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Title: A Daughter of Eve

Author: Honore de Balzac

Release Date: July 23, 2004 [EBook #1481]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny




                          A DAUGHTER OF EVE

                                  BY

                           HONORE DE BALZAC



                            Translated By

                     Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                              DEDICATION

  To Madame la Comtesse Bolognini, nee Vimercati.

  If you remember, madame, the pleasure your conversation gave to a
  traveller by recalling Paris to his memory in Milan, you will not
  be surprised to find him testifying his gratitude for many
  pleasant evenings passed beside you by laying one of his works at
  your feet, and begging you to protect it with your name, as in
  former days that name protected the tales of an ancient writer
  dear to the Milanese.

  You have an Eugenie, already beautiful, whose intelligent smile
  gives promise that she has inherited from you the most precious
  gifts of womanhood, and who will certainly enjoy during her
  childhood and youth all those happinesses which a rigid mother
  denied to the Eugenie of these pages. Though Frenchmen are taxed
  with inconstancy, you will find me Italian in faithfulness and
  memory. While writing the name of "Eugenie," my thoughts have
  often led me back to that cool stuccoed salon and little garden in
  the Vicolo dei Cappucini, which echoed to the laughter of that
  dear child, to our sportive quarrels and our chatter. But you have
  left the Corso for the Tre Monasteri, and I know not how you are
  placed there; consequently, I am forced to think of you, not among
  the charming things with which no doubt you have surrounded
  yourself, but like one of those fine figures due to Raffaelle,
  Titian, Correggio, Allori, which seem abstractions, so distant are
  they from our daily lives.

  If this book should wing its way across the Alps, it will prove to
  you the lively gratitude and respectful friendship of

Your devoted servant,
De Balzac.




                          A DAUGHTER OF EVE



                              CHAPTER I

                           THE TWO MARIES

In one of the finest houses of the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at
half-past eleven at night, two young women were sitting before the
fireplace of a boudoir hung with blue velvet of that tender shade,
with shimmering reflections, which French industry has lately learned
to fabricate. Over the doors and windows were draped soft folds of
blue cashmere, the tint of the hangings, the work of one of those
upholsterers who have just missed being artists. A silver lamp studded
with turquoise, and suspended by chains of beautiful workmanship, hung
from the centre of the ceiling. The same system of decoration was
followed in the smallest details, and even to the ceiling of fluted
blue silk, with long bands of white cashmere falling at equal
distances on the hangings, where they were caught back by ropes of
pearl. A warm Belgian carpet, thick as turf, of a gray ground with
blue posies, covered the floor. The furniture, of carved ebony, after
a fine model of the old school, gave substance and richness to the
rather too decorative quality, as a painter might call it, of the rest
of the room. On either side of a large window, two etageres displayed
a hundred precious trifles, flowers of mechanical art brought into
bloom by the fire of thought. On a chimney-piece of slate-blue marble
were figures in old Dresden, shepherds in bridal garb, with delicate
bouquets in their hands, German fantasticalities surrounding a
platinum clock, inlaid with arabesques. Above it sparkled the
brilliant facets of a Venice mirror framed in ebony, with figures
carved in relief, evidently obtained from some former royal residence.
Two jardinieres were filled with the exotic product of a hot-house,
pale, but divine flowers, the treasures of botany.

In this cold, orderly boudoir, where all things were in place as if
for sale, no sign existed of the gay and capricious disorder of a
happy home. At the present moment, the two young women were weeping.
Pain seemed to predominate. The name of the owner, Ferdinand du
Tillet, one of the richest bankers in Paris, is enough to explain the
luxury of the whole house, of which this boudoir is but a sample.

Though without either rank or station, having pushed himself forward,
heaven knows how, du Tillet had married, in 1831, the daughter of the
Comte de Granville, one of the greatest names in the French
magistracy,--a man who became peer of France after the revolution of
July. This marriage of ambition on du Tillet's part was brought about
by his agreeing to sign an acknowledgment in the marriage contract of
a dowry not received, equal to that of her elder sister, who was
married to Comte Felix de Vandenesse. On the other hand, the
Granvilles obtained the alliance with de Vandenesse by the largeness
of the "dot." Thus the bank repaired the breach made in the pocket of
the magistracy by rank. Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen
himself, three years later, the brother-in-law of a Sieur Ferdinand DU
Tillet, so-called, he might not have married his wife; but what man of
rank in 1828 foresaw the strange upheavals which the year 1830 was
destined to produce in the political condition, the fortunes, and the
customs of France? Had any one predicted to Comte Felix de Vandenesse
that his head would lose the coronet of a peer, and that of his
father-in-law acquire one, he would have thought his informant a
lunatic.

Bending forward on one of those low chairs then called "chaffeuses,"
in the attitude of a listener, Madame du Tillet was pressing to her
bosom with maternal tenderness, and occasionally kissing, the hand of
her sister, Madame Felix de Vandenesse. Society added the baptismal
name to the surname, in order to distinguish the countess from her
sister-in-law, the Marquise Charles de Vandenesse, wife of the former
ambassador, who had married the widow of the Comte de Kergarouet,
Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine.

Half lying on a sofa, her handkerchief in the other hand, her
breathing choked by repressed sobs, and with tearful eyes, the
countess had been making confidences such as are made only from sister
to sister when two sisters love each other; and these two sisters did
love each other tenderly. We live in days when sisters married into
such antagonist spheres can very well not love each other, and
therefore the historian is bound to relate the reasons of this tender
affection, preserved without spot or jar in spite of their husbands'
contempt for each other and their own social disunion. A rapid glance
at their childhood will explain the situation.

Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind,
a "devote" who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!),
had fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and
Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the
first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever
leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled
them. Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of
Paris were their theatre. Their education in their mother's house had
been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent. From infancy they
had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the
door of which stood always open. The time not occupied by the care of
their persons, their religious duties and the studies considered
necessary for well-bred young ladies, was spent in needlework done for
the poor, or in walks like those an Englishwoman allows herself on
Sunday, saying, apparently, "Not so fast, or we shall seem to be
amusing ourselves."

Their education did not go beyond the limits imposed by confessors,
who were chosen by their mother from the strictest and least tolerant
of the Jansenist priests. Never were girls delivered over to their
husbands more absolutely pure and virgin than they; their mother
seemed to consider that point, essential as indeed it is, the
accomplishment of all her duties toward earth and heaven. These two
poor creatures had never, before their marriage, read a tale, or heard
of a romance; their very drawings were of figures whose anatomy would
have been masterpieces of the impossible to Cuvier, designed to
feminize the Farnese Hercules himself. An old maid taught them
drawing. A worthy priest instructed them in grammar, the French
language, history, geography, and the very little arithmetic it was
thought necessary in their rank for women to know. Their reading,
selected from authorized books, such as the "Lettres Edifiantes," and
Noel's "Lecons de Litterature," was done aloud in the evening; but
always in presence of their mother's confessor, for even in those
books there did sometimes occur passages which, without wise comments,
might have roused their imagination. Fenelon's "Telemaque" was thought
dangerous.

The Comtesse de Granville loved her daughters sufficiently to wish to
make them angels after the pattern of Marie Alacoque, but the poor
girls themselves would have preferred a less virtuous and more amiable
mother. This education bore its natural fruits. Religion, imposed as a
yoke and presented under its sternest aspect, wearied with formal
practice these innocent young hearts, treated as sinful. It repressed
their feelings, and was never precious to them, although it struck its
roots deep down into their natures. Under such training the two Maries
would either have become mere imbeciles, or they must necessarily have
longed for independence. Thus it came to pass that they looked to
marriage as soon as they saw anything of life and were able to compare
a few ideas. Of their own tender graces and their personal value they
were absolutely ignorant. They were ignorant, too, of their own
innocence; how, then, could they know life? Without weapons to meet
misfortune, without experience to appreciate happiness, they found no
comfort in the maternal jail, all their joys were in each other. Their
tender confidences at night in whispers, or a few short sentences
exchanged if their mother left them for a moment, contained more ideas
than the words themselves expressed. Often a glance, concealed from
other eyes, by which they conveyed to each other their emotions, was
like a poem of bitter melancholy. The sight of a cloudless sky, the
fragrance of flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were
their joys. The finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a
source of enjoyment.

Their mother's social circle, far from opening resources to their
hearts or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and
depressed them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and
graceless, whose conversation turned on the differences which
distinguished various preachers and confessors, on their own petty
indispositions, on religious events insignificant even to the
"Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de la Religion." As for the men who appeared
in the Comtesse de Granville's salon, they extinguished any possible
torch of love, so cold and sadly resigned were their faces. They were
all of an age when mankind is sulky and fretful, and natural
sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table and on the things
relating to personal comfort. Religious egotism had long dried up
those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched behind pious
practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole evening, and the
two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim enforced by maternal
severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages about them with
their hollow eyes and scowling faces.

On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a
music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that
music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed
within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A
spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a
neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest
girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the
importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the
value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of
a devote's character to make a merit of doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem
all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his
brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and
artless in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes,
and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair,
falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his
ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to
his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with
the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to
which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too
high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities.
This great unknown artist belonged to the kindly class of the
self-forgetting, who give their time and their soul to others, just as
they leave their gloves on every table and their umbrella at all doors.
His hands were of the kind that are dirty as soon as washed. In short,
his old body, badly poised on its knotted old legs, proving to what
degree a man can make it the mere accessory of his soul, belonged to
those strange creations which have been properly depicted only by a
German,--by Hoffman, the poet of that which seems not to exist but yet
has life.

Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach;
a musical genius, who was now examined by a council of devotes, and
asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer,
"Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and
Jansenist confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in
the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand
and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere
comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave
him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed
to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred francs a
year and his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never found courage
to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two
adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of
maternal rigor and the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke
and the girlhood of the two Maries.

No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered
the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as
mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a
music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and
address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This
tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were
lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen.
His artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty,
reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches
in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said
with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a
laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy
had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully
ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within
their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for
reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of
protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to
overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home,
they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and
spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three
daughters of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk
with music, were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials;
they made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives.
Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain
secondary geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion
which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts,
though it permeated that other creation through which, in spirit, they
winged their flight. When they had executed some great work in a
manner that their master declared was almost faultless, they embraced
each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years
of age, and then only four times a year in special houses. They were
not allowed to leave their mother's side without instructions as to
their behavior with their partners; and so severe were those
instructions that they dared say only yes or no during a dance. The
eye of the countess never left them, and she seemed to know from the
mere movement of their lips the words they uttered. Even the
ball-dresses of these poor little things were piously irreproachable;
their muslin gowns came up to their chins with an endless number of
thick ruches, and the sleeves came down to their wrists. Swathing in
this way their natural charms, this costume gave them a vague
resemblance to Egyptian hermae; though from these blocks of muslin
rose enchanting little heads of tender melancholy. They felt
themselves the objects of pity, and inwardly resented it. What woman,
however innocent, does not desire to excite envy?

No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp
of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly
red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from
the hands of God than these two girls from their mother's home when
they went to the mayor's office and the church to be married, after
receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two
men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by
night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses
where they were to go than the maternal convent.

Why did the father of these poor girls, the Comte de Granville, a wise
and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics),
refrain from protecting the helpless little creatures from such
crushing despotism? Alas! by mutual understanding, about ten years
after marriage, he and his wife were separated while living under one
roof. The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons,
leaving that of the daughters to his wife. He saw less danger for
women than for men in the application of his wife's oppressive system.
The two Maries, destined as women to endure tyranny, either of love or
marriage, would be, he thought, less injured than boys, whose minds
ought to have freer play, and whose manly qualities would deteriorate
under the powerful compression of religious ideas pushed to their
utmost consequences. Of four victims the count saved two.

The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the
slightest intimacy with their sisters. All communication between the
poor children was therefore strictly watched. When the boys came home
from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house. The
boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after that
the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or, during
the summer season, into the country. Except on the solemn days of some
family festival, such as the countess's birthday or New Year's day, or
the day of the distribution of prizes, when the boys remained in their
father's house and slept there, the sisters saw so little of their
brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them. On those days
the countess never left them for an instant alone together. Calls of
"Where is Angelique?"--"What is Eugenie about?"--"Where are my
daughters?" resounded all day. As for the mother's sentiments towards
her sons, the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes,
as if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.

Her exclamations, and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,
were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah, and completely
deceived the sisters, who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed
to perdition.

When the boys were eighteen years of age, the count gave them rooms in
his own part of the house, and sent them to study law under the
supervision of a solicitor, his former secretary. The two Maries knew
nothing therefore of fraternity, except by theory. At the time of the
marriage of the sisters, both brothers were practising in provincial
courts, and both were detained by important cases. Domestic life in
many families which might be expected to be intimate, united, and
homogeneous, is really spent in this way. Brothers are sent to a
distance, busy with their own careers, their own advancement,
occupied, perhaps, about the good of the country; the sisters are
engrossed in a round of other interests. All the members of such a
family live disunited, forgetting one another, bound together only by
some feeble tie of memory, until, perhaps, a sentiment of pride or
self-interest either joins them or separates them in heart as they
already are in fact. Modern laws, by multiplying the family by the
family, has created a great evil,--namely, individualism.

In the depths of this solitude where their girlhood was spent,
Angelique and Eugenie seldom saw their father, and when he did enter
the grand apartment of his wife on the first floor, he brought with
him a saddened face. In his own home he always wore the grave and
solemn look of a magistrate on the bench. When the little girls had
passed the age of dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to
use their minds (an epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke)
they divined the secret of the cares that lined their father's
forehead, and they recognized beneath that mask of sternness the
relics of a kind heart and a fine character. They vaguely perceived
how he had yielded to the forces of religion in his household,
disappointed as he was in his hopes of a husband, and wounded in the
tenderest fibres of paternity,--the love of a father for his
daughters. Such griefs were singularly moving to the hearts of the two
young girls, who were themselves deprived of all tenderness.
Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters, with an arm
round each little waist, and stepping with their own short steps, the
father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight of the
house, and kiss them on their foreheads; his eyes, his lips, his whole
countenance expressing the deepest commiseration.

"You are not very happy, my dear little girls," he said one day; "but
I shall marry you early. It will comfort me to have you leave home."

"Papa," said Eugenie, "we have decided to take the first man who
offers."

"Ah!" he cried, "that is the bitter fruit of such a system. They want
to make saints, and they make--" he stopped without ending his
sentence.

Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father's
"Adieu," or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home. They
pitied that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.

This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the
two sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the
hand of Nature. Many men, driven to marriage, prefer a girl taken from
a convent, and saturated with piety, to a girl brought up to worldly
ideas. There seems to be no middle course. A man must marry either an
educated girl, who reads the newspapers and comments upon them, who
waltzes with a dozen young men, goes to the theatre, devours novels,
cares nothing for religion, and makes her own ethics, or an ignorant
and innocent young girl, like either of the two Maries. Perhaps there
may be as much danger with the one kind as with the other. Yet the
vast majority of men who are not so old as Arnolphe, prefer a
religious Agnes to a budding Celimene.

The two Maries, who were small and slender, had the same figure, the
same foot, the same hand. Eugenie, the younger, was fair-haired, like
her mother, Angelique was dark-haired, like the father. But they both
had the same complexion,--a skin of the pearly whiteness which shows
the richness and purity of the blood, where the color rises through a
tissue like that of the jasmine, soft, smooth, and tender to the
touch. Eugenie's blue eyes and the brown eyes of Angelique had an
expression of artless indifference, of ingenuous surprise, which was
rendered by the vague manner with which the pupils floated on the
fluid whiteness of the eyeball. They were both well-made; the rather
thin shoulders would develop later. Their throats, long veiled,
delighted the eye when their husbands requested them to wear low
dresses to a ball, on which occasion they both felt a pleasing shame,
which made them first blush behind closed doors, and afterwards,
through a whole evening in company.

On the occasion when this scene opens, and the eldest, Angelique, was
weeping, while the younger, Eugenie, was consoling her, their hands
and arms were white as milk. Each had nursed a child,--one a boy, the
other a daughter. Eugenie, as a girl, was thought very giddy by her
mother, who had therefore treated her with especial watchfulness and
severity. In the eyes of that much-feared mother, Angelique, noble and
proud, appeared to have a soul so lofty that it would guard itself,
whereas, the more lively Eugenie needed restraint. There are many
charming beings misused by fate,--beings who ought by rights to
prosper in this life, but who live and die unhappy, tortured by some
evil genius, the victims of unfortunate circumstances. The innocent
and naturally light-hearted Eugenie had fallen into the hands and
beneath the malicious despotism of a self-made man on leaving the
maternal prison. Angelique, whose nature inclined her to deeper
sentiments, was thrown into the upper spheres of Parisian social life,
with the bridle lying loose upon her neck.



                              CHAPTER II

                     A CONFIDENCE BETWEEN SISTERS

Madame de Vandenesse, Marie-Angelique, who seemed to have broken down
under a weight of troubles too heavy for her soul to bear, was lying
back on the sofa with bent limbs, and her head tossing restlessly. She
had rushed to her sister's house after a brief appearance at the
Opera. Flowers were still in her hair, but others were scattered upon
the carpet, together with her gloves, her silk pelisse, and muff and
hood. Tears were mingling with the pearls on her bosom; her swollen
eyes appeared to make strange confidences. In the midst of so much
luxury her distress was horrible, and she seemed unable to summon
courage to speak.

"Poor darling!" said Madame du Tillet; "what a mistaken idea you have
of my marriage if you think that I can help you!"

Hearing this revelation, dragged from her sister's heart by the
violence of the storm she herself had raised there, the countess
looked with stupefied eyes at the banker's wife; her tears stopped,
and her eyes grew fixed.

"Are you in misery as well, my dearest?" she said, in a low voice.

"My griefs will not ease yours."

"But tell them to me, darling; I am not yet too selfish to listen. Are
we to suffer together once more, as we did in girlhood?"

"But alas! we suffer apart," said the banker's wife. "You and I live
in two worlds at enmity with each other. I go to the Tuileries when
you are not there. Our husbands belong to opposite parties. I am the
wife of an ambitious banker,--a bad man, my darling; while you have a
noble, kind, and generous husband."

"Oh! don't reproach me!" cried the countess. "To understand my
position, a woman must have borne the weariness of a vapid and barren
life, and have entered suddenly into a paradise of light and love; she
must know the happiness of feeling her whole life in that of another;
of espousing, as it were, the infinite emotions of a poet's soul; of
living a double existence,--going, coming with him in his courses
through space, through the world of ambition; suffering with his
griefs, rising on the wings of his high pleasures, developing her
faculties on some vast stage; and all this while living calm, serene,
and cold before an observing world. Ah! dearest, what happiness in
having at all hours an enormous interest, which multiplies the fibres
of the heart and varies them indefinitely! to feel no longer cold
indifference! to find one's very life depending on a thousand trifles!
--on a walk where an eye will beam to us from a crowd, on a glance
which pales the sun! Ah! what intoxication, dear, to live! to _live_
when other women are praying on their knees for emotions that never
come to them! Remember, darling, that for this poem of delight there
is but a single moment,--youth! In a few years winter comes, and cold.
Ah! if you possessed these living riches of the heart, and were
threatened with the loss of them--"

Madame du Tillet, terrified, had covered her face with her hands
during the passionate utterance of this anthem.

"I did not even think of reproaching you, my beloved," she said at
last, seeing her sister's face bathed in hot tears. "You have cast
into my soul, in one moment, more brands than I have tears to quench.
Yes, the life I live would justify to my heart a love like that you
picture. Let me believe that if we could have seen each other oftener,
we should not now be where we are. If you had seen my sufferings, you
must have valued your own happiness the more, and you might have
strengthened me to resist my tyrant, and so have won a sort of peace.
Your misery is an incident which chance may change, but mine is daily
and perpetual. To my husband I am a peg on which to hang his luxury,
the sign-post of his ambition, a satisfaction to his vanity. He has no
real affection for me, and no confidence. Ferdinand is hard and
polished as that piece of marble," she continued, striking the
chimney-piece. "He distrusts me. Whatever I may want for myself is
refused before I ask it; but as for what flatters his vanity and
proclaims his wealth, I have no occasion to express a wish. He
decorates my apartments; he spends enormous sums upon my
entertainments; my servants, my opera-box, all external matters are
maintained with the utmost splendor. His vanity spares no expense; he
would trim his children's swaddling-clothes with lace if he could, but
he would never hear their cries, or guess their needs. Do you
understand me? I am covered with diamonds when I go to court; I wear
the richest jewels in society, but I have not one farthing I can use.
Madame du Tillet, who, they say, is envied, who appears to float in
gold, has not a hundred francs she can call her own. If the father
cares little for his child, he cares less for its mother. Ah! he has
cruelly made me feel that he bought me, and that in marrying me
without a 'dot' he was wronged. I might perhaps have won him to love
me, but there's an outside influence against it,--that of a woman, who
is over fifty years of age, the widow of a notary, who rules him. I
shall never be free, I know that, so long as he lives. My life is
regulated like that of a queen; my meals are served with the utmost
formality; at a given hour I must drive to the Bois; I am always
accompanied by two footmen in full dress; I am obliged to return at a
certain hour. Instead of giving orders, I receive them. At a ball, at
the theatre, a servant comes to me and says: 'Madame's carriage is
ready,' and I am obliged to go, in the midst, perhaps, of something I
enjoy. Ferdinand would be furious if I did not obey the etiquette he
prescribes for his wife; he frightens me. In the midst of this hateful
opulence, I find myself regretting the past, and thinking that our
mother was kind; she left us the nights when we could talk together;
at any rate, I was living with a dear being who loved me and suffered
with me; whereas here, in this sumptuous house, I live in a desert."

At this terrible confession the countess caught her sister's hand and
kissed it, weeping.

"How, then, can I help you," said Eugenie, in a low voice. "He would
be suspicious at once if he surprised us here, and would insist on
knowing all that you have been saying to me. I should be forced to
tell a lie, which is difficult indeed with so sly and treacherous a
man; he would lay traps for me. But enough of my own miseries; let us
think of yours. The forty thousand francs you want would be, of
course, a mere nothing to Ferdinand, who handles millions with that
fat banker, Baron de Nucingen. Sometimes, at dinner, in my presence,
they say things to each other which make me shudder. Du Tillet knows
my discretion, and they often talk freely before me, being sure of my
silence. Well, robbery and murder on the high-road seem to me merciful
compared to some of their financial schemes. Nucingen and he no more
mind destroying a man than if he were an animal. Often I am told to
receive poor dupes whose fate I have heard them talk of the night
before,--men who rush into some business where they are certain to
lose their all. I am tempted, like Leonardo in the brigand's cave, to
cry out, 'Beware!' But if I did, what would become of me? So I keep
silence. This splendid house is a cut-throat's den! But Ferdinand and
Nucingen will lavish millions for their own caprices. Ferdinand is now
buying from the other du Tillet family the site of their old castle;
he intends to rebuild it and add a forest with large domains to the
estate, and make his son a count; he declares that by the third
generation the family will be noble. Nucingen, who is tired of his
house in the rue Saint-Lazare, is building a palace. His wife is a
friend of mine--Ah!" she cried, interrupting herself, "she might help
us; she is very bold with her husband; her fortune is in her own
right. Yes, she could save you."

"Dear heart, I have but a few hours left; let us go to her this
evening, now, instantly," said Madame de Vandenesse, throwing herself
into Madame du Tillet's arms with a burst of tears.

"I can't go out at eleven o'clock at night," replied her sister.

"My carriage is here."

"What are you two plotting together?" said du Tillet, pushing open the
door of the boudoir.

