“But we know all about that, old man!” Paul exclaimed. “She comes here sometimes, she’s the Girl with the Golden Eyes. We gave her that name. She’s a young lady about twenty-two years old, and I’ve seen her here when the Bourbons were here, but with a woman who’s worth 100,000 times more than she is.”
“Shut up, Paul! It’s impossible for any woman whatsoever to surpass this girl who’s like a cat who wants to come rubbing up against your legs, a pale girl with ash blond hair, delicate in her looks, but with fine hairs on the third phalanx of her fingers; and her cheeks are covered with a white down, luminous on a sunny day, which begins at the ears and disappears down her neck.”
“Oh! But the other one, my dear de Marsay! She has black eyes that have never cried, but burn; black eyebrows that meet and give her a look of hardness that’s contradicted by the full contours of her lips, on which no kiss remains—passionate, fresh lips; a Moorish complexion by which a man can be warmed like the sun; but, my word of honor, she looks just like you.…”
“You flatter her!”
“An arched waist, the streamlined waist of a racing sloop, which pounces on a merchant vessel with a French impetuosity, overtakes it and makes it go under in no time.”
“Come on, old man, what do I have to do with a woman I’ve never even seen!” de Marsay interrupted. “As long as I’ve been studying women, my unknown girl is the only one whose virgin breast, passionate and voluptuous forms, have actualized for me the only woman I’ve ever dreamt of! She is the original of the rapturous painting called “The Woman Caressing Her Chimera,” the most ardent, infernal inspiration of ancient genius, a holy form of poetry prostituted by those who copied it for frescoes and mosaics, for a bunch of bourgeois who see nothing in this cameo but a bracelet charm, and put it on the covers of their pocket-watches, whereas it is everything that a woman is, an abyss of pleasures you wallow in without ever finding an end to them, yet it’s an ideal woman who can sometimes actually be seen in Spain or Italy, almost never in France. Well, I’ve seen this Girl with the Golden Eyes again, this woman caressing her chimera, I saw her here, on Friday. I sensed she would return the next day at the same time. I was not wrong. I took pleasure in following her without her seeing me, in studying the indolent walk of an idle woman, in whose movements you can discern a sleeping voluptuousness. Well, she turned around, saw me, again adored me, again trembled, shivered. Then I noticed the veritable Spanish duenna guarding her, a hyena whom some jealous man dressed up as a woman, some female devil well-paid to guard this suave creature.… Oh! Then the duenna made me even more than in love—she made me curious. Saturday, no one. Here I am, today, waiting for this girl whose chimera I am, and asking for nothing better than to pose like the monster in the fresco.”
“There she is,” Paul said, “everyone’s turning around to look at her.…”
The unknown girl blushed; her eyes sparkled when she saw Henri. Lowering them, she passed by.
“You think she noticed you?” Paul de Manerville cried amusedly.
The duenna observed the two young men fixedly and attentively. When the unknown girl and Henri met again, the young girl brushed by him, and squeezed the young man’s hand with her own. Then she turned back and smiled passionately; but the duenna pulled her along at a fast pace towards the gate to the Rue Castiglione. The two friends followed the young woman, admiring the magnificent sinuosity of her neck, to which her head was joined by a coordination of vigorous lines, whence a few little ringlets of hair forced their way out. The Girl with the Golden Eyes had the thin, well-turned ankle that offers so many attractions to ready imaginations. She was elegantly shod, and wore a short dress. During her promenade, she turned round from time to time to look again at Henri, and seemed only regretfully to follow the older woman, of whom she seemed to be both mistress and slave: She could have her thrashed black and blue, but could not have sent her away. So much was obvious. The two friends reached the gate. Two footmen in livery folded down the steps of a tasteful carriage adorned with a coat of arms. The Girl with the Golden Eyes climbed in first, took the side where she would be seen when the car turned around; put her hand on the door and waved her handkerchief, without the duenna knowing, mocking the whatever will they say of curious onlookers, and publicly saying to Henri with the motions of her handkerchief: “Follow me.…”
“Have you ever seen anyone motion more nicely with a handkerchief?” Henri said to Paul de Manerville.
