’ll go” and “I won’t go,” Raoul left his partners in the middle of an important discussion to hasten to the Faubourg St. Honoré and Mme. d’Espard’s house. The sight of Rastignac’s elegant cabriolet driving up as he was paying his cabman at the door hurt Nathan’s vanity; he too would have such a cabriolet, he resolved, and the correct tiger. The carriage of the Countess was in the court, and Raoul’s heart swelled with joy as he perceived it. Marie’s movements responded to her longings with the regularity of a clock-hand propelled by its spring. She was reclining in an armchair by the fireplace in the small drawing-room. Instead of looking at Nathan as he entered, she gazed at his reflection in the mirror, feeling sure that the mistress of the house would turn to him. Love, baited by society, is forced to have recourse to these little tricks; it endows with life mirrors, muffs, fans, and numberless objects, the purpose of which is not clear at first sight, and is indeed never found out by many of the women who use them.

“The Prime Minister,” said Mme. d’Espard, with a glance at de Marsay, as she drew Nathan into the conversation, “was just declaring, when you came in, that there is an understanding between the Royalists and Republicans. What do you say? You ought to know something about it.”

“Supposing it were so, where would be the harm?” said Raoul. “The object of our animosity is the same; we agree in our hatred, and differ only in what we love.”

“The alliance is at least singular,” said de Marsay, with a glance which embraced Raoul and the Comtesse Félix.

“It will not last,” said Rastignac, who, like all novices, took his politics a little too seriously.

“What do you say, darling?” asked Mme. d’Espard of the Countess.

“I! oh! I know nothing about politics.”

“You will learn, madame,” said de Marsay, “and then you will be doubly our enemy.”

Neither Nathan nor Marie understood de Marsay’s sally till he had gone. Rastignac followed him, and Mme. d’Espard went with them both as far as the door of the first drawing-room. Not another thought did the lovers give to the minister’s epigram; they saw the priceless wealth of a few minutes before them. Marie swiftly removed her glove, and held out her hand to Raoul, who took it and kissed it with the fervor of eighteen. The eyes of the Countess were eloquent of a devotion so generous and absolute that Raoul felt his own moisten. A tear is always at the command of men of nervous temperament.

“Where can I see you⁠—speak to you?” he said. “It will kill me if I must perpetually disguise my looks and my voice, my heart and my love.”

Moved by the tear, Marie promised to go to the Bois whenever the weather did not make it impossible. This promise gave Raoul more happiness than Florine had brought him in five years.

“I have so much to say to you! I suffer so from the silence to which we are condemned.”

The Countess was gazing at him rapturously, unable to reply, when the Marchioness returned.

“So!” she exclaimed as she entered, “you had no retort for de Marsay!”

“One must respect the dead,” replied Raoul. “Don’t you see that he is at the last gasp? Rastignac is acting as nurse, and hopes to be mentioned in the will.”

The Countess made an excuse of having calls to pay, and took leave, as a precaution against gossip. For this quarter of an hour Raoul had sacrificed precious time and most urgent claims. Marie as yet knew nothing of the details of a life which, while to all appearance gay and idle as a bird’s, had yet its side of very complicated business and extremely taxing work. When two beings, united by an enduring love, lead a life which each day knits them more closely in the bonds of mutual confidence and by the interchange of counsel over difficulties as they arise; when two hearts pour forth their sorrows, night and morning, with mingled sighs; when they share the same suspense and shudder together at a common danger, then everything is taken into account. The woman then can measure the love in an averted gaze, the cost of a hurried visit, she has her part in the business, the hurrying to and fro, the hopes and anxieties of the hard-worked, harassed man. If she complains, it is only of the actual conditions; her doubts are at rest, for she knows and appreciates the details of his life. But in the opening chapters of passion, when all is eagerness, suspicion, and demands; when neither of the two know themselves or each other; when, in addition, the woman is an idler, expecting love to stand guard all day at her door⁠—one of those who have an exaggerated estimate of their own claims, and choose to be obeyed even when obedience spells ruin to a career⁠—then love, in Paris and at the present time, becomes a superhuman task. Women of fashion have not yet thrown off the traditions of the eighteenth century, when every man had his own place marked out for him. Few of them know anything of the difficulties of existence for the bulk of men, all with a position to carve out, a distinction to win, a fortune to consolidate. Men of well-established fortune are, at present, rare exceptions. Only the old have time for love; men in their prime are chained, like Nathan, to the galleys of ambition.

Women, not yet reconciled to this change of habits, cannot bring themselves to believe any man short of the time which is so cheap a commodity with them; they can imagine no occupations or aims other than their own. Had the gallant vanquished the hydra of Lerna to get at them, he would not rise one whit in their estimation; the joy of seeing him is everything. They are grateful because he makes them happy, but never think of asking what their happiness has cost him. Whereas, if they, in an idle hour, have devised some stratagem such as they abound in, they flaunt it in your eyes as something superlative. You have wrenched the iron bars of destiny, while they have played with subterfuge and diplomacy⁠—and yet the palm is theirs, dispute were vain. After all, are they not right? The woman who gives up all for you, should she not receive all? She exacts no more than she gives.

Raoul, during his walk home, pondered on the difficulty of directing at one and the same time a fashionable intrigue, the ten-horse chariot of journalism, his theatrical pieces, and his entangled personal affairs.

“It will be a wretched paper tonight,” he said to himself as he went; “nothing from my hand, and the second number too!”

Mme. Félix de Vandenesse went three times to the Bois de Boulogne without seeing Raoul; she came home agitated and despairing. Nathan was determined not to show himself till he could do so in all the glory of a press magnate. He spent the week in looking out for a pair of horses and a suitable cabriolet and tiger, in persuading his partners of the necessity of sparing time so valuable as his, and in getting the purchase put down to the general expenses of the paper. Massol and du Tillet agreed so readily to this request, that he thought them the best fellows in the world. But for this assistance, life would have been impossible for Raoul. As it was, it became so taxing, in spite of the exquisite delights of ideal love with which it was mingled, that many men, even of excellent constitution, would have broken down under the strain of such distractions. A violent and reciprocal passion is bound to bulk largely even in an ordinary life; but when its object is a woman of conspicuous position, like Mme. de Vandenesse, it cannot fail to play havoc with that of a busy man like Nathan.

Here are some of the duties to which his passion gave the first place. Almost every day between two and three o’clock he rode to the Bois de Boulogne in the style of the purest dandy. He then learned in what house or at what theatre he might meet Mme. de Vandenesse again that evening. He never left a reception till close upon midnight, when he had at last succeeded in snapping up some long watched-for words, a few crumbs of tenderness, artfully dropped below the table, or in a corridor, or on the way to the carriage. Marie, who had launched him in the world of fashion, generally got him invitations to dinner at the houses where she visited. Nothing could be more natural. Raoul was too proud, and also too much in love, to say a word about business. He had to obey every caprice and whim of his innocent tyrant; while, at the same time, following closely the debates in the Chamber and the rapid current of politics, directing his paper, and bringing out two plays which were to furnish the sinews of war. If ever he asked to be let off a ball, a concert, or a drive, a look of annoyance from Mme. de Vandenesse was enough to make him sacrifice his interests to her pleasure.

When he returned home from these engagements at one or two in the morning, he worked till eight or nine, leaving scant time for sleep. Directly he was up, he plunged into consultations with influential supporters as to the policy of the paper. A thousand and one internal difficulties meantime would await his settlement, for journalism nowadays has an all-embracing grasp. Business, public and private interests, new ventures, the personal sensitiveness of literary men, as well as their compositions⁠—nothing is alien to it. When, harassed and exhausted, Nathan flew from his office to the theatre, from the theatre to the Chamber, from the Chamber to a creditor, he had next to present himself, calm and smiling, before Marie, and canter beside her carriage with the ease of a man who has no cares, and whose only business is pleasure. When, as sole reward for so many unnoticed acts of devotion, he found only the gentlest of words or prettiest assurances of undying attachment, a warm pressure of the hand, if by chance they escaped observation for a moment, or one or two passionate expressions in response to his own, Raoul began to feel that it was mere Quixotism not to make known the extravagant price he paid for these “modest favors,” as our fathers might have called them.

The opportunity for an explanation was not long of coming. On a lovely April day the Countess took Nathan’s arm in a secluded corner of the Bois de Boulogne. She had a pretty little quarrel to pick with him about one of those molehills which women have the art of turning into mountains. There was no smiling welcome, no radiant brow, the eyes did not sparkle with fun or happiness; it was a serious and burdened woman who met him.

“What is wrong?” said Nathan.

“Oh! Why worry about trifles?” she said. “Surely you know how childish women are.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Should I be here?”

“But you don’t smile, you don’t seem a bit glad to see me.”

“I suppose you mean that I am cross,” she said, with the resigned air of a woman determined to be a martyr.

Nathan walked on a few steps, an overshadowing fear gripping at his heart. After a moment’s silence, he went on:

“It can only be one of those idle fears, those vague suspicions, to which you give such exaggerated importance. A straw, a thread in your hands is enough to upset the balance of the world!”

“Satire next!⁠ ⁠… Well, I expected it,” she said, hanging her head.

“Marie, my beloved, do you not see that I say this only to wring your secret from you?”

“My secret will remain a secret, even after I have told you.”

“Well, tell me⁠ ⁠…”

“I am not loved,” she said, with the stealthy side-look, which is a woman’s instrument for probing the man she means to torture.

“Not loved!” exclaimed Nathan.

“No; you have too many things on your mind. What am I in the midst of this whirl? You are only too glad to forget me. Yesterday I came to the Bois, I waited for you⁠—”

“But⁠—”

“I had put on a new dress for you, and you did not come. Where were you?”

“But⁠—”

“I couldn’t tell. I went to Mme. d’Espard’s; you were not there.”

“But⁠—”

“At the opera in the evening my eyes never left the balcony. Every time the door opened my heart beat so that I thought it would break.”

“But⁠—”

“What an evening! You have no conception of such agony!”

“But⁠—”

“It eats into life⁠—”

“But⁠—”

“Well?” she said.

“Yes,” replied Nathan, “it does eat into life, and in a few months you will have consumed mine. Your wild reproaches have torn from me my secret also.⁠ ⁠… Ah! you are not loved? My God, you are loved too well.”

He drew a graphic picture of his straits. He told her how he sat up at nights, how he had to keep certain engagements at fixed hours, and how, above all things, he was bound to succeed. He showed her how insatiable were the claims of a paper, compelled, at risk of losing its reputation, to be beforehand with an accurate judgment on every event that took place, and how incessant was the call for a rapid survey of questions, which chased each other like clouds over the horizon in that period of political convulsions.

In a moment the mischief was done. Raoul had been told by the Marquise d’Espard that nothing is so ingenuous as a first love, and it soon appeared that the Countess erred in loving too much. A loving woman meets every difficulty with delight and with fresh proof of her passion. On seeing the panorama of this varied life unrolled before her, the Countess was filled with admiration. She had pictured Nathan a great man, but now he seemed transcendent. She blamed herself for an excessive love, and begged him to come only when he was at liberty; Nathan’s ambitious struggles sank to nothing before the glance she cast towards Heaven! She would wait! Henceforth her pleasure should be sacrificed. She, who had wished to be a stepping-stone, had proved only an obstacle.⁠ ⁠… She wept despairingly.

“Women, it seems,” she said with tearful eyes, “are fit only to love. Men have a thousand different ways of spending their energy; all we can do is to dream, and pray, and worship.”

