“Who is this woman?” Henri asked Paquita.
But Paquita didn’t reply. She made a sign that she didn’t understand French, and asked Henri if he spoke English. De Marsay repeated his question in English.
“She is the only woman I can trust, even though she has already sold me,” Paquita said calmly. “My dear Adolphe, she is my mother, a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, hardly any of which remains today. She speaks nothing but her mother tongue.”
The attitude of this woman, and her wish to divine what was going on between her daughter and Henri from their movements, were suddenly explained to the young man, and put him more at ease.
“Paquita,” he said to her, “we won’t ever be free, then?”
“Never!” she said sadly. “Even now we don’t have many days left us.”
She lowered her eyes, looked at her hand, and with her right hand counted the fingers on her left hand, thus displaying the most beautiful hands Henri had ever seen.
“One, two, three …”
She counted up to twelve.
“Yes,” she said, “we have twelve days left.”
“And then?”
“Then,” she said, remaining as self-absorbed as a frail woman before the executioner’s axe, as if killed beforehand by a fear that stripped her of that magnificent energy that nature seemed to have granted only to increase sensual delights and convert the coarsest pleasures into endless poetry. “Then,” she repeated. Her eyes became fixed; she seemed to contemplate a distant, threatening object. “I don’t know,” she said.
“This girl is mad,” Henri said to himself, and thereupon fell into a strange reverie.
Paquita seemed to him preoccupied by something other than himself; she was like a woman under the influence of both remorse and passion. Maybe she had another love in her heart that she alternately forgot and remembered. In an instant, Henri was assailed by a thousand contradictory thoughts. This girl became a mystery to him; but, contemplating her with the expert attention of the world-weary, a man starved for new sensual pleasures, like that Oriental monarch who asked for a new pleasure to be created for him—a horrible thirst to which great souls are prey—Henri recognized in Paquita the richest combination nature has ever created for love. The presumed workings of this mechanism, with its soul set aside, would have frightened any other man but de Marsay; but he was fascinated by this wealth of promised pleasures, by this constant variety in happiness, every man’s dream, and also what every woman in love strives for. He was driven wild by the infinite made palpable, and transported into the creature’s most excessive delights. He saw all that in this girl more clearly than he had ever yet seen it, for she complacently let herself be observed, glad to be admired. De Marsay’s admiration became a secret rage, and he revealed it completely in the looks he gave the Spanish girl that she understood, as if she were used to receiving such looks.
“If you were not going to be mine alone, I would kill you!” he cried out.
Hearing this, Paquita covered her face with her hands and naively cried: “Holy Virgin, what have I gotten myself into?”
She got up, threw herself on the red sofa, plunged her head into the rags that covered her mother’s bosom, and wept. The old lady received her daughter without emerging from her immobility, without showing her any emotion. The mother exhibited to the fullest that gravity of savage peoples, that impassivity of statues, on which observation runs aground. Did she, or did she not, love her daughter? No answer. Beneath this mask all human emotions were smoldering, good and bad, and anything at all might be expected from this creature. Her gaze passed slowly from her daughter’s beautiful hair, which covered her like a mantle, to Henri’s face, which she observed with an inexpressible curiosity. She seemed to be wondering by what magic spell he was there, by what caprice nature had made so seductive a man.
“These women are making fun of me!” Henri said to himself.
At that instant, Paquita raised her head and gave him one of those looks that sear your soul and burn you. She looked so beautiful to him that he swore to himself he would possess this treasure of beauty.
“My Paquita, be mine!”
“Do you want to kill me?” she said, fearful, trembling, anxious, but led back to him by some inexplicable force.
“Me, kill you!” he said, smiling.
Paquita let out a cry of fear and said a word to the old woman, who took Henri’s hand without asking, and her daughter’s hand, studied them a long time, then returned their hands to them, nodding her head in a horribly significant way.
“Be mine tonight, this very instant, follow me, don’t leave me, you must, Paquita! Do you love me? Come with me!”
In an instant, he said a thousand senseless words to her with the rapidity of a torrent leaping between rocks, repeating the same sound in a thousand different ways.
“It’s the same voice!” Paquita said sadly, without de Marsay hearing her, “and … the same fervor,” she added.
“All right, yes,” she said with an abandon of passion that nothing could express. “Yes, but not tonight. Tonight, Adolphe, I didn’t give enough opium to the Concha, she might wake up, I would be lost. At this moment, everyone in the house thinks I’m asleep in my bedroom. In two days, be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. This man is my foster father, Christemio adores me and would die in torment for me without anyone being able to tear a word against me from him. Adieu,” she said, seizing Henri’s body and twisting herself around him like a snake.
She squeezed him tight, brought her head up to his, offered her lips, and gave him a kiss that gave them both such vertigo that de Marsay thought the earth was opening up, and then Paquita cried out, “Go away!” in a voice that let him know how little in control of herself she really was. But she clung to him, still crying “Go!”, and led him slowly to the stairway.
