“Oh my dear, my tender Eugénie,” said the Count, seating himself beside her on the flower-strewn chairs which were to serve as the scene of his triumph, “if indeed it is true that you owe me something, if your feelings toward me are as sincere as you say they are, do you know by what means you can persuade me of your sincerity?”
“What are they, my brother? Tell them to me quickly, so that I may be quick to seize them.”
“All these many charms, Eugénie, that Nature has lavished upon you, all these physical charms with which She has embellished you—these you must sacrifice to me without a moment’s delay.”
“But what is it you ask of me? Are you not already the master of everything? Does not what you have wrought belong to you? Can another delight in your handiwork?”
“But you are not unaware of people’s prejudices. . . .”
“You have never concealed them from me.”
“I do not wish to flout them without your consent.”
“Do you not despise them as much as I?”
“Surely, but I do not want to be your tyrant, and even less your seducer. The services I am soliciting, nay the rewards I request, I wish to be won through love, and through love alone. You are familiar with the world and with its ways; I have never concealed any of its lures from you. My habit of keeping other men from your eyes, so that I alone will be the constant object of your vision, has become a hoax, a piece of trickery unworthy of me. If in the world there exists a being whom you prefer to me, name him without delay, I shall go to the ends of the earth to find him and straightway lead him back here into your arms. In a word, it is your happiness I seek, my angel, yours much more than mine. These gentle pleasures you can give me will be nothing to me, if they are not the concrete proof of your love. Therefore, Eugénie, make up your mind. The time has come for you to be immolated, and immolated you must be. But you yourself must name the priest who shall perform the sacrifice; I renounce the pleasures which this title assures me if it is not your heart and soul which offer them to me. And, still worthy of your heart, if ’tis not I whom you most prefer, still I shall, by bringing you him whom you can love and cherish, at least have merited your tender affection though I may not have won the citadel of your heart. And, failing to become Eugénie’s lover, I shall still be her friend.”
“You will be everything, my brother, you will be everything,” Eugénie said, burning with love and desire. “To whom do you wish me to sacrifice myself if it is not to him whom I solely adore! What creature in the entire universe can be more worthy than you of these meager charms that you desire . . . and over which your burning hands are already roaming with great ardor! Can’t you see by the fire which inflames me that I am just as eager as you to know these pleasures of which you have spoken? Ah! do, do what you will, my dear brother, my best friend, make Eugénie your victim; immolated by your beloved hands, she will always be triumphant.”
The fervent Franval who, considering the character we know him to possess, had draped himself in so much delicacy only in order to seduce his daughter all the more subtly, soon abused her credulity and, with all the obstacles eliminated or overcome both by the principles with which he had nourished that open and impressionable heart and by the cunning with which he had ensnared her at this final moment, he concluded his perfidious conquest and himself became with impunity the ravisher of that virginity of which Nature and the bonds of blood had made him the trusted defender.
Several days passed in mutual intoxication. Eugénie, old enough to experience the pleasures of love, her appetite whetted by his doctrines, yielded herself to its transports. Franval taught her all its mysteries; he traced for her all its paths and byways. The more he paid obeisance, the more complete became his conquest. She would have wished to receive him in a thousand temples simultaneously; she accused her friend’s imagination of being too timid, of not throwing all caution to the winds. And she had the feeling that he was hiding something from her. She complained of her age, and of a kind of ingenuousness which perhaps kept her from being seductive enough. And if she wished to further her amorous education, it was to insure that no means of inflaming her lover remained unknown to her.