Then, noticing a fiacre ready to go after having discharged its passengers, he signed to the cabman to stop.
“Follow that carriage, mark the street and house it turns into, you’ll have ten francs.—Goodbye, Paul.”
The fiacre followed the carriage. The carriage returned to the Rue Saint-Lazare, to one of the most beautiful mansions in the neighborhood.
De Marsay wasn’t stupid. Any other young man would have obeyed the wish to find out some more information about a girl who so well embodied the most luminous ideas expressed about women in Oriental poetry; but, too skilful thus to compromise the future of his love affair, he just told his fiacre to continue on the Rue Saint-Lazare and bring him back to his house. The next day, his chief valet-de-chambre, Laurent, a boy as crafty as a Frontin out of the old comedies, waited near the house inhabited by the unknown girl at the hour when the mail was delivered. In order to be able to spy at his ease and wander around the mansion, he had, following the habit of policemen who want to disguise themselves, provided himself with the outfit of a peasant from the Auvergne, and tried to make his face look the part. When the mailman who was making the deliveries that morning for the Rue Saint-Lazare came by, Laurent pretended to be a messenger who was having trouble remembering the name of a person to whom he was supposed to deliver a package, and consulted the mailman. Deceived first of all by appearances—the sight of such a picturesque person in the midst of Parisian civilization—the postman told him that the mansion where the Girl with the Golden Eyes lived belonged to Don Hijos, Marquis de San-Réal, a Spanish grandee. Naturally the Auvergnat had no business with the marquis.
“My package,” he said, “is for the Marquise.”
“She is away,” the mailman replied. “Her letters are forwarded to London.”
“So the Marquise isn’t a young lady who …”
“Aha!” said the mailman, interrupting the valet-de-chambre and looking at him attentively, “you’re a messenger like I can fly.”
Laurent displayed a few gold coins to the functionary, who began to smile.
“Look, here’s the name of your prey,” he said, taking out of his leather box a letter that bore a London stamp, and on which was this address:
To Mademoiselle
PAQUITA VALDÈS,
Rue Saint-Lazare, Hôtel de San-Réal,
PARIS.
was written in the tiny, elongated letters of a woman’s hand.
“Would you be hostile to a bottle of Chablis, accompanied by a steak sautéed with mushrooms, and preceded by a few dozen oysters?” Laurent said, who wanted to conquer the precious friendship of the mailman.
“At 9:30, after work. Where?”
“At the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, ‘Au Petit Sans Vin,’ ” said Laurent.
“Listen, friend,” the mailman said when he joined the valet, an hour after that first meeting, “if your master is in love with this girl, he’s got his work cut out for him! I doubt you’ll be able to see her. In the ten years I’ve been a mailman in Paris, I’ve been able to study quite a few different security systems! But I can honestly say, without fear of being refuted by any of my comrades, that there is no gate as mysterious as M. de San-Réal’s. No one can penetrate the house without some sort of password, and notice that the house was chosen on purpose between a courtyard and a garden, to avoid any communication with other houses. The guard is an old Spaniard who never speaks a word of French, but who stares hard at people, the way the secret agent Vidocq would, to make su
re they’re not thieves. Even if this head clerk let himself be tricked by a lover, a thief, or by you (no offense), well, in the first room, which is closed off by a glass door, you’d meet a majordomo surrounded by lackeys, an old joker even more savage and surly than the guard. If someone gets through the carriage entrance, my majordomo emerges, makes you wait under the peristyle, and puts you through an interrogation as if you were a criminal. That has happened to me, an ordinary mailman. He took me for a seminary in disguise,” he said, laughing at his own play on the word ‘emissary.’ “As to other people, don’t even hope to get anything out of them, I think they’re mute, no one in the neighborhood has heard a word out of them; I don’t know what kind of wages they’re given not to speak and not to drink anything; the fact is they’re unapproachable, either because they’re afraid of being shot, or because they have an enormous amount to lose if they’re indiscreet. If your master loves Mlle. Paquita enough to surmount all these obstacles, he will certainly not triumph over Doña Concha Marialva, the duenna who is her companion, and who would put her under her skirts rather than leave her. These two women seem as if they’re sewn together.”