So much love deserved a recompense. Peeping round, like a nightingale ready to alight from its branch beside a spring of water, she tried to make sure whether they were alone in this solitude, and whether no spectator lurked in the silence. Then raising her head to Raoul, who bent his to meet her, she allowed him a kiss, the first, the only, contraband kiss she was destined to give. At that instant she was happier than she had been for five years, while Raoul felt himself repaid for all that he had gone through.

They had to return to their carriages, and walked on, hardly knowing whither, along the road from Auteuil to Boulogne, moving with the even rhythmic step familiar to lovers. Confidence came to Raoul in that kiss, tendered with the modest frankness that is the outcome of a pure mind. All the evil came from society, not from this woman, who was so absolutely his. The hardships of his frenzied existence were nothing now to him; and Marie, in the ardor of her first passion, was bound, womanlike, soon to forget them, since she could not witness from hour to hour the terrible throes of a life too exceptional to be easily imagined.

Marie, penetrated by the grateful veneration, characteristic of a woman’s love, hastened with resolute and active tread along the sand-strewn alley. Like Raoul, she spoke but little, but that little came from the heart, and was full of meaning. The sky was clear; buds were forming on the larger trees, where already spots of green enlivened the delicate brown tracery; while the shrubs, birches, willows, and poplars showed their first tender and unsubstantial foliage. What heart can resist the harmony of such a scene? Love was now interpreting nature to the Countess, as it had already interpreted the ways of men.

“If only I were your first love!” she breathed.

“You are,” replied Raoul. “We have each been the first to reveal true love to the other.”

Nor did he speak falsely. In posing before this fresh young heart as a man of pure life, he became affected by the noble sentiments with which he embroidered his talk. His passion, at first a matter of policy and ambition, had become sincere. Starting from falsehood, he had arrived at truth. Add to this that all authors have a natural instinct, repressed only with effort, to admire moral beauty. Lastly, a man has but to make enough sacrifices in order to become attached to the person demanding them. Women of the world know this intuitively, just as courtesans do, and it may even be that they unconsciously act upon the knowledge.

The Countess, after her first burst of surprised gratitude, was delighted to have inspired so much devotion and been the cause of such astounding feats. The man who loved her was worthy of her. Raoul had not the least idea to what this playing at greatness would commit him. He forgot that no woman will allow her lover to fall below her ideal of him, and that nothing paltry can be suffered in a god. Marie had never heard that solution of the problem which Raoul had disclosed to his friends in the course of the supper at Véry’s. His struggles as a man of letters, forcing his way upward from the masses, had filled the first ten years of early manhood; now he was resolved to be loved by one of the queens of the fashionable world. Vanity, without which, as Chamfort said, love has no backbone, sustained his passion, and could not fail to augment it day by day.

“Can you swear to me,” said Marie, “that you are nothing, and never will be anything, to another woman?”

“My life has no space for another, even were my heart free,” was his reply, made in all sincerity, so completely had Florine dropped out of sight.

And she believed him.

When they reached the road where the carriages were waiting, Marie let go the arm of Nathan, who at once assumed a respectful attitude, as though this were a chance meeting. He walked with her, hat in hand, as far as the carriage, and then followed it down the avenue Charles X, inhaling the dust it raised, and watching the drooping feathers swaying in the wind.

In spite of Marie’s generous resolutions of sacrifice, Raoul, spurred on by passion, continued to appear wherever she went; he adored the half-vexed, half-smiling air with which she vainly tried to scold him for wasting the time he could so badly spare. Marie began to take Raoul’s work in hand, laid down what he was to do every hour in the day, and remained at home herself, so as to leave him no excuse for taking a holiday. She read his paper every morning, and she trumpeted the praises of Étienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, whom she thought charming, of Félicien Vernou, Claude Vignon, and all the staff. It was she who advised Raoul to deal generously with de Marsay when he died, and she read with dizzy pride the fine dignified tribute which he paid the late minister, while deploring his Machiavellianism and hatred of the masses. She was of course present in a stage box at the Gymnase on the first night of the play, to which Raoul was trusting for the funds of his undertaking, and which seemed to her, deceived by the hired applause, an immense success.

“You did not come to say farewell to the opera?” asked Lady Dudley, to whose house she went after the performance.

“No; I was at the Gymnase. It was a first night.”

“I can’t bear vaudeville. I feel to it as Louis XIV did to a Teniers,” said Lady Dudley.

“For my part,” remarked Mme. d’Espard, “I think they have improved very much. Vaudevilles now are charming comedies, full of wit, and the work of very clever men. I enjoy them immensely.”

“The acting is so good too,” said Marie. “The play tonight at the Gymnase went capitally; it seemed to suit the actors, and the dialogue is spirited and amusing.”

“A regular Beaumarchais business,” said Lady Dudley.

“M. Nathan is not a Molière yet, but⁠—” said Mme. d’Espard, with a look at the Countess.

“But he makes vaudevilles,” said Mme. Charles de Vandenesse.

“And unmakes ministers,” retorted Mme. de Manerville.

The Countess remained silent; she racked her brains for pungent epigrams; her heart burned with rage, but nothing better occurred to her than⁠—

“Some day perhaps he will make one.”

All the women exchanged glances of mysterious understanding. When Mme. de Vandenesse had gone, Moïna de Saint-Héren exclaimed:

“Why, she adores Nathan!”

“She makes no mystery of it,” said Mme. d’Espard.

VII

Suicide

With the month of May, Vandenesse took his wife away to their country seat. Here her only comfort was in passionate letters from Raoul, to whom she wrote every day.

The absence of the Countess might possibly have saved Raoul from the abyss over which he hung had Florine been with him. But he was alone amongst friends, secretly turned to enemies ever since his determination to take the whip hand became plain. For the moment he was an object of hatred to his staff, who reserved however the right of holding out a consoling hand in case he failed, or of cringing to him should he succeed. This is the way in the literary world where people are friendly only to their inferiors, and the rising man has everybody against him. This universal jealousy increases tenfold the chance of mediocrities, who arouse neither envy nor suspicion. Like moles, they work their way underground, and, with all their incompetence, find more than one snug corner in the official lists, while really able men are struggling and blocking each other at the door of promotion. Florine, with the inborn gift of such women for putting their finger on the real thing among a thousand presentments of it, would at once have detected the underhand animosity of these false friends.

But this was not Raoul’s greatest danger. His two partners, the barrister Massol and the banker du Tillet, had conceived the idea of harnessing his energy to the car in which they should loll at ease, with the full intention of turning him adrift as soon as his resources failed to keep the paper going, or of wresting it from his hands the moment they saw their way to using this powerful instrument for their own purposes. To their minds, Nathan represented so much capital to run through, a literary force, equal to that of ten ordinary writers, to exploit.

Massol belonged to the type of barrister who takes a flux of words for eloquence and can weary any audience by his prolixity, who in every gathering of men acts as a blight, shriveling up their enthusiasm, yet who is determined at all costs to be a somebody. Massol’s ambition, however, no longer pointed to the ministry of justice. Within four years he had seen five or six men clothed with the robes of office, and this had cured him of the fancy. Meanwhile he was ready to accept, as something in hand, a professorship or a post under the Council, with of course the Cross of the Legion of Honor to season the dish. Du Tillet and the Baron de Nucingen had guaranteed him the Cross and the desired post if he fell in with their views; and as he judged them to be in a better position than Nathan for fulfilling their promises, he followed them blindly.

The better to hoodwink Raoul, these men allowed him to exercise uncontrolled power. Du Tillet only made use of the paper for his stock-jobbing interests, which were outside Raoul’s ken. He had, however, already given Rastignac to understand, through the Baron de Nucingen, that this organ was ready to give a silent adhesion to the Government, on the one condition that the Government should support du Tillet’s candidature as successor to M. de Nucingen, who would be a peer some day, and who at present sat for a rotten borough, where the paper was lavishly circulated, gratis. Thus was Raoul jockeyed by both the banker and the barrister, who took a huge delight in seeing him lord it at the office, pocketing all the gains, as well as the less substantial dues of vanity and the like. Nathan could not praise them enough; again, as when they furnished his stables, they were “the best fellows in the world,” and he actually believed that he was duping them.

Men of imagination, whose whole life is based on hope, never will admit that in business the moment of danger is that when everything goes to a wish. Such a moment of triumph had come for Nathan, and he made full use of it, letting himself be seen both in political and financial circles. Du Tillet introduced him to the Nucingens, and he was received in a most friendly way by Mme. de Nucingen, not so much for his own sake as for that of Mme. de Vandenesse. Yet, when she alluded to the Countess, Nathan thought himself a marvel of discretion for taking refuge behind Florine, and he enlarged with generous self-complacency on his relations with the actress, which nothing, he declared, could break. How could any man abandon an assured happiness for the coquetry of the Faubourg Saint-Germain?

Nathan, beguiled by Nucingen and Rastignac, du Tillet and Blondet, lent an ostentatious support to the doctrinaire party in the formation of one of their ephemeral cabinets. At the same time, wishing to start in public life with clean hands, he refused, with much parade, to accept any share in the profits of certain enterprises, which had been launched by the help of this paper. And this was the man who never hesitated to compromise a friend, or was hampered by a scruple in his relations with a certain class of business men at critical moments! Such startling contrasts, born of vanity and ambition, may often be found in careers like his. The mantle must make a brave show to the public, but scraps raised from a friend will serve to patch it.

But in the very midst of all his successes, Nathan was roused to some uneasiness by a bad quarter of an hour which he spent over his business accounts two months after the departure of the Countess. Du Tillet had advanced a hundred thousand francs. The money given by Florine, the third part of his original capital, had gone in government dues and in the expenses of starting the paper, which were enormous. The future had to be provided for. The banker assisted him by accepting bills for fifty thousand francs at four months, and thereby fastened a halter round the author’s neck. Thanks to this subvention, the paper was in funds again for six months. In the eyes of many literary men, six months is an eternity. Further, by dint of puffs and by sending round canvassers, who offered illusory advantages to subscribers, they managed to raise the circulation by two thousand. This semi-triumph was an incentive to cast his latest borrowings into the melting-pot. One more effort of his wits, and a political lawsuit or a sham persecution might give Raoul a place among those modern Condottieri, whose ink has today taken the place of gunpowder.

Unfortunately, these steps were already taken when Florine returned with about fifty thousand francs. Instead of setting this aside as a reserve, Raouly confident of a success which was his only safety, humiliated at the thought of having once before accepted money from the actress, feeling that his love had raised him to a higher plane, and dazzled by the specious plaudits of his flatterers, deceived Florine as to his situation, and obliged her to spend the money in setting up house again. Under present circumstances, a smart and dashing style was, he assured her, essential. The actress, who needed no spurring, got into debt for thirty thousand francs. Instead of a flat, Florine took a charming house in the Rue Pigalle, where her old friends came about her again. The house of a woman in Florine’s position supplied a neutral ground, most convenient for pushing politicians, who, following the example of Louis XIV with the Dutch, entertained at Raoul’s house in Raoul’s absence.