He came in showing a torpid face lighted now by a speciously amiable
expression. The carpets had dulled his steps and the preoccupation of
the two sisters had kept them from noticing the noise of his
carriage-wheels on entering the court-yard. The countess, in whom the
habits of social life and the freedom in which her husband had left
her had developed both wit and shrewdness,--qualities repressed in her
sister by marital despotism, which simply continued that of their
mother,--saw that Eugenie's terror was on the point of betraying them,
and she evaded that danger by a frank answer.

"I thought my sister richer than she is," she replied, looking
straight at her brother-in-law. "Women are sometimes embarrassed for
money, and do not wish to tell their husbands, like Josephine with
Napoleon. I came here to ask Eugenie to do me a service."

"She can easily do that, madame. Eugenie is very rich," replied du
Tillet, with concealed sarcasm.

"Is she?" replied the countess, smiling bitterly.

"How much do you want?" asked du Tillet, who was not sorry to get his
sister-in-law into his meshes.

"Ah, monsieur! but I have told you already we do not wish to let our
husbands into this affair," said Madame de Vandenesse, cautiously,
--aware that if she took his money, she would put herself at the
mercy of the man whose portrait Eugenie had fortunately drawn for her
not ten minutes earlier. "I will come to-morrow and talk with Eugenie."

"To-morrow?" said the banker. "No; Madame du Tillet dines to-morrow
with a future peer of France, the Baron de Nucingen, who is to leave
me his place in the Chamber of Deputies."

"Then permit her to join me in my box at the Opera," said the
countess, without even glancing at her sister, so much did she fear
that Eugenie's candor would betray them.

"She has her own box, madame," said du Tillet, nettled.

"Very good; then I will go to hers," replied the countess.

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

The countess felt the sting of that reproach, and began to laugh.

"Well, never mind; you shall not be made to pay anything this time.
Adieu, my darling."

"She is an insolent woman," said du Tillet, picking up the flowers
that had fallen on the carpet. "You ought," he said to his wife, "to
study Madame de Vandenesse. I'd like to see you before the world as
insolent and overbearing as your sister has just been here. You have a
silly, bourgeois air which I detest."

Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven as her only answer.

"Ah ca, madame! what have you both been talking of?" said the banker,
after a pause, pointing to the flowers. "What has happened to make
your sister so anxious all of a sudden to go to your opera-box?"

The poor helot endeavored to escape questioning on the score of
sleepiness, and turned to go into her dressing-room to prepare for the
night; but du Tillet took her by the arm and brought her back under
the full light of the wax-candles which were burning in two
silver-gilt sconces between fragrant nosegays. He plunged his light eyes
into hers and said, coldly:--

"Your sister came here to borrow forty thousand francs for a man in
whom she takes an interest, who'll be locked up within three days in a
debtor's prison."

The poor woman was seized with a nervous trembling, which she
endeavored to repress.

"You alarm me," she said. "But my sister is far too well brought up,
and she loves her husband too much to be interested in any man to that
extent."

"Quite the contrary," he said, dryly. "Girls brought up as you two
were, in the constraints and practice of piety, have a thirst for
liberty; they desire happiness, and the happiness they get in marriage
is never as fine as that they dreamt of. Such girls make bad wives."

"Speak for me," said poor Eugenie, in a tone of bitter feeling, "but
respect my sister. The Comtesse de Vandenesse is happy; her husband
gives her too much freedom not to make her truly attached to him.
Besides, if your supposition were true, she would never have told me
of such a matter."

"It is true," he said, "and I forbid you to have anything to do with
the affair. My interests demand that the man shall go to prison.
Remember my orders."

Madame du Tillet left the room.

"She will disobey me, of course, and I shall find out all the facts by
watching her," thought du Tillet, when alone in the boudoir. "These
poor fools always think they can do battle against us."

He shrugged his shoulders and rejoined his wife, or to speak the
truth, his slave.

The confidence made to Madame du Tillet by Madame Felix de Vandenesse
is connected with so many points of the latter's history for the last
six years, that it would be unintelligible without a succinct account
of the principal events of her life.



                             CHAPTER III

                   THE HISTORY OF A FORTUNATE WOMAN

Among the remarkable men who owed their destiny to the Restoration,
but whom, unfortunately, the restored monarchy kept, with Martignac,
aloof from the concerns of government, was Felix de Vandenesse,
removed, with several others, to the Chamber of peers during the last
days of Charles X. This misfortune, though, as he supposed, temporary,
made him think of marriage, towards which he was also led, as so many
men are, by a sort of disgust for the emotions of gallantry, those
fairy flowers of the soul. There comes a vital moment to most of us
when social life appears in all its soberness.

Felix de Vandenesse had been in turn happy and unhappy, oftener
unhappy than happy, like men who, at their start in life, have met
with Love in its most perfect form. Such privileged beings can never
subsequently be satisfied; but, after fully experiencing life, and
comparing characters, they attain to a certain contentment, taking
refuge in a spirit of general indulgence. No one deceives them, for
they delude themselves no longer; but their resignation, their
disillusionment is always graceful; they expect what comes, and
therefor they suffer less. Felix might still rank among the handsomest
and most agreeable men in Paris. He was originally commended to many
women by one of the noblest creatures of our epoch, Madame de
Mortsauf, who had died, it was said, out of love and grief for him;
but he was specially trained for social life by the handsome and
well-known Lady Dudley.

In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance,
owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him. Madame de
Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures; and perhaps
her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind. At any rate,
without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world of
love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of
politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of which
--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life, he
despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas
were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the
strictest tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the
Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he
had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He
himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still
remembered his unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath
the reserves of feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must
have brought the heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured,
embittered, or rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable,
and ready to unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two
opposite effects, the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of
ancient slavery, Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on
the one hand, resignation and tenderness, on the other.

The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de
Granville. In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure
young girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling
with the conjugal feeling. He knew his own heart was withered by the
world and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for
a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence. Beside those
springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience
with young and innocent ignorance. After soberly judging the position,
he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and
perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers
of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind
protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a
surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities
are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career
had taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was
busy, literary, and thoughtful by turns, all his forces, in fact, were
now employed in making his wife happy; to that end he applied his
mind.

When Marie-Angelique left the maternal purgatory, she rose at once
into the conjugal paradise prepared for her by Felix, rue du Rocher,
in a house where all things were redolent of aristocracy, but where
the varnish of society did not impede the ease and "laisser-aller"
which young and loving hearts desire so much. From the start,
Marie-Angelique tasted all the sweets of material life to the very
utmost. For two years her husband made himself, as it were, her
purveyor. He explained to her, by degrees, and with great art, the
things of life; he initiated her slowly into the mysteries of the
highest society; he taught her the genealogies of noble families; he
showed her the world; he guided her taste in dress; he trained her to
converse; he took her from theatre to theatre, and made her study
literature and current history. This education he accomplished with
all the care of a lover, father, master, and husband; but he did it
soberly and discreetly; he managed both enjoyments and instructions
in such a manner as not to destroy the value of her religious ideas.
In short, he carried out his enterprise with the wisdom of a great
master. At the end of four years, he had the happiness of having
formed in the Comtesse de Vandenesse one of the most lovable and
remarkable young women of our day.

Marie-Angelique felt for Felix precisely the feelings with which Felix
desired to inspire her,--true friendship, sincere gratitude, and a
fraternal love, in which was mingled, at certain times, a noble and
dignified tenderness, such as tenderness between husband and wife
ought to be. She was a mother, and a good mother. Felix had therefore
attached himself to his young wife by every bond without any
appearance of garroting her,--relying for his happiness on the charms
of habit.

None but men trained in the school of life--men who have gone round
the circle of disillusionment, political and amorous--are capable of
following out a course like this. Felix, however, found in his work
the same pleasure that painters, writers, architects take in their
creations. He doubly enjoyed both the work and its fruition as he
admired his wife, so artless, yet so well-informed, witty, but
natural, lovable and chaste, a girl, and yet a mother, perfectly free,
though bound by the chains of righteousness. The history of all good
homes is that of prosperous peoples; it can be written in two lines,
and has in it nothing for literature. So, as happiness is only
explicable to and by itself, these four years furnish nothing to
relate which was not as tender as the soft outlines of eternal
cherubs, as insipid, alas! as manna, and about as amusing as the tale
of "Astrea."

In 1833, this edifice of happiness, so carefully erected by Felix de
Vandenesse, began to crumble, weakened at its base without his
knowledge. The heart of a woman of twenty-five is no longer that of a
girl of eighteen, any more than the heart of a woman of forty is that
of a woman of thirty. There are four ages in the life of woman; each
age creates a new woman. Vandenesse knew, no doubt, the law of these
transformations (created by our modern manners and morals), but he
forgot them in his own case,--just as the best grammarian will forget
a rule of grammar in writing a book, or the greatest general in the
field under fire, surprised by some unlooked-for change of base,
forgets his military tactics. The man who can perpetually bring his
thought to bear upon his facts is a man of genius; but the man of the
highest genius does not display genius at all times; if he did, he
would be like to God.

After four years of this life, with never a shock to the soul, nor a
word that produced the slightest discord in this sweet concert of
sentiment, the countess, feeling herself developed like a beautiful
plant in a fertile soil, caressed by the sun of a cloudless sky, awoke
to a sense of a new self. This crisis of her life, the subject of this
Scene, would be incomprehensible without certain explanations, which
may extenuate in the eyes of women the wrong-doing of this young
countess, a happy wife, a happy mother, who seems, at first sight,
inexcusable.

Life results from the action of two opposing principles; when one of
them is lacking the being suffers. Vandenesse, by satisfying every
need, had suppressed desire, that king of creation, which fills an
enormous place in the moral forces. Extreme heat, extreme sorrow,
complete happiness, are all despotic principles that reign over spaces
devoid of production; they insist on being solitary; they stifle all
that is not themselves. Vandenesse was not a woman, and none but women
know the art of varying happiness; hence their coquetry, refusals,
fears, quarrels, and the all-wise clever foolery with which they put
in doubt the things that seemed to be without a cloud the night
before. Men may weary by their constancy, but women never. Vandenesse
was too thoroughly kind by nature to worry deliberately the woman he
loved; on the contrary, he kept her in the bluest and least cloudy
heaven of love. The problem of eternal beatitude is one of those whose
solution is known only to God. Here, below, the sublimest poets have
simply harassed their readers when attempting to picture paradise.
Dante's reef was that of Vandenesse; all honor to such courage!

Felix's wife began to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the
perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial
paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made
the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the
fold. Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning
of that emblematic serpent to which Eve listened, in all probability,
out of ennui. This deduction may seem a little venturesome to
Protestants, who take the book of Genesis more seriously than the Jews
themselves.

The situation of Madame de Vandenesse can, however, be explained
without recourse to Biblical images. She felt in her soul an enormous
power that was unemployed. Her happiness gave her no suffering; it
rolled along without care or uneasiness; she was not afraid of losing
it; each morning it shone upon her, with the same blue sky, the same
smile, the same sweet words. That clear, still lake was unruffled by
any breeze, even a zephyr; she would fain have seen a ripple on its
glassy surface. Her desire had something so infantine about it that it
ought to be excused; but society is not more indulgent than the God of
Genesis. Madame de Vandenesse, having now become intelligently clever,
was aware that such sentiments were not permissible, and she refrained
from confiding them to her "dear little husband." Her genuine
simplicity had not invented any other name for him; for one can't call
up in cold blood that delightfully exaggerated language which love
imparts to its victims in the midst of flames.

Vandenesse, glad of this adorable reserve, kept his wife, by
deliberate calculations, in the temperate regions of conjugal
affection. He never condescended to seek a reward or even an
acknowledgment of the infinite pains which he gave himself; his wife
thought his luxury and good taste her natural right, and she felt no
gratitude for the fact that her pride and self-love had never
suffered. It was thus in everything. Kindness has its mishaps; often
it is attributed to temperament; people are seldom willing to
recognize it as the secret effort of a noble soul.

About this period of her life, Madame Felix de Vandenesse had attained
to a degree of worldly knowledge which enabled her to quit the
insignificant role of a timid, listening, and observing supernumerary,
--a part played, they say, for some time, by Giulia Grisi in the
chorus at La Scala. The young countess now felt herself capable of
attempting the part of prima-donna, and she did so on several
occasions. To the great satisfaction of her husband, she began to
mingle in conversations. Intelligent ideas and delicate observations
put into her mind by her intercourse with her husband, made her
remarked upon, and success emboldened her. Vandenesse, to whom the
world admitted that his wife was beautiful, was delighted when the
same assurance was given that she was clever and witty. On their
return from a ball, concert, or rout where Marie had shone
brilliantly, she would turn to her husband, as she took off her
ornaments, and say, with a joyous, self-assured air,--

"Were you pleased with me this evening?"

The countess excited jealousies; among others that of her husband's
sister, Madame de Listomere, who until now had patronized her,
thinking that she protected a foil to her own merits. A countess,
beautiful, witty and virtuous!--what a prey for the tongues of the
world! Felix had broken with too many women, and too many women had
broken with him, to leave them indifferent to his marriage. When these
women beheld in Madame de Vandenesse a small woman with red hands, and
rather awkward manner, saying little, and apparently not thinking
much, they thought themselves sufficiently avenged. The disasters of
July, 1830, supervened; society was dissolved for two years; the rich
evaded the turmoil and left Paris either for foreign travel or for
their estates in the country, and none of the salons reopened until
1833. When that time came, the faubourg Saint-Germain still sulked,
but it held intercourse with a few houses, regarding them as neutral
ground,--among others that of the Austrian ambassador, where the
legitimist society and the new social world met together in the
persons of their best representatives.

Attached by many ties of the heart and by gratitude to the exiled
family, and strong in his personal convictions, Vandenesse did not
consider himself obliged to imitate the silly behavior of his party.
In times of danger, he had done his duty at the risk of his life; his
fidelity had never been compromised, and he determined to take his
wife into general society without fear of its becoming so. His former
mistresses could scarcely recognize the bride they had thought so
childish in the elegant, witty, and gentle countess, who now appeared
in society with the exquisite manners of the highest female
aristocracy. Mesdames d'Espard, de Manerville, and Lady Dudley, with
others less known, felt the serpent waking up in the depths of their
hearts; they heard the low hissings of angry pride; they were jealous
of Felix's happiness, and would gladly have given their prettiest
jewel to do him some harm; but instead of being hostile to the
countess, these kind, ill-natured women surrounded her, showed her the
utmost friendship, and praised her to me. Sufficiently aware of their
intentions, Felix watched their relations with Marie, and warned her
to distrust them. They all suspected the uneasiness of the count at
their intimacy with his wife, and they redoubled their attentions and
flatteries, so that they gave her an enormous vogue in society, to the
great displeasure of her sister-in-law, the Marquise de Listomere, who
could not understand it. The Comtesse Felix de Vandenesse was cited as
the most charming and the cleverest woman in Paris. Marie's other
sister-in-law, the Marquise Charles de Vandenesse, was consumed with
vexation at the confusion of names and the comparisons it sometimes
brought about. Though the marquise was a handsome and clever woman,
her rivals took delight in comparing her with her sister-in-law, with
all the more point because the countess was a dozen years younger.
These women knew very well what bitterness Marie's social vogue would
bring into her intercourse with both of her sisters-in-law, who, in
fact, became cold and disobliging in proportion to her triumph in
society. She was thus surrounded by dangerous relations and intimate
enemies.

Every one knows that French literature at that particular period was
endeavoring to defend itself against an apathetic indifference (the
result of the political drama) by producing works more or less
Byronian, in which the only topics really discussed were conjugal
delinquencies. Infringements of the marriage tie formed the staple of
reviews, books, and dramas. This eternal subject grew more and more
the fashion. The lover, that nightmare of husbands, was everywhere,
except perhaps in homes, where, in point of fact, under the bourgeois
regime, he was less seen than formerly. It is not when every one
rushes to their window and cries "Thief!" and lights the streets, that
robbers abound. It is true that during those years so fruitful of
turmoil--urban, political, and moral--a few matrimonial catastrophes
took place; but these were exceptional, and less observed than they
would have been under the Restoration. Nevertheless, women talked a
great deal together about books and the stage, then the two chief
forms of poesy. The lover thus became one of their leading topics,--a
being rare in point of act and much desired. The few affairs which
were known gave rise to discussions, and these discussions were, as
usually happens, carried on by immaculate women.

A fact worthy of remark is the aversion shown to such conversations by
women who are enjoying some illicit happiness; they maintain before
the eyes of the world a reserved, prudish, and even timid countenance;
they seem to ask silence on the subject, or some condonation of their
pleasure from society. When, on the contrary, a woman talks freely of
such catastrophes, and seems to take pleasure in doing so, allowing
herself to explain the emotions that justify the guilty parties, we
may be sure that she herself is at the crossways of indecision, and
does not know what road she might take.

During this winter, the Comtesse de Vandenesse heard the great voice
of the social world roaring in her ears, and the wind of its stormy
gusts blew round her. Her pretended friends, who maintained their
reputations at the height of their rank and their positions, often
produced in her presence the seductive idea of the lover; they cast
into her soul certain ardent talk of love, the "mot d'enigme" which
life propounds to woman, the grand passion, as Madame de Stael called
it,--preaching by example. When the countess asked naively, in a small
and select circle of these friends, what difference there was between
a lover and a husband, all those who wished evil to Felix took care to
reply in a way to pique her curiosity, or fire her imagination, or
touch her heart, or interest her mind.

"Oh! my dear, we vegetate with a husband, but we live with a lover,"
said her sister-in-law, the marquise.

"Marriage, my dear, is our purgatory; love is paradise," said Lady
Dudley.

"Don't believe her," cried Mademoiselle des Touches; "it is hell."

"But a hell we like," remarked Madame de Rochefide. "There is often
more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!"

"With a husband, my dear innocent, we live, as it were, in our own
life; but to love, is to live in the life of another," said the
Marquise d'Espard.

"A lover is forbidden fruit, and that to me, says all!" cried the
pretty Moina de Saint-Heren, laughing.

When she was not at some diplomatic rout, or at a ball given by rich
foreigners, like Lady Dudley or the Princesse Galathionne, the
Comtesse de Vandenesse might be seen, after the Opera, at the houses
of Madame d'Espard, the Marquise de Listomere, Mademoiselle des
Touches, the Comtesse de Montcornet, or the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu,
the only aristocratic houses then open; and never did she leave any
one of them without some evil seed of the world being sown in her
heart. She heard talk of completing her life,--a saying much in
fashion in those days; of being comprehended,--another word to which
women gave strange meanings. She often returned home uneasy, excited,
curious, and thoughtful. She began to find something less, she hardly
knew what, in her life; but she did not yet go so far as to think it
lonely.



                              CHAPTER IV

                           A CELEBRATED MAN

The most amusing society, but also the most mixed, which Madame Felix
de Vandenesse frequented, was that of the Comtesse de Montcornet, a
charming little woman, who received illustrious artists, leading
financial personages, distinguished writers; but only after subjecting
them to so rigid an examination that the most exclusive aristocrat had
nothing to fear in coming in contact with this second-class society.
The loftiest pretensions were there respected.

During the winter of 1833, when society rallied after the revolution
of July, some salons, notably those of Mesdames d'Espard and de
Listomere, Mademoiselle des Touches, and the Duchesse de Grandlieu,
had selected certain of the celebrities in art, science, literature,
and politics, and received them. Society can lose nothing of its
rights, and it must be amused. At a concert given by Madame de
Montcornet toward the close of the winter of 1833, a man of rising
fame in literature and politics appeared in her salon, brought there
by one of the wittiest, but also one of the laziest writers of that
epoch, Emile Blondet, celebrated behind closed doors, highly praised
by journalists, but unknown beyond the barriers. Blondet himself was
well aware of this; he indulged in no illusions, and, among his other
witty and contemptuous sayings, he was wont to remark that fame is a
poison good to take in little doses.

From the moment when the man we speak of, Raoul Nathan, after a long
struggle, forced his way to the public gaze, he had put to profit the
sudden infatuation for form manifested by those elegant descendants of
the middle ages, jestingly called Young France. He assumed the
singularities of a man of genius and enrolled himself among those
adorers of art, whose intentions, let us say, were excellent; for
surely nothing could be more ridiculous than the costume of Frenchmen
in the nineteenth century, and nothing more courageous than an attempt
to reform it. Raoul, let us do him this justice, presents in his
person something fine, fantastic, and extraordinary, which needs a
frame. His enemies, or his friends, they are about the same thing,
agree that nothing could harmonize better with his mind than his
outward form.

Raoul Nathan would, perhaps, be more singular if left to his natural
self than he is with his various accompaniments. His worn and haggard
face gives him an appearance of having fought with angels or devils;
it bears some resemblance to that the German painters give to the dead
Christ; countless signs of a constant struggle between failing human
nature and the powers on high appear in it. But the lines in his
hollow cheeks, the projections of his crooked, furrowed skull, the
caverns around his eyes and behind his temples, show nothing weakly in
his constitution. His hard membranes, his visible bones are the signs
of remarkable solidity; and though his skin, discolored by excesses,
clings to those bones as if dried there by inward fires, it
nevertheless covers a most powerful structure. He is thin and tall.
His long hair, always in disorder, is worn so for effect. This
ill-combed, ill-made Byron has heron legs and stiffened knee-joints,
an exaggerated stoop, hands with knotty muscles, firm as a crab's
claws, and long, thin, wiry fingers. Raoul's eyes are Napoleonic, blue
eyes, which pierce to the soul; his nose is crooked and very shrewd;
his mouth charming, embellished with the whitest teeth that any woman
could desire. There is fire and movement in the head, and genius on
that brow. Raoul belongs to the small number of men who strike your
mind as you pass them, and who, in a salon, make a luminous spot to
which all eyes are attracted.

He makes himself remarked also by his "neglige," if we may borrow from
Moliere the word which Eliante uses to express the want of personal
neatness. His clothes always seem to have been twisted, frayed, and
crumpled intentionally, in order to harmonize with his physiognomy. He
keeps one of his hands habitually in the bosom of his waistcoat in the
pose which Girodet's portrait of Monsieur de Chateaubriand has
rendered famous; but less to imitate that great man (for he does not
wish to resemble any one) than to rumple the over-smooth front of his
shirt. His cravat is no sooner put on than it is twisted by the
convulsive motions of his head, which are quick and abrupt, like those
of a thoroughbred horse impatient of harness, and constantly tossing
up its head to rid itself of bit and bridle. His long and pointed
beard is neither combed, nor perfumed, nor brushed, nor trimmed, like
those of the elegant young men of society; he lets it alone, to grow
as it will. His hair, getting between the collar of his coat and his
cravat, lies luxuriantly on his shoulders, and greases whatever spot
it touches. His wiry, bony hands ignore a nailbrush and the luxury of
lemon. Some of his cofeuilletonists declare that purifying waters
seldom touch their calcined skin.

In short, the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as
if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of
order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which
knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and
boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of
bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its
tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without
apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns
somersets of wit, which at times are somewhat wearying. In society, he
is boldly awkward, and exhibits a contempt for conventions and a
critical air about things respected which makes him unpleasant to
narrow minds, and also to those who strive to preserve the doctrines
of old-fashioned, gentlemanly politeness; but for all that there is a
sort of lawless originality about him which women do not dislike.
Besides, to them, he is often most amiably courteous; he seems to take
pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities, and thus
obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity,
his self-love, or his pride.

"Why do you present yourself like that?" said the Marquise de
Vandenesse one day.

"Pearls live in oyster-shells," he answered, conceitedly.

To another who asked him somewhat the same question, he replied,--

"If I were charming to all the world, how could I seem better still to
the one woman I wish to please?"

Raoul Nathan imports this same natural disorder (which he uses as a
banner) into his intellectual life; and the attribute is not
misleading. His talent is very much that of the poor girls who go
about in bourgeois families to work by the day. He was first a critic,
and a great critic; but he felt himself cheated in that vocation. His
articles were equal to books, he said. The profits of theatrical work
then allured him; but, incapable of the slow and steady application
required for stage arrangement, he was forced to associate with
himself a vaudevillist, du Bruel, who took his ideas, worked them
over, and reduced them into those productive little pieces, full of
wit, which are written expressly for actors and actresses. Between
them, they had invented Florine, an actress now in vogue.