“What you tell me, worthy mailman,” Laurent said after tasting the wine, “confirms what I’ve just learned. On my word as an honest man, I thought they were making fun of me. The greengrocer across the street told me that at night, in the gardens, they let loose some dogs whose food is hung from posts, so that they can’t reach it. So these cursed animals think that any people who come in are after their food, and they’d tear them to pieces. You might suggest I throw them lumps of meat, but apparently they’re raised to eat only from the concierge’s hand.”
“The porter of M. le Baron de Nucingen, whose garden is next door to that of the San-Réal mansion, told me the exact same thing,” the mailman said.
“Oh good, my master knows him,” Laurent told himself. “Did you know,” he resumed, keeping a careful eye on the mailman, “that I belong to a master who is a proud man, and if he got it into his head to kiss the soles of an empress’s feet, that would inevitably come to pass? If he needed you, which I hope for your sake is the case, since he’s generous, could we count on you?”
“Indeed, Monsieur Laurent. My name is Moinot. My name is written exactly the same as moineau, sparrow: M-o-i-n-o-t.”
“I see,” said Laurent.
“I live on the Rue des Trois-Frères, No. 11, on the sixth floor,” Moinot went on. “I have a wife and four children. If what you want from me doesn’t go beyond the possibilities of conscience and my administrative duties—you understand!—I am yours to command.”
“You are a good man,” Laurent said to him as he shook his hand.
“Paquita Valdès must be the mistress of the Marquis de San-Réal, a friend of King Ferdinand’s. Only an eighty-year-old Spanish cadaver is capable of taking such precautions,” Henri said when his valet de chambre had told him the results of his researches.
“Monsieur,” Laurent said to him, “unless you arrive there in a balloon, no one can get into that mansion.”
“How stupid you are! Does one need to enter the mansion to have Paquita, when Paquita can easily leave it?”
“But, Monsieur, what about the duenna?”
“We can confine her to her room for a few days, your duenna.”
“So then, we’ll have Paquita!” Laurent said, rubbing his hands.
“Idiot!” Henri continued. “I’ll condemn you to the Concha if you push insolence to the point of talking that way about a woman before I’ve had her. Turn your mind to dressing me, I’m going out.”
Henri remained for a moment plunged in joyous thought. We’ll say this in praise of women: He won all those he deigned to desire. And what could one think of a woman without a lover who could resist a young man armed with beauty, which is the body’s spirit, armed with spirit, which is the soul’s grace, armed with moral force and wealth, which are the only two real powers? But by triumphing so easily, de Marsay was bound to become bored with his triumphs, so that for about two years he was often bored. Plunging to the depths of sensual delights, he brought back more pebbles than pearls. Thus he had come to the point, as sovereigns do, of begging Fortune for some obstacle to conquer, some undertaking that asked for the deployment of his idling moral and physical strength. Although Paquita Valdès presented him with the marvelous assembly of perfections he had not yet enjoyed in detail, the attraction of passion was almost nil for him. A constant satiety had weakened the sentiment of love in his heart. Like the old and the blasé, he had nothing left but extravagant whims, ruinous tastes, and fantasies that, once satisfied, left him with no good memories in his heart. In young people, love is the finest of sentiments, it makes life blossom in the soul, by its sun-like power it spreads the fairest inspirations and their great thoughts: The beginnings of any affair have a delicious taste. In men, love becomes a passion: Force leads to abuse. In old men, it turns to vice: Impotence leads to excess. Henri was at once an old man, a man, and a young man. For him to have the emotions of true love, he needed someone like Lovelace’s Clarissa Harlowe. Without the magical reflection of such an elusive pearl, he could experience nothing more than either passions sharpened by some Parisian vanity, or wagers made with himself to cause some woman to sink to a degree of corruption, or adventures that stimulated his curiosity. The report of Laurent, his valet, had just given an enormous value to the Girl with the Golden Eyes. It was a matter of waging battle with some secret enemy, who seemed as dangerous as he was cunning; to earn victory, all the forces at Henri’s disposal would be needed. He was going to play the ancient eternal comedy that will always be new, whose characters are an old man, a young lady, and a lover: Don Hijos, Paquita, de Marsay. Though Laurent was as good as Figaro, the duenna seemed incorruptible. Thus, the real-life play was more formidably developed by chance than it had ever been by any dramatic author! But isn’t Chance also a person of genius?