They returned to Paris, but the criminal pleasures which this perverse man had reveled in had too delightfully flattered his moral and physical faculties for that trait of character, inconstancy, which generally caused him to break off his other affairs, to have the least effect in breaking the bonds of this one. He had fallen hopelessly in love, and from this dangerous passion there inevitably ensued the cruelest abandonment of his wife. . . . Alas! what a victim. Madame de Franval, who was then thirty-one, was in the full flower of her beauty. An impression of sadness, the sort which inevitably follows upon the sorrows which consumed her, made her even more attractive. Bathed in her own tears, a constant prey to melancholy, her beautiful hair carelessly scattered over an alabaster throat, her lips lovingly pressed against the portraits of her faithless daughter and tyrant-husband, she resembled one of those beautiful virgins whom Michelangelo was wont to portray in the throes of sorrow. As yet she was still unaware of that which was destined to crown her affliction. The manner in which Eugénie was being educated, the essential things to which Madame de Franval was not privy or those she was told only to make her hate them; the certainty that these duties, despised by Franval, would never be permitted to her daughter; the little time she was allowed to spend with the young person; the fear that the peculiar education that Eugénie was being given might sooner or later lead her into the paths of crime; and, finally, Franval’s wild conduct, his daily harshness toward her—she whose only concern in life was to anticipate his every wish, who knew no other charms than those resulting from her having interested or pleased him: these alone, for the moment, were the only causes of her distress. But imagine with what sorrow and pain this tender soul would be afflicted when she learned the full truth!
Meanwhile, Eugénie’s education continued. She herself had expressed a desire to follow her masters until she was sixteen, and her talents, the broad scope of her knowledge, the graces which daily developed in her—all these further tightened Franval’s fetters. It was easy to see that he had never loved anyone the way he loved Eugénie.
On the surface, nothing in Eugénie’s daily routine had been changed save the time of the lectures. These private discussions with her father occurred much more frequently and lasted far into the night. Eugénie’s governess was the only person privy to the affair, and they trusted her sufficiently not to be worried about her indiscretion. There were also a few changes in Eugénie’s meal schedule: now she ate with her parents. In a house like Franval’s, this circumstance soon placed Eugénie in a position to meet people and to be courted with a view toward marriage. Several men did ask for her hand. Franval, certain of his daughter’s heart and feeling he had nothing to fear from these requests, had nonetheless failed to realize that this virtual flood of proposals might end by revealing everything.
In one conversation with her daughter—a favor so devoutly desired by Madame de Franval and so rarely obtained—this tender mother informed Eugénie that Monsieur de Colunce had asked for her hand.
“You know the gentleman,” Madame de Franval said. “He loves you; he is young, agreeable, and one day he will be rich. He awaits your consent . . . naught but your consent. What will my answer be?”
Taken aback, Eugénie reddened and replied that as yet she did not feel inclined toward marriage, but suggested the matter be referred to her father; his wish would be her command.
Seeing in this reply nothing but candor pure and simple, Madame de Franval waited patiently for a few days until at last she found an occasion to speak to her husband about it. She communicated to him the intentions of the Colunce family, and those of young Colunce himself, and told him what his daughter’s reply had been.
As one can imagine, Franval already knew everything; but he made little effort to disguise his feelings.
“Madame,” he
said dryly to his wife, “I must ask you to refrain from interfering in matters pertaining to Eugénie. I should have imagined that you would have surmised, from the care you saw me take to keep her away from you, how deeply I desired to make certain that anything relating to her should in no wise concern you. I reiterate my orders on this subject. I trust you will not forget them again.”
“But what, Sir, shall I reply,” she answered, “since the request has been made through me?”
“You will say that I appreciate the honor, and that my daughter has certain congenital defects which make marriage impossible for her.”
“But, Monsieur, these defects are not real. Why should I then falsely saddle her with them, and why deprive your daughter of the happiness she may find in marriage?”
“Has marriage then made you so profoundly happy, Madame?”
“Doubtless all other wives have not failed so signally to win their husband’s devotion, or” (and this was accompanied by a sigh) “all husbands are not like you.”
“Wives . . . wives are faithless, jealous, imperious, coquettish, or pious. . . . Husbands are treacherous, inconstant, cruel, or despotic. There, Madame, you have the summary of everyone on earth. Do not expect to find a paragon.”
“Still, everyone gets married.”
“True, the fools and ne’er-do-wells. In the words of one philosopher, ‘People get married only when they do not know what they are doing, or when they no longer know what to do.’”