Humiliated by this association, which was that of the Siamese twins,
Nathan had produced alone, at the Theatre-Francais, a serious drama,
which fell with all the honors of war amid salvos of thundering
articles. In his youth he had once before appeared at the great and
noble Theatre-Francais in a splendid romantic play of the style of
"Pinto,"--a period when the classic reigned supreme. The Odeon was so
violently agitated for three nights that the play was forbidden by the
censor. This second piece was considered by many a masterpiece, and
won him more real reputation than all his productive little pieces
done with collaborators,--but only among a class to whom little
attention is paid, that of connoisseurs and persons of true taste.

"Make another failure like that," said Emile Blondet, "and you'll be
immortal."

But instead of continuing in that difficult path, Nathan had fallen,
out of sheer necessity, into the powder and patches of
eighteenth-century vaudeville, costume plays, and the reproduction,
scenically, of successful novels.

Nevertheless, he passed for a great mind which had not said its last
word. He had, moreover, attempted permanent literature, having
published three novels, not to speak of several others which he kept
in press like fish in a tank. One of these three books, the first
(like that of many writers who can only make one real trip into
literature), had obtained a very brilliant success. This work,
imprudently placed in the front rank, this really artistic work he was
never weary of calling the finest book of the period, the novel of the
century.

Raoul complained bitterly of the exigencies of art. He was one of
those who contributed most to bring all created work, pictures,
statues, books, building under the single standard of Art. He had
begun his career by committing a volume of verse, which won him a
place in the pleiades of living poets; among these verses was a
nebulous poem that was greatly admired. Forced by want of means to
keep on producing, he went from the theatre to the press, and from the
press to the theatre, dissipating and scattering his talent, but
believing always in his vein. His fame was therefore not unpublished
like that of so many great minds in extremity, who sustain themselves
only by the thought of work to be done.

Nathan resembled a man of genius; and had he marched to the scaffold,
as he sometimes wished he could have done, he might have struck his
brow with the famous action of Andre Chenier. Seized with political
ambition on seeing the rise to power of a dozen authors, professors,
metaphysicians, and historians, who encrusted themselves, so to speak,
upon the machine during the turmoils of 1830 and 1833, he regretted
that he had not spent his time on political instead of literary
articles. He thought himself superior to all those parvenus, whose
success inspired him with consuming jealousy. He belonged to the class
of minds ambitious of everything, capable of all things, from whom
success is, as it were, stolen; who go their way dashing at a hundred
luminous points, and settling upon none, exhausting at last the
good-will of others.

At this particular time he was going from Saint-Simonism into
republicanism, to return, very likely, to ministerialism. He looked
for a bone to gnaw in all corners, searching for a safe place where he
could bark secure from kicks and make himself feared. But he had the
mortification of finding he was held to be of no account by de Marsay,
then at the head of the government, who had no consideration whatever
for authors, among whom he did not find what Richelieu called a
consecutive mind, or more correctly, continuity of ideas; he counted
as any minister would have done on the constant embarrassment of
Raoul's business affairs. Sooner or later, necessity would bring him
to accept conditions instead of imposing them.

The real, but carefully concealed character of Raoul Nathan is of a
piece with his public career. He is a comedian in good faith, selfish
as if the State were himself, and a very clever orator. No one knows
better how to play off sentiments, glory in false grandeurs, deck
himself with moral beauty, do honor to his nature in language, and
pose like Alceste while behaving like Philinte. His egotism trots
along protected by this cardboard armor, and often almost reaches the
end he seeks. Lazy to a superlative degree, he does nothing, however,
until he is prodded by the bayonets of need. He is incapable of
continued labor applied to the creation of a work; but, in a paroxysm
of rage caused by wounded vanity, or in a crisis brought on by
creditors, he leaps the Eurotas and attains to some great triumph of
his intellect. After which, weary, and surprised at having created
anything, he drops back into the marasmus of Parisian dissipation;
wants become formidable; he has no strength to face them; and then he
comes down from his pedestal and compromises.

Influenced by a false idea of his grandeur and of his future,--the
measure of which he reckons on the noble success of one of his former
comrades, one of the few great talents brought to light by the
revolution of July,--he allows himself, in order to get out of his
embarrassments, certain laxities of principle with persons who are
friendly to him,--laxities which never come to the surface, but are
buried in private life, where no one ever mentions or complains of
them. The shallowness of his heart, the impurity of his hand, which
clasps that of all vices, all evils, all treacheries, all opinions,
have made him as inviolable as a constitutional king. Venial sins,
which excite a hue and cry against a man of high character, are
thought nothing of in him; the world hastens to excuse them. Men who
might otherwise be inclined to despise him shake hands with him,
fearing that the day may come when they will need him. He has, in
fact, so many friends that he wishes for enemies.

Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and
cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he
disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday. He has neither the time
nor the patience to write carefully; he does not observe, but he
listens. Incapable of constructing a vigorously framed plot, he
sometimes makes up for it by the impetuous ardor of his drawing. He
"does passion," to use a term of the literary argot; but instead of
awaking ideas, his heroes are simply enlarged individualities, who
excite only fugitive sympathies; they are not connected with any of
the great interests of life, and consequently they represent nothing.
Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his
mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke."
He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris. His
fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance
events, and to control them he distorts their meaning. In short, he is
not _true_; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is
the born juggler. Moreover, his pen gets its ink in the boudoir of an
actress.

Raoul Nathan is a fair type of the Parisian literary youth of the day,
with its false grandeurs and its real misery. He represents that youth
by his incomplete beauties and his headlong falls, by the turbulent
torrent of his existence, with its sudden reverses and its unhoped-for
triumphs. He is truly the child of a century consumed with envy,--a
century with a thousand rivalries lurking under many a system, which
nourish to their own profit that hydra of anarchy which wants wealth
without toil, fame without talent, success without effort, but whose
vices force it, after much rebellion and many skirmishes, to accept
the budget under the powers that be. When so many young ambitions,
starting on foot, give one another rendezvous at the same point, there
is always contention of wills, extreme wretchedness, bitter struggles.
In this dreadful battle, selfishness, the most overbearing or the most
adroit selfishness, gains the victory; and it is envied and applauded
in spite, as Moliere said, of outcries, and we all know it.

When, in his capacity as enemy to the new dynasty, Raoul was
introduced in the salon of Madame de Montcornet, his apparent
grandeurs were flourishing. He was accepted as the political critic of
the de Marsays, the Rastignacs, and the Roche-Hugons, who had stepped
into power. Emile Blondet, the victim of incurable hesitation and of
his innate repugnance to any action that concerned only himself,
continued his trade of scoffer, took sides with no one, and kept well
with all. He was friendly with Raoul, friendly with Rastignac,
friendly with Montcornet.

"You are a political triangle," said de Marsay, laughing, when they
met at the Opera. "That geometric form, my dear fellow, belongs only
to the Deity, who has nothing to do; ambitious men ought to follow
curved lines, the shortest road in politics."

Seen from a distance, Raoul Nathan was a very fine meteor. Fashion
accepted his ways and his appearance. His borrowed republicanism gave
him, for the time being, that Jansenist harshness assumed by the
defenders of the popular cause, while they inwardly scoff at it,--a
quality not without charm in the eyes of women. Women like to perform
prodigies, break rocks, and soften natures which seem of iron.

Raoul's moral costume was therefore in keeping with his clothes. He
was fitted to be what he became to the Eve who was bored in her
paradise in the rue du Rocher,--the fascinating serpent, the fine
talker with magnetic eyes and harmonious motions who tempted the first
woman. No sooner had the Comtesse Marie laid eyes on Raoul than she
felt an inward emotion, the violence of which caused her a species of
terror. The glance of that fraudulent great man exercised a physical
influence upon her, which quivered in her very heart, and troubled it.
But the trouble was pleasure. The purple mantle which celebrity had
draped for a moment round Nathan's shoulders dazzled the ingenuous
young woman. When tea was served, she rose from her seat among a knot
of talking women, where she had been striving to see and hear that
extraordinary being. Her silence and absorption were noticed by her
false friends.

The countess approached the divan in the centre of the room, where
Raoul was perorating. She stood there with her arm in that of Madame
Octave de Camp, an excellent woman, who kept the secret of the
involuntary trembling by which these violent emotions betrayed
themselves. Though the eyes of a captivated woman are apt to shed
wonderful sweetness, Raoul was too occupied at that moment in letting
off fireworks, too absorbed in his epigrams going up like rockets (in
the midst of which were flaming portraits drawn in lines of fire) to
notice the naive admiration of one little Eve concealed in a group of
women. Marie's curiosity--like that which would undoubtedly
precipitate all Paris into the Jardin des Plantes to see a unicorn, if
such an animal could be found in those mountains of the moon, still
virgin of the tread of Europeans--intoxicates a secondary mind as much
as it saddens great ones; but Raoul was enchanted by it; although he
was then too anxious to secure all women to care very much for one
alone.

"Take care, my dear," said Marie's kind and gracious companion in her
ear, "and go home."

The countess looked at her husband to ask for his arm with one of
those glances which husbands do not always understand. Felix did so,
and took her home.

"My dear friend," said Madame d'Espard in Raoul's ear, "you are a
lucky fellow. You have made more than one conquest to-night, and among
them that of the charming woman who has just left us so abruptly."

"Do you know what the Marquise d'Espard meant by that?" said Raoul to
Rastignac, when they happened to be comparatively alone between one
and two o'clock in the morning.

"I am told that the Comtesse de Vandenesse has taken a violent fancy
to you. You are not to be pitied!" said Rastignac.

"I did not see her," said Raoul.

"Oh! but you will see her, you scamp!" cried Emile Blondet, who was
standing by. "Lady Dudley is going to ask you to her grand ball, that
you may meet the pretty countess."

Raoul and Blondet went off with Rastignac, who offered them his
carriage. All three laughed at the combination of an eclectic
under-secretary of State, a ferocious republican, and a political
atheist.

"Suppose we sup at the expense of the present order of things?" said
Blondet, who would fain recall suppers to fashion.

Rastignac took them to Very's, sent away his carriage, and all three
sat down to table to analyze society with Rabelaisian laughs. During
the supper, Rastignac and Blondet advised their provisional enemy not
to neglect such a capital chance of advancement as the one now offered
to him. The two "roues" gave him, in fine satirical style, the history
of Madame Felix de Vandenesse; they drove the scalpel of epigram and
the sharp points of much good wit into that innocent girlhood and
happy marriage. Blondet congratulated Raoul on encountering a woman
guilty of nothing worse so far than horrible drawings in red chalk,
attenuated water-colors, slippers embroidered for a husband, sonatas
executed with the best intentions,--a girl tied to her mother's
apron-strings till she was eighteen, trussed for religious practices,
seasoned by Vandenesse, and cooked to a point by marriage. At the
third bottle of champagne, Raoul unbosomed himself as he had never
done before in his life.

"My friends," he said, "you know my relations with Florine; you also
know my life, and you will not be surprised to hear me say that I am
absolutely ignorant of what a countess's love may be like. I have
often felt mortified that I, a poet, could not give myself a Beatrice,
a Laura, except in poetry. A pure and noble woman is like an unstained
conscience,--she represents us to ourselves under a noble form.
Elsewhere we may soil ourselves, but with her we are always proud,
lofty, and immaculate. Elsewhere we lead ill-regulated lives; with her
we breathe the calm, the freshness, the verdure of an oasis--"

"Go on, go on, my dear fellow!" cried Rastignac; "twang that fourth
string with the prayer in 'Moses' like Paganini."

Raoul remained silent, with fixed eyes, apparently musing.

"This wretched ministerial apprentice does not understand me," he
said, after a moment's silence.

So, while the poor Eve in the rue du Rocher went to bed in the sheets
of shame, frightened at the pleasure with which she had listened to
that sham great poet, these three bold minds were trampling with jests
over the tender flowers of her dawning love. Ah! if women only knew
the cynical tone that such men, so humble, so fawning in their
presence, take behind their backs! how they sneer at what they say
they adore! Fresh, pure, gracious being, how the scoffing jester
disrobes and analyzes her! but, even so, the more she loses veils, the
more her beauty shines.

Marie was at this moment comparing Raoul and Felix, without imagining
the danger there might be for her in such comparisons. Nothing could
present a greater contrast than the disorderly, vigorous Raoul to
Felix de Vandenesse, who cared for his person like a dainty woman,
wore well-fitting clothes, had a charming "desinvoltura," and was a
votary of English nicety, to which, in earlier days, Lady Dudley had
trained him. Marie, as a good and pious woman, soon forbade herself
even to think of Raoul, and considered that she was a monster of
ingratitude for making the comparison.

"What do you think of Raoul Nathan?" she asked her husband the next
day at breakfast.

"He is something of a charlatan," replied Felix; "one of those
volcanoes who are easily calmed down with a little gold-dust. Madame
de Montcornet makes a mistake in admitting him."

This answer annoyed Marie, all the more because Felix supported his
opinion with certain facts, relating what he knew of Raoul Nathan's
life,--a precarious existence mixed up with a popular actress.

"If the man has genius," he said in conclusion, "he certainly has
neither the constancy nor the patience which sanctifies it, and makes
it a thing divine. He endeavors to impose on the world by placing
himself on a level which he does nothing to maintain. True talent,
pains-taking and honorable talent does not act thus. Men who possess
such talent follow their path courageously; they accept its pains and
penalties, and don't cover them with tinsel."

A woman's thought is endowed with incredible elasticity. When she
receives a knockdown blow, she bends, seems crushed, and then renews
her natural shape in a given time.

"Felix is no doubt right," thought she.

But three days later she was once more thinking of the serpent,
recalled to him by that singular emotion, painful and yet sweet, which
the first sight of Raoul had given her. The count and countess went to
Lady Dudley's grand ball, where, by the bye, de Marsay appeared in
society for the last time. He died about two months later, leaving the
reputation of a great statesman, because, as Blondet remarked, he was
incomprehensible.

Vandenesse and his wife again met Raoul Nathan at this ball, which was
remarkable for the meeting of several personages of the political
drama, who were not a little astonished to find themselves together.
It was one of the first solemnities of the great world. The salons
presented a magnificent spectacle to the eye,--flowers, diamonds, and
brilliant head-dresses; all jewel-boxes emptied; all resources of the
toilet put under contribution. The ball-room might be compared to one
of those choice conservatories where rich horticulturists collect the
most superb rarities,--same brilliancy, same delicacy of texture. On
all sides white or tinted gauzes like the wings of the airiest
dragon-fly, crepes, laces, blondes, and tulles, varied as the fantasies
of entomological nature; dentelled, waved, and scalloped; spider's webs
of gold and silver; mists of silk embroidered by fairy fingers; plumes
colored by the fire of the tropics drooping from haughty heads; pearls
twined in braided hair; shot or ribbed or brocaded silks, as though
the genius of arabesque had presided over French manufactures,--all
this luxury was in harmony with the beauties collected there as if to
realize a "Keepsake." The eye received there an impression of the
whitest shoulders, some amber-tinted, others so polished as to seem
colandered, some dewy, some plump and satiny, as though Rubens had
prepared their flesh; in short, all shades known to man in white. Here
were eyes sparkling like onyx or turquoise fringed with dark lashes;
faces of varied outline presenting the most graceful types of many
lands; foreheads noble and majestic, or softly rounded, as if thought
ruled, or flat, as if resistant will reigned there unconquered;
beautiful bosoms swelling, as George IV. admired them, or widely
parted after the fashion of the eighteenth century, or pressed
together, as Louis XV. required; some shown boldly, without veils,
others covered by those charming pleated chemisettes which Raffaelle
painted. The prettiest feet pointed for the dance, the slimmest waists
encircled in the waltz, stimulated the gaze of the most indifferent
person present. The murmur of sweet voices, the rustle of gowns, the
cadence of the dance, the whir of the waltz harmoniously accompanied
the music. A fairy's wand seemed to have commanded this dazzling
revelry, this melody of perfumes, these iridescent lights glittering
from crystal chandeliers or sparkling in candelabra. This assemblage
of the prettiest women in their prettiest dresses stood out upon a
gloomy background of men in black coats, among whom the eye remarked
the elegant, delicate, and correctly drawn profile of nobles, the
ruddy beards and grave faces of Englishmen, and the more gracious
faces of the French aristocracy. All the orders of Europe glittered on
the breasts or hung from the necks of these men.

Examining this society carefully, it was seen to present not only the
brilliant tones and colors and outward adornment, but to have a soul,
--it lived, it felt, it thought. Hidden passions gave it a
physiognomy; mischievous or malignant looks were exchanged; fair and
giddy girls betrayed desires; jealous women told each other scandals
behind their fans, or paid exaggerated compliments. Society, anointed,
curled, and perfumed, gave itself up to social gaiety which went to
the brain like a heady liquor. It seemed as if from all foreheads, as
well as from all hearts, ideas and sentiments were exhaling, which
presently condensed and reacted in a volume on the coldest persons
present, and excited them. At the most animated moment of this
intoxicating party, in a corner of a gilded salon where certain
bankers, ambassadors, and the immoral old English earl, Lord Dudley,
were playing cards, Madame Felix de Vandenesse was irresistibly drawn
to converse with Raoul Nathan. Possibly she yielded to that
ball-intoxication which sometimes wrings avowals from the most
discreet.

At sight of such a fete, and the splendors of a world in which he had
never before appeared, Nathan was stirred to the soul by fresh
ambition. Seeing Rastignac, whose younger brother had just been made
bishop at twenty-seven years of age, and whose brother-in-law, Martial
de la Roche-Hugon, was a minister, and who himself was under-secretary
of State, and about to marry, rumor said, the only daughter of the
Baron de Nucingen,--a girl with an illimitable "dot"; seeing,
moreover, in the diplomatic body an obscure writer whom he had
formerly known translating articles in foreign journals for a
newspaper turned dynastic since 1830, also professors now made peers
of France,--he felt with anguish that he was left behind on a bad road
by advocating the overthrow of this new aristocracy of lucky talent,
of cleverness crowned by success, and of real merit. Even Blondet, so
unfortunate, so used by others in journalism, but so welcomed here,
who could, if he liked, enter a career of public service through the
influence of Madame de Montcornet, seemed to Nathan's eyes a striking
example of the power of social relations. Secretly, in his heart, he
resolved to play the game of political opinions, like de Marsay,
Rastignac, Blondet, Talleyrand, the leader of this set of men; to rely
on facts only, turn them to his own profit, regard his system as a
weapon, and not interfere with a society so well constituted, so
shrewd, so natural.

"My influence," he thought, "will depend on the influence of some
woman belonging to this class of society."

With this thought in his mind, conceived by the flame of this frenzied
desire, he fell upon the Comtesse de Vandenesse like a hawk on its
prey. That charming young woman in her head-dress of marabouts, which
produced the delightful "flou" of the paintings of Lawrence and
harmonized well with her gentle nature, was penetrated through and
through by the foaming vigor of this poet wild with ambition. Lady
Dudley, whom nothing escaped, aided this tete-a-tete by throwing the
Comte de Vandenesse with Madame de Manerville. Strong in her former
ascendancy over him, Natalie de Manerville amused herself by leading
Felix into the mazes of a quarrel of witty teasing, blushing
half-confidences, regrets coyly flung like flowers at his feet,
recriminations in which she excused herself for the sole purpose of
being put in the wrong.

These former lovers were speaking to each other for the first time
since their rupture; and while her husband's former love was stirring
the embers to see if a spark were yet alive, Madame Felix de
Vandenesse was undergoing those violent palpitations which a woman
feels at the certainty of doing wrong, and stepping on forbidden
ground,--emotions that are not without charm, and which awaken various
dormant faculties. Women are fond of using Bluebeard's bloody key,
that fine mythological idea for which we are indebted to Perrault.

The dramatist--who knew his Shakespeare--displayed his wretchedness,
related his struggle with men and things, made his hearer aware of his
baseless grandeur, his unrecognized political genius, his life without
noble affections. Without saying a single definite word, he contrived
to suggest to this charming woman that she should play the noble part
of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, and love and protect him. It was all, of
course, in the ethereal regions of sentiment. Forget-me-nots are not
more blue, lilies not more white than the images, thoughts, and
radiantly illumined brow of this accomplished artist, who was likely
to send his conversation to a publisher. He played his part of reptile
to this poor Eve so cleverly, he made the fatal bloom of the apple so
dazzling to her eyes, that Marie left the ball-room filled with that
species of remorse which resembles hope, flattered in all her
vanities, stirred to every corner of her heart, caught by her own
virtues, allured by her native pity for misfortune.

Perhaps Madame de Manerville had taken Vandenesse into the salon where
his wife was talking with Nathan; perhaps he had come there himself to
fetch Marie, and take her home; perhaps his conversation with his
former flame had awakened slumbering griefs; certain it is that when
his wife took his arm to leave the ball-room, she saw that his face
was sad and his look serious. The countess wondered if he was
displeased with her. No sooner were they seated in the carriage than
she turned to Felix and said, with a mischievous smile,--

"Did not I see you talking half the evening with Madame de
Manerville?"

Felix was not out of the tangled paths into which his wife had led him
by this charming little quarrel, when the carriage turned into their
court-yard. This was Marie's first artifice dictated by her new
emotion; and she even took pleasure in triumphing over a man who,
until then, had seemed to her so superior.



                              CHAPTER V

                               FLORINE

Between the rue Basse-du-Rempart and the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins,
Raoul had, on the third floor of an ugly and narrow house, in the
Passage Sandrie, a poor enough lodging, cold and bare, where he lived
ostensibly for the general public, for literary neophytes, and for his
creditors, duns, and other annoying persons whom he kept on the
threshold of private life. His real home, his fine existence, his
presentation of himself before his friends, was in the house of
Mademoiselle Florine, a second-class comedy actress, where, for ten
years, the said friends, journalists, certain authors, and writers in
general disported themselves in the society of equally illustrious
actresses. For ten years Raoul had attached himself so closely to this
woman that he passed more than half his life with her; he took all his
meals at her house unless he had some friend to invite, or an
invitation to dinner elsewhere.

To consummate corruption, Florine added a lively wit, which
intercourse with artists had developed and practice sharpened day by
day. Wit is thought to be a quality rare in comedians. It is so
natural to suppose that persons who spend their lives in showing
things on the outside have nothing within. But if we reflect on the
small number of actors and actresses who live in each century, and
also on how many dramatic authors and fascinating women this
population has supplied relatively to its numbers, it is allowable to
refute that opinion, which rests, and apparently will rest forever, on
a criticism made against dramatic artists,--namely, that their
personal sentiments are destroyed by the plastic presentation of
passions; whereas, in fact, they put into their art only their gifts
of mind, memory, and imagination. Great artists are beings who, to
quote Napoleon, can cut off at will the connection which Nature has
put between the senses and thought. Moliere and Talma, in their old
age, were more in love than ordinary men in all their lives.

Accustomed to listen to journalists, who guess at most things, putting
two and two together, to writers, who foresee and tell all that they
see; accustomed also to the ways of certain political personages, who
watched one another in her house, and profited by all admissions,
Florine presented in her own person a mixture of devil and angel,
which made her peculiarly fitted to receive these roues. They
delighted in her cool self-possession; her anomalies of mind and heart
entertained them prodigiously. Her house, enriched by gallant
tributes, displayed the exaggerated magnificence of women who, caring
little about the cost of things, care only for the things themselves,
and give them the value of their own caprices,--women who will break a
fan or a smelling-bottle fit for queens in a moment of passion, and
scream with rage if a servant breaks a ten-franc saucer from which
their poodle drinks.