“We’ll have to play a close game,” Henri told himself.
“Well, then,” Paul de Manerville said to him as he came in, “where are we now? I’ve come to lunch with you.”
“Fine,” Henri said. “You won’t be shocked if I complete my toilette in front of you?”
“What a funny thought!”
“We’re borrowing so many things from the English nowadays that we might turn into hypocrites and prudes just like them,” Henri said.
Laurent had brought so many implements to his master, so many different articles, and such pretty ones, that Paul couldn’t prevent himself from exclaiming: “What, is your toilette going to take two hours?”
“Not at all,” Henri said, “two and a half hours.”
“Well, since we’re alone and we say anything we like to each other, explain to me why such a superior man as yourself—for you are superior—affects this exaggerated vanity, which must not be natural in you. Why spend two and a half hours grooming yourself, when it’s enough to take a fifteen-minute bath, run a comb through your hair, and get dressed? Come now, tell me your system.”
“I’d have to like you a lot, you fat oaf, to confide such high thoughts to you,” the young man said, who at that moment was having his feet scrubbed with a soft brush lathered with English soap.
“But I’ve vowed the most sincere attachment to you,” Paul de Manerville replied, “and I like you so much that I think you’re even better than I am!”
“You must have noticed, if you’re still capable of observing a moral fact, that women like vain men,” de Marsay continued, responding to Paul’s declaration with a meaningful glance. “Do you know why women like vain men? My friend, conceited men are the only men who take care of themselves. Now, doesn’t taking excessive care of yourself imply that you’re looking after the good of the other person in yourself? The man who doesn’t belong to himself is precisely the man women are fond of. Love is essentially a thief. I’m not talking about that excess of cleanliness they’re crazy about. Have you ever found a woman who was
passionately in love with a slovenly person, even one who was a remarkable man? If ever such a thing occurred, we’d have to attribute it to the whims of a pregnant woman, those weird ideas that come into her head and are told to everyone without a second thought. On the contrary, I have seen remarkable people quite simply dropped because of their negligence. A vain man who takes care of his appearance is one who takes care of a foolish thing, mere trifles. And what is woman? A mere trifle, an ensemble of foolish things. With two words spoken into the air, can’t we make her work for four hours? She is certain the vain man will take care of her, since he doesn’t think about big things. She will never play second fiddle to fame, ambition, politics, art, those big public girls who she thinks of as her rivals. Further, vain men have the courage to cover themselves with ridicule to please a woman, and her heart is full of consideration for a man who is made ridiculous by love. Finally, a conceited man can only be conceited if he has some reason to be so. Women are the ones who give us this rank. The conceited man is the colonel of love, he has affairs, he has his regiment of women to command! My dear friend! In Paris, everything is known, and a man cannot be conceited here gratis. You who have only one woman and who may have reason to have only one, if you tried to seem full of yourself, you’d not only become ridiculous, you’d be dead. You’d become a walking caricature, one of those men inevitably condemned to do one single thing. You would signify foolishness the way M. de Lafayette signifies America; M. de Talleyrand, diplomacy; Désaugiers, song; M. de Ségur, romance. If they depart from their specialty, everyone stops believing in the value of what they do. That’s what we’re like in France, always supremely unfair! M. de Talleyrand might be a great financier, M. de Lafayette a tyrant, and Désaugiers an administrator. You could have forty women the following year, but publicly they wouldn’t credit you with even one. Thus conceit, my friend Paul, is the sign of an unquestionable power acquired over the female population. A man loved by many women passes for having superior qualities; and then he can have whomever he likes, the wretch! But do you think it’s nothing to have the right to come into a salon, survey everyone there from over your cravat or through a monocle, and be able to scorn the most superior man there if he’s wearing an outdated waistcoat? Laurent, you’re hurting me! After lunch, Paul, we’ll go to the Tuileries to see the adorable Girl with the Golden Eyes.”