“Then you think the human race should be allowed to die out?”
“And why not? A planet whose only product is poison cannot be rooted out too quickly.”
“Eugénie will not be grateful to you for your excessive sternness toward her.”
“Has she evinced any desire to marry this young man?”
“She said that your wishes were her commands.”
“In that case, Madame, my commands are that you pursue this matter no further.”
And Monsieur de Franval left the room after reiterating most vigorously to his wife that she never speak to him on the subject again.
Madame de Franval did not fail to inform her mother of the conversation that she had just had with her husband, and Madame de Farneille, a more subtle soul and one more versed in the effects of the passions than was her attractive daughter, immediately suspected something unnatural was involved.
Eugénie saw her grandmother very seldom, no more than an hour, on festive or important occasions, and always in the presence of her father. Desirous of clarifying the matter, Madame de Farneille sent word to her son-in-law asking him to accord her the presence of her granddaughter one day, and requesting that he might allow her to stay one entire afternoon, in order to distract her, she said, from a migraine headache from which she was suffering. Franval sent back an irritable reply saying that there was nothing Eugénie feared more than the vapors, but that he would nonetheless bring her personally to her grandmother whenever the latter desired. He added, however, that Eugénie would not be able to remain for very long, since she was obliged to go from her grandmother’s to a physics course which she was assiduously following.
When they arrived at Madame de Farneille’s, she did not hide from her son-in-law her astonishment at his refusal of the proposed marriage.
“I imagine that you safely can allow your daughter to persuade me herself,” Madame de Farneille went on, “of this defect which, according to you, must deprive her of marriage.”
“Whether this defect is real or not, Madame,” said Franval, who was slightly surprised by his mother-in-law’s resolution, “the fact is that it would cost me a small fortune to marry my daughter, and I am still too young to consent to such sacrifices. When she is twenty-five, she may do as she wishes. Until then, she cannot count on me or my support.”
“And do you feel the same way, Eugénie?” said Madame de Farneille.
“With this one difference,” Eugénie said with considerable firmness. “My father has given me permission to marry when I am twenty-five. But to you both here present, Madame, I swear that I shall never in my life take advantage of this permission, which with my way of thinking would only lead to unhappiness.”
“At your age one does not have ‘a way of thinking,’ said Madame de Farneille, “and there is something quite out of the ordinary in all this, which I intend to ferret out.”
“I urge you to try, Madame,” Franval said, leading his daughter away. “In fact, you would be well advised to seek the services of your clergy to help you in solving the enigma. And when all your powers have scraped and delved and you are at last enlightened in the matter, please let me know whether or not I was right in opposing Eugénie’s marriage.”
Franval’s sarcasm concerning his mother-in-law’s ecclesiastical advisers was aimed at a respectable personage whom it will be appropriate to introduce at this point, since the sequence of events will soon show him in action.
He was the confessor both of Madame de Farneille and her daughter, one of the most virtuous men in all France: honest, benevolent, a paragon of candor and wisdom, Monsieur de Clervil, far from having all the vices of men of the cloth, was possessed only of gentle and useful qualities. The rod and the staff of the poor, the sincere friend of the wealthy, the consoler of the wretched and downtrodden, this worthy man combined all the gifts which make a person agreeable, all the virtues which make one sensitive.
When consulted, Clervil replied as a man of good common sense that before taking a stand in the matter they would have to unravel the reasons why Monsieur de Franval was opposed to his daughter’s marriage; and although Madame de Farneille offered a few remarks suggesting the possibility of an affair—one which in fact existed all too concretely—the prudent confessor rejected these ideas. And finding them too outrageously insulting both for Madame de Franval and for her husband, he indignantly refused even to consider the possibility.