Florine's dining-room, filled with her most distinguished offerings,
will give a fair idea of this pell-mell of regal and fantastic luxury.
Throughout, even on the ceilings, it was panelled in oak, picked out,
here and there, by dead-gold lines. These panels were framed in relief
with figures of children playing with fantastic animals, among which
the light danced and floated, touching here a sketch by Bixiou, that
maker of caricatures, there the cast of an angel holding a vessel of
holy water (presented by Francois Souchet), farther on a coquettish
painting of Joseph Bridau, a gloomy picture of a Spanish alchemist by
Hippolyte Schinner, an autograph of Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb,
framed in carved ebony, while, hanging opposite as a species of
pendant, was a letter from Napoleon to Josephine. All these things
were placed about without the slightest symmetry, but with almost
imperceptible art. On the chimney-piece, of exquisitely carved oak,
there was nothing except a strange, evidently Florentine, ivory
statuette attributed to Michael Angelo, representing Pan discovering a
woman under the skin of a young shepherd, the original of which is in
the royal palace of Vienna. On either side were candelabra of
Renaissance design. A clock, by Boule, on a tortoise-shell stand,
inlaid with brass, sparkled in the centre of one panel between two
statuettes, undoubtedly obtained from the demolition of some abbey. In
the corners of the room, on pedestals, were lamps of royal
magnificence, as to which a manufacturer had made strong remonstrance
against adapting his lamps to Japanese vases. On a marvellous
sideboard was displayed a service of silver plate, the gift of an
English lord, also porcelains in high relief; in short, the luxury of
an actress who has no other property than her furniture.

The bedroom, all in violet, was a dream that Florine had indulged from
her debut, the chief features of which were curtains of violet velvet
lined with white silk, and looped over tulle; a ceiling of white
cashmere with violet satin rays, an ermine carpet beside the bed; in
the bed, the curtains of which resembled a lily turned upside down was
a lantern by which to read the newspaper plaudits or criticisms before
they appeared in the morning. A yellow salon, its effect heightened by
trimmings of the color of Florentine bronze, was in harmony with the
rest of these magnificences, a further description of which would make
our pages resemble the posters of an auction sale. To find comparisons
for all these fine things, it would be necessary to go to a certain
house that was almost next door, belonging to a Rothschild.

Sophie Grignault, surnamed Florine by a form of baptism common in
theatres, had made her first appearances, in spite of her beauty, on
very inferior boards. Her success and her money she owed to Raoul
Nathan. This association of their two fates, usual enough in the
dramatic and literary world, did no harm to Raoul, who kept up the
outward conventions of a man of the world. Moreover, Florine's actual
means were precarious; her revenues came from her salary and her
leaves of absence, and barely sufficed for her dress and her household
expenses. Nathan gave her certain perquisites which he managed to levy
as critic on several of the new enterprises of industrial art. But
although he was always gallant and protecting towards her, that
protection had nothing regular or solid about it.

This uncertainty, and this life on a bough, as it were, did not alarm
Florine; she believed in her talent, and she believed in her beauty.
Her robust faith was somewhat comical to those who heard her staking
her future upon it, when remonstrances were made to her.

"I can have income enough when I please," she was wont to say; "I have
invested fifty francs on the Grand-livre."

No one could ever understand how it happened that Florine, handsome as
she was, had remained in obscurity for seven years; but the fact is,
Florine was enrolled as a supernumerary at thirteen years of age, and
made her debut two years later at an obscure boulevard theatre. At
fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist; a woman is simply all
promise.

She was now twenty-eight,--the age at which the beauties of a French
woman are in their glory. Painters particularly admired the lustre of
her white shoulders, tinted with olive tones about the nape of the
neck, and wonderfully firm and polished, so that the light shimmered
over them as it does on watered silk. When she turned her head, superb
folds formed about her neck, the admiration of sculptors. She carried
on this triumphant neck the small head of a Roman empress, the
delicate, round, and self-willed head of Pompeia, with features of
elegant correctness, and the smooth forehead of a woman who drives all
care away and all reflection, who yields easily, but is capable of
balking like a mule, and incapable at such times of listening to
reason. That forehead, turned, as it were, with one cut of the chisel,
brought out the beauty of the golden hair, which was raised in front,
after the Roman fashion, in two equal masses, and twisted up behind
the head to prolong the line of the neck, and enhance that whiteness
by its beautiful color. Black and delicate eyebrows, drawn by a
Chinese brush, encircled the soft eyelids, which were threaded with
rosy fibres. The pupils of the eyes, extremely bright, though striped
with brown rays, gave to her glance the cruel fixity of a beast of
prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness of the courtesan. The eyes
were gray, fringed with black lashes,--a charming contrast, which made
their expression of calm and contemplative voluptuousness the more
observable; the circle round the eyes showed marks of fatigue, but the
artistic manner in which she could turn her eyeballs, right and left,
or up and down, to observe, or seem to mediate, the way in which she
could hold them fixed, casting out their vivid fire without moving her
head, without taking from her face its absolute immovability (a
manoeuvre learned upon the stage), and the vivacity of their glance,
as she looked about a theatre in search of a friend, made her eyes the
most terrible, also the softest, in short, the most extraordinary eyes
in the world. Rouge had destroyed by this time the diaphanous tints of
her cheeks, the flesh of which was still delicate; but although she
could no longer blush or turn pale, she had a thin nose with rosy,
passionate nostrils, made to express irony,--the mocking irony of
Moliere's women-servants. Her sensual mouth, expressive of sarcasm and
love of dissipation, was adorned with a deep furrow that united the
upper lip with the nose. Her chin, white and rather fat, betrayed the
violence of passion. Her hands and arms were worthy of a sovereign.

But she had one ineradicable sign of low birth,--her foot was short
and fat. No inherited quality ever caused greater distress. Florine
had tried everything, short of amputation, to get rid of it. The feet
were obstinate, like the Breton race from which she came; they
resisted all treatment. Florine now wore long boots stuffed with
cotton, to give length, and the semblance of an instep. Her figure was
of medium height, threatened with corpulence, but still well-balanced,
and well-made.

Morally, she was an adept in all the attitudinizing, quarrelling,
alluring, and cajoling of her business; and she gave to those actions
a savor of their own by playing childlike innocence, and slipping in
among her artless speeches philosophical malignities. Apparently
ignorant and giddy, she was very strong on money-matters and
commercial law,--for the reason that she had gone through so much
misery before attaining to her present precarious success. She had
come down, story by story, from the garret to the first floor, through
so many vicissitudes! She knew life, from that which begins in Brie
cheese and ends at pineapples; from that which cooks and washes in the
corner of a garret on an earthenware stove, to that which convokes the
tribes of pot-bellied chefs and saucemakers. She had lived on credit
and not killed it; she was ignorant of nothing that honest women
ignore; she spoke all languages: she was one of the populace by
experience; she was noble by beauty and physical distinction.
Suspicious as a spy, or a judge, or an old statesman, she was
difficult to impose upon, and therefore the more able to see clearly
into most matters. She knew the ways of managing tradespeople, and how
to evade their snares, and she was quite as well versed in the prices
of things as a public appraiser. To see her lying on her sofa, like a
young bride, fresh and white, holding her part in her hand and
learning it, you would have thought her a child of sixteen, ingenuous,
ignorant, and weak, with no other artifice about her but her
innocence. Let a creditor contrive to enter, and she was up like a
startled fawn, and swearing a good round oath.

"Hey! my good fellow; your insolence is too dear an interest on the
money I owe you," she would say. "I am sick of seeing you. Send the
sheriff here; I'd prefer him to your silly face."

Florine gave charming dinners, concerts, and well-attended soirees,
where play ran high. Her female friends were all handsome; no old
woman had ever appeared within her precincts. She was not jealous; in
fact, she would have thought jealousy an admission of inferiority. She
had known Coralie and La Torpille in their lifetimes, and now knew
Tullia, Euphrasie, Aquilina, Madame du Val-Noble, Mariette,--those
women who pass through Paris like gossamer through the atmosphere,
without our knowing where they go nor whence they came; to-day queens,
to-morrow slaves. She also knew the actresses, her rivals, and all the
prima-donnas; in short, that whole exceptional feminine society, so
kindly, so graceful in its easy "sans-souci," which absorbs into its
own Bohemian life all who allow themselves to be caught in the frantic
whirl of its gay spirits, its eager abandonment, and its contemptuous
indifference to the future.

Though this Bohemian life displayed itself in her house in tumultuous
disorder, amid the laughter of artists of every description, the queen
of the revels had ten fingers on which she knew better how to count
than any of her guests. In that house secret saturnalias of literature
and art, politics and finance were carried on; there, desire reigned a
sovereign; there, caprice and fancy were as sacred as honor and virtue
to a bourgeoise; thither came Blondet, Finot, Etienne Lousteau, Vernou
the feuilletonist, Couture, Bixiou, Rastignac in his earlier days,
Claude Vignon the critic, Nucingen the banker, du Tillet, Conti the
composer,--in short, that whole devil-may-care legion of selfish
materialists of all kinds; friends of Florine and of the singers,
actresses and "danseuses" collected about her. They all hated or liked
one another according to circumstances.

This Bohemian resort, to which celebrity was the only ticket of
admission, was a Hades of the mind, the galleys of the intellect. No
one could enter there without having legally conquered fortune, done
ten years of misery, strangled two or three passions, acquired some
celebrity, either by books or waistcoats, by dramas or fine equipages;
plots were hatched there, means of making fortune scrutinized, all
things were discussed and weighed. But every man, on leaving it,
resumed the livery of his own opinions; there he could, without
compromising himself, criticise his own party, admit the knowledge and
good play of his adversaries, formulate thoughts that no one admits
thinking,--in short, say all, as if ready to do all. Paris is the only
place in the world where such eclectic houses exist; where all tastes,
all vices, all opinions are received under decent guise. Therefore it
is not yet certain that Florine will remain to the end of her career a
second-class actress.

Florine's life was by no means an idle one, or a life to be envied.
Many persons, misled by the magnificent pedestal that the stage gives
to a woman, suppose her in the midst of a perpetual carnival. In the
dark recesses of a porter's lodge, beneath the tiles of an attic roof,
many a poor girl dreams, on returning from the theatre, of pearls and
diamonds, gold-embroidered gowns and sumptuous girdles; she fancies
herself adored, applauded, courted; but little she knows of that
treadmill life, in which the actress is forced to rehearsals under
pain of fines, to the reading of new pieces, to the constant study of
new roles. At each representation Florine changes her dress at least
two or three times; often she comes home exhausted and half-dead; but
before she can rest, she must wash off with various cosmetics the
white and the red she has applied, and clean all the powder from her
hair, if she has played a part from the eighteenth century. She
scarcely has time for food. When she plays, an actress can live no
life of her own; she can neither dress, nor eat, nor talk. Florine
often has no time to sup. On returning from a play, which lasts, in
these days, till after midnight, she does not get to bed before two in
the morning; but she must rise early to study her part, order her
dresses, try them on, breakfast, read her love-letters, answer them,
discuss with the leader of the "claque" the place for the plaudits,
pay for the triumphs of the last month in solid cash, and bespeak
those of the month ahead. In the days of Saint-Genest, the canonized
comedian who fulfilled his duties in a pious manner and wore a hair
shirt, we must suppose that an actor's life did not demand this
incessant activity. Sometimes Florine, seized with a bourgeois desire
to get out into the country and gather flowers, pretends to the
manager that she is ill.

But even these mechanical operations are nothing in comparison with
the intrigues to be carried on, the pains of wounded vanity to be
endured,--preferences shown by authors, parts taken away or given to
others, exactions of the male actors, spite of rivals, naggings of the
stage manager, struggles with journalists; all of which require
another twelve hours to the day. But even so far, nothing has been
said of the art of acting, the expression of passion, the practice of
positions and gesture, the minute care and watchfulness required on
the stage, where a thousand opera-glasses are ready to detect a flaw,
--labors which consumed the life and thought of Talma, Lekain, Baron,
Contat, Clairon, Champmesle. In these infernal "coulisses" self-love
has no sex; the artist who triumphs, be it man or woman, has all the
other men and women against him or her. Then, as to money, however
many engagements Florine may have, her salary does not cover the costs
of her stage toilet, which, in addition to its costumes, requires an
immense variety of long gloves, shoes, and frippery; and all this
exclusive of her personal clothing. The first third of such a life is
spent in struggling and imploring; the next third, in getting a
foothold; the last third, in defending it. If happiness is frantically
grasped, it is because it is so rare, so long desired, and found at
last only amid the odious fictitious pleasures and smiles of such a
life.

As for Florine, Raoul's power in the press was like a protecting
sceptre; he spared her many cares and anxieties; she clung to him less
as a lover than a prop; she took care of him like a father, she
deceived him like a husband; but she would readily have sacrificed all
she had to him. Raoul could, and did do everything for her vanity as
an actress, for the peace of her self-love, and for her future on the
stage. Without the intervention of a successful author, there is no
successful actress; Champmesle was due to Racine, like Mars to Monvel
and Andrieux. Florine could do nothing in return for Raoul, though she
would gladly have been useful and necessary to him. She reckoned on
the charms of habit to keep him by her; she was always ready to open
her salons and display the luxury of her dinners and suppers for his
friends, and to further his projects. She desired to be for him what
Madame de Pompadour was to Louis XV. All actresses envied Florine's
position, and some journalists envied that of Raoul.

Those to whom the inclination of the human mind towards chance,
opposition, and contrasts is known, will readily understand that after
ten years of this lawless Bohemian life, full of ups and downs, of
fetes and sheriffs, of orgies and forced sobrieties, Raoul was
attracted to the idea of another love,--to the gentle, harmonious
house and presence of a great lady, just as the Comtesse Felix
instinctively desired to introduce the torture of great emotions into
a life made monotonous by happiness. This law of life is the law of
all arts, which exist only by contrasts. A work done without this
incentive is the loftiest expression of genius, just as the cloister
is the highest expression of the Christian life.

On returning to his lodging from Lady Dudley's ball, Raoul found a
note from Florine, brought by her maid, which an invincible sleepiness
prevented him from reading at that moment. He fell asleep, dreaming of
a gentle love that his life had so far lacked. Some hours later he
opened the note, and found in it important news, which neither
Rastignac nor de Marsay had allowed to transpire. The indiscretion of
a member of the government had revealed to the actress the coming
dissolution of the Chamber after the present session. Raoul instantly
went to Florine's house and sent for Blondet. In the actress's
boudoir, with their feet on the fender, Emile and Raoul analyzed the
political situation of France in 1834. On which side lay the best
chance of fortune? They reviewed all parties and all shades of party,
--pure republicans, presiding republicans, republicans without a
republic, constitutionals without a dynasty, ministerial
conservatives, ministerial absolutists; also the Right, the
aristocratic Right, the legitimist, henriquinquist Right, and the
carlest Right. Between the party of resistance and that of action
there was no discussion; they might as well have hesitated between
life and death.

At this period a flock of newspapers, created to represent all shades
of opinion, produced a fearful pell-mell of political principles.
Blondet, the most judicious mind of the day,--judicious for others,
never for himself, like some great lawyers unable to manage their own
affairs,--was magnificent in such a discussion. The upshot was that he
advised Nathan not to apostatize too suddenly.

"Napoleon said it; you can't make young republics of old monarchies.
Therefore, my dear fellow, become the hero, the support, the creator
of the Left Centre in the new Chamber, and you'll succeed. Once
admitted into political ranks, once in the government, you can be what
you like,--of any opinion that triumphs."

Nathan was bent on creating a daily political journal and becoming the
absolute master of an enterprise which should absorb into it the
countless little papers then swarming from the press, and establish
ramifications with a review. He had seen so many fortunes made all
around him by the press that he would not listen to Blondet, who
warned him not to trust to such a venture, declaring that the plan was
unsound, so great was the present number of newspapers, all fighting
for subscribers. Raoul, relying on his so-called friends and his own
courage, was all for daring it; he sprang up eagerly and said, with a
proud gesture,--

"I shall succeed."

"But you haven't a sou."

"I will write a play."

"It will fail."

"Let it fail!" replied Nathan.

He rushed through the various rooms of Florine's apartment, followed
by Blondet, who thought him crazy, looking with a greedy eye upon the
wealth displayed there. Blondet understood that look.

"There's a hundred and more thousand francs in them," he remarked.

"Yes," said Raoul, sighing, as he looked at Florine's sumptuous
bedstead; "but I'd rather be a pedler all my life on the boulevard,
and live on fried potatoes, than sell one item of this apartment."

"Not one item," said Blondet; "sell all. Ambition is like death; it
takes all or nothing."

"No, a hundred times no! I would take anything from my new countess;
but rob Florine of her shell? no."

"Upset our money-box, break one's balance-pole, smash our refuge,
--yes, that would be serious," said Blondet with a tragic air.

"It seems to me from what I hear that you want to play politics
instead of comedies," said Florine, suddenly appearing.

"Yes, my dear, yes," said Raoul, affectionately taking her by the neck
and kissing her forehead. "Don't make faces at that; you won't lose
anything. A minister can do better than a journalist for the queen of
the boards. What parts and what holidays you shall have!"

"Where will you get the money?" she said.

"From my uncle," replied Raoul.

Florine knew Raoul's "uncle." The word meant usury, as in popular
parlance "aunt" means pawn.

"Don't worry yourself, my little darling," said Blondet to Florine,
tapping her shoulder. "I'll get him the assistance of Massol, a lawyer
who wants to be deputy; also Finot, who has never yet got beyond his
'petit-journal,' and Pantin, who wants to be master of petitions, and
who dabbles in reviews. Yes, I'll save him from himself; we'll convoke
here to supper Etienne Lousteau, who can do the feuilleton; Claude
Vignon for criticisms; Felicien Vernou as general care-taker; the
lawyer will work, and du Tillet may take charge of the Bourse, the
money article, and all industrial questions. We'll see where these
various talents and slaves united will land the enterprise."

"In a hospital or a ministry,--where all men ruined in body or mind
are apt to go," said Raoul, laughing.

"Where and when shall we invite them?"

"Here, five days hence."

"Tell me the sum you want," said Florine, simply.

"Well, the lawyer, du Tillet, and Raoul will each have to put up a
hundred thousand francs before they embark on the affair," replied
Blondet. "Then the paper can run eighteen months; about long enough
for a rise and fall in Paris."

Florine gave a little grimace of approval. The two friends jumped
into a cabriolet to go about collecting guests and pens, ideas and
self-interests.

Florine meantime sent for certain dealers in old furniture,
bric-a-brac, pictures, and jewels. These men entered her sanctuary and
took an inventory of every article, precisely as if Florine were dead.
She declared she would sell everything at public auction if they did
not offer her a proper price. She had had the luck to please, she said,
an English lord, and she wanted to get rid of all her property and
look poor, so that he might give her a fine house and furniture, fit
to rival the Rothschilds. But in spite of these persuasions and
subterfuges, all the dealers would offer her for a mass of belongings
worth a hundred and fifty thousand was seventy thousand. Florine
thereupon offered to deliver over everything in eight days for eighty
thousand,--"To take or leave," she said,--and the bargain was
concluded. After the men had departed she skipped for joy, like the
hills of King David, and performed all manner of follies, not having
thought herself so rich.

When Raoul came back she made him a little scene, pretending to be
hurt; she declared that he abandoned her; that she had reflected; men
did not pass from one party to another, from the stage to the Chamber,
without some reason; there was a woman at the bottom; she had a rival!
In short, she made him swear eternal fidelity. Five days later she
gave a splendid feast. The new journal was baptized in floods of wine
and wit, with oaths of loyalty, fidelity, and good-fellowship. The
name, forgotten now like those of the Liberal, Communal, Departmental,
Garde National, Federal, Impartial, was something in "al" that was
equally imposing and evanescent. At three in the morning Florine could
undress and go to bed as if alone, though no one had left the house;
these lights of the epoch were sleeping the sleep of brutes. And when,
early in the morning, the packers and vans arrived to remove Florine's
treasures she laughed to see the porters moving the bodies of the
celebrated men like pieces of furniture that lay in their way. "Sic
transit" all her fine things! all her presents and souvenirs went to
the shops of the various dealers, where no one on seeing them would
know how those flowers of luxury had been originally paid for. It was
agreed that a few little necessary articles should be left, for
Florine's personal convenience until evening,--her bed, a table, a few
chairs, and china enough to give her guests their breakfast.

Having gone to sleep beneath the draperies of wealth and luxury, these
distinguished men awoke to find themselves within bare walls, full of
nail-holes, degraded into abject poverty.

"Why, Florine!--The poor girl has been seized for debt!" cried Bixiou,
who was one of the guests. "Quick! a subscription for her!"

On this they all roused up. Every pocket was emptied and produced a
total of thirty-seven francs, which Raoul carried in jest to Florine's
bedside. She burst out laughing and lifted her pillow, beneath which
lay a mass of bank-notes to which she pointed.

Raoul called to Blondet.

"Ah! I see!" cried Blondet. "The little cheat has sold herself out
without a word to us. Well done, you little angel!"

Thereupon, the actress was borne in triumph into the dining-room where
most of the party still remained. The lawyer and du Tillet had
departed.

That evening Florine had an ovation at the theatre; the story of her
sacrifice had circulated among the audience.

"I'd rather be applauded for my talent," said her rival in the
green-room.

"A natural desire in an actress who has never been applauded at all,"
remarked Florine.

During the evening Florine's maid installed her in Raoul's apartment
in the Passage Sandrie. Raoul himself was to encamp in the house where
the office of the new journal was established.

Such was the rival of the innocent Madame de Vandenesse. Raoul was the
connecting link between the actress and the countess,--a knot severed
by a duchess in the days of Louis XV. by the poisoning of Adrienne
Lecouvreur; a not inconceivable vengeance, considering the offence.

Florine, however, was not in the way of Raoul's dawning passion. She
foresaw the lack of money in the difficult enterprise he had
undertaken, and she asked for leave of absence from the theatre. Raoul
conducted the negotiation in a way to make himself more than ever
valuable to her. With the good sense of the peasant in La Fontaine's
fable, who makes sure of a dinner while the patricians talk, the
actress went into the provinces to cut faggots for her celebrated man
while he was employed in hunting power.



                              CHAPTER VI

                             ROMANTIC LOVE

On the morrow of the ball given by Lady Dudley, Marie, without having
received the slightest declaration, believed that she was loved by
Raoul according to the programme of her dreams, and Raoul was aware
that the countess had chosen him for her lover. Though neither had
reached the incline of such emotions where preliminaries are abridged,
both were on the road to it. Raoul, wearied with the dissipations of
life, longed for an ideal world, while Marie, from whom the thought of
wrong-doing was far, indeed, never imagined the possibility of going
out of such a world. No love was ever more innocent or purer than
theirs; but none was ever more enthusiastic or more entrancing in
thought.

The countess was captivated by ideas worthy of the days of chivalry,
though completely modernized. The glowing conversation of the poet had
more echo in her mind than in her heart. She thought it fine to be his
providence. How sweet the thought of supporting by her white and
feeble hand this colossus,--whose feet of clay she did not choose to
see; of giving life where life was needed; of being secretly the
creator of a career; of helping a man of genius to struggle with fate
and master it. Ah! to embroider his scarf for the tournament! to
procure him weapons! to be his talisman against ill-fortune! his balm
for every wound! For a woman brought up like Marie, religious and
noble as she was, such a love was a form of charity. Hence the
boldness of it. Pure sentiments often compromise themselves with a
lofty disdain that resembles the boldness of courtesans.