Nathan had reserved for the return of the actress a play, the chief part in which suited her admirably. This vaudeville-drama was intended as Raoul’s farewell to the theatre. The newspapers, by an attention to Raoul which cost them nothing, planned beforehand such an ovation to Florine that the Comédie-Française began to speak of engaging her. Critics pointed to her as the direct successor of Mlle. Mars. This triumph threw the actress so far off her balance as to prevent her examining carefully the state of Nathan’s affairs; her life was a whirl of banquets and revelry. Queen in a world of bustling suitors, each with something to push⁠—a book, a play, a ballet-girl, a theatre, a company, or an advertisement⁠—she reveled in the delights of this press influence, which she pictured as the dawn of ministerial patronage. In the mouths of those who frequented her house, Nathan was a politician of high standing. His scheme would succeed, he would be elected to the Chamber, and beyond doubt have a turn at office, like so many others. Actresses are rarely slow to believe what flatters their hopes. How could Florine, lauded in the notices, mistrust the paper or its contributors? She was too ignorant of the mechanism of the press to be uneasy about its resources, and women of her stamp look only to results.

As for Nathan, he no longer doubted that in the course of the next session he would come to the front, along with two former journalists, one of whom, already in office, was anxious to strengthen his position by turning out his colleagues. After six months of absence, Nathan was glad to see Florine again, and lazily fell back into his old habits. The coarse web of his life was covertly embroidered by him with the loveliest flowers of his ideal passion and with the pleasures scattered by Florine. His letters to Marie were masterpieces of love, elegance, and style. He made of her the guiding-star of his life; he undertook nothing without consulting his good genius. Miserable at being on the popular side, he was tempted at times to join the aristocrats; but, with all his skill in turning his back on himself, it seemed impossible to make the leap from left to right; it was easier to get office.

Marie’s precious letters were kept in a portfolio with secret springs, an invention either of Huret or Fichet, the two mechanists who carry on a war of emulation in the newspaper columns and on the walls of Paris as to the comparative efficacy and unobtrusiveness of their locks. The portfolio lay in Florine’s new boudoir, where Raoul worked. No one is more easily deceived than the woman who is used to frankness; she has no suspicions, because she believes herself to know and see all that goes on. Moreover, since her return the actress took her part in Nathan’s daily life, which appeared to go on just as usual. It never would have occurred to her that this writing-case, which she had barely noticed, and which Raoul made no mystery about locking, contained love tokens in the shape of a rival’s letters, addressed, at Raoul’s request, to the office. To all appearance, therefore, Nathan’s situation was of the brightest. He had plenty of nominal friends. Two plays, at which he had worked jointly with others, and which had just made a success, kept him in luxuries and removed all anxiety for the future. Indeed, his debt to his friend du Tillet never gave him a moment’s uneasiness.

“How can one suspect a friend?” he said, when now and again Blondet would give utterance to doubts, which were natural to his analytic turn of mind.

“But we have no need to fear our enemies,” said Florine.

Nathan stood up for du Tillet. Du Tillet was the best, most good-natured, and most honorable of men.

This life upon the tightrope, without even a steadying-pole, which might have appalled a mere onlooker who had grasped its meaning, was watched by du Tillet with the stoicism and hard-heartedness of a parvenu. At times a fierce irony broke through the genial cordiality of his manner with Nathan. One day he pressed his hand as he was leaving Florine’s, and watched him get into his cabriolet.

“There goes our dandy off to the Bois in tiptop style,” he said to Lousteau, the very incarnation of envy, “and in six months he may be laid by the heels in Clichy.”

“Not he!” exclaimed Lousteau; “think of Florine.”

“And how do you know, my good fellow, that he’ll keep Florine? I tell you, you’re worth a thousand of him, and I expect six months will see you in the editorial chair.”

In October the bills fell due, and du Tillet graciously renewed them, but this time for two months only, and the amount was increased by the discount and by a new loan. Confident of victory, Raoul drained his till. An overmastering desire to see him was bringing the Countess back to town a month earlier than usual⁠—within a few days in fact⁠—and it would not do to be crippled for lack of funds when the moment had come for entering the field again.

The pen is always bolder than the tongue, and the letters she received had raised the Comtesse de Vandenesse to the highest pitch of excitement. Thoughts clothed in the flowers of rhetoric can express so much without meeting a repulse. She saw in Raoul one of the finest intellects of the day, a delicately-strung and unappreciated heart, which in its unstained purity was worthy of adoration. She watched him put forth a bold hand upon the citadel of power. Ere long that voice, so tuneful in love, would thunder from the tribune. Marie was not entirely absorbed in that life of intersecting circles, which resemble the orbits of the planets, and revolve round the sun of society as their centre. Finding no flavor in the calm pleasures of home, she received the shock of every agitation in this whirling life, brought home to her by the pen of a literary artist and a lover. She showered kisses on letters which had been written in the thick of press combats, or purloined from hours of study. She realized now what they had cost and was well assured of being his only love, with no rivals but glory and ambition. Even in the depths of her solitude she found occupation for all her powers, and could dwell with satisfaction upon the choice of her heart. There was no one like Nathan.

Fortunately, her withdrawal into the country and the barriers thus placed between her and Raoul had silenced ill-natured gossip. During the last days of autumn, therefore, Marie and Raoul were able once more to begin their walks in the Bois de Boulogne, their only meeting-place until the season opened. Raoul had now a little more leisure to enjoy the exquisite delights of his ideal life, and also to practise concealment with Florine; his work at the office had ceased to be so hard since things were well in train there and each member of the staff understood his duty. Involuntarily he made comparisons which, though always favorable to Florine, did the Countess no injury. Exhausted once more by the various shifts to which his passion, alike of the head and of the heart, for a woman of fashion impelled him, Raoul put forth superhuman energy in the effort to appear simultaneously on three different stages⁠—society, the office, and the greenroom. While Florine, always grateful and taking almost a partner’s share in his work and difficulties, appeared and vanished as required, and showered on him a wealth of substantial and unpretentious happiness, which called forth no remorse, the unapproachable Countess, with her hungry eyes, had already forgotten his stupendous labors and the trouble it often cost him to get a passing glimpse of her. Florine, far from trying to impose her will, would let herself be taken up and put down with the good-natured indifference of a cat, which always falls on its feet and walks off, shaking its ears. This easy way of life is admirably fitted to the habits of brain-workers; and it is only in the artist’s nature to take full advantage of it, as Nathan did, whilst not abandoning the pursuit of that fine ideal love, that splendid passion, which delighted at once his poetic instincts, the germ of greatness in him, and his social ambitions. Fully aware how disastrous would be the effect of any indiscretion, he told himself it was impossible that either the Countess or Florine should find out anything. The chasm between them was too great.

With the beginning of winter Raoul once more made his appearance in society, and this time in the heyday of his glory: he was all but a personage. Rastignac, who had fallen with the Government which went to pieces on de Marsay’s death, leant upon Raoul, and in return gave him the support of his good word. Mme. de Vandenesse was curious to know whether her husband had changed his opinion of Raoul. After the lapse of a year she questioned him again, in the expectation of a signal revenge, such as the noblest and least earthly of women do not disdain; for we may be sure that the angels in heaven have not lost all thought of self as they range themselves round the throne.

“That he should become the tool of unscrupulous men was the one thing lacking to him,” replied the Count.

Félix, with the keen insight of a politician and a man of the world, had thoroughly gauged Raoul’s position. He calmly explained to his wife how the attempt of Fieschi had resulted in rallying many lukewarm people round the interests threatened in the person of Louis-Philippe. The comparatively neutral papers would go down in circulation as journalism, along with politics, fell into more definite lines. If Nathan had put his capital into his paper, he would soon be done for. This summary of the situation, so clear and accurate in spite of its brevity and the purely abstract point of view from which it was made, and coming from a man well used to calculate the chances of party, frightened Mme. de Vandenesse.

“Do you take much interest in him then?” asked Félix of his wife.

“Oh! I like his humor, and he talks well.”

The reply came so naturally that it did not rouse the Count’s suspicions.

At four o’clock next day at Mme. d’Espard’s, Marie and Raoul held a long whispered conversation. The Countess gave expression to fears which Raoul dissipated, only too glad of this opportunity to damage the husband’s authority under a battery of epigrams. He had his revenge to take. The Count, thus handled, appeared a man of narrow mind and behind the day, who judged the Revolution of July by the standard of the Restoration, and shut his eyes to the triumph of the middle-class, that new and substantial factor to be reckoned with, for a time at least if not permanently, in every society. The great feudal lords of the past were impossible now, the reign of true merit had begun. Instead of weighing well the indirect and impartial warning he had received from an experienced politician in the expression of his deliberate opinion, Raoul made it an occasion for display, mounted his stilts, and draped himself in the purple of success. Where is the woman who would not believe her lover rather than her husband?

Mme. de Vandenesse, reassured, plunged once more into that life of repressed irritation, of little stolen pleasures, and of covert hand-pressings which had carried her through the preceding winter; but which can have no other end than to drag a woman over the boundary line if the man she loves has any spirit and chafes against the curb. Happily for her, Raoul, kept in check by Florine, was not dangerous. He was engrossed, too, in business which did not allow him to turn his good fortune to account. Nevertheless, some sudden disaster, a renewal of difficulties, an outburst of impatience, might at any moment precipitate the Countess into the abyss.

Raoul was becoming conscious of this disposition in Marie when, towards the end of December, du Tillet asked for his money. The wealthy banker told Raoul he was hard up, and advised him to borrow the amount for a fortnight from a moneylender called Gigonnet⁠—a twenty-five percent Providence for all young men in difficulties. In a few days the paper would make a fresh financial start with the new year, there would be cash in the countinghouse, and then du Tillet would see what he could do. Besides, why should not Nathan write another play? Nathan was too proud not to resolve on paying at any cost. Du Tillet gave him a letter for the moneylender, in response to which Gigonnet handed him the amount required and took bills payable in twenty days. Raoul, instead of having his suspicions roused by this accommodating reception, was only vexed that he had not asked for more. This is the way with men of the greatest intellectual power; they see only matter for pleasantry in a grave predicament, and reserve their wits for writing books, as though afraid there might not be enough of them to go round if applied to daily life. Raoul told Florine and Blondet how he had spent his morning; he drew a faithful picture of Gigonnet and his surroundings, his cheap fleur-de-lys wallpaper, his staircase, his asthmatic bell, his stag-foot knocker, his worn little door mat, his hearth as devoid of fire as his eye; he made them laugh at his new “uncle,” and neither du Tillet’s professed need of money nor the facility of the usurer caused them the least uneasiness.⁠—One can’t account for every whim!

“He has only taken fifteen percent from you,” said Blondet; “he deserves your thanks. At twenty-five they cease to be gentlemen; at fifty, usury begins; at this figure they are only contemptible!”

“Contemptible!” cried Florine. “I should like to know which of your friends would lend you money at this rate without posing as a benefactor?”

“She is quite right; I am heartily glad to be quit of du Tillet’s debt,” said Raoul.

Most mysterious is this lack of penetration in regard to their private affairs on the part of men generally so keen-sighted! It may be that it is impossible for the mind to be fully equipped on every side; it may be that artists live too entirely in the present to trouble about the future; or it may be that, always on the lookout for the ridiculous, they are blind to traps, and cannot believe in anyone daring to fool them.

The end did not tarry. Twenty days later the bills were protested; but in the court Florine had a respite of twenty-five days applied for and granted. Raoul made an effort to see where he stood; he sent for the books; and from these it appeared that the receipts of the paper covered two-thirds of the cost, and that the circulation was going down. The great man became uneasy and gloomy, but only in the company of Florine, in whom he confided. Florine advised him to borrow on the security of plays not yet written, selling them in a lump, and parting at the same time with the royalties on his acted plays. By this means Nathan raised twenty thousand francs, and reduced his debt to forty thousand.