“Crime is such a distressing thing, Madame,” this honest man was sometimes wont to say, “it is so highly unlikely that a decent person should voluntarily exceed all the bounds of modesty and virtue, that it is never with anything but the most extreme repugnance that I make up my mind to ascribe such wrongs to someone. Be wary in suspecting the presence of vice. Our suspicions are often the handiwork of our pride and vanity, and almost always the fruit of a secret comparison that takes place in the depths of our soul: we hasten to assign evil, for this gives us the right to feel superior. If we reflect seriously upon the matter, would it not be better to leave a secret sin forever hidden rather than to dream up imaginary ones because of our unforgivable haste, and thus, for no reason, to sully in our eyes people who have never committed any wrongs save those which our pride has ascribed to them? And would our world not be a better place if this principle were always followed? Is it not infinitely less necessary to punish a crime than it is essential to prevent it from spreading? By leaving it in the darkness it seeks, have we not as it were annihilated it? Scandal noised abroad is certain scandal, and the recital of it awakens the passions of those who are inclined toward the same kind of crime. Crime being inevitably blind, the guilty party of the as yet undiscovered crime flatters himself that he will be luckier than the criminal whose crime has been found out. ’Tis not a lesson he has been given, but a counsel, and he gives himself over to excesses that he might never have dared to indulge in without the rash revelations . . . falsely mistaken for justice, but which, in reality, are nothing more than ill-conceived severity, or vanity in disguise.”
This initial conference therefore led to no other resolution than the decision to investigate carefully the reasons for Franval’s aversion to the marriage of his daughter, and the reasons why Eugénie shared his opinions. It was decided not to undertake anything until these motives were discovered.
“Well, Eugénie,” Franval said to his daughter that evening, “now can you see for yourself that they want to separate us? And do you think they’ll succeed, my child? . . . Will they succeed in breaking the sw
eetest bonds in my life?”
“Never . . . never! Don’t be afraid, my dearest friend! These bonds in which you delight are as precious to me as they are to you. You did not deceive me when you formed them; you clearly warned me how they would shock the morality of our society. But I was hardly frightened at the idea of breaking a custom which, varying from clime to clime, cannot therefore be sacred. I wanted these bonds; I wove them without remorse. Therefore you need have no fear that I shall break them.”
“Alas, who knows? . . . Colunce is younger than I. . . . He has everything a man needs to win you. Eugénie, leave off listening to a vestige of madness which doubtless blinds you. Age and the torch of reason will soon dispel the aura and lead to regrets, you’ll confide them to me, and I shall never forgive myself for having been the cause of them.”
“No,” Eugénie said firmly, “no, I have made up my mind to love no one but you. I should deem myself the most miserable of women if I were obliged to marry. . . . Can you imagine,” she went on heatedly, “me, me married to a stranger who, unlike you, would not have double reason to love me and whose feelings therefore would at best be no stronger than his desire. . . . Abandoned and despised by him, what would become of me thereafter? A prude, a sanctimonious person, or a whore? No, no, I prefer being your mistress, my friend. Yes, I love you a hundred times better than being reduced to playing one or the other of these infamous roles in society. . . . But what is the cause of all this commotion?” Eugénie went on bitterly. “Do you know what it is, my friend? Who is the cause of it? . . . Your wife? . . . She and she alone. Her implacable jealousy . . . You may be sure of it: these are the only reasons behind the disasters that threaten us. . . . Oh, I don’t blame her: everything is simple . . . everything conceivable . . . one can resort to anything when it is a question of keeping you. What would I not do if I were in her place, and someone were trying to steal your affections from me?”
Deeply moved, Franval showered his daughter with a thousand kisses. And Eugénie, finding the encouragement in these criminal caresses to plumb more forcefully the depths of her appalling soul, chanced to mention to her father, with an unforgivable impudence, that the only way for either one of them to escape her mother’s surveillance would be to give her a lover. The idea amused Franval. But being a much more evil person than his daughter, and wishing to prepare imperceptibly this young heart for all the impressions of hatred for his wife that he desired to implant therein, he answered that he found this vengeance far too mild, adding that there were plenty of other means of making a woman miserable when she put her husband into a bad humor.