As soon as by her specious distinctions Marie had convinced herself
that she did not in any way impair her conjugal faith, she rushed into
the happiness of loving Raoul. The least little things of her daily
life acquired a charm. Her boudoir, where she thought of him, became a
sanctuary. There was nothing there that did not rouse some sense of
pleasure; even her ink-stand was the coming accomplice in the
pleasures of correspondence; for she would now have letters to read
and answer. Dress, that splendid poesy of the feminine life, unknown
or exhausted by her, appeared to her eyes endowed with a magic
hitherto unperceived. It suddenly became clear to her what it is to
most women, the manifestation of an inward thought, a language, a
symbol. How many enjoyments in a toilet arranged to please _him_, to
do _him_ honor! She gave herself up ingenuously to all those gracefully
charming things in which so many Parisian women spend their lives, and
which give such significance to all that we see about them, and in
them, and on them. Few women go to milliners and dressmakers for their
own pleasure and interest. When old they never think of adornment. The
next time you meet in the street a young woman stopping for a moment
to look into a shop-window, examine her face carefully. "Will he think
I look better in that?" are the words written on that fair brow, in
the eyes sparkling with hope, in the smile that flickers on the lips.

Lady Dudley's ball took place on a Saturday night. On the following
Monday the countess went to the Opera, feeling certain of seeing
Raoul, who was, in fact, watching for her on one of the stairways
leading down to the stalls. With what delight did she observe the
unwonted care he had bestowed upon his clothes. This despiser of the
laws of elegance had brushed and perfumed his hair; his waistcoat
followed the fashion, his cravat was well tied, the bosom of his shirt
was irreproachably smooth. Raoul was standing with his arms crossed as
if posed for his portrait, magnificently indifferent to the rest of
the audience and full of repressed impatience. Though lowered, his
eyes were turned to the red velvet cushion on which lay Marie's arm.
Felix, seated in the opposite corner of the box, had his back to
Nathan.

So, in a moment, as it were, Marie had compelled this remarkable man
to abjure his cynicism in the line of clothes. All women, high or low,
are filled with delight on seeing a first proof of their power in one
of these sudden metamorphoses. Such changes are an admission of
serfdom.

"Those women were right; there is a great pleasure in being
understood," she said to herself, thinking of her treacherous friends.

When the two lovers had gazed around the theatre with that glance that
takes in everything, they exchanged a look of intelligence. It was for
each as if some celestial dew had refreshed their hearts, burned-up
with expectation.

"I have been here for an hour in purgatory, but now the heavens are
opening," said Raoul's eyes.

"I knew you were waiting, but how could I help it?" replied those of
the countess.

Thieves, spies, lovers, diplomats, and slaves of any kind alone know
the resources and comforts of a glance. They alone know what it
contains of meaning, sweetness, thought, anger, villainy, displayed by
the modification of that ray of light which conveys the soul. Between
the box of the Comtesse Felix de Vandenesse and the step on which
Raoul had perched there were barely thirty feet; and yet it was
impossible to wipe out that distance. To a fiery being, who had
hitherto known no space between his wishes and their gratification,
this imaginary but insuperable gulf inspired a mad desire to spring to
the countess with the bound of a tiger. In a species of rage he
determined to try the ground and bow openly to the countess. She
returned the bow with one of those slight inclinations of the head
with which women take from their adorers all desire to continue their
attempt. Comte Felix turned round to see who had bowed to his wife; he
saw Nathan, but did not bow, and seemed to inquire the meaning of such
audacity; then he turned back slowly and said a few words to his wife.
Evidently the door of that box was closed to Nathan, who cast a
terrible look of hatred upon Felix.

Madame d'Espard had seen the whole thing from her box, which was just
above where Raoul was standing. She raised her voice in crying bravo
to some singer, which caused Nathan to look up to her; he bowed and
received in return a gracious smile which seemed to say:--

"If they won't admit you there come here to me."

Raoul obeyed the silent summons and went to her box. He felt the need
of showing himself in a place which might teach that little Vandenesse
that fame was every whit as good as nobility, and that all doors
turned on their hinges to admit him. The marquise made him sit in
front of her. She wanted to question him.

"Madame Felix de Vandenesse is fascinating in that gown," she said,
complimenting the dress as if it were a book he had published the day
before.

"Yes," said Raoul, indifferently, "marabouts are very becoming to her;
but she seems wedded to them; she wore them on Saturday," he added, in
a careless tone, as if to repudiate the intimacy Madame d'Espard was
fastening upon him.

"You know the proverb," she replied. "There is no good fete without a
morrow."

In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick
as women. Raoul pretended dulness, a last resort for clever men.

"That proverb is true in my case," he said, looking gallantly at the
marquise.

"My dear friend, your speech comes too late; I can't accept it," she
said, laughing. "Don't be so prudish! Come, I know how it was; you
complimented Madame de Vandenesse at the ball on her marabouts and she
has put them on again for your sake. She likes you, and you adore her;
it may be a little rapid, but it is all very natural. If I were
mistaken you wouldn't be twisting your gloves like a man who is
furious at having to sit here with me instead of flying to the box of
his idol. She has obtained," continued Madame d'Espard, glancing at
his person impertinently, "certain sacrifices which you refused to
make to society. She ought to be delighted with her success,--in fact,
I have no doubt she is vain of it; I should be so in her place
--immensely. She was never a woman of any mind, but she may now pass
for one of genius. I am sure you will describe her in one of those
delightful novels you write. And pray don't forget Vandenesse; put him
in to please me. Really, his self-sufficiency is too much. I can't
stand that Jupiter Olympian air of his,--the only mythological
character exempt, they say, from ill-luck."

"Madame," cried Raoul, "you rate my soul very low if you think me
capable of trafficking with my feelings, my affections. Rather than
commit such literary baseness, I would do as they do in England,--put
a rope round a woman's neck and sell her in the market."

"But I know Marie; she would like you to do it."

"She is incapable of liking it," said Raoul, vehemently.

"Oh! then you do know her well?"

Nathan laughed; he, the maker of scenes, to be trapped into playing
one himself!

"Comedy is no longer there," he said, nodding at the stage; "it is
here, in you."

He took his opera-glass and looked about the theatre to recover
countenance.

"You are not angry with me, I hope?" said the marquise, giving him a
sidelong glance. "I should have had your secret somehow. Let us make
peace. Come and see me; I receive every Wednesday, and I am sure the
dear countess will never miss an evening if I let her know you will be
there. So I shall be the gainer. Sometimes she comes between four and
five o'clock, and I'll be kind and add you to the little set of
favorites I admit at that hour."

"Ah!" cried Raoul, "how the world judges; it calls you unkind."

"So I am when I need to be," she replied. "We must defend ourselves.
But your countess I adore; you will be contented with her; she is
charming. Your name will be the first engraved upon her heart with
that infantine joy that makes a lad cut the initials of his love on
the barks of trees."

Raoul was aware of the danger of such conversations, in which a
Parisian woman excels; he feared the marquise would extract some
admission from him which she would instantly turn into ridicule among
her friends. He therefore withdrew, prudently, as Lady Dudley entered.

"Well?" said the Englishwoman to the marquise, "how far have they
got?"

"They are madly in love; he has just told me so."

"I wish he were uglier," said Lady Dudley, with a viperish look at
Comte Felix. "In other respects he is just what I want him: the son of
a Jew broker who died a bankrupt soon after his marriage; but the
mother was a Catholic, and I am sorry to say she made a Christian of
the boy."

This origin, which Nathan thought carefully concealed, Lady Dudley had
just discovered, and she enjoyed by anticipation the pleasure she
should have in launching some terrible epigram against Vandenesse.

"Heavens! I have just invited him to my house!" cried Madame d'Espard.

"Didn't I receive him at my ball?" replied Lady Dudley. "Some
pleasures, my dear love, are costly."

The news of the mutual attachment between Raoul and Madame de
Vandenesse circulated in the world after this, but not without
exciting denials and incredulity. The countess, however, was defended
by her friends, Lady Dudley, and Mesdames d'Espard and de Manerville,
with an unnecessary warmth that gave a certain color to the calumny.

On the following Wednesday evening Raoul went to Madame d'Espard's,
and was able to exchange a few sentences with Marie, more expressive
by their tones than their ideas. In the midst of the elegant assembly
both found pleasure in those enjoyable sensations given by the voice,
the gestures, the attitude of one beloved. The soul then fastens upon
absolute nothings. No longer do ideas or even language speak, but
things; and these so loudly, that often a man lets another pay the
small attentions--bring a cup of tea, or the sugar to sweeten it
--demanded by the woman he loves, fearful of betraying his emotion to
eyes that seem to see nothing and yet see all. Raoul, however, a man
indifferent to the eyes of the world, betrayed his passion in his
speech and was brilliantly witty. The company listened to the roar of
a discourse inspired by the restraint put upon him; restraint being
that which artists cannot endure. This Rolandic fury, this wit which
slashed down all things, using epigram as its weapon, intoxicated
Marie and amused the circle around them, as the sight of a bull goaded
with banderols amuses the company in a Spanish circus.

"You may kick as you please, but you can't make a solitude about you,"
whispered Blondet.

The words brought Raoul to his senses, and he ceased to exhibit his
irritation to the company. Madame d'Espard came up to offer him a cup
of tea, and said loud enough for Madame de Vandenesse to hear:--

"You are certainly very amusing; come and see me sometimes at four
o'clock."

The word "amusing" offended Raoul, though it was used as the ground of
an invitation. Blondet took pity on him.

"My dear fellow," he said, taking him aside into a corner, "you are
behaving in society as if you were at Florine's. Here no one shows
annoyance, or spouts long articles; they say a few words now and then,
they look their calmest when most desirous of flinging others out of
the window; they sneer softly, they pretend not to think of the woman
they adore, and they are careful not to roll like a donkey on the
high-road. In society, my good Raoul, conventions rule love. Either
carry off Madame de Vandenesse, or show yourself a gentleman. As it
is, you are playing the lover in one of your own books."

Nathan listened with his head lowered; he was like a lion caught in a
toil.

"I'll never set foot in this house again," he cried. "That
papier-mache marquise sells her tea too dear. She thinks me amusing! I
understand now why Saint-Just wanted to guillotine this whole class of
people."

"You'll be back here to-morrow."

Blondet was right. Passions are as mean as they are cruel. The next
day after long hesitation between "I'll go--I'll not go," Raoul left
his new partners in the midst of an important discussion and rushed to
Madame d'Espard's house in the faubourg Saint-Honore. Beholding
Rastignac's elegant cabriolet enter the court-yard while he was paying
his cab at the gate, Nathan's vanity was stung; he resolved to have a
cabriolet himself, and its accompanying tiger, too. The carriage of
the countess was in the court-yard, and the sight of it swelled
Raoul's heart with joy. Marie was advancing under the pressure of her
desires with the regularity of the hands of a clock obeying the
mainspring. He found her sitting at the corner of the fireplace in the
little salon. Instead of looking at Nathan when he was announced, she
looked at his reflection in a mirror.

"Monsieur le ministre," said Madame d'Espard, addressing Nathan, and
presenting him to de Marsay by a glance, "was maintaining, when you
came in, that the royalists and the republicans have a secret
understanding. You ought to know something about it; is it so?"

"If it were so," said Raoul, "where's the harm? We hate the same
thing; we agree as to our hatreds, we differ only in our love. That's
the whole of it."

"The alliance is odd enough," said de Marsay, giving a comprehensively
meaning glance at the Comtesse Felix and Nathan.

"It won't last," said Rastignac, thinking, perhaps, wholly of
politics.

"What do you think, my dear?" asked Madame d'Espard, addressing Marie.

"I know nothing of public affairs," replied the countess.

"But you soon will, madame," said de Marsay, "and then you will be
doubly our enemy."

So saying he left the room with Rastignac, and Madame d'Espard
accompanied them to the door of the first salon. The lovers had the
room to themselves for a few moments. Marie held out her ungloved hand
to Raoul, who took and kissed it as though he were eighteen years old.
The eyes of the countess expressed so noble a tenderness that the
tears which men of nervous temperament can always find at their
service came into Raoul's eyes.

"Where can I see you? where can I speak with you?" he said. "It is
death to be forced to disguise my voice, my look, my heart, my love--"

Moved by that tear Marie promised to drive daily in the Bois, unless
the weather were extremely bad. This promise gave Raoul more pleasure
than he had found in Florine for the last five years.

"I have so many things to say to you! I suffer from the silence to
which we are condemned--"

The countess looked at him eagerly without replying, and at that
moment Madame d'Espard returned to the room.

"Why didn't you answer de Marsay?" she said as she entered.

"We ought to respect the dead," replied Raoul. "Don't you see that he
is dying? Rastignac is his nurse,--hoping to be put in the will."

The countess pretended to have other visits to pay, and left the
house.

For this quarter of an hour Raoul had sacrificed important interests
and most precious time. Marie was perfectly ignorant of the life of
such men, involved in complicated affairs and burdened with exacting
toil. Women of society are still under the influence of the traditions
of the eighteenth century, in which all positions were definite and
assured. Few women know the harassments in the life of most men who in
these days have a position to make and to maintain, a fame to reach, a
fortune to consolidate. Men of settled wealth and position can now be
counted; old men alone have time to love; young men are rowing, like
Nathan, the galleys of ambition. Women are not yet resigned to this
change of customs; they suppose the same leisure of which they have
too much in those who have none; they cannot imagine other
occupations, other ends in life than their own. When a lover has
vanquished the Lernean hydra in order to pay them a visit he has no
merit in their eyes; they are only grateful to him for the pleasure he
gives; they neither know nor care what it costs. Raoul became aware as
he returned from this visit how difficult it would be to hold the
reins of a love-affair in society, the ten-horsed chariot of
journalism, his dramas on the stage, and his generally involved
affairs.

"The paper will be wretched to-night," he thought, as he walked away.
"No article of mine, and only the second number, too!"

Madame Felix de Vandenesse drove three times to the Bois de Boulogne
without finding Raoul; the third time she came back anxious and
uneasy. The fact was that Nathan did not choose to show himself in the
Bois until he could go there as a prince of the press. He employed a
whole week in searching for horses, a phantom and a suitable tiger,
and in convincing his partners of the necessity of saving time so
precious to them, and therefore of charging his equipage to the costs
of the journal. His associates, Massol and du Tillet agreed to this so
readily that he really believed them the best fellows in the world.
Without this help, however, life would have been simply impossible to
Raoul; as it was, it became so irksome that many men, even those of
the strongest constitutions, could not have borne it. A violent and
successful passion takes a great deal of space in an ordinary life;
but when it is connected with a woman in the social position of Madame
de Vandenesse it sucks the life out of a man as busy as Raoul. Here is
a list of the obligations his passion imposed upon him.

Every day, or nearly every day, he was obliged to be on horseback in
the Bois, between two and three o'clock, in the careful dress of a
gentleman of leisure. He had to learn at what house or theatre he
could meet Madame de Vandenesse in the evening. He was not able to
leave the party or the play until long after midnight, having obtained
nothing better than a few tender sentences, long awaited, said in a
doorway, or hastily as he put her into her carriage. It frequently
happened that Marie, who by this time had launched him into the great
world, procured for him invitations to dinner in certain houses where
she went herself. All this seemed the simplest life in the world to
her. Raoul moved by pride and led on by his passion never told her of
his labors. He obeyed the will of this innocent sovereign, followed in
her train, followed, also, the parliamentary debates, edited and wrote
for his newspaper, and put upon the stage two plays, the money for
which was absolutely indispensable to him. It sufficed for Madame de
Vandenesse to make a little face of displeasure when he tried to
excuse himself from attending a ball, a concert, or from driving in
the Bois, to compel him to sacrifice his most pressing interests to
her good pleasure. When he left society between one and two in the
morning he went straight to work until eight or nine. He was scarcely
asleep before he was obliged to be up and concocting the opinions of
his journal with the men of political influence on whom he depended,
--not to speak of the thousand and one other details of the paper.
Journalism is connected with everything in these days; with industrial
concerns, with public and private interests, with all new enterprises,
and all the schemes of literature, its self-loves, and its products.

When Nathan, harassed and fatigued, would rush from his editorial
office to the theatre, from the theatre to the Chamber, from the
Chamber to face certain creditors, he was forced to appear in the Bois
with a calm countenance, and gallop beside Marie's carriage in the
leisurely style of a man devoid of cares and with no other duties than
those of love. When in return for this toilsome and wholly ignored
devotion all he won were a few sweet words, the prettiest assurances
of eternal attachment, ardent pressures of the hand on the very few
occasions when they found themselves alone, he began to feel he was
rather duped by leaving his mistress in ignorance of the enormous
costs of these "little attentions," as our fathers called them. The
occasion for an explanation arrived in due time.

On a fine April morning the countess accepted Nathan's arm for a walk
through the sequestered path of the Bois de Boulogne. She intended to
make him one of those pretty little quarrels apropos of nothing, which
women are so fond of exciting. Instead of greeting him as usual, with
a smile upon her lips, her forehead illumined with pleasure, her eyes
bright with some gay or delicate thought, she assumed a grave and
serious aspect.

"What is the matter?" said Nathan.

"Why do you pretend to such ignorance?" she replied. "You ought to
know that a woman is not a child."

"Have I displeased you?"

"Should I be here if you had?"

"But you don't smile to me; you don't seem happy to see me."

"Oh! do you accuse me of sulking?" she said, looking at him with that
submissive air which women assume when they want to seem victims.

Nathan walked on a few steps in a state of real apprehension which
oppressed him.

"It must be," he said, after a moment's silence, "one of those
frivolous fears, those hazy suspicions which women dwell on more than
they do on the great things of life. You all have a way of tipping the
world sideways with a straw, a cobweb--"

"Sarcasm!" she said, "I might have expected it!"

"Marie, my angel, I only said those words to wring your secret out of
you."

"My secret would be always a secret, even if I told it to you."

"But all the same, tell it to me."

"I am not loved," she said, giving him one of those sly oblique
glances with which women question so maliciously the men they are
trying to torment.

"Not loved!" cried Nathan.

"No; you are too occupied with other things. What am I to you in the
midst of them? forgotten on the least occasion! Yesterday I came to
the Bois and you were not here--"

"But--"

"I had put on a new dress expressly to please you; you did not come;
where were you?"

"But--"

"I did not know where. I went to Madame d'Espard's; you were not
there."

"But--"

"That evening at the Opera, I watched the balcony; every time a door
opened my heart was beating!"

"But--"

"What an evening I had! You don't reflect on such tempests of the
heart."

"But--"

"Life is shortened by such emotions."

"But--"

"Well, what?" she said.

"You are right; life is shortened by them," said Nathan, "and in a few
months you will utterly have consumed mine. Your unreasonable
reproaches drag my secret from me-- Ha! you say you are not loved; you
are loved too well."

And thereupon he vividly depicted his position, told of his sleepless
nights, his duties at certain hours, the absolute necessity of
succeeding in his enterprise, the insatiable requirements of a
newspaper in which he was required to judge the events of the whole
world without blundering, under pain of losing his power, and so
losing all, the infinite amount of rapid study he was forced to give
to questions which passed as rapidly as clouds in this all-consuming
age, etc., etc.

Raoul made a great mistake. The Marquise d'Espard had said to him on
one occasion, "Nothing is more naive than a first love." As he
unfolded before Marie's eyes this life which seemed to her immense,
the countess was overcome with admiration. She had thought Nathan
grand, she now considered him sublime. She blamed herself for loving
him too much; begged him to come to her only when he could do so
without difficulty. Wait? indeed she could wait! In future, she should
know how to sacrifice her enjoyments. Wishing to be his stepping-stone
was she really an obstacle? She wept with despair.

"Women," she said, with tears in her eyes, "can only love; men act;
they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act. But we can
only think, and pray, and worship."

A love that had sacrificed so much for her sake deserved a recompense.
She looked about her like a nightingale descending from a leafy covert
to drink at a spring, to see if she were alone in the solitude, if the
silence hid no witness; then she raised her head to Raoul, who bent
his own, and let him take one kiss, the first and the only one that
she ever gave in secret, feeling happier at that moment than she had
felt in five years. Raoul thought all his toils well-paid. They both
walked forward they scarcely knew where, but it was on the road to
Auteuil; presently, however, they were forced to return and find their
carriages, pacing together with the rhythmic step well-known to
lovers. Raoul had faith in that kiss given with the quiet facility of
a sacred sentiment. All the evil of it was in the mind of the world,
not in that of the woman who walked beside him. Marie herself, given
over to the grateful admiration which characterizes the love of woman,
walked with a firm, light step on the gravelled path, saying, like
Raoul, but few words; yet those few were felt and full of meaning. The
sky was cloudless, the tall trees had burgeoned, a few green shoots
were already brightening their myriad of brown twigs. The shrubs, the
birches, the willows, the poplars were showing their first diaphanous
and tender foliage. No soul resists these harmonies. Love explained
Nature as it had already explained society to Marie's heart.

"I wish you have never loved any one but me," she said.

"Your wish is realized," replied Raoul. "We have awakened in each
other the only true love."

He spoke the truth as he felt it. Posing before this innocent young
heart as a pure man, Raoul was caught himself by his own fine
sentiments. At first purely speculative and born of vanity, his love
had now become sincere. He began by lying, he had ended in speaking
truth. In all writers there is ever a sentiment, difficult to stifle,
which impels them to admire the highest good. The countess, on her
part, after her first rush of gratitude and surprise, was charmed to
have inspired such sacrifices, to have caused him to surmount such
difficulties. She was beloved by a man who was worthy of her! Raoul
was totally ignorant to what his imaginary grandeur bound him. Women
will not suffer their idol to step down from his pedestal. They do not
forgive the slightest pettiness in a god. Marie was far from knowing
the solution to the riddle given by Raoul to his friends at Very's.
The struggle of this writer, risen from the lower classes, had cost
him the ten first years of his youth; and now in the days of his
success he longed to be loved by one of the queens of the great world.
Vanity, without which, as Champfort says, love would be but a feeble
thing, sustained his passion and increased it day by day.

"Can you swear to me," said Marie, "that you belong and will never
belong to any other woman?"

"There is neither time in my life nor place in my heart for any other
woman," replied Raoul, not thinking that he told a lie, so little did
he value Florine.

"I believe you," she said.

When they reached the alley where their carriages were waiting, Marie
dropped Raoul's arm, and the young man assumed a respectful and
distant attitude as if he had just met her; he accompanied her, with
his hat off, to her carriage, then he followed her by the Avenue
Charles X., breathing in, with satisfaction, the very dust her caleche
raised.

In spite of Marie's high renunciations, Raoul continued to follow her
everywhere; he adored the air of mingled pleasure and displeasure with
which she scolded him for wasting his precious time. She took
direction of his labors, she gave him formal orders on the employment
of his time; she stayed at home to deprive him of every pretext for
dissipation. Every morning she read his paper, and became the herald
of his staff of editors, of Etienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, whom
she thought delightful, of Felicien Vernou, of Claude Vignon,--in
short, of the whole staff. She advised Raoul to do justice to de
Marsay when he died, and she read with deep emotion the noble eulogy
which Raoul published upon the dead minister while blaming his
Machiavelianism and his hatred for the masses. She was present, of
course, at the Gymnase on the occasion of the first representation of
the play upon the proceeds of which Nathan relied to support his
enterprise, and was completely duped by the purchased applause.

"You did not bid farewell to the Italian opera," said Lady Dudley, to
whose house she went after the performance.

"No, I went to the Gymnase. They gave a first representation."

"I can't endure vaudevilles. I am like Louis XIV. about Teniers," said
Lady Dudley.

"For my part," said Madame d'Espard, "I think actors have greatly
improved. Vaudevilles in the present day are really charming comedies,
full of wit, requiring great talent; they amuse me very much."

"The actors are excellent, too," said Marie. "Those at the Gymnase
played very well to-night; the piece pleased them; the dialogue was
witty and keen."

"Like those of Beaumarchais," said Lady Dudley.

"Monsieur Nathan is not Moliere as yet, but--" said Madame d'Espard,
looking at the countess.

"He makes vaudevilles," said Madame Charles de Vandenesse.