On the 10th of February the twenty-five days expired. Du Tillet, determined to oust Nathan, as a rival, from the constituency, where he intended to stand himself (leaving to Massol another which was in the pocket of the Government), got Gigonnet to refuse Raoul all quarter. A man laid by the heels for debt can hardly present himself as a candidate; and the embryo minister might disappear in the maw of a debtor’s prison. Florine herself was in constant communication with the bailiffs on account of her own debts, and in this crisis the only resource left to her was the “I!” of Medea, for her furniture was seized. The aspirant to fame heard on every side the crack of ruin in his freshly reared but baseless fabric. Unequal to the task of sustaining so vast an enterprise, how could he think of beginning again to lay the foundations? Nothing remained, therefore, but to perish beneath his crumbling visions. His love for the Countess still brought flashes of life, but only to the outer mask; within, all hope was dead. He did not suspect du Tillet; the usurer alone filled his view. Rastignac, Blondet, Lousteau, Vernou, Finot, Massol, carefully refrained from enlightening a man of such dangerous energy. Rastignac, who aimed at getting back to power, made common cause with Nucingen and du Tillet. The rest found measureless delight in watching the expiring agony of one of their comrades, convicted of the crime of aiming at mastery. Not one of them would breathe a word to Florine; to her, on the contrary, they were full of Raoul’s praises. “Nathan’s shoulders were broad enough to bear the world; he would come out all right, no fear!”

“The circulation went up two yesterday,” said Blondet solemnly. “Raoul will be elected yet. As soon as the budget is through the dissolution will be announced.”

Nathan, dogged by the law, could no longer look to moneylenders; Florine, her furniture distrained, had no hope left save in the chance of inspiring a passion in some good-natured fool, who never turns up at the right moment. Nathan’s friends were all men without money or credit. His political chances would be ruined by his arrest. To crown all, he saw himself pledged to huge tasks, paid for in advance; it was a bottomless pit of horrors into which he gazed.

Before an outlook so threatening his self-confidence deserted him. Would the Comtesse de Vandenesse unite her fate to his and fly with him? Only a fully developed passion can bring a woman to this fatal step, and theirs had never bound them to each other in the mysterious ties of rapture. Even supposing the Countess would follow him abroad, she would come penniless, bare, and stripped, and would prove an added burden. A proud man, of second-rate quality, like Nathan, could not fail to see in suicide, as Nathan did, the sword with which to cut this Gordian knot. The idea of overthrow, in full view of that society into which he had worked his way, and which he had aspired to dominate, of leaving the Countess enthroned there, while he fell back to join the mud-spattered rank and file, was unbearable. Madness danced and rang her bells before the door of that airy palace in which the poet had made his home. In this extremity, Nathan waited upon chance, and put off killing himself till the last moment.

During the last days, occupied with the notice of judgment, the writs, and publication of order of arrest, Raoul could not succeed in throwing off that coldly sinister look, observed by noticing people to haunt those marked out for suicide, or whose minds are dwelling on it. The dismal ideas which they fondle cast a gray, gloomy shade over the forehead; their smile is vaguely ominous, and they move with solemnity. The unhappy wretches seem resolved to suck dry the golden fruit of life; they cast appealing glances on every side, the toll of the passing bell is in their ears, and their minds wander. These alarming symptoms were perceived by Marie one night at Lady Dudley’s. Raoul had remained alone on a sofa in the boudoir, while the rest of the company were conversing in the drawing-room; when the Countess came to the door, he did not raise his head; he heard neither Marie’s breath nor the rustle of her silk dress; his eyes, stupid with pain, were fixed on a flower in the carpet. “Sooner die than abdicate,” was his thought. It is not every man who has a Saint-Helena to retire upon. Suicide, moreover, was at that time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a sceptical society? Raoul then had just resolved to put an end to himself. Despair must be proportioned to hope, and that of Raoul could find no issue but the grave.

“What is the matter?” said Marie, flying to him.

“Nothing,” he replied.

Lovers have a way of using this word “nothing” which implies exactly the opposite. Marie gave a little shrug.

“What a child you are!” she said. “Something has gone wrong with you?”

“Not with me,” he said. “Besides,” he added affectionately, “you will know it all too soon, Marie.”

“What were you thinking of when I came in?” she said, with an air that would not be denied.

“Are you determined to know the truth?”

She bowed her head.

“I was thinking of you; I said to myself that many men in my place would have wished to be loved without reserve: I am loved, am I not?”

“Yes,” she said.

Braving the risk of interruption, Raoul put his arm round her, and drew her near enough to kiss her on the forehead, as he continued:

“And I am leaving you pure and free from remorse. I might drag you into the abyss, but you stand upon the brink in all your stainless glory. One thought, though, haunts me⁠ ⁠…”

“What thought?”

“You will despise me.”

She smiled a proud smile.

“Yes, you will never believe in the holiness of my love for you; and then they will slander me, I know. No woman can conceive how, from out of the filth in which we wallow, we raise our eyes to heaven in single-hearted worship of some radiant star⁠—some Marie. They mix up this adoration with painful questions; they cannot understand that men of high intellect and poetic vision are able to wean their souls from pleasure and keep them to lay entire upon some cherished altar. And yet, Marie, our devotion to the ideal is more ardent than yours; we embody it in a woman, while she does not even seek for it in us.”

“Why this effusion?” she said, with the irony of a woman who has no misgivings.

“I am leaving France; you will learn how and why tomorrow from a letter which my servant will bring you. Farewell, Marie.”

Raoul went out, after pressing the Countess to his heart in an agonized embrace, and left her dazed with misery.

“What is wrong, dear?” said the Marquise d’Espard, coming to look for her. “What has M. Nathan been saying? He left us with quite a melodramatic air. You must have been terribly foolish⁠—or terribly prudent.”

The Countess took Mme. d’Espard’s arm to return to the drawing-room, where, however, she only stayed a few instants.

“Perhaps she is going to her first appointment,” said Lady Dudley to the Marchioness.

“I shall make sure as to that,” replied Mme. d’Espard, who left at once to follow the Countess’ carriage.

But the coupé of Mme. de Vandenesse took the road to the Faubourg St. Honoré. When Mme. d’Espard entered her house, she saw the Countess driving along the Faubourg in the direction of the Rue du Rocher. Marie went to bed, but not to sleep, and spent the night in reading a voyage to the North Pole, of which she did not take in a word.

At half-past eight next morning, she got a letter from Raoul and opened it in feverish haste. The letter began with the classic phrase:

“My loved one, when this paper is in your hands, I shall be no more.”

She read no further, but crushing the paper with a nervous motion, rang for her maid, hastily put on a loose gown, and the first pair of shoes that came to hand, wrapped a shawl round her, took a bonnet, and then went out, instructing her maid to tell the Count that she had gone to her sister, Mme. du Tillet.

“Where did you leave your master?” she asked of Raoul’s servant.

“At the newspaper office.”

“Take me there,” she said.

To the amazement of the household, she left the house on foot before nine o’clock, visibly distraught. Fortunately for her, the maid went to tell the Count that her mistress had just received a letter from Mme. du Tillet which had upset her very much, and that she had started in a great hurry for her sister’s house, accompanied by the servant who had brought the letter. Vandenesse waited for further explanations till his wife’s return. The Countess got a cab and was borne rapidly to the office. At that time of day the spacious rooms occupied by the paper, in an old house in the Rue Feydeau, were deserted. The only occupant was an attendant, whose astonishment was great when a pretty and distracted young woman rushed up and demanded M. Nathan.

“I expect he is with Mlle. Florine,” he replied, taking the Countess for some jealous rival, bent on making a scene.

“Where does he work?” she asked.

“In a small room, the key of which is in his pocket.”

“I must go there.”

The man led her to a dark room, looking out on a backyard, which had formerly been the dressing-closet attached to a large bedroom. This closet made an angle with the bedroom, in which the recess for the bed still remained. By opening the bedroom window, the Countess was able to see through that of the closet what was happening within.

Nathan lay in the editorial chair, the death-rattle in his throat.

“Break open that door, and tell no one! I will pay you to keep silence,” she cried. “Can’t you see that M. Nathan is dying?”

The man went to the compositors’ room to fetch an iron chase with which to force the door. Raoul was killing himself, like some poor workgirl, with the fumes from a pan of charcoal. He had just finished a letter to Blondet, in which he begged him to attribute his death to a fit of apoplexy. The Countess was just in time; she had Raoul carried into the cab; and not knowing where to get him looked after, she went to a hotel, took a room there, and sent the attendant to fetch a doctor. Raoul in a few hours was out of danger; but the Countess did not leave his bedside till she had obtained a full confession. When the prostrate wrestler with fate had poured into her heart the terrible elegy of his sufferings, she returned home a prey to all the torturing fancies which the evening before had brooded over Nathan’s brow.

“Leave it all to me,” she had said, hoping to win him back to life.

“Well, what is wrong with your sister?” asked Félix, on seeing his wife return. “You look like a ghost.”

“It is a frightful story, but I must keep it an absolute secret,” she replied, summoning all her strength to put on an appearance of composure.

In order to be alone and able to think in peace, she went to the opera in the evening, and thence had gone on to unbosom her woes to Mme. du Tillet. After describing the ghastly scene of the morning, she implored her sister’s advice and aid. Neither of them had an idea then that it was du Tillet whose hand had put the match to that vulgar pan of charcoal, the sight of which had so dismayed Mme. de Vandenesse.

“He has no one but me in the world,” Marie had said to her sister, “and I shall not fail him.”

In these words may be read the key to women’s hearts. They become heroic in the assurance of being all in all to a great and honorable man.

VIII

A Lover Saved and Lost

Du Tillet had heard many speculations as to the greater or less probability of his sister-in-law’s love for Nathan; but he was one of those who deemed the liaison incompatible with that existing between Raoul and Florine, or who denied it on other grounds. In his view, either the actress made the Countess impossible, or vice versa. But when, on his return that evening, he found his sister-in-law, whose agitation had been plainly written on her face at the opera, he surmised that Raoul had confided his plight to the Countess. This meant that the Countess loved him, and had come to beg from Marie-Eugénie the amount due to old Gigonnet. Mme. du Tillet, at a loss how to explain this apparently miraculous insight, had betrayed so much confusion, that du Tillet’s suspicion became a certainty. The banker was confident that he could now get hold of the clue to Nathan’s intrigues.

No one knew of the poor wretch who lay ill in a private hotel in the Rue du Mail, under the name of the attendant, François Quillet, to whom the Countess had promised five hundred francs as the reward for silence on the events of the night and morning. Quillet in consequence had taken the precaution of telling the portress that Nathan was ill from overwork. It was no surprise to du Tillet not to see Nathan, for it was only natural the journalist should keep in hiding from the bailiffs. When the detectives came to make inquiry, they were told that a lady had been there that morning and carried off the editor. Two days elapsed before they had discovered the number of the cab, questioned the driver, and identified and explored the house in which the poor insolvent was coming back to life. Thus Marie’s wary tactics had won for Nathan a respite of three days.

Each of the sisters passed an agitated night. Such a tragedy casts a lurid light, like the glow of its own charcoal, upon the whole substance of a life, throwing out its shoals and reefs rather than the heights which hitherto had struck the eye. Mme. du Tillet, overcome by the frightful spectacle of a young man dying in his editorial chair, and writing his last words with Roman stoicism, could think of nothing but how to help him, how to restore to life the being in whom her sister’s life was bound up. It is a law of the mind to look at effects before analyzing causes. Eugénie once more approved the idea, which had occurred to her, of applying to the Baronne Delphine de Nucingen, with whom she had a dining acquaintance, and felt that it promised well. With the generosity natural to those whose hearts have not been ground in the polished mill of society, Mme. du Tillet determined to take everything upon herself.