There the mulatto, whose white eyes lit up at sight of Paquita, took the torch from his idol’s hands, and led Henri out to the street. He left the torch under the archway, opened the door, put Henri back in the carriage, and let him out on the Boulevard des Italiens with amazing speed. The horses seemed to have hellfire in their bodies.
The scene was like a dream for de Marsay, but one of those dreams that, even as they evaporate, leave behind a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness in the soul, which a man chases after for the rest of his life. One single kiss had been enough. No tryst had ever taken place in so decent a way, or so chaste, or even so cold, in a place made more terrible in its details, before a more hideous divinity—for this mother of hers had stayed in Henri’s imagination like something hellish, crouching, cadaverous, vicious, savage, something the fantasies of painters and poets had not yet guessed. In actual fact, never had a tryst more inflamed his senses, or revealed to him bolder sensual delights, or made love gush more from his core to spread itself like an atmosphere around a man. This was something dark, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained and expansive, a pairing of the horrible and the heavenly, of paradise and hell, that made de Marsay almost drunk. He was no longer himself, and yet he was old enough to be able to resist the intoxications of pleasure.
In order to understand de Marsay’s behavior at the end of this story, it must be explained how his soul had expanded at an age when most young men’s shrank from getting mixed up with women or having too much to do with them. His soul had grown through a combination of secret circumstances that endowed him with an immense unknown power. This young man held a scepter in his hand that was more powerful than that of modern kings, almost all of them restrained by laws in even their slightest wishes. De Marsay wielded the autocratic power of the Oriental despot. But this power, so stupidly put into practice in Asia by coarse men, was increased tenfold by European intelligence and by French wit—the liveliest, keenest of all instruments of the mind. Henri could do whatever he liked in the interest of his pleasures and his vanities. This invisible action on the social world had clothed him in a real but secret maje
sty, discreet, folded in on itself. He had about himself, not the opinion that Louis XIV would have had, but what the proudest of Caliphs, of Pharaohs, of Xerxes who believe they belong to the divine race, had about themselves, when they imitated God by veiling themselves from their subjects, under the pretext that their gaze caused death. Thus, without having any remorse at being both judge and plaintiff, de Marsay coldly condemned to death the man or woman who had seriously offended him. Although often pronounced almost offhandedly, the sentence was irrevocable. A mere foible became a catastrophe, like lightning striking some happy Parisian girl in her fiacre, instead of killing the old coachman who is bringing her to a tryst. Thus the bitter, profound pleasantry that marked the conversation of this young man generally caused fear in others; no one felt a desire to challenge him. Women intensely love those who call themselves “pashas,” who seem as if they’re accompanied by lions and executioners, and who walk clothed in terror. These men have an ensuing confidence of action, a certainty of power, a pride of look, a leonine awareness that for women embody the type of strength they all dream of. De Marsay was such a man.
Joyous at that instant with his future, he became once again young and vibrant, and thought only of love as he went to bed. He dreamed of the Girl with the Golden Eyes, as passionate young men dream: monstrous images, elusive peculiarities, full of light, which reveal invisible worlds, but always in an incomplete way, for the interposing veil changes optic conditions. The next day and the day after that, he disappeared without anyone knowing where he had gone. His power belonged to him only on certain conditions, and fortunately for him, during these two days, he was a simple soldier in the service of the demon whose talismanic existence he possessed. But at the agreed-upon time, that night, on the boulevard, he waited for the carriage, which wasn’t late in coming. The mulatto approached Henri to tell him, in French, a phrase he seemed to have learned by heart: “If you want to come, she told me, you have to agree to have your eyes blindfolded.”
And Christemio showed him a scarf of white silk.
“No!” Henri said, whose omnipotence suddenly rebelled.
And he wanted to climb in. The mulatto gave a sign; the carriage started off.
“Yes!” de Marsay cried, furious at losing a happiness that had been promised him. Moreover, he saw the impossibility of arguing with a slave whose obedience was blind as an executioner’s. And why should it be on this passive instrument that his anger should fall?
The mulatto whistled; the carriage returned. Henri quickly climbed in. Already some curious onlookers were stupidly gathering on the boulevard. Henri was strong, he wanted to trick the mulatto. When the carriage left at a fast trot, he grabbed his hands, trying to get control of him so as, by overcoming his guard, to be able to keep the exercise of his faculties so he could know where he was going. Vain attempt. The mulatto’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. The man uttered furious cries, got free, threw de Marsay down with an iron hand, and nailed him, so to speak, to the floor of the carriage. Then, with his free hand, he drew out a triangular dagger, and whistled. The coachman heard the whistle, and stopped. Henri, weaponless, was forced to give in; he offered his head for the blindfold. This gesture of submission appeased Christemio, who tied his eyes with a respect and care that testified to a kind of veneration for the body of the man his idol loved. But, before taking this precaution, he had defiantly put his dagger away in his side pocket, and buttoned himself up to his chin.
“He would have killed me, that Chinaman!” de Marsay said to himself.