"And unmakes ministries," added Madame de Manerville.

The countess was silent; she wanted to answer with a sharp repartee;
her heart was bounding with anger, but she could find nothing better
to say than,--

"He will make them, perhaps."

All the women looked at each other with mysterious significance. When
Marie de Vandenesse departed Moina de Saint-Heren exclaimed:--

"She adores him."

"And she makes no secret of it," said Madame d'Espard.



                              CHAPTER VII

                               SUICIDE

In the month of May Vandenesse took his wife, as usual, to their
country-seat, where she was consoled by the passionate letters she
received from Raoul, to whom she wrote every day.

Marie's absence might have saved Raoul from the gulf into which he was
falling, if Florine had been near him; but, unfortunately, he was
alone in the midst of friends who had become his enemies from the
moment that he showed his intention of ruling them. His staff of
writers hated him "pro tem.," ready to hold out a hand to him and
console him in case of a fall, ready to adore him in case of success.
So goes the world of literature. No one is really liked but an
inferior. Every man's hand is against him who is likely to rise. This
wide-spread envy doubles the chances of common minds who excite
neither envy nor suspicion, who make their way like moles, and, fools
though they be, find themselves gazetted in the "Moniteur," for three
or four places, while men of talent are still struggling at the door
to keep each other out.

The underhand enmity of these pretended friends, which Florine would
have scented with the innate faculty of a courtesan to get at truth
amid a thousand misleading circumstances, was by no means Raoul's
greatest danger. His partners, Massol the lawyer, and du Tillet the
banker, had intended from the first to harness his ardor to the
chariot of their own importance and get rid of him as soon as he was
out of condition to feed the paper, or else to deprive him of his
power, arbitrarily, whenever it suited their purpose to take it. To
them Nathan represented a certain amount of talent to use up, a
literary force of the motive power of ten pens to employ. Massol, one
of those lawyers who mistake the faculty of endless speech for
eloquence, who possess the art of boring by diffusiveness, the torment
of all meetings and assemblies where they belittle everything, and who
desire to become personages at any cost,--Massol no longer wanted the
place as Keeper of the Seals; he had seen some five or six different
men go through that office in four years, and the robes disgusted him.
In exchange, his mind was now set on obtaining a chair on the Board of
Education and a place in the Council of State; the whole adorned with
the cross of the Legion of honor. Du Tillet and Nucingen had
guaranteed the cross to him, and the office of Master of Petitions
provided he obeyed them blindly.

The better to deceive Raoul, these men allowed him to manage the paper
without control. Du Tillet used it only for his stock-gambling, about
which Nathan understood next to nothing; but he had given, through
Nucingen, an assurance to Rastignac that the paper would be tacitly
obliging to the government on the sole condition of supporting his
candidacy for Monsieur de Nucingen's place as soon as he was nominated
peer of France. Raoul was thus being undermined by the banker and the
lawyer, who saw him with much satisfaction lording it in the
newspaper, profiting by all advantages, and harvesting the fruits of
self-love, while Nathan, enchanted, believed them to be, as on the
occasion of his equestrian wants, the best fellows in the world. He
thought he managed them! Men of imagination, to whom hope is the basis
of existence, never allow themselves to know that the most perilous
moment in their affairs is that when all seems going well according to
their wishes.

This was a period of triumph by which Nathan profited. He appeared as
a personage in the world, political and financial. Du Tillet presented
him to the Nucingens. Madame de Nucingen received him cordially, less
for himself than for Madame de Vandenesse; but when she ventured a few
words about the countess he thought himself marvellously clever in
using Florine as a shield; he alluded to his relations with the
actress in a tone of generous self-conceit. How could he desert a
great devotion, for the coquetries of the faubourg Saint-Germain?

Nathan, manipulated by Nucingen and Rastignac, by du Tillet and
Blondet, gave his support ostentatiously to the "doctrinaires" of
their new and ephemeral cabinet. But in order to show himself pure of
all bribery he refused to take advantage of certain profitable
enterprises which were started by means of his paper,--he! who had no
reluctance in compromising friends or in behaving with little decency
to mechanics under certain circumstances. Such meannesses, the result
of vanity and of ambition, are found in many lives like his. The
mantle must be splendid before the eyes of the world, and we steal our
friend's or a poor man's cloth to patch it.

Nevertheless, two months after the departure of the countess, Raoul
had a certain Rabelaisian "quart d'heure" which caused him some
anxiety in the midst of these triumphs. Du Tillet had advanced a
hundred thousand francs, Florine's money had gone in the costs of the
first establishment of the paper, which were enormous. It was
necessary to provide for the future. The banker agreed to let the
editor have fifty thousand francs on notes for four months. Du Tillet
thus held Raoul by the halter of an IOU. By means of this relief the
funds of the paper were secured for six months. In the eyes of some
writers six months is an eternity. Besides, by dint of advertising and
by offering illusory advantages to subscribers two thousand had been
secured; an influx of travellers added to this semi-success, which was
enough, perhaps, to excuse the throwing of more bank-bills after the
rest. A little more display of talent, a timely political trial or
crisis, an apparent persecution, and Raoul felt certain of becoming
one of those modern "condottieri" whose ink is worth more than powder
and shot of the olden time.

This loan from du Tillet was already made when Florine returned with
fifty thousand francs. Instead of creating a savings fund with that
sum, Raoul, certain of success (simply because he felt it was
necessary), and already humiliated at having accepted the actress's
money, deceived Florine as to his actual position, and persuaded her
to employ the money in refurnishing her house. The actress, who did
not need persuasion, not only spent the sum in hand, but she burdened
herself with a debt of thirty thousand francs, with which she obtained
a charming little house all to herself in the rue Pigale, whither her
old society resorted. Raoul had reserved the production of his great
piece, in which was a part especially suited to Florine, until her
return. This comedy-vaudeville was to be Raoul's farewell to the
stage. The newspapers, with that good nature which costs nothing,
prepared the way for such an ovation to Florine that even the
Theatre-Francais talked of engaging her. The feuilletons proclaimed
her the heiress of Mars.

This triumph was sufficiently dazzling to prevent Florine from
carefully studying the ground on which Nathan was advancing; she
lived, for the time being, in a round of festivities and glory.
According to those about her, he was now a great political character;
he was justified in his enterprise; he would certainly be a deputy,
probably a minister in course of time, like so many others. As for
Nathan himself, he firmly believed that in the next session of the
Chamber he should find himself in government with two other
journalists, one of whom, already a minister, was anxious to associate
some of his own craft with himself, and so consolidate his power.
After a separation of six months, Nathan met Florine again with
pleasure, and returned easily to his old way of life. All his comforts
came from the actress, but he embroidered the heavy tissue of his life
with the flowers of ideal passion; his letters to Marie were
masterpieces of grace and style. Nathan made her the light of his
life; he undertook nothing without consulting his "guardian angel." In
despair at being on the popular side, he talked of going over to that
of the aristocracy; but, in spite of his habitual agility, even he saw
the absolute impossibility of such a jump; it was easier to become a
minister. Marie's precious replies were deposited in one of those
portfolios with patent locks made by Huret or Fichet, two mechanics
who were then waging war in advertisements and posters all over Paris,
as to which could make the safest and most impenetrable locks.

This portfolio was left about in Florine's new boudoir, where Nathan
did much of his work. No one is easier to deceive than a woman to whom
a man is in the habit of telling everything; she has no suspicions;
she thinks she sees and hears and knows all. Besides, since her
return, Nathan had led the most regular of lives under her very nose.
Never did she imagine that that portfolio, which she hardly glanced at
as it lay there unconcealed, contained the letters of a rival,
treasures of admiring love which the countess addressed, at Raoul's
request, to the office of his newspaper.

Nathan's situation was, therefore, to all appearance, extremely
brilliant. He had many friends. The two plays lately produced had
succeeded well, and their proceeds supplied his personal wants and
relieved him of all care for the future. His debt to du Tillet, "his
friend," did not make him in the least uneasy.

"Why distrust a friend?" he said to Blondet, who from time to time
would cast a doubt on his position, led to do so by his general habit
of analyzing.

"But we don't need to distrust our enemies," remarked Florine.

Nathan defended du Tillet; he was the best, the most upright of men.

This existence, which was really that of a dancer on the tight rope
without his balance-pole, would have alarmed any one, even the most
indifferent, had it been seen as it really was. Du Tillet watched it
with the cool eye and the cynicism of a parvenu. Through the friendly
good humor of his intercourse with Raoul there flashed now and then a
malignant jeer. One day, after pressing his hand in Florine's boudoir
and watching him as he got into his carriage, du Tillet remarked to
Lousteau (envier par excellence):--

"That fellow is off to the Bois in fine style to-day, but he is just
as likely, six months hence, to be in a debtor's prison."

"He? never!" cried Lousteau. "He has Florine."

"How do you know that he'll keep her? As for you, who are worth a
dozen of him, I predict that you will be our editor-in-chief within
six months."

In October Nathan's notes to du Tillet fell due, and the banker
graciously renewed them, but for two months only, with the discount
added and a fresh loan. Sure of victory, Raoul was not afraid of
continuing to put his hand in the bag. Madame Felix de Vandenesse was
to return in a few days, a month earlier than usual, brought back, of
course, by her unconquerable desire to see Nathan, who felt that he
could not be short of money at a time when he renewed that assiduous
life.

Correspondence, in which the pen is always bolder than speech, and
thought, wreathing itself with flowers, allows itself to be seen
without disguise, and brought the countess to the highest pitch of
enthusiasm. She believed she saw in Raoul one of the noblest spirits
of the epoch, a delicate but misjudged heart without a stain and
worthy of adoration; she saw him advancing with a brave hand to grasp
the sceptre of power. Soon that speech so beautiful in love would echo
from the tribune. Marie now lived only in this life of a world outside
her own. Her taste was lost for the tranquil joys of home, and she
gave herself up to the agitations of this whirlwind life communicated
by a clever and adoring pen. She kissed Raoul's letters, written in
the midst of the ceaseless battles of the press, with time taken from
necessary studies; she felt their value; she was certain of being
loved, and loved only, with no rival but the fame and ambition he
adored. She found enough in her country solitude to fill her soul and
employ her faculties,--happy, indeed, to have been so chosen by such a
man, who to her was an angel.

During the last days of autumn Marie and Raoul again met and renewed
their walks in the Bois, where alone they could see each other until
the salons reopened. But when the winter fairly began, Raoul appeared
in social life at his apogee. He was almost a personage. Rastignac,
now out of power with the ministry, which went to pieces on the death
of de Marsay, leaned upon Nathan, and gave him in return the warmest
praise. Madame de Vandenesse, feeling this change in public opinion,
was desirous of knowing if her husband's judgment had altered also.
She questioned him again; perhaps with the hope of obtaining one of
those brilliant revenges which please all women, even the noblest and
least worldly,--for may we not believe that even the angels retain
some portion of their self-love as they gather in serried ranks before
the Holy of Holies?

"Nothing was wanting to Raoul Nathan but to be the dupe he now is to a
parcel of intriguing sharpers," replied the count.

Felix, whose knowledge of the world and politics enabled him to judge
clearly, had seen Nathan's true position. He explained to his wife
that Fieschi's attempt had resulted in attaching to the interests
threatened by this attack on Louis-Philippe a large body of hitherto
lukewarm persons. The newspapers which were non-committal, and did not
show their colors, would lose subscribers; for journalism, like
politics, was about to be simplified by falling into regular lines. If
Nathan had put his whole fortune into that newspaper he would lose it.
This judgment, so apparently just and clear-cut, though brief and
given by a man who fathomed a matter in which he had no interest,
alarmed Madame de Vandenesse.

"Do you take an interest in him?" asked her husband.

"Only as a man whose mind interests me and whose conversation I like."

This reply was made so naturally that the count suspected nothing.

The next day at four o'clock, Marie and Raoul had a long conversation
together, in a low voice, in Madame d'Espard's salon. The countess
expressed fears which Raoul dissipated, only too happy to destroy by
epigrams the conjugal judgment. Nathan had a revenge to take. He
characterized the count as narrow-minded, behind the age, a man who
judged the revolution of July with the eyes of the Restoration, who
would never be willing to admit the triumph of the middle-classes--the
new force of all societies, whether temporary or lasting, but a real
force. Instead of turning his mind to the study of an opinion given
impartially and incidentally by a man well-versed in politics, Raoul
mounted his stilts and stalked about in the purple of his own glory.
Where is the woman who would not have believed his glowing talk sooner
than the cold logic of her husband? Madame de Vandenesse, completely
reassured, returned to her life of little enjoyments, clandestine
pressures of the hand, occasional quarrels,--in short, to her
nourishment of the year before, harmless in itself, but likely to drag
a woman over the border if the man she favors is resolute and
impatient of obstacles. Happily for her, Nathan was not dangerous.
Besides, he was too full of his immediate self-interests to think at
this time of profiting by his love.

But toward the end of December, when the second notes fell due, du
Tillet demanded payment. The rich banker, who said he was embarrassed,
advised Raoul to borrow the money for a short time from a usurer, from
Gigonnet, the providence of all young men who were pressed for money.
In January, he remarked, the renewal of subscriptions to the paper
would be coming in, there would be plenty of money in hand, and they
could then see what had best be done. Besides, couldn't Nathan write a
play? As a matter of pride Raoul determined to pay off the notes at
once. Du Tillet gave Raoul a letter to Gigonnet, who counted out the
money on a note of Nathan's at twenty days' sight. Instead of asking
himself the reason of such unusual facility, Raoul felt vexed at his
folly in not having asked for more. That is how men who are truly
remarkable for the power of thought are apt to behave in practical
business; they seem to reserve the power of their mind for their
writings, and are fearful of lessening it by putting it to use in the
daily affairs of life.

Raoul related his morning to Florine and Blondet. He gave them an
inimitable sketch of Gigonnet, his fireplace without fire, his shabby
wall-paper, his stairway, his asthmatic bell, his aged straw mattress,
his den without warmth, like his eye. He made them laugh about this
new uncle; they neither troubled themselves about du Tillet and his
pretended want of money, nor about an old usurer so ready to disburse.
What was there to worry about in that?

"He has only asked you fifteen per cent," said Blondet; "you ought to
be grateful to him. At twenty-five per cent you don't bow to those old
fellows. This is money-lending; usury doesn't begin till fifty per
cent; and then you despise the usurer."

"Despise him!" cried Florine; "if any of your friends lent you money
at that price they'd pose as your benefactors."

"She is right; and I am glad I don't owe anything now to du Tillet,"
said Raoul.

Why this lack of penetration as to their personal affairs in men whose
business it is to penetrate all things? Perhaps the mind cannot be
complete at all points; perhaps artists of every kind live too much in
the present moment to study the future; perhaps they are too observant
of the ridiculous to notice snares, or they may believe that none
would dare to lay a snare for such as they. However this may be, the
future arrived in due time. Twenty days later Raoul's notes were
protested, but Florine obtained from the Court of commerce an
extension of twenty-five days in which to meet them. Thus pressed,
Raoul looked into his affairs and asked for the accounts, and it then
appeared that the receipts of the newspaper covered only two-thirds of
the expenses, while the subscriptions were rapidly dwindling. The
great man now grew anxious and gloomy, but to Florine only, in whom he
confided. She advised him to borrow money on unwritten plays, and
write than at once, giving a lien on his work. Nathan followed this
advice and obtained thereby twenty thousand francs, which reduced his
debt to forty thousand.

On the 10th of February the twenty-five days expired. Du Tillet, who
did not want Nathan as a rival before the electoral college, where he
meant to appear himself, instigated Gigonnet to sue Nathan without
compromise. A man locked up for debt could not present himself as a
candidate for election. Florine was herself in communication with the
sheriff on the subject of her personal debts, and no resource was left
to her but the "I" of Medea, for her new furniture and belongings were
now attached. The ambitious Raoul heard the cracking in all directions
of his prosperous edifice, built, alas! without foundations. His nerve
failed him; too weak already to sustain so vast an enterprise, he felt
himself incapable of attempting to build it up again; he was fated to
perish in its ashes. Love for the countess gave him still a few
thrills of life; his mask brightened for a moment, but behind it hope
was dead. He did not suspect the hand of du Tillet, and laid the blame
of his misfortune on the usurer. Rastignac, Blondet, Lousteau, Vernou,
Finot, and Massol took care not to enlighten him. Rastignac, who
wanted to return to power, made common cause with Nucingen and du
Tillet. The others felt a satisfaction in the catastrophe of an equal
who had attempted to make himself their master. None of them, however,
would have said a word to Florine; on the contrary, they praised Raoul
to her.

"Nathan," they said, "has the shoulders of an Atlas; he'll pull
himself through; all will come right."

"There were two new subscribers yesterday," said Blondet, gravely.
"Raoul will certainly be elected deputy. As soon as the budget is
voted the dissolution is sure to take place."

But Nathan, sued, could no longer obtain even usury; Florine, with all
her personal property attached, could count on nothing but inspiring a
passion in some fool who might not appear at the right moment.
Nathan's friends were all men without money and without credit. An
arrest for debt would destroy his hopes of a political career; and
besides all this, he had bound himself to do an immense amount of
dramatic work for which he had already received payment. He could see
no bottom to the gulf of misery that lay before him, into which he was
about to roll. In presence of such threatened evil his boldness
deserted him. Would the Comtesse de Vandenesse stand by him? Would she
fly with him? Women are never led into a gulf of that kind except by
an absolute love, and the love of Raoul and Marie had not bound them
together by the mysterious and inalienable ties of happiness. But
supposing that the countess did follow him to some foreign country;
she would come without fortune, despoiled of everything, and then,
alas! she would merely be one more embarrassment to him. A mind of a
second order, and a proud mind like that of Nathan, would be likely to
see, under these circumstances, and did see, in suicide the sword to
cut the Gordian knots. The idea of failure in the face of the world
and that society he had so lately entered and meant to rule, of
leaving the chariot of the countess and becoming once more a muddied
pedestrian, was more than he could bear. Madness began to dance and
whirl and shake her bells at the gates of the fantastic palace in
which the poet had been dreaming. In this extremity, Nathan waited for
some lucky accident, determined not to kill himself until the final
moment.

During the last days employed by the legal formalities required before
proceeding to arrest for debt, Raoul went about, in spite of himself,
with that coldly sullen and morose expression of face which may be
noticed in persons who are either fated to commit suicide or are
meditating it. The funereal ideas they are turning over in their minds
appear upon their foreheads in gray and cloudy tints, their smile has
something fatalistic in it, their motions are solemn. These unhappy
beings seem to want to suck the last juices of the life they mean to
leave; their eyes see things invisible, their ears are listening to a
death-knell, they pay no attention to the minor things about them.
These alarming symptoms Marie perceived one evening at Lady Dudley's.
Raoul was sitting apart on a sofa in the boudoir, while the rest of
the company were conversing in the salon. The countess went to the
door, but he did not raise his head; he heard neither Marie's
breathing nor the rustle of her silk dress; he was gazing at a flower
in the carpet, with fixed eyes, stupid with grief; he felt he had
rather die than abdicate. All the world can't have the rock of Saint
Helena for a pedestal. Moreover, suicide was then the fashion in
Paris. Is it not, in fact, the last resource of all atheistical
societies? Raoul, as he sat there, had decided that the moment had
come to die. Despair is in proportion to our hopes; that of Raoul had
no other issue than the grave.

"What is the matter?" cried Marie, flying to him.

"Nothing," he answered.

There is one way of saying that word "nothing" between lovers which
signifies its exact contrary. Marie shrugged her shoulders.

"You are a child," she said. "Some misfortune has happened to you."

"No, not to me," he replied. "But you will know all soon enough,
Marie," he added, affectionately.

"What were you thinking of when I came in?" she asked, in a tone of
authority.

"Do you want to know the truth?" She nodded. "I was thinking of you; I
was saying to myself that most men in my place would have wanted to be
loved without reserve. I am loved, am I not?"

"Yes," she answered.

"And yet," he said, taking her round the waist and kissing her
forehead at the risk of being seen, "I leave you pure and without
remorse. I could have dragged you into an abyss, but you remain in all
your glory on its brink without a stain. Yet one thought troubles
me--"

"What is it?" she asked.

"You will despise me." She smiled superbly. "Yes, you will never
believe that I have sacredly loved you; I shall be disgraced, I know
that. Women never imagine that from the depths of our mire we raise
our eyes to heaven and truly adore a Marie. They assail that sacred
love with miserable doubts; they cannot believe that men of intellect
and poesy can so detach their soul from earthly enjoyment as to lay it
pure upon some cherished altar. And yet, Marie, the worship of the
ideal is more fervent in men then in women; we find it in women, who
do not even look for it in us."

"Why are you making me that article?" she said, jestingly.

"I am leaving France; and you will hear to-morrow, how and why, from a
letter my valet will bring you. Adieu, Marie."

Raoul left the house after again straining the countess to his heart
with dreadful pressure, leaving her stupefied and distressed.

"What is the matter, my dear?" said Madame d'Espard, coming to look
for her. "What has Monsieur Nathan been saying to you? He has just
left us in a most melodramatic way. Perhaps you are too reasonable or
too unreasonable with him."

The countess got into a hackney-coach and was driven rapidly to the
newspaper office. At that hour the huge apartments which they occupied
in an old mansion in the rue Feydeau were deserted; not a soul was
there but the watchman, who was greatly surprised to see a young and
pretty woman hurrying through the rooms in evident distress. She asked
him to tell her where was Monsieur Nathan.

"At Mademoiselle Florine's, probably," replied the man, taking Marie
for a rival who intended to make a scene.

"Where does he work?"

"In his office, the key of which he carries in his pocket."

"I wish to go there."

The man took her to a dark little room looking out on a rear
court-yard. The office was at right angles. Opening the window of the
room she was in, the countess could look through into the window of the
office, and she saw Nathan sitting there in the editorial arm-chair.

"Break in the door, and be silent about all this; I'll pay you well,"
she said. "Don't you see that Monsieur Nathan is dying?"

The man got an iron bar from the press-room, with which he burst in
the door. Raoul had actually smothered himself, like any poor
work-girl, with a pan of charcoal. He had written a letter to Blondet,
which lay on the table, in which he asked him to ascribe his death to
apoplexy. The countess, however, had arrived in time; she had Raoul
carried to her coach, and then, not knowing where else to care for
him, she took him to a hotel, engaged a room, and sent for a doctor.
In a few hours Raoul was out of danger; but the countess did not leave
him until she had obtained a general confession of the causes of his
act. When he had poured into her heart the dreadful elegy of his woes,
she said, in order to make him willing to live:--

"I can arrange all that."

But, nevertheless, she returned home with a heart oppressed with the
same anxieties and ideas that had darkened Nathan's brow the night
before.

"Well, what was the matter with your sister?" said Felix, when his
wife returned. "You look distressed."

"It is a dreadful history about which I am bound to secrecy," she
said, summoning all her nerve to appear calm before him.

In order to be alone and to think at her ease, she went to the Opera
in the evening, after which she resolved to go (as we have seen) and
discharge her heart into that of her sister, Madame du Tillet;
relating to her the horrible scene of the morning, and begging her
advice and assistance. Neither the one nor the other could then know
that du Tillet himself had lighted the charcoal of the vulgar brazier,
the sight of which had so justly terrified the countess.

"He has but me in all the world," said Marie to her sister, "and I
will not fail him."

That speech contains the secret motive of most women; they can be
heroic when they are certain of being all in all to a grand and
irreproachable being.