The Countess again, happy in having saved Nathan’s life, spent the night in scheming how to lay her hands on forty thousand francs. In such a crisis women are beyond praise. Under the impulse of feeling they light upon contrivances which would excite, if anything could, the admiration of thieves, brokers, usurers, those three more or less licensed classes of men who live by their wits. The Countess would sell her diamonds and wear false ones. Then she was for asking Vandenesse to give her the money for her sister, whom she had already used as a pretext; but she was too high-minded not to recoil from such degrading expedients, which occurred to her only to be rejected. To give Vandenesse’s money to Nathan! At the very thought she leaped up in bed, horrified at her own baseness. Wear false diamonds! her husband would find out sooner or later. She would go and beg the money from the Rothschilds, who had so much; from the Archbishop of Paris, whose duty it was to succor the poor. Then in her extremity she rushed from one religion to another with impartial prayers. She lamented being in opposition; in old days she could have borrowed from persons near to royalty. She thought of applying to her father. But the ex-judge had a horror of any breach of the law; his children had learned from experience how little sympathy he had with love troubles; he refused to hear of them, he had become a misanthrope, he could not away with intrigue of any description. As to the Comtesse de Granville, she had gone to live in retirement on one of her estates in Normandy, and, icy to the last, was ending her days, pinching and praying, between priests and moneybags. Even were there time for Marie to reach Bayeax, would her mother give her so large a sum without knowing what it was wanted for? Imaginary debts? Yes, possibly her favorite child might move her to compassion. Well, then, as a last resource, to Normandy the Countess would go. The Comte de Granville would not refuse to give her a pretext by sending false news of his wife’s serious illness.

The tragedy which had given her such a shock in the morning, the care she had lavished on Nathan, the hours passed by his bedside, the broken tale, the agony of a great mind, the career of genius cut short by a vulgar and ignoble detail, all rushed upon her memory as so many spurs to love. Once more she lived through every heartthrob, and felt her love stronger in the hour of Nathan’s abasement than in that of his success. Would she have kissed that forehead crowned with triumph? Her heart answered: No. The parting words Nathan had spoken to her in Lady Dudley’s boudoir touched her unspeakably by their noble dignity. Was ever farewell more saintly? What could be more heroic than to abandon happiness because it would have made her misery? The Countess had longed for sensations in her life, truly she had a wealth of them now, fearful, agonizing, and yet dear to her. Her life seemed fuller in pain than it had ever been in pleasure. With what ecstasy she repeated to herself, “I have saved him already, and I will save him again!” She heard his cry, “Only the miserable know the power of love!” when he had felt his Marie’s lips upon his forehead.

“Are you ill?” asked her husband, coming into her room to fetch her for lunch.

“I cannot get over the tragedy which is being enacted at my sister’s,” she said, truthfully enough.

“She has fallen into bad hands; it’s a disgrace to the family to have a du Tillet in it, a worthless fellow like that. If your sister got into any trouble, she would find scant pity with him.”

“What woman could endure pity?” said the Countess, with an involuntary shudder. “Your ruthless harshness is the truest homage.”

“There speaks your noble heart!” said Félix, kissing his wife’s hand, quite touched by her fine scorn. “A woman who feels like that does not need guarding.”

“Guarding?” she answered; “that again is another disgrace which recoils on you.”

Félix smiled, but Marie blushed. When a woman has committed a secret fault, she cloaks herself in an exaggerated womanly pride, nor can we blame the fraud, which points to a reserve of dignity or even high-mindedness.

Marie wrote a line to Nathan, under the name of M. Quillet, to tell him that all was going well, and sent it by a commissionaire to the Mail Hotel. At the Opera in the evening the Countess reaped the benefit of her falsehoods, her husband finding it quite natural that she should leave her box to go and see her sister. Félix waited to give her his arm till du Tillet had left his wife alone. What were not Marie’s feelings as she crossed the passage, entered her sister’s box, and took her seat there, facing with calm and serene countenance the world of fashion, amazed to see the sisters together!

“Tell me,” she said.

The reply was written on Marie-Eugénie’s face, the radiance of which many people ascribed to gratified vanity.

“Yes, he will be saved, darling, but for three months only, during which time we will put our heads together and find some more substantial help. Mme. de Nucingen will take four bills, each for ten thousand francs, signed by anyone you like, so as not to compromise you. She has explained to me how they are to be made out; I don’t understand in the least, but M. Nathan will get them ready for you. Only it occurred to me that perhaps our old master, Schmucke, might be useful to us now; he would sign them. If, in addition to these four securities, you write a letter guaranteeing their payment to Mme. de Nucingen, she will hand you the money tomorrow. Do the whole thing yourself; don’t trust to anybody. Schmucke, you see, would, I think, make no difficulty if you asked him. To disarm suspicion, I said that you wanted to do a kindness to our old music-master, a German who was in trouble. In this way I was able to beg for the strictest secrecy.”

“You angel of cleverness! If only the Baronne de Nucingen does not talk till after she has given the money!” said the Countess, raising her eyes as though in prayer, regardless of her surroundings.

“Schmucke lives in the little Rue de Nevers, on the Quai Conti; don’t forget, and go yourself.”

“Thanks,” said the Countess, pressing her sister’s hand. “Ah! I would give ten years of my life⁠—”

“From your old age⁠—”

“To put an end to all these horrors,” said the Countess, with a smile at the interruption.

The crowd at this moment, spying the two sisters through their opera-glasses, might suppose them to be talking of trivialities, as they heard the ring of their frank laughter. But any one of those idlers, who frequent the Opera rather to study dress and faces than to enjoy themselves, would be able to detect the secret of the Countess in the wave of feeling which suddenly blotted all cheerfulness out of their fair faces. Raoul, who did not fear the bailiffs at night, appeared, pale and ashy, with anxious eye and gloomy brow, on the step of the staircase where he regularly took his stand. He looked for the Countess in her box and, finding it empty, buried his face in his hands, leaning his elbows on the balustrade.

“Can she be here!” he thought.

“Look up, unhappy hero,” whispered Mme. du Tillet.

As for Marie, at all risks she fixed on him that steady magnetic gaze, in which the will flashes from the eye, as rays of light from the sun. Such a look, mesmerizers say, penetrates to the person on whom it is directed, and certainly Raoul seemed as though struck by a magic wand. Raising his head, his eyes met those of the sisters. With that charming feminine readiness which is never at fault, Mme. de Vandenesse seized a cross, sparkling on her neck, and directed his attention to it by a swift smile, full of meaning. The brilliance of the gem radiated even upon Raoul’s forehead, and he replied with a look of joy; he had understood.

“Is it nothing, then, Eugénie,” said the Countess, “thus to restore life to the dead?”

“You have a chance yet with the Royal Humane Society,” replied Eugénie, with a smile.

“How wretched and depressed he looked when he came, and how happy he will go away!”

At this moment du Tillet, coming up to Raoul with every mark of friendliness, pressed his hand, and said:

“Well, old fellow, how are you?”

“As well as a man is likely to be who has just got the best possible news of the election. I shall be successful,” replied Raoul, radiant.

“Delighted,” said du Tillet. “We shall want money for the paper.”

“The money will be found,” said Raoul.

“The devil is with these women!” exclaimed du Tillet, still unconvinced by the words of Raoul, whom he had nicknamed Charnathan.

“What are you talking about?” said Raoul.

“My sister-in-law is there with my wife, and they are hatching something together. You seem in high favor with the Countess; she is bowing to you right across the house.”

“Look,” said Mme. du Tillet to her sister, “they told us wrong. See how my husband fawns on M. Nathan, and it is he who they declared was trying to get him put in prison!”

“And men call us slanderers!” cried the Countess. “I will give him a warning.”

She rose, took the arm of Vandenesse, who was waiting in the passage, and returned jubilant to her box; by and by she left the Opera, ordered her carriage for the next morning before eight o’clock, and found herself at half-past eight on the Quai Conti, having called at the Rue du Mail on her way.

The carriage could not enter the narrow Rue de Nevers; but, as Schmucke’s house stood at the corner of the Quay, the Countess was not obliged to walk to it through the mud. She almost leapt from the step of the carriage on to the dirty and dilapidated entrance of the grimy old house, which was held together by iron clamps, like a poor man’s crockery, and overhung the street in quite an alarming fashion.

The old organist lived on the fourth floor, and rejoiced in a beautiful view of the Seine, from the Pont Neuf to the rising ground of Chaillot. The simple fellow was so taken aback when the footman announced his former pupil, that, before he could recover himself, she was in the room. Never could the Countess have imagined or guessed at an existence such as that suddenly laid bare to her, though she had long known Schmucke’s scorn for appearances and his indifference to worldly things. Who could have believed in so neglected a life, in carelessness carried to such a pitch? Schmucke was a musical Diogenes; he felt no shame for the hugger-mugger in which he lived; indeed, custom had made him insensible to it.

The constant use of a fat, friendly, German pipe had spread over the ceiling and the flimsy wallpaper⁠—well rubbed by the cat⁠—a faint yellow tint, which gave a pervading impression of the golden harvests of Ceres. The cat, whose long ruffled silky coat made a garment such as a portress might have envied, did the honors of the house, sedately whiskered, and entirely at her ease. From the top of a first-rate Vienna piano, where she lay couched in state, she cast on the Countess as she entered the gracious yet chilly glance with which any woman, astonished at her beauty, might have greeted her. She did not stir, except to wave the two silvery threads of her upright moustache and to fix upon Schmucke two golden eyes. The piano, which had known better days, and was cased in a good wood, painted black and gold, was dirty, discolored, chipped, and its keys were worn like the teeth of an old horse and mellowed by the deeper tints which fell from the pipe. Little piles of ashes on the ledge proclaimed that the night before Schmucke had bestridden the old instrument to some witches’ rendezvous. The brick floor, strewn with dried mud, torn paper, pipe ashes, and odds and ends that defy description, suggested the boards of a lodging-house floor, when they have not been swept for a week and heaps of litter, a cross between the contents of the ash-pit and the ragbag, await the servants’ brooms. A more practised eye than that of the Countess might have read indications of Schmucke’s way of living in the chestnut parings, scraps of apple peel, and shells of Easter eggs, which covered broken fragments of plates, all messed with sauerkraut. This German detritus formed a carpet of dusty filth which grated under the feet and lost itself in a mass of cinders, dropping with slow dignity from a painted stone fireplace, where a lump of coal lorded it over two half-burnt logs that seemed to waste away before it. On the mantelpiece was a pier-glass with figures dancing a saraband round it; on one side the glorious pipe hung on a nail, on the other stood a china pot in which the Professor kept his tobacco. Two armchairs, casually picked up, together with a thin, flattened couch, a worm-eaten chest of drawers with the marble top gone, and a maimed table, on which lay the remains of a frugal breakfast, made up the furniture, unpretending as that of a Mohican wigwam. A shaving-glass hanging from the catch of a curtainless window, and surmounted by a rag, striped by razor scrapings, were evidence of the sole sacrifices paid by Schmucke to the graces and to society.