The carriage quickly started up again. One resource remained for a young man who knew Paris as well as Henri knew it. To learn where he was going, it was enough for him to concentrate and count, by the number of gutters they crossed, the streets they passed on the boulevards, as long as the carriage continued to go straight ahead. He could thus recognize along which side street the carriage would head, whether towards the Seine, or towards the hills of Montmartre, and guess the name or position of the street where his guide would stop. But the violent emotion that his struggle had caused him, the fury at his compromised dignity, the ideas of revenge he dwelt on, the suppositions suggested to him by the meticulous care this mysterious girl was taking to bring him to her—all this prevented him from having that blind man’s attention necessary to the concentration of his intelligence and to the perfect hindsight of memory. The journey lasted half an hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on a paved road. The mulatto and the coachman took Henri bodily round the waist, lifted him up, put him on a kind of stretcher, and carried him through a garden whose flowers and particular odor of the trees and greenery Henri could smell. The silence that reigned there was so profound that he could make out the sound a few drops of water made as they fell from wet leaves. The two men carried him into a stairway, made him stand up, then led him through several rooms, guiding him by the hands, and left him in a room whose atmosphere was perfumed, and whose thick rug he could feel beneath his feet. A woman’s hand pushed him onto a divan and untied his blindfold. Henri saw Paquita in front of him, but Paquita in her glory as a voluptuous woman.
One half of the boudoir in which Henri found himself described a softly gracious circular outline, which contrasted with the other part perfectly square, in the middle of which gleamed a mantelpiece of white marble and gold. He had entered by a side door concealed beneath a rich tapestry curtain, which faced a window. The horseshoe part of the chamber was adorned with a real Turkish divan, that is to say a mattress placed on the ground, but a mattress deep as a bed, a divan fifty feet around, in white cashmere, adorned by black and poppy-red silk tassels arranged in diamond patterns. The back of this immense bed rose several inches above the many cushions that enriched it even more by their tasteful charm. This boudoir was hung with a red fabric overlaid by the sheerest Indian chiffon, fluted like a Corinthian column, its folds alternately hollow and full, ending at both top and bottom in a poppy red band of cloth on which black arabesques were outlined. Beneath the sheer muslin, the red cloth showed as pink, an amorous color that was repeated by the curtains on the window, made of Indian chiffon lined with pink taffeta, and adorned with poppy-red fringes mixed with black. Six silver gilt sconces, each supporting two candles, were attached to the wall-hangings at equal distances to illumine the divan. The ceiling, in the center of which hung a burnished silver chandelier, gleamed white, and the cornice was gilt. The rug was like a shawl from the Orient; it represented the pictures and recalled the poems of Persia, where the hands of slaves had labored on it. All the furniture was covered in white cashmere, enhanced by black and poppy-red accents. The clock, the candelabra, everything was white marble and gold. The solitary table had a cashmere shawl as covering. Elegant flower arrangements contained all kinds of roses, along with white or red flowers. The slightest detail seemed in fact to have been the object of the most loving attention. Never was richness more coquettishly veiled to become elegance, to express grace, to inspire voluptuousness. Here everything would have warmed the heart of even the coldest being. The way the hangings shimmered, their color always changing according to the direction of your gaze, becoming either completely white, or completely pink, harmonized with the effects of the light infused in the diaphanous folds of chiffon, producing a misty appearance. The soul has some sort of attachment to white; love is pleased by red; and gold flatters the passions, and has the power to realize their fantasies. Thus whatever vague and mysterious qualities there are in man, all his unexplained affinities, were caressed through their involuntary resemblances. There was a concert of colors in this perfect harmony to which the soul responded with voluptuous, indecisive, floating ideas.
It was in the midst of this hazy atmosphere charged with exquisite perfumes that Paquita, wearing a white dressing gown, her feet bare, orange blossoms in her black hair, appeared kneeling before Henri, adoring him like the god of this temple he had deigned to visit. Although de Marsay was accustomed to seeing the affectations of Parisian luxury, he w
as surprised at the appearance of this shell, so like the one from which Venus was born. Either because of the contrast between the darkness from which he had emerged and the light flooding his soul, or from a quick comparison between this scene and that of the first meeting, he experienced one of those delicate sensations that true poetry produces. When he caught sight, in the middle of this sanctum appearing from a fairy’s wand, of that masterpiece of creation, this girl, whose warmly suffused complexion, whose soft skin lightly gilded by the reflections of red and by the effusion of some unknown vapor of love, glowed as if she were reflecting the beams of lights and colors, then all his anger, his desires for revenge, his wounded vanity, fell away from him. Like an eagle swooping down on his prey, he seized her round the waist, seated her on his lap, and with an inexpressible drunkenness felt the voluptuous pressure of this girl whose charms, so generously developed, gently enveloped him.
“Come, Paquita!” he said in a low voice.
“Speak! Speak without fear,” she said to him. “This retreat was built for love. No sound can escape it, designed as it is with the aim of cherishing the accents and musical tones of the beloved’s voice. However loud our cries here, they cannot be heard beyond this enclosure. Someone could be killed here, but his moans would be as vain as if he were in the middle of the Great Desert.”
“Who is it who has so well understood jealousy and its needs?”
“Never ask me about that,” she replied, undoing the young man’s cravat with an incredible tenderness, no doubt the better to see his neck.