                             CHAPTER VIII

                        A LOVER SAVED AND LOST

Du Tillet had heard some talk even in financial circles of the more or
less possible adoration of his sister-in-law for Nathan; but he was
one of those who denied it, thinking it incompatible with Raoul's
known relations with Florine. The actress would certainly drive off
the countess, or vice versa. But when, on coming home that evening, he
found his sister-in-law with a perturbed face, in consultation with
his wife about money, it occurred to him that Raoul had, in all
probability, confided to her his situation. The countess must
therefore love him; she had doubtless come to obtain from her sister
the sum due to old Gigonnet. Madame du Tillet, unaware, of course, of
the reasons for her husband's apparently supernatural penetration, had
shown such stupefaction when he told her the sum wanted, that du
Tillet's suspicions became certainties. He was sure now that he held
the thread of all Nathan's possible manoeuvres.

No one knew that the unhappy man himself was in bed in a small hotel
in the rue du Mail, under the name of the office watchman, to whom
Marie had promised five hundred francs if he kept silence as to the
events of the preceding night and morning. Thus bribed, the man, whose
name was Francois Quillet, went back to the office and left word with
the portress that Monsieur Nathan had been taken ill in consequence of
overwork, and was resting. Du Tillet was therefore not surprised at
Raoul's absence. It was natural for the journalist to hide under any
such pretence to avoid arrest. When the sheriff's spies made inquiries
they learned that a lady had carried him away in a public coach early
in the morning; but it took three days to ferret out the number of the
coach, question the driver, and find the hotel where the debtor was
recovering his strength. Thus Marie's prompt action had really gained
for Nathan a truce of four days.

Both sisters passed a cruel night. Such a catastrophe casts the lurid
gleams of its charcoal over the whole of life, showing reefs, pools,
depths, where the eye has hitherto seen only summits and grandeurs.
Struck by the horrible picture of a young man lying back in his chair
to die, with the last proofs of his paper before him, containing in
type his last thoughts, poor Madame du Tillet could think of nothing
else than how to save him and restore a life so precious to her
sister. It is the nature of our mind to see effects before we analyze
their causes. Eugenie recurred to her first idea of consulting Madame
Delphine de Nucingen, with whom she was to dine, and she resolved to
make the attempt, not doubting of success. Generous, like all persons
who are not bound in the polished steel armor of modern society,
Madame du Tillet resolved to take the whole matter upon herself.

The countess, on the other hand, happy in the thought that she had
saved Raoul's life, spent the night in devising means to obtain the
forty thousand francs. In emergencies like these women are sublime;
they find contrivances which would astonish thieves, business men, and
usurers, if those three classes of industrials were capable of being
astonished. First, the countess sold her diamonds and decided on
wearing paste; then she resolved to ask the money from Vandenesse on
her sister's account; but these were dishonorable means, and her soul
was too noble not to recoil at them; she merely conceived them, and
cast them from her. Ask money of Vandenesse to give to Nathan! She
bounded in her bed with horror at such baseness. Wear false diamonds
to deceive her husband! Next she thought of borrowing the money from
the Rothschilds, who had so much, or from the archbishop of Paris,
whose mission it was to help persons in distress; darting thus from
thought to thought, seeking help in all. She deplored belonging to a
class opposed to the government. Formerly, she could easily have
borrowed the money on the steps of the throne. She thought of
appealing to her father, the Comte de Granville. But that great
magistrate had a horror of illegalities; his children knew how little
he sympathized with the trials of love; he was now a misanthrope and
held all affairs of the heart in horror. As for the Comtesse de
Granville, she was living a retired life on one of her estates in
Normandy, economizing and praying, ending her days between priests and
money-bags, cold as ever to her dying moment. Even supposing that
Marie had time to go to Bayeux and implore her, would her mother give
her such a sum unless she explained why she wanted it? Could she say
she had debts? Yes, perhaps her mother would be softened by the wants
of her favorite child. Well, then! in case all other means failed, she
_would_ go to Normandy. The dreadful sight of the morning, the effects
she had made to revive Nathan, the hours passed beside his pillow, his
broken confession, the agony of a great soul, a vast genius stopped in
its upward flight by a sordid vulgar obstacle,--all these things
rushed into her memory and stimulated her love. She went over and over
her emotions, and felt her love to be deeper in these days of misery
than in those of Nathan's fame and grandeur. She felt the nobility of
his last words said to her in Lady Dudley's boudoir. What sacredness
in that farewell! What grandeur in the immolation of a selfish
happiness which would have been her torture! The countess had longed
for emotions, and now she had them,--terrible, cruel, and yet most
precious. She lived a deeper life in pain than in pleasure. With what
delight she said to herself: "I have saved him once, and I will save
him again." She heard him cry out when he felt her lips upon his
forehead, "Many a poor wretch does not know what love is!"

"Are you ill?" said her husband, coming into her room to take her to
breakfast.

"I am dreadfully worried about a matter that is happening at my
sister's," she replied, without actually telling a lie.

"Your sister has fallen into bad hands," replied Felix. "It is a shame
for any family to have a du Tillet in it,--a man without honor of any
kind. If disaster happened to her she would get no pity from him."

"What woman wants pity?" said the countess, with a convulsive motion.
"A man's sternness is to us our only pardon."

"This is not the first time that I read your noble heart," said the
count. "A woman who thinks as you do needs no watching."

"Watching!" she said; "another shame that recoils on you."

Felix smiled, but Marie blushed. When women are secretly to blame they
often show ostensibly the utmost womanly pride. It is a dissimulation
of mind for which we ought to be obliged to them. The deception is
full of dignity, if not of grandeur. Marie wrote two lines to Nathan
under the name of Monsieur Quillet, to tell him that all went well,
and sent them by a street porter to the hotel du Mail. That night, at
the Opera, Felix thought it very natural that she should wish to leave
her box and go to that of her sister, and he waited till du Tillet had
left his wife to give Marie his arm and take her there. Who can tell
what emotions agitated her as she went through the corridors and
entered her sister's box with a face that was outwardly serene and
calm!

"Well?" she said, as soon as they were alone.

Eugenie's face was an answer; it was bright with a joy which some
persons might have attributed to the satisfaction of vanity.

"He can be saved, dear; but for three months only; during which time
we must plan some other means of doing it permanently. Madame de
Nucingen wants four notes of hand, each for ten thousand francs,
endorsed by any one, no matter who, so as not to compromise you. She
explained to me how they were made, but I couldn't understand her.
Monsieur Nathan, however, can make them for us. I thought of Schmucke,
our old master. I am sure he could be very useful in this emergency;
he will endorse the notes. You must add to the four notes a letter in
which you guarantee their payment to Madame de Nucingen, and she will
give you the money to-morrow. Do the whole thing yourself; don't trust
it to any one. I feel sure that Schmucke will make no objection. To
divert all suspicion I told Madame de Nucingen you wanted to oblige
our old music-master who was in distress, and I asked her to keep the
matter secret."

"You have the sense of angels! I only hope Madame de Nucingen won't
tell of it until after she gives me the money," said the countess.

"Schmucke lives in the rue de Nevers on the quai Conti; don't forget
the address, and go yourself."

"Thanks!" said the countess, pressing her sister's hand. "Ah! I'd give
ten years of life--"

"Out of your old age--"

"If I could put an end to these anxieties," said the countess, smiling
at the interruption.

The persons who were at that moment levelling their opera-glasses at
the two sisters might well have supposed them engaged in some
light-hearted talk; but any observer who had come to the Opera more
for the pleasure of watching faces than for mere idle amusement might
have guessed them in trouble, from the anxious look which followed the
momentary smiles on their charming 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, Eugenie," said the Countess, "thus to restore
life to the dead?"

"You have a chance yet with the Royal Humane Society," replied
Eugenie, 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 and
ordered her carriage for the next morning before eight o'clock.

The next morning, by half-past eight, Marie had driven to the quai
Conti, stopping at the hotel du Mail on her way. The carriage could
not enter the narrow rue de Nevers; but as Schmucke lived in a house
at the corner of the quai she was not obliged to walk up its muddy
pavement, but could jump from the step of her carriage to the broken
step of the dismal old house, mended like porter's crockery, with iron
rivets, and bulging out over the street in a way that was quite
alarming to pedestrians. The old chapel-master lived on the fourth
floor, and enjoyed a fine view of the Seine from the pont Neuf to the
heights of Chaillot.

The good soul was so surprised when the countess's footman announced
the visit of his former scholar that in his stupefaction he let her
enter without going down to receive her. Never did the countess
suspect or imagine such an existence as that which suddenly revealed
itself to her eyes, though she had long known Schmucke's contempt for
dress, and the little interest he held in the affairs of this world.
But who could have believed in such complete indifference, in the
utter laisser-aller of such a life? Schmucke was a musical Diogenes,
and he felt no shame whatever in his untidiness; in fact, he was so
accustomed to it that he would probably have denied its existence. The
incessant smoking of a stout German pipe had spread upon the ceiling
and over a wretched wall-paper, scratched and defaced by the cat, a
yellowish tinge. The cat, a magnificently long-furred, fluffy animal,
the envy of all portresses, presided there like the mistress of the
house, grave and sedate, and without anxieties. On the top of an
excellent Viennese piano he sat majestically, and cast upon the
countess, as she entered, that coldly gracious look which a woman,
surprised by the beauty of another woman, might have given. He did not
move, and merely waved the two silver threads of his right whisker as
he turned his golden eyes on Schmucke.

The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted
black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys,
worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous
colors of the pipe. On the desk, a little heap of ashes showed that
the night before Schmucke had bestrode the old instrument to some
musical Walhalla. The floor, covered with dried mud, torn papers,
tobacco-dust, fragments indescribable, was like that of a boy's
school-room, unswept for a week, on which a mound of things
accumulate, half rags, half filth.

A more practised eye than that of the countess would have seen certain
other revelations of Schmucke's mode of life,--chestnut-peels,
apple-parings, egg-shells dyed red in broken dishes smeared with
sauer-kraut. This German detritus formed a carpet of dusty filth which
crackled under foot, joining company near the hearth with a mass of
cinders and ashes descending majestically from the fireplace, where
lay a block of coal, before which two slender twigs made a show of
burning. On the chimney-piece was a mirror in a painted frame, adorned
with figures dancing a saraband; on one side hung the glorious pipe,
on the other was a Chinese jar in which the musician kept his tobacco.
Two arm-chairs bought at auction, a thin and rickety cot, a worm-eaten
bureau without a top, a maimed table on which lay the remains of a
frugal breakfast, made up a set of household belongings as plain as
those of an Indian wigwam. A shaving-glass, suspended to the fastening
of a curtainless window, and surmounted by a rag striped by many
wipings of a razor, indicated the only sacrifices paid by Schmucke to
the Graces and society. The cat, being the feebler and protected
partner, had rather the best of the establishment; he enjoyed the
comforts of an old sofa-cushion, near which could be seen a white
china cup and plate. But what no pen can describe was the state into
which Schmucke, the cat, and the pipe, that existing trinity, had
reduced these articles. The pipe had burned the table. The cat and
Schmucke's head had greased the green Utrecht velvet of the two
arm-chairs and reduced it to a slimy texture. If it had not been for
the cat's magnificent tail, which played a useful part in the household,
the uncovered places on the bureau and the piano would never have been
dusted. In one corner of the room were a pile of shoes which need an
epic to describe them. The top of the bureau and that of the piano
were encumbered by music-books with ragged backs and whitened corners,
through which the pasteboard showed its many layers. Along the walls
the names and addresses of pupils written on scraps of paper were
stuck on by wafers,--the number of wafers without paper indicating the
number of pupils no longer taught. On the wall-papers were many
calculations written with chalk. The bureau was decorated with
beer-mugs used the night before, their newness appearing very brilliant
in the midst of this rubbish of dirt and age. Hygiene was represented
by a jug of water with a towel laid upon it, and a bit of common soap.
Two ancient hats hung to their respective nails, near which also hung
the self-same blue box-coat with three capes, in which the countess
had always seen Schmucke when he came to give his lessons. On the
window-sill were three pots of flowers, German flowers, no doubt, and
near them a stout holly-wood stick.

Though Marie's sight and smell were disagreeably affected, Schmucke's
smile and glance disguised these abject miseries by rays of celestial
light which actually illuminated their smoky tones and vivified the
chaos. The soul of this dear man, which saw and revealed so many
things divine, shone like the sun. His laugh, so frank, so guileless
at seeing one of his Saint-Cecilias, shed sparkles of youth and gaiety
and innocence about him. The treasures he poured from the inner to the
outer were like a mantle with which he covered his squalid life. The
most supercilious parvenu would have felt it ignoble to care for the
frame in which this glorious old apostle of the musical religion lived
and moved and had his being.

"Hey! by what good luck do I see you here, dear Madame la comtesse?"
he said. "Must I sing the canticle of Simeon at my age?" (This idea so
tickled him that he laughed immoderately.) "Truly I'm 'en bonne
fortune.'" (And again he laughed like a merry child.) "But, ah!" he
said, changing to melancholy, "you come for the music, and not for a
poor old man like me. Yes, I know that; but come for what you will, I
am yours, you know, body and soul and all I have!"

This was said in his unspeakable German accent, a rendition of which
we spare the reader.

He took the countess's hand, kissed it and left a tear there, for the
worthy soul was always on the morrow of her benefit. Then he seized a
bit of chalk, jumped on a chair in front of the piano, and wrote upon
the wall in big letters, with the rapidity of a young man, "February
17th, 1835." This pretty, artless action, done in such a passion of
gratitude, touched the countess to tears.

"My sister will come too," she said.

"The other, too! When? when? God grant it be before I die!"

"She will come to thank you for a great service I am now here to ask
of you."

"Quick! quick! tell me what it is," cried Schmucke. "What must I do?
go to the devil?"

"Nothing more than write the words 'Accepted for ten thousand francs,'
and sign your name on each of these papers," she said, taking from her
muff four notes prepared for her by Nathan.

"Hey! that's soon done," replied the German, with the docility of a
lamb; "only I'm sure I don't know where my pens and ink are-- Get away
from there, Meinherr Mirr!" he cried to the cat, which looked
composedly at him. "That's my cat," he said, showing him to the
countess. "That's the poor animal that lives with poor Schmucke.
Hasn't he fine fur?"

"Yes," said the countess.

"Will you have him?" he cried.

"How can you think of such a thing?" she answered. "Why, he's your
friend!"

The cat, who hid the inkstand behind him, divined that Schmucke wanted
it, and jumped to the bed.

"He's as mischievous as a monkey," said Schmucke. "I call him Mirr in
honor of our great Hoffman of Berlin, whom I knew well."

The good man signed the papers with the innocence of a child who does
what his mother orders without question, so sure is he that all is
right. He was thinking much more of presenting the cat to the countess
than of the papers by which his liberty might be, according to the
laws relating to foreigners, forever sacrificed.

"You assure me that these little papers with the stamps on them--"

"Don't be in the least uneasy," said the countess.

"I am not uneasy," he said, hastily. "I only meant to ask if these
little papers will give pleasure to Madame du Tillet."

"Oh, yes," she said, "you are doing her a service, as if you were her
father."

"I am happy, indeed, to be of any good to her-- Come and listen to my
music!" and leaving the papers on the table, he jumped to his piano.

The hands of this angel ran along the yellowing keys, his glance was
rising to heaven, regardless of the roof; already the air of some
blessed climate permeated the room and the soul of the old musician;
but the countess did not allow the artless interpreter of things
celestial to make the strings and the worn wood speak, like
Raffaelle's Saint Cecilia, to the listening angels. She quickly
slipped the notes into her muff and recalled her radiant master from
the ethereal spheres to which he soared, by laying her hand upon his
shoulder.

"My good Schmucke--" she said.

"Going already?" he cried. "Ah! why did you come?"

He did not murmur, but he sat up like a faithful dog who listens to
his mistress.

"My good Schmucke," she repeated, "this is a matter of life and death;
minutes can save tears, perhaps blood."

"Always the same!" he said. "Go, angel! dry the tears of others. Your
poor Schmucke thinks more of your visit than of your gifts."

"But we must see each other often," she said. "You must come and dine
and play to me every Sunday, or we shall quarrel. Remember, I shall
expect you next Sunday."

"Really and truly?"

"Yes, I entreat you; and my sister will want you, too, for another
day."

"Then my happiness will be complete," he said; "for I only see you now
in the Champs Elysees as you pass in your carriage, and that is very
seldom."

This thought dried the tears in his eyes as he gave his arm to his
beautiful pupil, who felt the old man's heart beat violently.

"You think of us?" she said.

"Always as I eat my food," he answered,--"as my benefactresses; but
chiefly as the first young girls worthy of love whom I ever knew."

So respectful, faithful, and religious a solemnity was in this speech
that the countess dared say no more. That smoky chamber, full of dirt
and rubbish, was the temple of the two divinities.

"There we are loved--and truly loved," she thought.

The emotion with which old Schmucke saw the countess get into her
carriage and leave him she fully shared, and she sent him from the
tips of her fingers one of those pretty kisses which women give each
other from afar. Receiving it, the old man stood planted on his feet
for a long time after the carriage had disappeared.

A few moments later the countess entered the court-yard of the hotel
de Nucingen. Madame de Nucingen was not yet up; but anxious not to
keep a woman of the countess's position waiting, she hastily threw on
a shawl and wrapper.

"My visit concerns a charitable action, madame," said the countess,
"or I would not disturb you at so early an hour."

"But I am only too happy to be disturbed," said the banker's wife,
taking the notes and the countess's guarantee. She rang for her maid.

"Therese," she said, "tell the cashier to bring me up himself,
immediately, forty thousand francs."

Then she locked into a table drawer the guarantee given by Madame de
Vandenesse, after sealing it up.

"You have a delightful room," said the countess.

"Yes, but Monsieur de Nucingen is going to take it from me. He is
building a new house."

"You will doubtless give this one to your daughter, who, I am told, is
to marry Monsieur de Rastignac."

The cashier appeared at this moment with the money. Madame de Nucingen
took the bank-bills and gave him the notes of hand.

"That balances," she said.

"Except the discount," replied the cashier. "Ha, Schmucke; that's the
musician of Anspach," he added, examining the signatures in a
suspicious manner that made the countess tremble.

"Who is doing this business?" said Madame de Nucingen, with a haughty
glance at the cashier. "This is my affair."

The cashier looked alternately at the two ladies, but he could
discover nothing on their impenetrable faces.

"Go, leave us-- Have the kindness to wait a few moments that the
people in the bank may not connect you with this negotiation," said
Madame de Nucingen to the countess.

"I must ask you to add to all your other kindness that of keeping this
matter secret," said Madame de Vandenesse.

"Most assuredly, since it is for charity," replied the baroness,
smiling. "I will send your carriage round to the garden gate, so that
no one will see you leave the house."

"You have the thoughtful grace of a person who has suffered," said the
countess.

"I do not know if I have grace," said the baroness; "but I have
suffered much. I hope that your anxieties cost less than mine."

When a man has laid a plot like that du Tillet was scheming against
Nathan, he confides it to no man. Nucingen knew something of it, but
his wife knew nothing. The baroness, however, aware that Raoul was
embarrassed, was not the dupe of the two sisters; she guessed into
whose hands that money was to go, and she was delighted to oblige the
countess; moreover, she felt a deep compassion for all such
embarrassments. Rastignac, so placed that he was able to fathom the
manoeuvres of the two bankers, came to breakfast that morning with
Madame de Nucingen.

Delphine and Rastignac had no secrets from each other; and the
baroness related to him her scene with the countess. Eugene, who had
never supposed that Delphine could be mixed up in the affair, which
was only accessory to his eyes,--one means among many others,--opened
her eyes to the truth. She had probably, he told her, destroyed du
Tillet's chances of selection, and rendered useless the intrigues and
deceptions of the past year. In short, he put her in the secret of the
whole affair, advising her to keep absolute silence as to the mistake
she had just committed.

"Provided the cashier does not tell Nucingen," she said.

A few moments after mid-day, while du Tillet was breakfasting,
Monsieur Gigonnet was announced.

"Let him come in," said the banker, though his wife was at table.
"Well, my old Shylock, is our man locked up?"

"No."

"Why not? Didn't I give you the address, rue du Mail, hotel--"

"He has paid up," said Gigonnet, drawing from his wallet a pile of
bank-bills. Du Tillet looked furious. "You should never frown at
money," said his impassible associate; "it brings ill-luck."

"Where did you get that money, madame?" said du Tillet, suddenly
turning upon his wife with a look which made her color to the roots of
her hair.

"I don't know what your question means," she said.

"I will fathom this mystery," he cried, springing furiously up. "You
have upset my most cherished plans."

"You are upsetting your breakfast," said Gigonnet, arresting the
table-clock, which was dragged by the skirt of du Tillet's
dressing-gown.

Madame du Tillet rose to leave the room, for her husband's words
alarmed her. She rang the bell, and a footman entered.

"The carriage," she said. "And call Virginie; I wish to dress."

"Where are you going?" exclaimed du Tillet.

"Well-bred husbands do not question their wives," she answered. "I
believe that you lay claim to be a gentleman."

"I don't recognize you ever since you have seen more of your
impertinent sister."

"You ordered me to be impertinent, and I am practising on you," she
replied.

"Your servant, madame," said Gigonnet, taking leave, not anxious to
witness this family scene.

Du Tillet looked fixedly at his wife, who returned the look without
lowering her eyes.

"What does all this mean?" he said.

"It means that I am no longer a little girl whom you can frighten,"
she replied. "I am, and shall be, all my life, a good and loyal wife
to you; you may be my master if you choose, my tyrant, never!"

Du Tillet left the room. After this effort Marie-Eugenie broke down.

"If it were not for my sister's danger," she said to herself, "I
should never have dared to brave him thus; but, as the proverb says,
'There's some good in every evil.'"



                              CHAPTER IX

                        THE HUSBAND'S TRIUMPH

During the preceding night Madame du Tillet had gone over in her mind
her sister's revelations. Sure, now, of Nathan's safety, she was no
longer influenced by the thought of an imminent danger in that
direction. But she remembered the vehement energy with which the
countess had declared that she would fly with Nathan if that would
save him. She saw that the man might determine her sister in some
paroxysm of gratitude and love to take a step which was nothing short
of madness. There were recent examples in the highest society of just
such flights which paid for doubtful pleasures by lasting remorse and
the disrepute of a false position. Du Tillet's speech brought her
fears to a point; she dreaded lest all should be discovered; she knew
her sister's signature was in Nucingen's hands, and she resolved to
entreat Marie to save herself by confessing all to Felix.

She drove to her sister's house, but Marie was not at home. Felix was
there. A voice within her cried aloud to Eugenie to save her sister;
the morrow might be too late. She took a vast responsibility upon
herself, but she resolved to tell all to the count. Surely he would be
indulgent when he knew that his honor was still safe. The countess was
deluded rather than sinful. Eugenie feared to be treacherous and base
in revealing secrets that society (agreeing on this point) holds to be
inviolable; but--she saw her sister's future, she trembled lest she
should some day be deserted, ruined by Nathan, poor, suffering,
disgraced, wretched, and she hesitated no longer; she sent in her name
and asked to see the count.

Felix, astonished at the visit, had a long conversation with his
sister-in-law, in which he seemed so calm, so completely master of
himself, that she feared he might have taken some terrible resolution.

"Do not be uneasy," he said, seeing her anxiety. "I will act in a
manner which shall make your sister bless you. However much you may
dislike to keep the fact that you have spoken to me from her
knowledge, I must entreat you to do so. I need a few days to search
into mysteries which you don't perceive; and, above all, I must act
cautiously. Perhaps I can learn all in a day. I, alone, my dear
sister, am the guilty person. All lovers play their game, and it is
not every woman who is able, unassisted, to see life as it is."

Madame du Tillet returned home comforted. Felix de Vandenesse drew
forty thousand francs from the Bank of France, and went direct to
Madame de Nucingen He found her at home, thanked her for the
confidence she had placed in his wife, and returned the money,
explaining that the countess had obtained this mysterious loan for her
charities, which were so profuse that he was trying to put a limit to
them.