The cat, petted as a feeble and dependent being, was the best off. It rejoiced in an old armchair cushion, beside which stood a white china cup and dish. But what no pen can describe is the state to which Schmucke, the cat, and the pipe⁠—trinity of living beings⁠—had reduced the furniture. The pipe had scorched the table in places. The cat and Schmucke’s head had greased the green Utrecht velvet of the two armchairs till it was worn quite smooth. But for the cat’s magnificent tail, which did a part of the cleaning, the dust would have lain forever undisturbed on the uncovered parts of the chest of drawers and piano. In a corner lay the army of slippers, to which only a Homeric catalogue could do justice. The tops of the chest of drawers and of the piano were blocked with broken-backed, loose-paged music-books, the boards showing all the pages peeping through, with corners white and dog-eared. Along the walls the addresses of pupils were glued with little wafers. The wafers without paper showed the number of obsolete addresses. On the wallpaper chalk additions might be read. The chest of drawers was adorned with last night’s tankards, which stood out quite fresh and bright in the midst of all this stuffiness and decay. Hygiene was represented by a water-jug crowned with a towel and a bit of common soap, white marbled with blue, which left its damp-mark here and there on the red wood. Two hats, equally ancient, hung on pegs, from which also was suspended the familiar blue ulster with its three capes, without which the Countess would hardly have known Schmucke. Beneath the window stood three pots of flowers, German flowers presumably, and close by a holly walking-stick.

Though the Countess was disagreeably affected both in sight and smell, yet Schmucke’s eyes and smile transformed the sordid scene with heavenly rays, that gave a glory to the dingy tones and animation to the chaos. The soul of this man, who seemed to belong to another world and revealed so many of its mysteries, radiated light like a sun. His frank and hearty laugh at the sight of one of his Saint Cecilias diffused the brightness of youth, mirth, and innocence. He poured out treasures of that which mankind holds dearest, and made a cloak of them to veil his poverty. The most purse-proud upstart would perhaps have blushed to think twice of the surroundings within which moved this noble apostle of the religion of music.

“Eh, py vot tchance came you here, tear Montame la Gondesse?” he said. “Must I den zing de zong ov Zimeon at mein asche?”

This idea started him on another peal of ringing laughter.

“Is it dat I haf a conqvest made?” he went on, with a look of cunning.

Then, laughing like a child again:

“You com for de musike, not for a boor man, I know,” he said sadly; “but come for vat you vill, you know dat all is here for you, pody, zoul, ant coots!”

He took the hand of the Countess, kissed it, and dropped a tear, for with this good man every day was the morrow of a kindness received. His joy had for a moment deprived him of memory, only to bring it back in greater force. He seized on the chalk, leaped on the armchair in front of the piano, and then, with the alacrity of a young man, wrote on the wall in large letters, “February 17th, 1835.” This movement, so pretty and artless, came with such an outburst of gratitude that the Countess was quite moved.

“My sister is coming too,” she said.

“De oder alzo! Ven? Ven? May it pe bevor I tie!” he replied.

“She will come to thank you for a great favor which I am here now to ask from you on her behalf.”

“Qvick; qvick! qvick! qvick!” cried Schmucke, “vot is dis dat I mosd to? Mosd I to de teufel go?”

“I only want you to write, I promise to pay the sum of ten thousand francs on each of these papers,” she said, drawing from her muff the four bills, which Nathan had prepared in accordance with the formula prescribed.

“Ach! dat vill pe soon tone,” replied the German with a lamblike docility. “Only, I know not vere are mein bens and baber.⁠—Get you away, Meinherr Mirr,” he cried to the cat, who stared at him frigidly. “Dis is mein gat,” he said, pointing it out to the Countess. “Dis is de boor peast vich lifs mit de boor Schmucke. He is peautivul, not zo?”

The Countess agreed.

“You vould vish him?”

“What an idea! Take away your friend!”

The cat, who was hiding the ink-bottle, divined what Schmucke wanted and jumped on to the bed.

“He is naughty ass ein monkey!” he went on, pointing to it on the bed. “I name him Mirr, for do glorivy our creat Hoffmann at Berlin, dat I haf mosh known.”

The good man signed with the innocence of a child doing its mother’s bidding, utterly ignorant what it is about, but sure that all will be right. He was far more taken up with presenting the cat to the Countess than with the papers, which, by the laws relating to foreigners, might have deprived him forever of liberty.

“You make me zure dat dese leetl stambed babers.”

“Don’t have the least uneasiness,” said the Countess.

“I haf not oneasiness,” he replied hastily. “I ask if dese leetl stambed babers vill plees do Montame ti Dilet?”

“Oh yes,” she said; “you will be helping her as a father might.”

“I am fer habby do pe coot do her for zomting. Com, do mein music!” he said, leaving the papers on the table and springing to the piano.

In a moment the hands of this unworldly being were flying over the well-worn keys, in a moment his glance pierced the roof to heaven, in a moment the sweetest of songs blossomed in the air and penetrated the soul. But only while the ink was drying could this simple-minded interpreter of heavenly things be allowed to draw forth eloquence from wood and string, like Raphael’s St. Cecilia playing to the listening hosts of heaven. The Countess then slipped the bills into her muff again, and recalled the radiant master from the ethereal spheres in which he soared by a touch on the shoulder.

“My good Schmucke,” she cried.

“Zo zoon,” he exclaimed, with a submissiveness painful to see. “Vy den are you kom?”

He did not complain, he stood like a faithful dog, waiting for a word from the Countess.

“My good Schmucke,” she again began, “this is a question of life and death, minutes now may be the price of blood and tears.”

“Efer de zame!” he said. “Go den! try de tears ov oders! Know dat de poor Schmucke counts your fisit for more dan your pounty.”

“We shall meet again,” she said. “You must come and play to me and dine with me every Sunday, or else we shall quarrel. I shall expect you next Sunday.”

“Truly?”

“Indeed, I hope you will come; and my sister, I am sure, will fix a day for you also.”

“Mein habbiness vill be den gomplete,” he said, “vor I tid not zee you put at de Champes-Hailysées, ven you passed in de carrisch, fery rarely.”

The thought of this dried the tears which had gathered in the old man’s eyes, and he offered his arm to his fair pupil, who could feel the wild beats of his heart.

“You thought of us then sometimes,” she said.

“Efery time ven I mein pret eat!” he replied. “Virst ass mein pountivul laties, ant den ass de two virst young girls vurty of luf dat I haf zeen.”

The Countess dared say no more! There was a marvelous and respectful solemnity in these words, as though they formed part of some religious service, breathing fidelity. That smoky room, that den of refuse, became a temple for two goddesses. Devotion there waxed stronger, all unknown to its objects.

“Here, then, we are loved, truly loved,” she thought.

The Countess shared the emotion with which old Schmucke saw her get into her carriage, as she blew from the ends of her fingers one of those airy kisses, which are a woman’s distant greeting. At this sight, Schmucke stood transfixed long after the carriage had disappeared.

A few minutes later, the Countess entered the courtyard of Mme. de Nucingen’s house. The Baroness was not yet up; but, in order not to keep a lady of position waiting, she flung round her a shawl and dressing gown.

“I come on the business of others, and promptitude is then a virtue,” said the Countess. “This must be my excuse for disturbing you so early.”

“Not at all! I am only too happy,” said the banker’s wife, taking the four papers and the guarantee of the Countess.

She rang for her maid.

“Theresa, tell the cashier to bring me up himself at once forty thousand francs.”

Then she sealed the letter of Mme. de Vandenesse, and locked it into a secret drawer of her table.

“What a pretty room you have!” said the Countess.

“M. de Nucingen is going to deprive me of it; he is getting a new house built.”

“You will no doubt give this one to your daughter. I hear that she is engaged to M. de Rastignac.”

The cashier appeared as Mme. de Nucingen was on the point of replying. She took the notes and handed him the four bills of exchange.

“That balances,” said the Baroness to the cashier.

“Egzebd for de disgound,” said the cashier. “Dis Schmucke iss ein musician vrom Ansbach,” he added, with a glance at the signature, which sent a shiver through the Countess.

“Do you suppose I am transacting business?” said Mme. de Nucingen, with a haughty glance of rebuke at the cashier. “This is my affair.”

In vain did the cashier cast sly glances now at the Countess, now at the Baroness; not a line of their faces moved.

“You can leave us now.⁠—Be so good as remain a minute or two, so that you may not seem to have anything to do with this matter,” said the Baroness to Mme. de Vandenesse.

“I must beg of you to add to your other kind services that of keeping my secret,” said the Countess.

“In a matter of charity that is of course,” replied the Baroness, with a smile. “I shall have your carriage sent to the end of the garden; it will start without you; then we shall cross the garden together, no one will see you leave this. The whole thing will remain a mystery.”

“You must have known suffering to have learned so much thought for others,” said the Countess.

“I don’t know about thoughtfulness, but I have suffered a great deal,” said the Baroness; “you, I trust, have paid less dearly for yours.”

The orders given, the Baroness took her fur shoes and cloak and led the Countess to the side door of the garden.

When a man is plotting against anyone, as du Tillet did against Nathan, he makes no confidant. Nucingen had some notion of what was going on, but his wife remained entirely outside this Machiavellian scheming. She knew, however, that Raoul was in difficulties, and was not deceived therefore by the sisters; she suspected shrewdly into whose hands the money would pass, and it gave her real pleasure to help the Countess. Entanglements of the kind always roused her deepest sympathy.

Rastignac, who was playing the detective on the intrigues of the two bankers, came to lunch with Mme. de Nucingen. Delphine and Rastignac had no secrets from each other, and she told him of her interview with the Countess. Rastignac, unable to imagine how the Baroness had become mixed up in this affair, which in his eyes was merely incidental, one weapon amongst many, explained to her that she had this morning in all probability demolished the electoral hopes of du Tillet and rendered abortive the foul play and sacrifices of a whole year. He then went on to enlighten her as to the whole position, urging her to keep silence about her own mistake.

“If only,” she said, “the cashier does not speak of it to Nucingen.”

Du Tillet was at lunch when, a few minutes after twelve, M. Gigonnet was announced.

“Show him in,” said the hanker, regardless of his wife’s presence. “Well, old Shylock, is our man under lock and key?”

“No.”

“No! Didn’t I tell you Rue du Mail, at the hotel?”

“He has paid,” said Gigonnet, drawing from his pocketbook forty banknotes.

A look of despair passed over du Tillet’s face.

“You should never look askance at good money,” said the impassive crony of du Tillet; “it’s unlucky.”

“Where did you get this money, madame?” said the banker, with a scowl at his wife, which made her scarlet to the roots of her hair.

“I have no idea what you mean,” she said.

“I shall get to the bottom of this,” he replied, starting up in a fury. “You have upset my most cherished plans.”

“You will upset your lunch,” said Gigonnet, laying hold of the tablecloth, which had caught in the skirts of du Tillet’a dressing-gown.

Mme. du Tillet rose with frigid dignity, for his words had terrified her. She rang, and a footman came.

“My horses,” she said. “And send Virginie; I wish to dress.”

“Where are you going?” said du Tillet.

“Men who have any manners do not question their wives. You profess to be a gentleman.”

“You have not been yourself for the last two days, since your flippant sister has twice been to see you.”

“You ordered me to be flippant,” she said. “I am practising on you.”

Gigonnet, who took no interest in family broils, saluted Mme. du Tillet and went out.

Du Tillet looked fixedly at his wife, whose eyes met his without wavering.

“What is the meaning of this?” he said.

“It means that I am no longer a child to be cowed by you,” she replied. “I am, and shall remain all my life, a faithful, attentive wife to you; you may be master if you like, but tyrant, no.”

Du Tillet left her, and Marie-Eugénie retired to her room, quite unnerved by such an effort.

“But for my sister’s danger,” she said to herself, “I should never have ventured to beard him thus; as the proverb says, ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good.’ ”

During the night Mme. du Tillet again passed in review her sister’s confidences. Raoul’s safety being assured, her reason was no longer overpowered by the thought of this imminent danger. She recalled the alarming energy with which the Countess had spoken of flying with Nathan, in order to console him in his calamity if she could not avert it. She foresaw how this man, in the violence of his gratitude and love, might persuade her sister to do what to the well-balanced Eugénie seemed an act of madness. There had been instances lately in the best society of such elopements, which pay the price of a doubtful pleasure in remorse and the social discredit arising out of a false position, and Eugénie recalled to mind their disastrous results. Du Tillet’s words had put the last touch to her panic; she dreaded discovery; she saw the signature of the Comtesse de Vandenesse in the archives of the Nucingen firm and she resolved to implore her sister to confess everything to Félix.

Mme. du Tillet did not find the Countess next morning; but Félix was at home. A voice within called on Eugénie to save her sister. Tomorrow even might be too late. It was a heavy responsibility, but she decided to tell everything to the Count. Surely he would be lenient, since his honor was still safe and the Countess was not so much depraved as misguided. Eugénie hesitated to commit what seemed like an act of cowardice and treachery by divulging secrets which society, at one in this, universally respects. But then came the thought of her sister’s future, the dread of seeing her some day deserted, ruined by Nathan, poor, ill, unhappy, despairing; she hesitated no longer, and asked to see the Count. Félix, greatly surprised by this visit, had a long conversation with his sister-in-law, in the course of which he showed such calm and self-mastery that Eugénie trembled at the desperate steps he might be revolving.

“Don’t be troubled,” said Vandenesse; “I shall act so that the day will come when your sister will bless you. However great your repugnance in keeping from her the fact that you have spoken to me, I must ask you to give me a few days’ grace. I require this in order to see my way through certain mysteries, of which you know nothing, and above all to take my measures with prudence. Possibly I may find out everything at once! I am the only one to blame, dear sister. All lovers play their own game, but all women are not fortunate enough to see life as it really is.”

IX

A Husband’s Triumph

Mme. du Tillet left Vandenesse’s house somewhat comforted. Félix, on his part, went at once to draw forty thousand francs from the Bank of France, and then hastened to Mme. de Nucingen. He found her at home, thanked her for the confidence she had shown in his wife, and returned her the money. He gave, as the reason for this mysterious loan, an excessive almsgiving, on which he had wished to impose some limit.

“Do not trouble to explain, since Mme. de Vandenesse has told you about it,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.

“She knows all,” thought Vandenesse.

The Baroness handed him his wife’s guarantee and sent for the four bills. Vandenesse, while this was going on, scanned the Baroness with the statesman’s piercing eye; she flinched a little, and he judged the time had come for negotiating.

“We live, madame,” he said, “at a period when nothing is stable. Thrones rise and disappear in France with a disconcerting rapidity. Fifteen years may see the end of a great empire, of a monarchy, and also of a revolution. No one can take upon himself to answer for the future. You know my devotion to the legitimist party. Such words in my mouth cannot surprise you. Imagine a catastrophe: would it not be a satisfaction to you to have a friend on the winning side?”

“Undoubtedly,” she replied with a smile.

“Supposing such a case to occur, will you have in me, unknown to the world, a grateful friend, ready to secure for M. de Nucingen under these circumstances the peerage to which he aspires?”

“What do you ask from me?” she said.

“Not much. Only the facts in your possession about M. Nathan.”

The Baroness repeated her conversation of the morning with Rastignac, and said to the ex-peer of France, as she handed him the four bills which the cashier brought her:

“Don’t forget your promise.”

So far was Vandenesse from forgetting this magical promise, that he dangled it before the eyes of the Baron de Rastignac in order to extract from him further information.

On leaving the Baron, he dictated to a scrivener the following letter addressed to Florine:

“If Mlle. Florine wishes to know what part is awaiting her, will she be so good as come to the approaching masked ball, and bring M. Nathan as her escort?”

This letter posted, he went next to his man of business, a very acute fellow, full of resource, and withal honest.

Him he begged to personate a friend, to whom the visit of Mme. de Vandenesse should have been confided by Schmucke, aroused to a tardy suspicion by the fourfold repetition of the words, “I promise to pay ten thousand francs,” and who should have come to request from M. Nathan a bill for forty thousand francs in exchange. It was a risky game. Nathan might already have learned how the thing had been arranged, but something had to be dared for so great a prize. In her agitation, Marie might easily have forgotten to ask her beloved Raoul for an acknowledgment for Schmucke. The man of business went at once to Nathan’s office, and returned triumphant to the Count by five o’clock with the bill of forty thousand francs. The very first words exchanged with Nathan had enabled him to pass for an emissary from the Countess.

This success obliged Félix to take steps for preventing a meeting between Raoul and his wife before the masked ball, whither he intended to escort her, in order that she might discover for herself the relation in which Nathan stood to Florine. He knew the jealous pride of the Countess, and was anxious to bring her to renounce the love affair of her own will, so that she might be spared from humiliation before himself. He also hoped to show her before it was too late her letters to Nathan sold by Florine, from whom he reckoned on buying them back. This prudent plan, so swiftly conceived and in part executed, was destined to fail through one of those chances to which the affairs of mortals are subject. After dinner Félix turned the conversation on the masked ball, remarking that Marie had never been to one, and proposed to take her there the following day by way of diversion.

“I will find someone for you to mystify.”

“Ah! I should like that immensely.”

“To make it really amusing, a woman ought to get hold of a foeman worthy of her steel, some celebrity or wit, and make mincemeat of him. What do you say to Nathan? A man who knows Florine could put me up to a few little things that would drive him wild.”

“Florine,” said the Countess, “the actress?”

Marie had already heard this name from the lips of Quillet the office attendant; a thought flashed through her like lightning.

“Well, yes, his mistress,” replied the Count. “What is there surprising in that?”

“I should have thought M. Nathan was too busy for such things. How can literary men find time for love?”

“I say nothing about love, my dear, but they have to lodge somewhere, like other people; and when they have no home and the bloodhounds of the law are after them, they lodge with their mistresses, which may seem a little strong to you, but which is infinitely preferable to lodging in prison.”

The fire was less red than the cheeks of the Countess.

“Would you like him for your victim? You could easily give him a fright,” the Count went on, paying no attention to his wife’s looks. “I can give you proofs by which you can show him that he has been a mere child in the hands of your brother-in-law du Tillet. The wretch wanted to clap him in prison in order to disqualify him for opposing his candidature in Nucingen’s constituency. I have learned from a friend of Florine’s the amount produced by the sale of her furniture, the whole of which she gave to Nathan for starting his paper, and I know what portion was sent to him of the harvest which she reaped this year in the provinces and Belgium; money which, in the long run, all goes into the pockets of du Tillet, Nucingen, and Massol. These three have sold the paper in advance to the Government, so confident are they of dispossessing the great man.”

“M. Nathan would never take money from an actress.”

“You don’t know these people, my dear,” said the Count; “he won’t deny the fact.”

“I shall certainly go to the ball,” said the Countess.

“You will have some fun,” replied Vandenesse. “Armed with such weapons, you will read a sharp lesson to Nathan’s vanity, and it will be a kindness to him. You will watch the ebb and flow of his rage, and his writhings under your stinging epigrams. Your badinage will be quite enough to show a clever man like him the danger in which he stands, and you will have the satisfaction of getting a good trouncing for the juste milieu team within their own stables.⁠ ⁠… You are not listening, my child.”

“Yes, indeed, I am only too much interested,” she answered. “I will tell you later why I am so anxious to be certain about all this.”

“Certain?” replied Vandenesse. “If you keep on your mask, I will take you to supper with Florine and Nathan. It will be sport for a great lady like you to take in an actress after having kept a famous man on the stretch, manoeuvring round his most precious secrets; you can harness them both to the same mystification. I shall put myself on the track of Nathan’s infidelities. If I can lay hold of the details of any recent affair, you will be able to indulge yourself in the spectacle of a courtesan’s rage, which is worth seeing. The fury of Florine will seethe like an Alpine torrent. She adores Nathan; he is everything to her, precious as the marrow of her bones, dear as her cubs to a lioness. I remember in my youth having seen a celebrated actress, whose writing was like a kitchen-maid’s, come to demand back her letters from one of my friends. I have never seen anything like it since; that quiet fury, that impudent dignity, that barbaric pose.⁠ ⁠… Are you ill, Marie?”

“No! only the fire is so hot.”

The Countess went to fling herself down on a sofa. All at once an incalculable impulse, inspired by the consuming ache of jealousy, drove her to her feet. Trembling in every limb, she crossed her arms, and advanced slowly towards her husband.

“How much do you know?” she asked. “It is not like you to torture me. Even were I guilty, you would give me an easy death.”

“What should I know, Marie?”

“About Nathan?”

“You believe you love him,” he replied, “but you love only a phantom made of words.”

“Then you do know⁠—?”

“Everything,” he said.

The word fell like a blow on Marie’s head.

“If you wish,” he continued, “it shall be as though I knew nothing. My child, you have fallen into an abyss, and I must save you; already I have done something. See⁠—”

He drew from his pocket her guarantee and Schmucke’s four bills, which the Countess recognized, and threw them into the fire.

“What would have become of you, poor Marie, in three months from now? You would have been dragged into Court by bailiffs. Don’t hang your head, don’t be ashamed; you have been betrayed by the noblest of feelings; you have trifled, not with a man, but with your own imagination. There is not a woman⁠—not one, do you hear, Marie?⁠—who would not have been fascinated in your place. It would be absurd that men, who, in the course of twenty years, have committed a thousand acts of folly, should insist that a woman is not to lose her head once in a lifetime. Pray Heaven I may never triumph over you or burden you with a pity such as you repudiated with scorn the other day! Possibly this wretched man was sincere when he wrote to you, sincere in trying to put an end to himself, sincere in returning that very evening to Florine. A man is a poor creature compared to a woman. I am speaking now for you, not for myself. I am tolerant, but society is not; it shuns the woman who makes a scandal; it will allow none to be rich at once in its regard and in the indulgence of passion. Whether this is just or not, I cannot say. Enough that the world is cruel. It may be that, taken in the mass, it is harsher than are the individuals separately. A thief, sitting in the pit, will applaud the triumph of innocence, and filch its jewels as he goes out. Society has no balm for the ills it creates; it honors clever roguery, and leaves unrewarded silent devotion. All this I see and know; but if I cannot reform the world, at least I can protect you from yourself. We have here to do with a man who brings you nothing but trouble, not with a saintly and pious love, such as sometimes commands self-effacement and brings its own excuse with it. Perhaps I have been to blame in not bringing more variety into your peaceful life; I ought to have enlivened our calm routine with the stir and excitement of travel and change. I can see also an explanation of the attraction which drew you to a man of note, in the envy you roused in certain women. Lady Dudley, Mme. d’Espard, Mme. de Manerville, and my sister-in-law Émilie count for something in all this. These women, whom I warned you against, have no doubt worked on your curiosity, more with the object of annoying me than in order to precipitate you among storms which, I trust, may have only threatened without breaking over you.”

The Countess, as she listened to these generous words, was tossed about by a host of conflicting feelings, but lively admiration for Félix dominated the tempest. A noble and high-spirited soul quickly responds to gentle handling. This sensitiveness is the counterpart of physical grace. Marie appreciated a magnanimity which sought in self-depreciation a screen for the blushes of an erring woman. She made a frantic motion to leave the room, then turned back, fearing lest her husband should misunderstand and take alarm.