"Give me no explanations, monsieur, since Madame de Vandenesse has
told you all," said the Baronne de Nucingen.

"She knows the truth," thought Vandenesse.

Madame de Nucingen returned to him Marie's letter of guarantee, and
sent to the bank for the four notes. Vandenesse, during the short time
that these arrangements kept him waiting, watched the baroness with
the eye of a statesman, and he thought the moment propitious for
further negotiation.

"We live in an age, madame, when nothing is sure," he said. "Even
thrones rise and fall in France with fearful rapidity. Fifteen years
have wreaked their will on a great empire, a monarchy, and a
revolution. No one can now dare to count upon the future. You know my
attachment to the cause of legitimacy. Suppose some catastrophe; would
you not be glad to have a friend in the conquering party?"

"Undoubtedly," she said, smiling.

"Very good; then, will you have in me, secretly, an obliged friend who
could be of use to Monsieur de Nucingen in such a case, by supporting
his claim to the peerage he is seeking?"

"What do you want of me?" she asked.

"Very little," he replied. "All that you know about Nathan's affairs."

The baroness repeated to him her conversation with Rastignac, and
said, as she gave him the four notes, which the cashier had meantime
brought to her:

"Don't forget your promise."

So little did Vandenesse forget this illusive promise that he used it
again on Baron Eugene de Rastignac to obtain from him certain other
information. Leaving Rastignac's apartments, he dictated to a street
amanuensis the following note to Florine.

  "If Mademoiselle Florine wishes to know of a part she may play she
  is requested to come to the masked opera at the Opera next Sunday
  night, accompanied by Monsieur Nathan."

To this ball he determined to take his wife and let her own eyes
enlighten her as to the relations between Nathan and Florine. He knew
the jealous pride of the countess; he wanted to make her renounce her
love of her own will, without causing her to blush before him, and
then to return to her her own letters, sold by Florine, from whom he
expected to be able to buy them. This judicious plan, rapidly
conceived and partly executed, might fail through some trick of chance
which meddles with all things here below.

After dinner that evening, Felix brought the conversation round to the
masked balls of the Opera, remarking that Marie had never been to one,
and proposing that she should accompany him the following evening.

"I'll find you some one to 'intriguer,'" he said.

"Ah! I wish you would," she replied.

"To do the thing well, a woman ought to fasten upon some good prey, a
celebrity, a man of enough wit to give and take. There's Nathan; will
you have him? I know, through a friend of Florine, certain secrets of
his which would drive him crazy."

"Florine?" said the countess. "Do you mean the actress?"

Marie had already heard that name from the lips of the watchman
Quillet; it now shot like a flash of lightning through her soul.

"Yes, his mistress," replied the count. "What is there so surprising
in that?"

"I thought Monsieur Nathan too busy to have a mistress. Do authors
have time to make love?"

"I don't say they love, my dear, but they are forced to _lodge_
somewhere, like other men, and when they haven't a home of their own
they _lodge_ with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather
loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison."

Fire was less red than Marie's cheeks.

"Will you have him for a victim? I can help you to terrify him,"
continued the count, not looking at his wife's face. "I'll put you in
the way of proving to him that he is being tricked like a child by
your brother-in-law du Tillet. That wretch is trying to put Nathan in
prison so as to make him ineligible to stand against him in the
electoral college. I know, through a friend of Florine, the exact sum
derived from the sale of her furniture, which she gave to Nathan to
found his newspaper; I know, too, what she sent him out of her
summer's harvest in the departments and in Belgium,--money which has
really gone to the profit of du Tillet, Nucingen, and Massol. All
three of them, unknown to Nathan, have privately sold the paper to the
new ministry, so sure are they of ejecting him."

"Monsieur Nathan is incapable of accepting money from an actress."

"You don't know that class of people, my dear," said the count. "He
would not deny the fact if you asked him."

"I will certainly go to the ball," said the countess.

"You will be very much amused," replied Vandenesse. "With such weapons
in hand you can cut Nathan's complacency to the quick, and you will
also do him a great service. You will put him in a fury; he'll try to
be calm, though inwardly fuming; but, all the same, you will enlighten
a man of talent as to the peril in which he really stands; and you
will also have the satisfaction of laming the horses of the
'juste-milieu' in their stalls-- But you are not listening to me, my
dear."

"On the contrary, I am listening intently," she said. "I will tell you
later why I feel desirous to know the truth of all this."

"You shall know it," said Vandenesse. "If you stay masked I will take
you to supper with Nathan and Florine; it would be rather amusing for
a woman of your rank to fool an actress after bewildering the wits of
a clever man about these important facts; you can harness them both to
the same hoax. I'll make some inquiries about Nathan's infidelities,
and if I discover any of his recent adventures you shall enjoy the
sight of a courtesan's fury; it is magnificent. Florine will boil and
foam like an Alpine torrent; she adores Nathan; he is everything to
her; she clings to him like flesh to the bones or a lioness to her
cubs. I remember seeing, in my youth, a celebrated actress (who wrote
like a scullion) when she came to a friend of mine to demand her
letters. I have never seen such a sight again, such calm fury, such
insolent majesty, such savage self-control-- Are you ill, Marie?"

"No; they have made too much fire." The countess turned away and threw
herself on a sofa. Suddenly, with an unforeseen movement, impelled by
the horrible anguish of her jealousy, she rose on her trembling legs,
crossed her arms, and came slowly to her husband.

"What do you know?" she asked. "You are not a man to torture me; you
would crush me without making me suffer if I were guilty."

"What do you expect me to know, Marie?"

"Well! about Nathan."

"You think you love him," he replied; "but you love a phantom made of
words."

"Then you know--"

"All," he said.

The word fell on Marie's head like the blow of a club.

"If you wish it, I will know nothing," he continued. "You are standing
on the brink of a precipice, my child, and I must draw you from it. I
have already done something. See!"

He drew from his pocket her letter of guarantee and the four notes
endorsed by Schmucke, and let the countess recognize them; then he
threw them into the fire.

"What would have happened to you, my poor Marie, three months hence?"
he said. "The sheriffs would have taken you to a public court-room.
Don't bow your head, don't feel humiliated; you have been the dupe of
noble feelings; you have coquetted with poesy, not with a man. All
women--all, do you hear me, Marie?--would have been seduced in your
position. How absurd we should be, we men, we who have committed a
thousand follies through a score of years, if we were not willing to
grant you one imprudence in a lifetime! God keep me from triumphing
over you or from offering you a pity you repelled so vehemently the
other day. Perhaps that unfortunate man was sincere when he wrote to
you, sincere in attempting to kill himself, sincere in returning that
same night to Florine. Men are worth less than women. It is not for my
own sake that I speak at this moment, but for yours. I am indulgent,
but the world is not; it shuns a woman who makes a scandal. Is that
just? I know not; but this I know, the world is cruel. Society refuses
to calm the woes itself has caused; it gives its honors to those who
best deceive it; it has no recompense for rash devotion. I see and
know all that. I can't reform society, but this I can do, I can
protect you, Marie, against yourself. This matter concerns a man who
has brought you trouble only, and not one of those high and sacred
loves which do, at times, command our abnegation, and even bear their
own excuse. Perhaps I have been wrong in not varying your happiness,
in not providing you with gayer pleasures, travel, amusements,
distractions for the mind. Besides, I can explain to myself the
impulse that has driven you to a celebrated man, by the jealous envy
you have roused in certain women. Lady Dudley, Madame d'Espard, and my
sister-in-law Emilie count for something in all this. Those women,
against whom I ought to have put you more thoroughly on your guard,
have cultivated your curiosity more to trouble me and cause me
unhappiness, than to fling you into a whirlpool which, as I believe,
you would never have entered."

As she listened to these words, so full of kindness, the countess was
torn by many conflicting feelings; but the storm within her breast was
ruled by one of them,--a keen admiration for her husband. Proud and
noble souls are prompt to recognize the delicacy with which they are
treated. Tact is to sentiments what grace is to the body. Marie
appreciated the grandeur of the man who bowed before a woman in fault,
that he might not see her blush. She ran from the room like one beside
herself, but instantly returned, fearing lest her hasty action might
cause him uneasiness.

"Wait," she said, and disappeared again.

Felix had ably prepared her excuse, and he was instantly rewarded for
his generosity. His wife returned with Nathan's letters in her hand,
and gave them to him.

"Judge me," she said, kneeling down beside him.

"Are we able to judge where we love?" he answered, throwing the
letters into the fire; for he felt that later his wife might not
forgive him for having read them. Marie, with her head upon his knee,
burst into tears.

"My child," he said, raising her head, "where are your letters?"

At this question the poor woman no longer felt the intolerable burning
of her cheeks; she turned cold.

"That you may not suspect me of calumniating a man whom you think
worthy of you, I will make Florine herself return you those letters."

"Oh! Surely he would give them back to me himself."

"Suppose that he refused to do so?"

The countess dropped her head.

"The world disgusts me," she said. "I don't want to enter it again. I
want to live alone with you, if you forgive me."

"But you might get bored again. Besides, what would the world say if
you left it so abruptly? In the spring we will travel; we will go to
Italy, and all over Europe; you shall see life. But to-morrow night we
must go to the Opera-ball; there is no other way to get those letters
without compromising you; besides, by giving them up, Florine will
prove to you her power."

"And must I see that?" said the countess, frightened.

"To-morrow night."

The next evening, about midnight, Nathan was walking about the foyer
of the Opera with a mask on his arm, to whom he was attending in a
sufficiently conjugal manner. Presently two masked women came up to
him.

"You poor fool! Marie is here and is watching you," said one of them,
who was Vandenesse, disguised as a woman.

"If you choose to listen to me I will tell you secrets that Nathan is
hiding from you," said the other woman, who was the countess, to
Florine.

Nathan had abruptly dropped Florine's arm to follow the count, who
adroitly slipped into the crowd and was out of sight in a moment.
Florine followed the countess, who sat down on a seat close at hand,
to which the count, doubling on Nathan, returned almost immediately to
guard his wife.

"Explain yourself, my dear," said Florine, "and don't think I shall
stand this long. No one can tear Raoul from me, I'll tell you that; I
hold him by habit, and that's even stronger than love."

"In the first place, are you Florine?" said the count, speaking in his
natural voice.

"A pretty question! if you don't know that, my joking friend, why
should I believe you?"

"Go and ask Nathan, who has left you to look for his other mistress,
where he passed the night, three days ago. He tried to kill himself
without a word to you, my dear,--and all for want of money. That shows
how much you know about the affairs of a man whom you say you love,
and who leaves you without a penny, and kills himself,--or, rather,
doesn't kill himself, for his misses it. Suicides that don't kill are
about as absurd as a duel without a scratch."

"That's a lie," said Florine. "He dined with me that very day. The
poor fellow had the sheriff after him; he was hiding, as well he
might."

"Go and ask at the hotel du Mail, rue du Mail, if he was not taken
there that morning, half dead of the fumes of charcoal, by a handsome
young woman with whom he has been in love over a year. Her letters are
at this moment under your very nose in your own house. If you want to
teach Nathan a good lesson, let us all three go there; and I'll show
you, papers in hand, how you can save him from the sheriff and Clichy
if you choose to be the good girl that you are."

"Try that on others than Florine, my little man. I am certain that
Nathan has never been in love with any one but me."

"On the contrary, he has been in love with a woman in society for over
a year--"

"A woman in society, he!" cried Florine. "I don't trouble myself about
such nonsense as that."

"Well, do you want me to make him come and tell you that he will not
take you home from here to-night."

"If you can make him tell me that," said Florine, "I'll take _you_
home, and we'll look for those letters, which I shall believe in when I
see them, and not till then. He must have written them while I slept."

"Stay here," said Felix, "and watch."

So saying, he took the arm of his wife and moved to a little distance.
Presently, Nathan, who had been hunting up and down the foyer like a
dog looking for its master, returned to the spot where the mask had
addressed him. Seeing on his face an expression he could not conceal,
Florine placed herself like a post in front of him, and said,
imperiously:--

"I don't wish you to leave me again; I have my reasons for this."

The countess then, at the instigation of her husband, went up to Raoul
and said in his ear,--

"Marie. Who is this woman? Leave her at once, and meet me at the foot
of the grand staircase."

In this difficult extremity Raoul dropped Florine's arm, and though
she caught his own and held it forcibly, she was obliged, after a
moment, to let him go. Nathan disappeared into the crowd.

"What did I tell you?" said Felix in Florine's astonished ears,
offering her his arm.

"Come," she said; "whoever you are, come. Have you a carriage here?"

For all answer, Vandenesse hurried Florine away, followed by his wife.
A few moments later the three masks, driven rapidly by the Vandenesse
coachman, reached Florine's house. As soon as she had entered her own
apartments the actress unmasked. Madame de Vandenesse could not
restrain a quiver of surprise at Florine's beauty as she stood there
choking with anger, and superb in her wrath and jealousy.

"There is, somewhere in these rooms," said Vandenesse, "a portfolio,
the key of which you have never had; the letters are probably in it."

"Well, well, for once in my life I am bewildered; you know something
that I have been uneasy about for some days," cried Florine, rushing
into the study in search of the portfolio.

Vandenesse saw that his wife was turning pale beneath her mask.
Florine's apartment revealed more about the intimacy of the actress
and Nathan than any ideal mistress would wish to know. The eye of a
woman can take in the truth of such things in a second, and the
countess saw vestiges of Nathan which proved to her the certainty of
what Vandenesse had said. Florine returned with the portfolio.

"How am I to open it?" she said.

The actress rang the bell and sent into the kitchen for the cook's
knife. When it came she brandished it in the air, crying out in
ironical tones:--

"With this they cut the necks of 'poulets.'"

The words, which made the countess shiver, explained to her, even
better than her husband had done the night before, the depths of the
abyss into which she had so nearly fallen.

"What a fool I am!" said Florine; "his razor will do better."

She fetched one of Nathan's razors from his dressing-table, and slit
the leather cover of the portfolio, through which Marie's letters
dropped. Florine snatched one up hap-hazard, and looked it over.

"Yes, she must be a well-bred woman. It looks to me as if there were
no mistakes in spelling here."

The count gathered up the letters hastily and gave them to his wife,
who took them to a table as if to see that they were all there.

"Now," said Vandenesse to Florine, "will you let me have those letters
for these?" showing her five bank-bills of ten thousand francs each.
"They'll replace the sums you have paid for him."

"Ah!" cried Florine, "didn't I kill myself body and soul in the
provinces to get him money,--I, who'd have cut my hand off to serve
him? But that's men! damn your soul for them and they'll march over
you rough-shod! He shall pay me for this!"

Madame de Vandenesse was disappearing with the letters.

"Hi! stop, stop, my fine mask!" cried Florine; "leave me one to
confound him with."

"Not possible," said Vandenesse.

"Why not?"

"That mask is your ex-rival; but you needn't fear her now."

"Well, she might have had the grace to say thank you," cried Florine.

"But you have the fifty thousand francs instead," said Vandenesse,
bowing to her.

It is extremely rare for young men, when driven to suicide, to attempt
it a second time if the first fails. When it doesn't cure life, it
cures all desire for voluntary death. Raoul felt no disposition to try
it again when he found himself in a more painful position than that
from which he had just been rescued. He tried to see the countess and
explain to her the nature of his love, which now shone more vividly in
his soul than ever. But the first time they met in society, Madame de
Vandenesse gave him that fixed and contemptuous look which at once and
forever puts an impassable gulf between a man and a woman. In spite of
his natural assurance, Nathan never dared, during the rest of the
winter, either to speak to the countess or even approach her.

But he opened his heart to Blondet; to him he talked of his Laura and
his Beatrice, apropos of Madame de Vandenesse. He even made a
paraphrase of the following beautiful passage from the pen of
Theophile Gautier, one of the most remarkable poets of our day:--

"'Ideala, flower of heaven's own blue, with heart of gold, whose
fibrous roots, softer, a thousandfold, than fairy tresses, strike to
our souls and drink their purest essence; flower most sweet and
bitter! thou canst not be torn away without the heart's blood flowing,
without thy bruised stems sweating with scarlet tears. Ah! cursed
flower, why didst thou grow within my soul?'"

"My dear fellow," said Blondet, "you are raving. I'll grant it was a
pretty flower, but it wasn't a bit ideal, and instead of singing like
a blind man before an empty niche, you had much better wash your hands
and make submission to the powers. You are too much of an artist ever
to be a good politician; you have been fooled by men of not one-half
your value. Think about being fooled again--but elsewhere."

"Marie cannot prevent my loving her," said Nathan; "she shall be my
Beatrice."

"Beatrice, my good Raoul, was a little girl twelve years of age when
Dante last saw her; otherwise, she would not have been Beatrice. To
make a divinity, it won't do to see her one day wrapped in a mantle,
and the next with a low dress, and the third on the boulevard,
cheapening toys for her last baby. When a man has Florine, who is in
turn duchess, bourgeoise, Negress, marquise, colonel, Swiss peasant,
virgin of the sun in Peru (only way she can play the part), I don't
see why he should go rambling after fashionable women."

Du Tillet, to use a Bourse term, _executed_ Nathan, who, for lack of
money, gave up his place on the newspaper; and the celebrated man
received but five votes in the electoral college where the banker was
elected.

When, after a long and happy journey in Italy, the Comtesse de
Vandenesse returned to Paris late in the following winter, all her
husband's predictions about Nathan were justified. He had taken
Blondet's advice and negotiated with the government, which employed
his pen. His personal affairs were in such disorder that one day, on
the Champs-Elysees, Marie saw her former adorer on foot, in shabby
clothes, giving his arm to Florine. When a man becomes indifferent to
the heart of a woman who has once loved him, he often seems to her
very ugly, even horrible, especially when he resembles Nathan. Madame
de Vandenesse had a sense of personal humiliation in the thought that
she had once cared for him. If she had not already been cured of all
extra-conjugal passion, the contrast then presented by the count to
this man, grown less and less worthy of public favor, would have
sufficed her.

To-day the ambitious Nathan, rich in ink and poor in will, has ended
by capitulating entirely, and has settled down into a sinecure, like
any other commonplace man. After lending his pen to all disorganizing
efforts, he now lives in peace under the protecting shade of a
ministerial organ. The cross of the Legion of honor, formerly the
fruitful text of his satire, adorns his button-hole. "Peace at any
price," ridicule of which was the stock-in-trade of his revolutionary
editorship, is now the topic of his laudatory articles. Heredity,
attacked by him in Saint-Simonian phrases, he now defends with solid
arguments. This illogical conduct has its origin and its explanation
in the change of front performed by many men besides Raoul during our
recent political evolutions.




ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bidault (known as Gigonnet)
  The Government Clerks
  Gobseck
  The Vendetta
  Cesar Birotteau
  The Firm of Nucingen

Blondet, Emile
  Jealousies of a Country Town
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Modeste Mignon
  Another Study of Woman
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Firm of Nucingen
  The Peasantry

Blondet, Virginie
  Jealousies of a Country Town
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Peasantry
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Another Study of Woman
  The Member for Arcis

Bruel, Jean Francois du
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  The Government Clerks
  A Start in Life
  A Prince of Bohemia
  The Middle Classes
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Camps, Madame Octave de
  Madame Firmiani
  The Government Clerks
  A Woman of Thirty
  The Member for Arcis

Dudley, Lord
  The Lily of the Valley
  The Thirteen
  A Man of Business
  Another Study of Woman

Dudley, Lady Arabella
  The Lily of the Valley
  The Ball at Sceaux
  The Magic Skin
  The Secrets of a Princess
  Letters of Two Brides

Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise d'
  The Commission in Lunacy
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Letters of Two Brides
  Another Study of Woman
  The Gondreville Mystery
  The Secrets of a Princess
  Beatrix

Galathionne, Prince and Princess (both not in each story)
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Middle Classes
  Father Goriot
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Beatrix

Grandlieu, Duchesse Ferdinand de
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Beatrix

Grandlieu, Vicomtesse Juste de
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Gobseck

Granville, Vicomte de
  The Gondreville Mystery
  A Second Home
  Farewell (Adieu)
  Cesar Birotteau
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Cousin Pons

Granville, Comtesse Angelique de
  A Second Home
  The Thirteen

Granville, Vicomte de
  A Second Home
  The Country Parson

La Roche-Hugon, Martial de
  Domestic Peace
  The Peasantry
  The Member for Arcis
  The Middle Classes
  Cousin Betty

Listomere, Marquise de
  The Lily of the Valley
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  A Daughter of Eve

Lousteau, Etienne
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Beatrix
  The Muse of the Department
  Cousin Betty
  A Prince of Bohemia
  A Man of Business
  The Middle Classes
  The Unconscious Humorists

Manerville, Comtesse Paul de
  A Marriage Settlement
  The Lily of the Valley

Marsay, Henri de
  The Thirteen
  The Unconscious Humorists
  Another Study of Woman
  The Lily of the Valley
  Father Goriot
  Jealousies of a Country Town
  Ursule Mirouet
  A Marriage Settlement
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Letters of Two Brides
  The Ball at Sceaux
  Modeste Mignon
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Gondreville Mystery

Massol
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  The Magic Skin
  Cousin Betty
  The Unconscious Humorists

Nathan, Raoul
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  The Secrets of a Princess
  Letters of Two Brides
  The Seamy Side of History
  The Muse of the Department
  A Prince of Bohemia
  A Man of Business
  The Unconscious Humorists

Nathan, Madame Raoul (Florine)
  The Muse of the Department
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  The Government Clerks
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  Ursule Mirouet
  Eugenie Grandet
  The Imaginary Mistress
  A Prince of Bohemia
  The Unconscious Humorists

Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
  Father Goriot
  The Thirteen
  Eugenie Grandet
  Cesar Birotteau
  Melmoth Reconciled
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  The Commission in Lunacy
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Modeste Mignon
  The Firm of Nucingen
  Another Study of Woman
  The Member for Arcis

Rastignac, Eugene de
  Father Goriot
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  The Ball at Sceaux
  The Commission in Lunacy
  A Study of Woman
  Another Study of Woman
  The Magic Skin
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Gondreville Mystery
  The Firm of Nucingen
  Cousin Betty
  The Member for Arcis
  The Unconscious Humorists

Rastignac, Monseigneur Gabriel de
  Father Goriot
  The Country Parson

Rochefide, Marquise de
  Beatrix
  The Secrets of a Princess
  Sarrasine
  A Prince of Bohemia

Roguin, Madame
  Cesar Birotteau
  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
  Pierrette
  A Second Home

Saint-Hereen, Comtesse Moina de
  A Woman of Thirty
  The Member for Arcis

Schmucke, Wilhelm
  Ursule Mirouet
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Cousin Pons

Souchet, Francois
  The Purse
  The Imaginary Mistress

Therese
  Father Goriot

Tillet, Ferdinand du
  Cesar Birotteau
  The Firm of Nucingen
  The Middle Classes
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  Pierrette
  Melmoth Reconciled
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  The Secrets of a Princess
  The Member for Arcis
  Cousin Betty
  The Unconscious Humorists

Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des
  Beatrix
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  Another Study of Woman
  Honorine
  Beatrix
  The Muse of the Department

Vandenesse, Marquis Charles de
  A Woman of Thirty
  A Start in Life

Vandenesse, Marquise Charles de
  Cesar Birotteau
  The Ball at Sceaux
  Ursule Mirouet
  A Daughter of Eve

Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
  The Lily of the Valley
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Cesar Birotteau
  Letters of Two Brides
  A Start in Life
  The Marriage Settlement
  The Secrets of a Princess
  Another Study of Woman
  The Gondreville Mystery

Vandenesse, Comtesse Felix de
  A Second Home
  The Muse of the Department

Vernou, Felicien
  A Bachelor's Establishment
  Lost Illusions
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
  Cousin Betty

Vignon, Claude
  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  Honorine
  Beatrix
  Cousin Betty
  The Unconscious Humorists





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