“Wait!” she said, as she vanished.

Félix had artfully prepared her defence, and he was soon recompensed for his adroitness; for his wife returned with the whole of Nathan’s letters in her hand, and held them out to him.

“Be my judge,” she said, kneeling before him.

“How can a man judge where he loves?” he replied.

He took the letters and threw them on the fire; later, the thought that he had read them might have stood between him and his wife. Marie, her head upon his knees, burst into tears.

“My child, where are yours?” he said, raising her head.

At this question, the Countess no longer felt the intolerable burning of her cheeks, a cold chill went through her.

“That you may not suspect your husband of slandering the man whom you have thought worthy of you, I will have those letters restored to you by Florine herself.”

“Oh! surely he would give them back if I asked him.”

“And supposing he refused?”

The Countess hung her head.

“The world is horrid,” she said; “I will not go into it any more; I will live alone with you, if you forgive me.”

“You might weary again. Besides, what would the world say if you left it abruptly? When spring comes, we will travel, we will go to Italy, we will wander about Europe, until another child comes to need your care. We must not give up the ball tomorrow, for it is the only way to get hold of your letters without compromising ourselves; and when Florine brings them to you, will not that be the measure of her power?”

“And I must see that?” said the terrified Countess.

“Tomorrow night.”

Towards midnight next evening Nathan was pacing the promenade at the masked ball, giving his arm to a domino with a very fair imitation of the conjugal manner. After two or three turns two masked women came up to them.

“Fool! you have done for yourself; Marie is here and sees you,” said Vandenesse, in the disguise of a woman, to Nathan, while the Countess, all trembling, addressed Florine:

“If you will listen, I will tell you secrets which Nathan has kept from you, and which will show you the dangers that threaten your love for him.”

Nathan had abruptly dropped Florine’s arm in order to follow the Count, who escaped him in the crowd. Florine went to take a seat beside the Countess, who had drawn her away to a form by the side of Vandenesse, now returned to look after his wife.

“Speak out, my dear,” said Florine, “and don’t suppose you can keep me long on the tenterhooks. Not a creature in the world can get Raoul from me, I can tell you. He is bound to me by habit, which is better than love any day.”

“In the first place, are you Florine?” said Félix, resuming his natural voice.

“A pretty question indeed! If you don’t know who I am, why should I believe you, pray?”

“Go and ask Nathan, who is hunting now for the mistress of whom I speak, where he spent the night three days ago! He tried to stifle himself with charcoal, my dear, unknown to you, because he was ruined. That’s all you know about the affairs of the man whom you profess to love; you leave him penniless, and he kills himself, or rather he doesn’t, he tries to and fails. Suicide when it doesn’t come off is much on a par with a bloodless duel.”

“It is a lie,” said Florine. “He dined with me that day, but not till after sunset. The bailiffs were after him, poor boy. He was in hiding, that’s all.”

“Well, you can go and ask at the Hôtel du Mail, Rue du Mail, whether he was not brought there at the point of death by a beautiful lady, with whom he has had intimate relations for a year; the letters of your rival are hidden in your house, under your very nose. If you care to catch Nathan out, we can go all three to your house; there I shall give you ocular proof that you can get him clear of his difficulties very shortly if you like to be good-natured.”

“That’s not good enough for Florine, thank you, my friend. I know very well that Nathan can’t have a love affair.”

“Because, I suppose, he has redoubled his attentions to you of late, as if that were not the very proof that he is tremendously in love⁠—”

“With a society woman?⁠—Nathan?” said Florine. “Oh! I don’t trouble about a trifle like that.”

“Very well, would you like him to come and tell you himself that he won’t take you home this evening?”

“If you get him to say that,” answered Florine, “I will let you come with me, and we can hunt together for those letters, which I shall believe in when I see them.”

“Stay here,” said Félix, “and watch.”

He took his wife’s arm and waited within a few steps of Florine. Before long Nathan, who was walking up and down the promenade, searching in all directions for his mask like a dog who has lost his master, returned to the spot where the mysterious warning had been spoken. Seeing evident marks of disturbance on Raoul’s brow, Florine planted herself firmly in front of him and said in a commanding voice:

“You must not leave me; I have a reason for wanting you.”

“Marie!” whispered the Countess, by her husband’s instructions, in Raoul’s ear. Then she added, “Who is that woman? Leave her immediately, go outside, and wait for me at the foot of the staircase.”

In this terrible strait, Raoul shook off roughly the arm of Florine, who was quite unprepared for such violence, and, though clinging to him forcibly, was obliged to let go. Nathan at once lost himself in the crowd.

“What did I tell you?” cried Félix in the ear of the stupefied Florine, to whom he offered his arm.

“Come,” she said, “let us go, whoever you are. Have you a carriage?”

Vandenesse’s only reply was to hurry Florine out and hasten to rejoin his wife at a spot agreed upon under the colonnade. In a few minutes the three dominoes, briskly conveyed by Vandenesse’s coachman, arrived at the house of the actress, who took off her mask. Mme. de Vandenesse could not repress a thrill of surprise at the sight of the actress, boiling with rage, magnificent in her wrath and jealousy.

“There is,” said Vandenesse, “a certain writing-case, the key of which has never been in your hands; the letters must be in it.”

“You have me there; you know something, at any rate, which has been bothering me for some days,” said Florine, dashing into the study to fetch the writing-case.

Vandenesse saw his wife grow pale under her mask. Florine’s room told more of Nathan’s intimacy with the actress than was altogether pleasant for a romantic ladylove. A woman’s eye is quick to seize the truth in such matters, and the Countess read in the promiscuous household arrangements a confirmation of what Vandenesse had told her.

Florine returned with the case.

“How shall we open it?” she said.

Then she sent for a large kitchen knife, and when her maid brought it, brandished it with a mocking air, exclaiming:

“This is the way to cut off the pretty dears’ heads!”3

The Countess shuddered. She realized now, even more than her husband’s words had enabled her to do the evening before, the depths from which she had so narrowly escaped.

“What a fool I am!” cried Florine. “His razor would be better.”

She went to fetch the razor, which had just served Nathan for shaving, and cut the edges of the morocco. They fell apart, and Marie’s letters appeared. Florine took up one at random.

“Sure enough, this is some fine lady’s work! Only see how she can spell!”

Vandenesse took the letters and handed them to his wife, who carried them to a table in order to see if they were all there.

“Will you give them up for this?” said Vandenesse, holding out to Florine the bill for forty thousand francs.

“What a donkey he is to sign such things!⁠ ⁠… ‘Bond for bills,’ ” cried Florine, reading the document. “Ah! yes, you shall have your fill of Countesses! And I, who worked myself to death, body and soul, raising money in the provinces for him⁠—I, who slaved like a broker to save him! That’s a man all over; go to the devil for him, and he’ll trample you under foot! I shall have it out with him for this.”

Mme. de Vandenesse had fled with the letters.

“Hi, there! pretty domino! leave me one, if you please, just to throw in his face.”

“That is impossible now,” said Vandenesse.

“And why, pray?”

“The other domino is your late rival.”

“You don’t say so! Well, she might have said ‘Thank you!’ ” cried Florine.

“And what then do you call the forty thousand francs?” said Vandenesse, with a polite bow.

It very seldom happens that a young fellow who has once attempted suicide cares to taste for a second time its discomforts. When suicide does not cure a man of life altogether, it cures him of a self-sought death. Thus Raoul no longer thought of making away with himself even after Florine’s possession of Schmucke’s guarantee⁠—plainly through the intervention of Vandenesse⁠—had reduced him to a still worse plight than that from which he had tried to escape. He made an attempt to see the Countess again in order to explain to her the nature of the love which burned brighter than ever in his breast. But the first time they met in society, the Countess fixed Raoul with that stony, scornful glance which makes an impassable barrier between a man and a woman. With all his audacity, Nathan made no further attempt during the winter to address the Countess.

He unburdened his soul, however, to Blondet, discoursing to him of Laura and Beatrice, whenever the name of Mme. de Vandenesse occurred. He paraphrased that beautiful passage of one of the greatest poets of his day⁠—

“Dream of the soul, blue flower with golden heart, whose spreading roots, finer a thousandfold than fairies’ silken tresses, pierce to the inmost being and draw their life from all that is purest there: flower sweet and bitter! To uproot thee is to draw the heart’s blood, oozing in ruddy drops from thy broken stem! Ah! cursed flower, how thou hast thriven on my soul!”

“You’re driveling, old boy,” said Blondet. “I grant you there was a pretty enough flower, only it has nothing to do with the soul; and instead of crooning like a blind man before an empty shrine, you had better be thinking how to get out of this scrape, so as to put yourself straight with the authorities and settle down. You are too much of the artist to make a politician. You have been played on by men who are your inferiors. Go and get yourself played on some other stage.”

“Marie can’t prevent my loving her,” said Nathan. “She shall be my Beatrice.”

“My dear fellow, Beatrice was a child of twelve, whom Dante never saw again; otherwise, would she have been Beatrice? If we are to make a divinity of a woman, we must not see her today in a mantle, tomorrow in a low-necked dress, the day after on the Boulevards, cheapening toys for her last baby. While there is Florine handy to play by turns a comedy duchess, a tragedy middle-class wife, a negress, a marchioness, a colonel, a Swiss peasant girl, a Peruvian virgin of the sun (the only virginity she knows much about), I don’t know why one should bother about society women.”

Du Tillet, by means of a forced sale, compelled the penniless Nathan to surrender his share in the paper. The great man received only five votes in the constituency which elected du Tillet.

When the Comtesse de Vandenesse, after a long and delightful time of travel in Italy, returned in the following winter to Paris, Nathan had exactly carried out the forecast of Félix. Following Blondet’s advice, he was negotiating with the party in power. His personal affairs were so embarrassed that, one day in the Champs-Élysées, the Comtesse Marie saw her ancient adorer walking in the sorriest plight, with Florine on his arm. In the eyes of a woman, the man to whom she is indifferent is always more or less ugly; but the man whom she has ceased to love is a monster, especially if he is of the type to which Nathan belonged. Mme. de Vandenesse felt a pang of shame as she remembered her fancy for Raoul. Had she not been cured before of any unlawful passion, the contrast which this man, already declining in popular estimation, then offered to her husband, would have sufficed to give the latter precedence over an angel.

At the present day this ambitious author, of ready pen but halting character, has at last capitulated and installed himself in a sinecure like any ordinary being. Having supported every scheme of disintegration, he now lives in peace beneath the shade of a ministerial broadsheet. The Cross of the Legion of Honor, fruitful text of his mockery, adorns his buttonhole. “Peace at any price,” the stock-in-trade of his denunciation as editor of a revolutionary organ, has now become the theme of his laudatory articles. The hereditary principle, butt of his Saint-Simonian oratory, is defended by him today in weighty arguments. This inconsistency has its origin and explanation in the change of front of certain men who, in the course of our latest political developments, have acted as Raoul did.

Endnotes

The magistrature assise consists of the judges who sit in court, and are appointed for life. The members of the magistrature amovible conduct the examination and prosecution of accused persons. They address the court standing, and are not appointed for life. ↩

The term is applied to all the substitutes of the procureur général, or Attorney General. ↩

In the French, “poulets,” which means “love-letters” as well as “chickens.” ↩

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A Daughter of Eve
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